Kyo crouched underneath the examining table while several men shuffled around the room and murmured amongst themselves. Kyo couldn't understand them, but he could tell from the way that a few of them cackled with glee that it couldn't be good. After hours of carts rolling in and out, IV lines being changed, and things he couldn't explain, all of the people left.

Carefully Kyo crept out from under the table and stiffly straightened out. He turned slowly, still stretching muscles cramped for too long, to rest his gaze on the young man lying on the table. He looked no different than he had before; his eyes were still vacant and lacking pupils, limbs resting slackly at his sides. The doctors had put a hospital gown on the body though, almost as if to give him some modesty. Kyo wished he had one too. Standing around naked was getting on his nerves.

Not really paying attention to his motions, he slid his hand into the slack one resting on the table. He stroked his fingers gently over the abraded knuckles and the long, thin bones of the slender hand. And the hand squeezed his, nearly shocking Kyo out of his skin. Kyo stared at the hand that tightened around his and slowly released. There had to be somebody home to accomplish that feat of muscular control, and yet when he looked up at the delicate face, there was no light in the sea green eyes. Seeing nothing else to do Kyo squeezed back.

Yohji, who had presumably gone to fetch drinks for them, had disappeared with Shigure to enjoy a smoke outside. Aya and Omi settled one of their guests on the couch in the mission room. Yuki stared around himself at the high tech equipment that was housed his rescuers basement. It amazed him to no end that the assassins were also florists during the day. And when they were at home they seemed the least likely candidates for assassins, though they were also at the bottom of the list for florists as well.

"Tea?" Omi inquired of him, proffering a teapot and cup. Yuki nodded wordlessly. Omi poured the fragrant green beverage into the American style mug and handed it to the Zodiac. Aya sat across from Yuki on a solitary chair he had moved there. Omi handed him a mug of tea without asking and then poured himself some and took a seat beside Yuki on the sofa.

"So tell us about yourself, Yuki." Omi said in a soft, childish voice.

"What would you like to know?"

"Everything, where are you from, where did you go to school, who's your best friend, and most importantly, how did you transform?"

"It's a long story," interjected Shigure as he and Yohji came down the stairs into the mission room.

After spending quite some time alone in the freaky psychiatric ward, of the freaky hospital in which Kyo had found himself, he discovered his way around and knew how to avoid being found out. Whenever he heard footsteps in the hall, the cat-man hid himself under the bed of his wayward companion. Not that he was much of a companion. He had heard the 'doctors' speaking about the patient the other day and they had referred to him as being catatonic, a state in which the mind is locked within the body to protect it from its fears. Eventually he was supposed to come out of it but that could take years if what the doctors said was worth anything.

Kyo slinked out into the hallway in the gown he had managed to appropriate from the stores he had found in one of the hall closets. Peaking around carefully, he padded on silent feet to the back of the cafeteria. No one would be there at this time of night, all of the people who worked there having gone home. Being the cat that he was, Kyo got into the kitchen with no one the wiser. The vacated room looked freakishly like a torture chamber with all of the shining stainless steel surfaces. Peeking around from where he was Kyo found the rice cooker unmoved since the last time he had been there. Snatching a clean bowl off the stack by the wall Kyo filled up the shallow dish almost to overflowing. Having accomplished the main objective without interruption Kyo made his way to the refrigerators. He found little that looked appetizing, for there were a lot of leeks in there. Finally he snatched up a cut of fish that was likely for the head honcho's morning sushi.

Kyo smirked to himself all the way back to the room where his vacant eyed buddy was strapped to a table. He crouched by the table and began to munch on the tuna he had scrounged. After having swallowed the first bite, Kyo took a smaller bite into his mouth and chewed it into mush. He had found that if he pre-chewed the food and then put it into his friend's mouth with a little encouragement, by way of stroking his throat, the guy would swallow. This was a good thing because the doctors weren't feeding him anything and he had yet to see an I.V. in his arm. So Kyo kept feeding him what he could and laughed when the doctors had to install a catheter because of it.

Kyo picked at the rice with the chopsticks he had confiscated from the cafeteria earlier in the week. He really wanted to get out of the freaky hospital and he wanted to take the catatonic guy with him. There were bad people in the place and very few of the patients belonged there. Kyo was especially freaked out by the orange-haired guy who had been in a couple of times to check over "his Siberian" in both Japanese and some foreign language. He was more than a little insane by the gleam in his eyes. And Kyo felt overly relieved that the guy had not found him hiding under the 'bed.'

After finishing his meal, Kyo poured a little water down the catatonic guy's throat and a little down his own. Then being satisfied with the amount of water they had both imbibed, he climbed on top of the table and curled against the other. The room wasn't particularly warm and neither of them had very much on so Kyo thought it best to share whatever body heat they could.

"So let me get this straight, you're telling me that your entire family is cursed to turn into animals every time they feel a strong emotion?" Yohji asked, incredulous.

"Well, not all of us," Shigure extemporized. "There are twelve of us Zodiac members if you count Kyo and each time one of us dies another is born in our place. So the whole family is cursed but only a few of us have two shapes.

"Oh," Yohji looked like he was about to die from too much information input.

"It's really dangerous for us to do anything outside of the family because it puts the secret at the risk of public knowledge," Yuki put in, his breathing a little ragged as the activities of earlier caught up with him. "We do have some friends though." He looked at Shigure. "I wonder how Tohru is doing. And Kyo…"

Shigure's face darkened a little. "We can only hope for the best," he replied and put his arm around Yuki's shoulders.

Omi got quietly up from his place on the sofa and went to the specially rigged mission computer. He cracked all his knuckles, neck and spine before sitting down at the machine. Aya and Yohji could entertain their guests well enough, he had work to do. The first thing he brought up on screen was a search engine, time to so a little research on the Sohma family.

The freaky orange-haired guy was back. And he was talking crazy again. Kyo never could understand what he was saying when he spoke in that foreign language, but today he was speaking in Japanese. He was threatening everyone around him. Something about the guy on the table, something about the kitty getting better, he'd thought that he was the only Kitty so that made absolutely no sense to him. All tangled up in that was a suspicion about somebody on the outside fixing up the catatonic guy. Kyo just pulled himself closer under the table.

Finally, all the people in the room convinced the guy to leave. Kyo had decided by this time that he and this 'kitty' guy had to get out of there. The guy was in an emaciated state and he wasn't much better himself though he could still sneak around to scrounge for food. They were both quite rank as well, neither of them had taken care of hygiene in what must have been nearly three weeks. It was killing him being trapped inside for so long.

So once he had waited for a reasonable amount of time, Kyo headed out the door in a lab coat he had snagged from a hook in some forgotten room. Wending his way through the halls he looked for doors and windows that might lead to the outside. That was when he noticed that there were no windows at all. They must be underground he decided. From then on he peeked into the doors he deemed safe to see if they lead to stairs or elevators, anything to get him up to the surface. There was nothing in any of the rooms he dared check. He found his way back to the room with the catatonic guy and hunkered down under the bed again. There was no hope. He just barely managed to keep his temper under control enough to not destroy anything.

Over the course of the weeks they spent together the five men who stayed above the Koneko No Sume Ie found themselves settling into a routine. Yuki had been enrolled into a school with Omi and each day they went together and each day they were followed into the shop by a horde of school girls. Aya and Yohji ran the store during the day with the minor help of Shigure (He was not allowed to work the afternoon shift with all the high school girls.). In the evenings they shared dinner in the kitchen around the table that was a little too small for the five of them.

Night found Yuki and Omi sharing a bedroom to ward off the nightmares that plagued them both. Before the incident three weeks past Omi would have slept in Ken's room but oftener now he found it was Yuki coming in to sleep with him. The three older men thought that the two younger didn't know it but the three of them were sharing a bed for a little more than comfort. Omi had seen Aya walk out of Yohji's room the other morning followed by Shigure.

Everything was settling into a normal pattern. Omi had been continuing to hack into Schwarz and ß had finally found some clues as to the whereabouts of their missing companions, or of Ken at least. Records of a person of Ken's description were in the files of the ß hospital they had been trying to blow up when they had rescued the Sohma boys. They could only hope that Kyo was still there.

He was planning on breaking the news to them tonight in hopes that they could begin planning a retrieval and demolition of said people and building. But he really didn't want Shigure and Yuki to be involved. It wasn't that he didn't trust them, but he wasn't sure they could handle themselves when it came down to the kill. He didn't want them to be involved in that. Ever. He wanted them to stay innocent of that as long as he knew them. Which with Yuki he wanted to be forever.

Yuki walked into the room and looked over Omi's shoulder. The screen had already been changed to something else so that whoever had walked in would not know what Omi was truly working on.

"Having fun, Omittchi?" the other boy asked in his low purr of a voice.

Omi blushed and stammered out, "Don't call me that Yuki-kun."

"But you're so cute when you blush," Omi realized then that Yuki was shamelessly teasing him in a manner that suggested that he shared Omi's interest. "Yo-tan asked me to come get you for dinner."

"Okay. I'm coming. You head upstairs and I'll be up in minute with some stuff we need to talk about."