Banana Fish characters belong to their various owners.
Note: Here it is. One day past the Feb deadline, but hey, this is a relatively long chapter ;-) Please see Endnotes for more.
Waiting in the massive line-up leading towards the Departure Gate, a man and a child were engaged in boisterous, childish bickering, all along, until sudden . . .
" . . . but seriously, thank you, Sing."
"Huh?" Taken aback, Sing blinked in incomprehension at Akira's abrupt change in tune. "For what?"
"For staying with Okumura-san for throughout these past seven years." Likely too bashful to say this to his face, the teen girl spoke without her dark eyes glancing off and at the TV located to their side, currently playing some 24 hr news broadcast. "For helping to shoulder his pain, and keeping him afloat. "
"Hey, now." Feeling self-conscious, Sing rubbed at the back of his head as heat slowly flushed up his face. "What's with talking so grown up when you're still just a brat?" The man now was fidgeting about in this rather boyish manner. "Ummm . . . hey, c'mon. Crack some joke about me and my outdated Rover Mini, or how I look like a massive ape-"
"If it's you, then I'm okay with it," stated Akira, further surprising the worldly man with her display of uncanny, age-defying maturity. "I'll leave Okumura-san in your . . ." And she froze, as though time had made a still life of her small body.
"Aki-" Alarmed, Sing, too, turned towards the TV the girl had been watching, and saw a news update that had his blood running cold.
/ . . . further reports on the violent daylight shooting that demolished a Greenwich Village residential unit and leaving the neighborhood shaken. The owner of the targeted property has been confirmed as rising photographer Okumura Eiji, who was believed to be at the scene during the shooting. By eyewitnesses' account, he was seen entering the house with a young Asian woman just moments before the attack began . . . An update. The person seen with Okumura was apparently Chinese Entrepreneur Lee Yut-Lung, rumored to have Chinese Triad connections. Police has now confirmed this incident to be gang-related . . ./
So cold, he thought to himself. Empty coldness - a sharp contrast to the suffocating, sympathy-driven warmth he had been subjected to for the past seven years - now was stabbing into every nerve of his being with needle-like sharpness. Still, he ran on, sprinting up the steep slope of that towering mountain, against snow and storm, and straight for the frosted top. For there he saw the Lynx standing poised upon ice, aloof, alone and freezing.
"Ah, wait . . ." he gasped from exertion as he powered onwards, against the massive odds situated between the two of them. "Wait for me . . . I come . . .
"You don't . . . have to be . . .
" . . . cold . . . alone . . . anymore . . .
". . . Ash . . . !"
/" . . ICU set up complete . . ."/
/". . . readying life support series A-15 to D-13. . ."/
" Out of the way!" barked Ash, pushing his way past the gathering of lab personnel as he sped towards the stretcher transporting the wounded Asian along the hallway. "Eiji!"
"Calm down!" snapped Golzine, failing to hold Ash back even with his body young and virile again. "You're interfering with the medical staff-"
"Who CARES about Yut-Lung's goons?!" Pushing aside one of the medics pushing the stretcher along, Ash grabbed onto Eiji's hand; his heart sank at feeling its coldness. "Eiji . . . hang in there!"
" . . . no need . . . save me . . ."
For a moment, Ash thought he heard wrong. Yet, it was indeed Eiji's mumbled voice coming through the oxygen mask; his eyes were close as though in sleep, or in prayer.
"Eiji . . ." Ash felt himself freezing up in incomprehension-driven stupor. "What are you-"
" . . .seven years," rasped Eiji. "Living while dead . . . ends now." A blissful smile graced his pallid face despite the physical agony he must be under. "At last, I can finally go . . . where he is . . . to that cold mountaintop . . . warm him up . . . at last . . ."
Each and every labored, mumbled word hammered at Ash's heart with an almost physical brutality, debilitating this powerful, passionate man into a mere hollowed-out husk.
He stood motionless as the lab personnel pushed Eiji's stretcher away from him and into the ICU.
"The medical facilities we have here are superior to even Presbyterian's." Golzine's voice –- a voice Ash used to hate more than anything -– now was an alien, distant sound to his ear. "Okumura will be well-taken care of . . ." He paid Golzine no heed, so fixated was he upon what Eiji had revealed.
Disjointed as Eiji's words were, Ash had immediately picked up on what his friend was talking about: Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Even now, Eiji still remembered that story he once told him, where the lonely beast froze alone on top of that icy mountain.
Was that how Eiji had envisioned his afterlife to be like? The legendary Ash Lynx, cold-blooded in life, killed in cold-blood, suffering alone in this grand, solitary limbo of his own making?
Or . . . perhaps . . . ?
"-calm your wheels, Sing!"
Footsteps signaled the appearance of yet another stretcher in this hallway, this one carrying his (former?) adversary, whose refined beauty now was rendered a bloody mess.
"I'm fine," insisted a wild-haired Yut-Lung from where he spoke into the cell phone clasped in his one non-injured arm. "This isn't the first time I've been assassinated. There's no need for you to come rushing over to see me - what'd you mean you're only worried about Eiji?!" He had to briefly move the phone away to let out a pained - likely injury-related - cough. "Your crush is well-taken-care-of by the best practitioners here . . . no, you don't have the clearance to know where 'here' is since you've yet to become my right hand like I've been asking you to! Look, the Vietnamese forces are likely roaming downtown trying to cause trouble with all my relations right now, so stay put at the airport. Shao Ei and his group should be there about now, so stick with them. Don't try coming to us, I'll come to you when the time-hello? Hello?!" He moved the phone away, having apparently been hung up on. "That brat . . ." He ceased at finally noticing Ash. "Umm . . ."
"You know to keep Sing in the dark about the Medusa Project," said Ash, in a tone so calm and conversation, that he startled even himself. "You know, that once he gets involved, there will be no turning back for him." He stepped up and towards the stretcher-bound Yut-Lung. "He will, like you and every other member of the core staff, be subjected to endless kidnapping and assassination attempts from global powers, after the Project's revolutionary bio-technology."
"Ash . . ." Yut-Lung glanced up at him with dark eyes widened. "Look, I honestly didn't know Eiji and I would get attacked-"
Bam.
"You've kept Sing away from the dangers of Medusa because you see him as your friend, and you want to protect him" stated Ash, hovering over Yut-Lung after having clasped a hand soundly against the stretcher. "So why can't you people just let me protect my friend?" Vaguely, he noticed how the surrounding goons had tensed up at the aggression he was displaying to their leader, and how Golzine had since stepped up (likely for the purpose of keeping them down). "I have played dead these past seven years just so Eiji could move on. Why are you and Golzine still trying to drag him into this dangerous mess that is my life?"
"Ash, have you moved on?"
With that one question, Golzine had extinguished Ash's self-righteous rage - by shattering his (already) shaky conviction.
"It's been seven years for you and him both." The man - who boasted a literal old soul behind his young body - proceeded to take his former charge down with practiced ease. "You claim you've feinted death these past seven years hoping Okumura Eiji would move on. Yet, throughout this time, you've also been stalking Okumura non-stop in the name of 'protecting' from the violence of our wayward state. Always lingering in his surroundings under numerous ridiculous disguises that would almost unfailingly grab his attention . . . including Cape Cod, how many close calls have you had just this year alone?"
"Golzine . . ." started Ash, who then realized he lacked the words to follow through with a rebuttal.
Since being put into his current state, the blond had been able to alter facial appearance by manipulating fluid distribution within his body. However, his hair color and general build remained static, thus keeping whatever disguise he wore resembling his old self. It had been five times Eiji had discovered and approached him on the streets just this year alone, and god knows just how many times his friends had been quietly impacted by suspicious glimpses . . .
"You claim you want to protect him . . . have you ever considered just how maddening it has been for Okumura Eiji to be continuously subjected to 'ghost sightings' of you through all these years?" asked Golzine, who had, by now moved between Ash and the stretcher-bound Yut-Lung. "The fact that he would rather follow you into death than to receive treatment from gun wounds speaks volumes about the emotional damage your death act's been doing both you and him all along."
"Damn you . . ." growled Ash, hating the man for having thrown the guilt of the matter right back at him. "What do you and your concubine even care about what goes on between Eiji and I anyway? Hadn't you two done enough damage already?"
Ash saw that Yut-Lung had the good grace to go downcast at his wording; Golzine, bona fide villain that he was, merely gave him a sneer that actually made his young, clean-shaven face appear rakish.
"Really, Ash, is this kind of talk even necessary? You should know by now that Mr. Lee have long since succumbed to your guilt-tripping tactics in the matter of your self-imposed 'death.'" Yut-Lung looked like he wanted to say something, but was silenced by a gesture from Golzine. "As for me . . . well, Okumura is relevant mostly because of the effect he has on you." The man then pointed a finger down and at Ash's nose tip. "Or, have you forgotten yourself . . . Medusa Subject 03?"
Even as Ash slapped the offending hand away, his gaze had lingered briefly upon Golzine's wristband - labeled "Medusa Subject 01."
"Remember your reason for staying on with the Medusa Project," drawled Golzine, clearing having caught his look. "Should we have Doctor Wong again lecture you on the detrimental effects your emotional instability has been having on your test results?" His voice darkened with a weathered, ominous tone that betrayed the seasoned kingpin behind the youthful facade. "Remember just whose interest is at stake should our work fail to advance."
Ash, knowing of the truth in Golzine's words, could only bear the talk-down in silence.
"What is keeping Mr. Lee at the door?"
The feminine alto had the men all turning towards the elegant, shorthaired Asian woman now emerging from the ICU's opened door.
"Doctor Wong," greeted Golzine, already motioning for Yut-Lung's goons to move his stretcher through the ICU doors. "How is Okumura Eiji doing?"
"Move Mr. Lee into Partition B," Dr. Wong instructed the goons, before facing not Golzine, but Ash. "Listen, Eiji is delirious from the pain and blood-loss. He has lost much of his vision and mobility, but is still persisting on refusing treatment." She held the blond's cloudy gaze with her somber dark eyes "I could sedate him first before giving him a much-needed blood transfusion; but, to drug him in his current weakened state . . ."
"I understand," muttered Ash, getting exactly what she was really telling him to do, between the lines. "The deception ends now," sighed the blond in resignation, prior to straightening his stance into one of square-shouldered determination. "I will go in, and reveal myself - the whole truth about my current self - to Eiji. I will get him to accept treatment."
To that, the Doctor's eyes widened in apparent surprise . . . and hope. Ash also heard, from beyond the ICU doors, Yut-Lung's distinctively melodramatic grasp.
"Ash . . . are you really sure?"
"It's time; I won't run away from him anymore . . . Nadia."
What remained of Nadia Wong's clinical front had by now melted off into a proud, big-sisterly beam. Smiling himself, Ash listened for a while the singular theatrical applause sounding from behind his back, before cutting it off at the source by elbowing the sarcastic Golzine right in the ribcage.
"Seven years.
"Seven years of suffering alone in a world where everybody feels sorry for me . . . because I was without you.
"Living in that city where you've lived and died, I see shadows of the boy you were, day in and out –- in the background, amidst the crowds, upon the horizons.
"They're calling to me to come to you, to this place you are now.
"The kindness of others - their insistence that I go on living - is what's been keeping me away . . . and you alone.
"I'm sorry for having kept you waiting for all this time . . .!"
Smiling, he wrapped his arms around the Lynx, relishing in the coldness of its snow-covered pelt.
"I'm here, at last." managed the man, all the while conscious of the slowing of his own pulse and heartbeat. "You won't ever have to be alone . . . no, we won't ever have to be alone anymore, Ash."
Only the blizzard - white, shrewd, uncaring - surrounded the two of them, walling them in upon their icy sanctuary.
"So it's okay now . . . I'll never leave this mountain, or return to the living ever again.
"For it is in death that we are reunited.
"In death . . . we are . . .
"In death-"
"Eiji, I'm here."
That voice, coupled with the firm, definite grip upon his hand, shattered his immaculate surroundings like hammer against glass. Losing his footing upon his blissful fevered dream, Eiji found himself in acute pain as he landed hard upon reality.
" . . . told you not to . . . save me . . ." protested the wounded man, lifting his heavy eyelids to glare up and at whomever that gave him such a rude awakening. "You . . ." He then went agape at what he now saw.
"It's me," said this unmistakable, one and only Ash Lynx, leaning over such that his striking blond features clashed against the sterile ceiling above to jarring effects from Eiji's point of view. "I'm not dead, I'm here and alive . . . Eiji."
To be continued . . . . ?
Endnotes: The mentioned "Shao Ei" is actually Sing's baby-faced secretary/bodyguard from Yasha. While I have the entire story outlined to the end, it takes more time and effort than I can currently afford to write the scenes out. So . . . if you really want to see this continued, please comment/review either on AO3 or FFnet to let me know you're still reading. Update speed – if this is gonna get updated at all – will depend on the level of continued interest shown.