"How do you like Beltline VII?" inquired the white-clad figure by the door, his form hardly separated from the paleness of the walls. It was as though he had materialized. 'He' being Kagami Kyoji, the likelihood was high. "It's like the original game, only better. Our programmers caught wind of the news that a 'mere girl in a kimono' escaped alive from that one, several years ago."
Fudou grinned widely. "After this, I'm going to terrorize Lower Town."
"Lower Town XI is on the shelf, but you can only play human thug characters with that one. The City wants to preserve its ecosystem for further experimentations. On the bright side, it's multi-player..." Kagami trailed off as Fudou seemed to forget about his disappointment, absorbed in a new task at hand.
The metal thumb left permanent dents in the plastic as it rained taps against a red button. Obedient to every distant command, the lizard took a dead limb in its grip and threw its body into wild undulations. The arm snapped beneath the stress and Fudou tore a fit of raucous laughter. Kagami slit his eyes against the echoes that rebounded off the walls. He was still smirking when Fudou gestured at him with the controller. "What's the command to eat? My health bar's going down!" he bellowed, lest the corpse's race to decay deprive his virtual monster persona of its easily-won meal. Kagami took his time answering the request, treading across the wide room like it was a narrow catwalk. Fudou's eye twitched. Clicking heels, sharp and hollow, inherited the space between the ceiling and the floor, from which laughter had died into fervent breathing. The glass-user repositioned his lean body beside Fudou's hospital bed, elbow on the headboard.
"The button just to the right of your big metal thumb, Fudou-san."
Big... metal... thumb... The button clattered to the floor by the tip of Kagami's polished white shoe, rejected by the spring that curled forlornly by the shell of cracked plastic. Fudou unfurled his fingers. Loose pieces dropped. The one-eyed man flung the remains to the ground, the wire whipping like the tail of his virtual monster, which continued to writhe in the dust with its prize. Kagami's cool purple eyes were on the screen before they shut, becoming twin bows. "What a pity. It didn't swallow that severed arm."
"MIDOU!"
Leaving Fudou's side, Kagami deftly toed scraps out of his way and pressed the button that turned the screen off. The button seemed to have a secondary function of lowering the volume in the room. No longer fixated by the image of severed body parts, Fudou turned his eye to his sadistic savior. "I am wasting my time away in this bed." Curled yellow wisps swung away form his face with every punctuated breath, his lips sneered agape as though to avoid puncture from his words. "That Midou Ban. He double-crossed me. He took my arm. I will not rest until I have taken my revenge." The bed began to creak. Kagami's hand fell against Fudou's rising chest a moment later, seemingly effortless in its speed to get there.
"Please do not strain yourself, Fudou-san." Calm eyes appealed to his reason; calm returned to the shuffled air. A whiff of sweet-smelling cologne filtered through to Fudou's flared nostrils. Barely discernible specks caught the flourescent lights, swirling, before disappearing. Kagami smiled. "You have not recuperated enough to leave this hospital."
"I am strong enough." The blunt ends of his metallic fingers rang together, emphasizing his point, should Kagami had chosen to ignore the one littered on the floor. "Midou was lucky but he will not defeat me again. My arm tingles with this desire to--"
"Is there a problem?" The thin voice had seethed from a speaker in the wall, strange and disembodied in the emptiness of the room. Kagami straightened up, eyes remaining on the patient. "No," he said, only to be corrected by the sound of Fudou's fitful commotions mere seconds later. Fudou's cursing traveled across the room and filtered through the tiny pores in the wall, filling the airwaves of the previously hidden channel. Issuing a harsh sigh, Kagami averted his gaze and reached into his blazer.
Suddenly, Fudou looked to Kagami fiercely. "Three seconds..."
"He must not disturb the other patients. Kagami, issue the--"
"I know," Kagami replied, his face a cool mask. He dodged a swipe of metallic claws and unloaded a dart into Fudou's shoulder. Jagged edges sank into the mattress, but eased to stillness before they could rip themselves out. It was nothing personal-- not that Fudou would likely remember.
The world was fuzzy. Fudou closed his eye tightly and reopened it, attempting to sharpen the lines that joined the bed to the floor. When he found them again, they lay in a different position. Time refused to fall into the world's usual rhythm. No events marked the seconds. No moment sought distinction over another. The stark emptiness of the hospital room surrounded him like a white vacuum. Too lethargic to rise, the one-eyed patient shifted into a more comfortable position. Finger by finger, his left hand peeled out of the mattress and relocated itself over his groin, where it made itself known as a quintet of pricks. He gasped. Then memory returned to him: Midou Ban removing his left arm as easily as a crocodile maimed a swimmer.
However, for a reason that failed to dawn, the muscles of his right arm refused to operate.
Tortured by ennui, his own helplessness, and his inability to relieve that tension between his thighs, Fudou found the new meaning of insanity.
Kagami entered Fudou's room between the hiss of sliding doors, hands casually tucked into his pockets, where he found the patient in silent inspection of the blank ceiling. A contemplative frown bent the illusionist's lips, only to ease a moment later. Fudou, Kagami mentally noted, had deviated little from the position he found him last. He could not have been awake for very long. "Are you in need of something to drink?" he asked, approaching Fudou's bedside. The five rips in the mattress caught his gaze, which then followed the folds of the sheet like motion lines in a comic book, perfectly directing his armored hand to rest over his groin.
Kagami's mouth lifted with vulpine sharpness. "Oh, Fudou..." He reached out to grasp Fudou's metal arm through the sheet with the intentions of moving it, avoiding the possibility of inadvertent castration during the man's half-conscious twitching.
Parallel talons clipped the round earring, gracing Kagami's ear with the chime of alarm that felt deafening in the quiet of the room. The certainty of danger filled Kagami's chest like a dead weight when the metal tips passed beneath his sight. A rip of holster leather accompanied the outward momentum of his spinning dart gun, knocked out the newly-torn rip in his blazer. As Kagami drew his next breath, his flesh slid against metal buried in his ribs. He steeled against the urge to scream and backed up, watching Fudou's red fingers slide out of his body. Then the hand twist, hooking savaged folds of cloth, and Kagami felt his back strain against his tightening jacket. Fudou made a tight fist and pulled. Kagami landed across his body with a painful grunt.
Fudou's swollen pupil swung from the ceiling, wobbled, and centered on him.
The one-eyed man flared his nostrils, taking in that soft cologne scent with the nip of blood. Unable to command his right arm, Fudou roared and heaved his body into a reckless roll that placed the two of them onto the ground, twisted in sheets that divided like tissue paper between his claws. "Fudou!" Kagami snapped in the other man's face, pinned down beneath his aggressor's determined weight. He guarded his abdomen with his arm, dreadfully mindful of its futility against disembowelment should Fudou's claws sweep downwards. They caught him in the chest again, tapping blood from his body while he lay exposed, the tattered sections of his blazer splayed like the hide of a fallen deer ripped apart by hunters. Tight droplets rolled past a coral nipple, dripping into the fabric to bloom red. He could hear the weight hitting the fibres, through their heavy breathing. "Fudou, it's me. I'm not here to fight." Squinting in pain, Kagami looked to the open hand where Fudou had placed much of his weight, his opposite arm hanging limp. Fortunately for him, his palm fell flat, fingers spaced evenly to distribute the downward pressure while the talons spread between them. It was hard to breathe, but the points bit shallowly. One slight shift, however...
"Take off your pants." Fudou's voice was heavy. Kagami flashed a look of indignant horror and stared into the opaque pupil that hovered over him, devoid of reason and sympathy. It reminded him of the gaze of a lizard, that lay in wait and swallowed its prey, all without a ripple of feeling behind that cold, hungry look. Then slowly, ever so slowly, Fudou's right shoulder rolled like the haunch of a great lion, the musculature flexing, coordinating lean movements down the cords of his arm. His opposite hand spread against the ground. Fudou's body was regaining control while his mind remained buried within its drugged world.
It was a world in which time slowed down, and nothing existed but desire.
"I said..."
The edge of Fudou's voice made Kagami inhale sharply, tickling his sinuses with the mild sting of floor disinfectant. He nodded slowly, and his earring grated against the irregularities in the otherwise smooth floor. Despite the constant quest for cleanliness and order, Babylon City was apparently not quite so clean, when things went wrong, and not quite so orderly. Kagami felt the dust collect along the tiny hairs on his arm, delicately raised like the hackles of a spooked cat, as he slid his hands to his hips. His heartbeat sounded -- and felt -- loud. Somewhere within the palpitations came the dry, distant zip of a fly drawn down. A cant of the pelvis brought a hipbone past the giving fabric. The cool currents of the air conditioned hospital slid over his loins like spider's silk, followed by the calloused fingers of Fudou's right hand. It closed over the flesh, shaping out the bone beneath its forceful touch. Fudou longed to crush out the living marrow. So slender, so smooth, so ... vulnerable, his bleeding prey. He could put his whole hand through it and etch lines against the hospital floor, faint depressions that would capture blood, forgotten, long after the Babylonian nurses have swept the area clean, long after this body, ravaged and used, has been picked off the floor by gloved hands.
"Fudou, get a hold of yourself." The uncomprehending look in Fudou's eye made Kagami consider unleashing Diamond Dust, to save himself at the cost of his mission, and some of his pride too. However, the words only succeeded in dispelling Fudou's fixation with his hipbone. Kagami's pants glided down with an urgent tug. Blunt fingernails scratched the bend of Kagami's lower back, then continued to leave pink marks along the curve of his ass. "No..." Fudou slid his hand down until the flesh narrowed at the thigh. Kagami tensed and clamped his knees together, but the slender formation of his long thighs permitted a gap between them, where Fudou was able to push two fingers through. "Fudou-san, I will definitely make you regret this!" One quick wrench and lift, and Fudou secured an opening. One forward thrust later, Kagami's explosive scream permeated through to the surrounding rooms.
"...Kagami? Is there a problem? Kagami, report!"
Within seconds, the doors swished open and footsteps rode loud into the room. Strong hands wrestled Fudou, grunting and thrashing, from Kagami. Picking himself stiffly from the floor, Kagami reached for his fallen dart gun. He shot Fudou in the thigh and watched the man sag before he let the gun drop from his unsteady hand. It clanked against the floor, where it committed to a lazy half-spin, streaking blood in a semi-circle. "Fine time to take a martini break, Rita," Kagami snarled towards the wall, tugging up his pants, while the men dragged Fudou to the bed. The patient would continue to recover in peace and hazy ignorance.
Next time, Kagami was leaving Fudou to his fate with Ban.