There was, much to Ankh's surprise, no cake on Kougami's desk when he was shown into the office a few days later. The CEO was standing at the window, looking out over the city. There were some scars, still, from Uva's mindless rampage.
"Good morning, Ankh," Kougami said quietly.
The tone was so out of character that every hair on Ankh's neck tried to stand upright, and he manifested his left arm without conscious thought. "Kougami," he said cautiously, surreptitiously making sure nothing was between him and the door.
"Well done!" Kougami boomed, turning around with a mad smile. Ankh relaxed. "You don't take things at face value. I like that about you."
"What do you want?" Ankh asked, letting his hand fade back into obscurity. He kept his position, though, with a clear path to an exit.
"I regret," Kougami said, "that I cannot recreate your lost Core Medals."
The words stung, although Ankh had expected them. It had been a small hope, pushed down over the few days since the conversation he'd had with Goto, as Ankh told himself that it was in vain. It was still a disappointment to find out that he was right.
"I didn't expect you to," he said roughly. "I assume there's something else you want, or I wouldn't be here."
"Ah. Yes." Kougami pulled something out of his desk drawer and tossed it at Ankh.
Purely out of reflex, Ankh caught it in his left hand and felt the unmistakable sensation of a Cell Medal being absorbed. It felt – it felt like a memory he'd caught the edge of, a memory of drinking cool water after being parched with thirst. "What?" he said, unable to muster a more coherent thought for several seconds. Kougami waited until his vision cleared to speak.
"I thought that might be the case," he said. "I have a proposition for you, Ankh."
"Goto said as much." Ankh knew he'd lost the high ground, knew he'd lost any leverage he might have had. The information he could have used before, information on how to repair a broken Core Medal, was suddenly much less valuable if Kougami could just make them from scratch.
"As you have been told, we are able to create Core Medals!" The manic excitement was back in Kougami's voice, flushing his face ever so slightly. "To distill desire, the force that will change the world."
"You can't be serious." Ankh didn't care what happened to the world inasmuch as he cared what happened to him, and having more Greeed around was going to make his life difficult at some point. Greeed did not coexist well. That argument, however, was not about to sway Kougami. "Look what happened last time."
"Yes," Kougami said. "Last time did not proceed in an ideal manner."
Understatement of the century, Ankh did not say. "Maki nearly pulled the city into a black hole," he said instead.
"Maki's not involved this time," Kougami said, which was very much not the point.
"You didn't think he was a problem last time," Ankh said, and then shook his head. He wasn't about to get sidetracked. "You didn't bring me here to talk about Maki."
"No," Kougami said. "But I still believe that desire is the appropriate path." He leaned against his desk, almost nonchalant. "Are you capable of making a Yummy?"
Whatever question Ankh had been expecting, that hadn't been it. He was beginning to feel as though everyone he had thought he'd known was taking it upon themselves to blindside him at every opportunity, and an honest answer slipped out before he could push it back. "I don't know."
"Ah." Kougami nodded. "Try," he said, with an intensity far above anything Ankh had heard since walking in the door.
"No," Ankh said reflexively. "I'm not a trained animal to dance for your amusement."
Kougami laughed. "As you know," he said, "I can't have Yummies running unchecked through my city." My city, Ankh mouthed, but said nothing. "If that were to happen, the environment might get messy."
Ankh didn't need Kougami to state outright that he'd send Goto after him; Ankh was fairly sure he could take Goto, but the resulting fight wouldn't be pretty, and it would ruin what he already had. A Greeed might take what he wanted, but that didn't mean he had to be a thoughtless idiot about it. Ankh nodded sharply.
"The power of desire is worthwhile if it can be controlled." The glint in Kougami's eye was unmistakable. "I could create new Greeed, but there's some uncertainty there."
At this stage, Kougami did not say, but Ankh heard it nonetheless.
"I would prefer to work with a known entity," Kougami said. "You create the Yummy, which I will then use as I see fit in a controlled environment. In exchange, you keep half the Cell Medals it generates."
"I should keep all of them," Ankh snapped, which he realized too late effectively placed him in verbal agreement to participate in Kougami's mad experiments. Kougami didn't exactly have the best track record in keeping Greeed under control.
"Half," Kougami said, tilting his chin up just slightly.
Ankh felt a distinct sense of déjà vu. "All," he said. "What possible use could you have for Core Medals?"
"I can't give away all my secrets," Kougami said. "Half."
"Ninety percent," Ankh said. "If I can create a Yummy for you at all." He was fairly sure he could; he was as complete as he was ever going to be.
"Half," said Kougami, mildly and infuriatingly.
"Eighty percent," Ankh said. He wanted to walk out the door, but absorbing the first Cell Medal since he'd woken in the hospital in Hokkaido had made him aware of how desperately he needed them. If he couldn't bring Kougami to some sort of reasonable agreement, there would be chaos. But half wasn't enough, couldn't be enough, not to go beyond the bare minimum to keep Eiji functioning.
"Half," Kougami said. "And a numerical amount to be determined if you can't create a Yummy."
Ankh grimaced. "Seventy percent," he said, hating that he was repeating the conversation he'd had with Kougami years before, when he'd bargained for Eiji's right to use the Ride Vendors and keep the support of the Kougami Foundation.
"Half," Kougami said again, but there was something on his face that made Ankh pause and seriously consider storming out the door. He could create a Yummy on his own, if he went far enough outside of the Tokyo city proper, and let it feed. It would give him enough Cell Medals, eventually, to heal and revive Eiji. Except, oh, except that it would cause chaos as it ran rampant, and Ankh hadn't cared about that when he'd met Eiji, but somehow he cared about it now. It was frustrating.
Ankh closed his eyes briefly, knowing exactly what was going to happen the moment the next words tumbled out of his mouth. "Sixty percent," he said.
"Happy Birthday!" Kougami roared, and there was the cake Ankh hadn't seen when he'd come in. To a long and fruitful relationship was written in kanji on a decorative chocolate plaque, above a trio of somehow already lit candles reading 60%.
Ankh accepted the cake, tempted for a very long moment to fling it directly at Kougami. "Shall we try now?" he said instead, and delicately bit down on the chocolate plaque. It was better than ice cream.
"Not yet," Kougami said. He scribbled something down on the back of a card and handed it to Ankh. "Take this to Satonaka," he said, and it occurred to Ankh for the first time that he and Kougami were alone in the office. "She'll get you set up."
"Set up," Ankh muttered, cake somehow in one hand and card in the other as he maneuvered his way out the office door. He didn't have to go far to find Satonaka, who took the cake from him with one hand, sighed, and handed it off to someone passing by.
"Please follow me to fill out your paperwork," she said, and Ankh glared.
"You have got to be kidding me," he said, and she straightened and stared at him intently. Ankh was reminded of a very large feline staring down something it intended to eat.
"Business runs on doing things correctly," she said, and Ankh somehow found himself scribbling on several sheets of paper.
Satonaka took them from him after a few moments, eying Ankh's handwriting and then looking at him. Ankh crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair; the writing system in this part of the world was ridiculous.
"Right," Satonaka said, visibly controlling her irritation, and started asking him questions instead. Her handwriting was as impeccably neat as the rest of her appearance, not that Ankh was paying attention to it. He did notice that she wrote Eiji's name on the forms, around his as though Eiji had a second given name.
"Why?" he asked.
"You're not technically a legal entity," she said absently. "Can't make a contract with someone who doesn't exist on paper."
"Tch." Ankh curled his lip at her, but she wasn't looking at him. "Are we done?"
"Almost." She wanted his fingerprints, it turned out, for access to the laboratory, and his picture for an ID badge.
"You don't expect me to wear this," he said, holding it up between thumb and forefinger.
"You will if you want access to the lab," she said. "Which is where you're going to be doing your work." If you don't work, you don't get paid went unspoken.
Ankh stuffed the badge into the wallet containing the unabsorbed Core Medals and forbore to comment further.
"As a sign-on bonus," Satonaka said, snapping his attention back to her, and handed him a small gift bag. Ankh took it warily; it was heavier than it looked. He peered inside to see several short, neat stacks of Cell Medals.
"We'll be in touch." Satonaka stood. "Plan on being here Monday."
"I plan nothing," Ankh muttered, but Satonaka was already out the door. The Cell Medals were enough to make him feel as though he hadn't made a mistake when he reached inside the bag, soothing a nagging want he hadn't even realized he'd had. He felt Eiji murmur contentedly in the back of his head. "Oh, shut up," he said, but there was a note of affection there.
Ankh was much less sanguine about the prospect of doing anything in Kougami's lab when he showed up significantly later than instructed and waved his ID in the general direction of the reader next to the door. It demanded his thumbprint next, and Ankh was tempted to just knock it off the wall. He put his thumb down instead, and the door obligingly slid open. Three familiar faces looked back at him, although he couldn't place them.
"Mr. Kougami didn't say you'd be joining us, Mr. Hino," said the tall blond, and it took Ankh a moment to realize that she was speaking Norwegian. Ankh didn't speak it well, but he knew enough to get by. The sentiment was echoed in Portuguese and then in Mandarin before the two clearly Japanese members of Kougami's little team welcomed him.
"I'm not Hino," Ankh said in English, guessing as to the most widely understood common language. He didn't speak either Portuguese or Mandarin, beyond being able to recognize them if he heard them, and he didn't want to use Eiji's memories. The odd reaction he'd had delving into them before hovered at the edge of his thoughts, making him even more reluctant to try and access even something as relatively neutral as language.
Ankh's declaration prompted a conversation in four languages that Ankh refused to participate in after the first ninety seconds, stalking over to the only person in the room who wasn't asking stupid questions. "Who am I supposed to use to make the Yummy?" he asked.
"Ah." The man looked at him, and then looked at a tablet, flicking through several screens. "Before we do that, there's some preliminary…"
"Then you can call me when it's done," Ankh said, and walked out.
Hina was in the apartment when Ankh walked in, intending to perch on the balcony railing and order his thoughts. He was remiss in not being able to understand what others in the lab might be saying, after all. Information was useful. That he was irritated and jittery at the prospect of reliving Eiji's memories again had no bearing on anything, nor did the fact that he'd followed directions and had nothing to show for it. Hina looked up in surprise when Ankh made a beeline for the balcony door, not stopping for so much as a greeting.
"Weren't you at the Kougami Foundation?" she asked. "Did something happen?"
Real or imagined, Ankh heard a note of accusation and more than an inkling of insinuation that he wasn't holding up his end of the bargain. "No," he said shortly, and kept walking.
"Ankh," Hina said, and Ankh's temper snapped.
"I don't have to put up with this," he said, and pulled himself out of Eiji's body. He felt rather than heard it crumple to the ground as he concentrated his own being into an arm and darted out the nearest open window.
"Eiji?" he heard from behind him, and picked up his pace.
Ankh hit the ground running, generating the basic form and functionality of a body. He wouldn't have been able to hold it long without the Cell Medals he'd absorbed earlier, or without the Core Medals he'd left attached to Eiji's belt. He hesitated for a moment, looking over his shoulder in indecision. He thought for half a second that he saw Hina in the window, and turned away before he could be accused of looking.
"I can take what I want," he growled, manifesting a single Cell Medal. He could pick a passerby at random – everyone wanted, and no matter who he picked would bear a Yummy that could bring him what he needed to be truly strong. "I can take it."
The thickest crowds were around the train station, which Ankh found himself approaching, flipping the Cell Medal back and forth through his fingers. No one looked particularly enticing, though. He wanted to make sure his first Yummy came from a strong enough desire to create a fruitful harvest, and everyone he saw seemed to have an overlying sense of apathy. Ankh toyed with the Cell Medal a little more, finally hoisting himself up to the top of a set of benches at the center of a busy corridor and listening.
"If I have to give something up to get what I want, there's no point." He didn't know how long he'd been watching the crowds, trying to pick someone to create a Yummy. "That's not how it works. I'm Greeed, not human. Humans bargain. I take."
The words rang hollow.
The edges of the Cell Medal dug into Ankh's palm, and he let it sink beneath his skin. He hadn't felt this uncertainty, before being sealed. Before being betrayed. He hadn't felt it when he'd slapped the OOO Driver around Eiji's waist and sent him off to beat Cell Medals out of Yummies and Core Medals out of other Greeed. When Eiji hadn't done as instructed, Ankh had been irritated but not uncertain; his maybe-lie that no one else could use the OOO Driver, since Eiji had been present when it was unsealed, had been one of the few statements he'd made early on that he actually regretted. In the end, it had been worth it. Of course, in the end, his goals had changed.
The Izumi balcony doors were wide open when Ankh floated back in, wearing the shape of an arm. The lights were on in the living room, but no one was there. Two pair of shoes were haphazardly lined up at the door, though, and Ankh could hear voices coming out of the space where he usually slept. The door was partially open; Ankh hovered for a moment.
"He needs a hospital, Hina," the detective was saying.
"Ankh wouldn't just leave," Hina said. "He wouldn't."
"I know how much you care about him," the detective said, and it wasn't clear which 'him' he meant.
"Ankh will come back," Hina said. "Eiji is…" she trailed off, and Ankh heard little choking noises. He pushed the door open and unobtrusively floated closer.
Hina had put Eiji on the pullout couch that had been meant for him to begin with, covering him to the waist with a light blanket. He looked odd, in Ankh's clothing. Hina was holding his hand, and as Ankh watched, she gripped it more tightly. Eiji flinched, his eyes barely opening, and he moaned. Hina let go, hastily. Ankh slipped onto Eiji's left hand, the pain of Hina's grip slamming home, and prodded at Eiji's mind. There was nothing more than there had been before, just the same sense of a lack of awareness. Ankh couldn't help but feel disappointed.
"Ankh," Hina said, and he opened his eyes.
"What." He sat up, noticing that his pants had gone somewhere.
Hina glanced between him and the detective, and then all but pushed the detective out of the room. Ankh stretched and got dressed. Something felt off, but he couldn't pinpoint it until he felt a breeze from the open window blow across his face. He'd felt everything, when he'd left Eiji behind, been able to see clearly and hear the world around him. Even as an arm, his senses had been almost as sharp as they were when he was in a human body.
The same thing had happened in the hospital, and he'd dismissed it as a fluke of perception. He wasn't confused now, though, and he didn't have the excuse of being newly woken. "Huh." He flexed Eiji's fingers, pulling a Cell Medal out and crushing it against his palm. It felt the same. He could hear Hina and the detective having a conversation through the closed door, voices low and intense, and it was less clear than what he'd heard through the open door. The door opened and then closed again while he wasn't paying attention to it.
"Ankh," Hina said again. He looked up to see her leaning against the closed door, and the sound he hadn't specifically noticed registered.
"No," he said.
"You can't do that," she said, as though he hadn't said anything. "You can't just leave like that."
"Leave at all, or leave Eiji behind?" he said idly, but for all of it he actually cared about the answer.
"Either," Hina said. "Both." She took a deep breath and then another, not speaking or moving for long enough that he considered climbing out the window. "If you need to go, off by yourself," she said finally, her voice tight, "that's fine, but you can't just abandon Eiji, and you can't make me think you're never coming back." Moisture glittered in the corner of one eye, and Ankh reached for it slowly.
Hina looked up at him, and Ankh snatched his hand back before it touched anything. "Fine," he found himself saying. He didn't know if he would have said anything else, but his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, turning away from Hina.
There was a text with the following day's date and a time from an unfamiliar number. Ankh frowned at it, but before he could delete it, a second message followed with the name of one of the laboratory staff members and the word "Yummy." Ankh sent back a single letter's worth of acknowledgement.
"Who was that?" Hina asked, and when he turned around, her eyes and face were dry.
"Foundation," he said, and she nodded.
The detective drew him aside almost the moment Ankh walked through the door, with a serious expression on his face; it mixed wariness with empathy, and put Ankh more on edge than he had to begin with.
"What?" Ankh snapped, before the detective could speak.
"Is it all right with you if I hand Eiji's medical file over to Date?" Izumi asked.
"I don't care," Ankh said. "You can do what you want with it." It was just a piece of paper, after all; whatever information it had wasn't something Ankh was worried about.
Izumi's gaze went flat and hooded; it was the same look he got when he disapproved of something someone – often Ankh, but he'd seen it directed at others – was doing. "Would Eiji mind?" he asked.
"How should I know?" Ankh slipped around the detective, leaving his shoes in an untidy heap in front of the door. "It's not like I can ask him."
"I suppose not," the detective said, and deflated, somehow, looking entirely too defeated for someone who had spent almost no actual conscious time with Eiji at all. "I'm going to see what he thinks about it."
"I told you that's fine." Ankh made his escape before anything else awkward could happen, although he couldn't help a faint sense of wanting to make amends.
His second experience at the Foundation laboratory was infinitely preferable to the first. The motley group inside paid very little attention to him as he sauntered through the door, except for the same person who hadn't mobbed him the first time. "Mr. Hino," he said.
"Ankh," Ankh corrected.
"Uh, right." The man looked at his tablet again, and then back at Ankh. "Please follow me."
It seemed ridiculous to leave the laboratory right after walking into it, but Ankh shrugged and fell in beside the man. He introduced himself as Fujii Chikara, which Ankh promptly forgot, and led Ankh to another floor entirely. "Are we going somewhere in particular?" Ankh asked.
"Ah, yes." Fujii – Ankh could read his name tag, now, and irked him to no end that he was going to waste memory on this human's name – pushed his glasses farther up his face. "We're going to – well, we're here."
The complex Ankh entered had oddly thick walls and a number of doors between the general access hallway and the room in which someone stood waiting. The person in question looked slightly nervous.
"This is one of our interns," Fujii started.
"Don't care," Ankh said. "This is who you want for the Yummy's parent?"
"Ah, yes." Fujii backed toward the door slightly, and the intern shifted on his chair. Both of his fists were balled into his pants, knuckles white.
"This won't hurt," Ankh said, and flicked a Cell Medal toward him. A slot opened up on the intern's forehead, the Cell Medal sliding neatly in. The intern stiffened before the outlines of a White Yummy became visible beneath his skin. The Yummy slipped out, separating from the intern, and began prowling around the locked space. "Is that it?" Ankh asked.
"Um." Fujii fumbled for the door behind him. "If we think of something, we'll give you a call."
It was odd, being able to feel the Yummy again; it almost gave Ankh a sense of nostalgia. There was something a little different about this one, its sense of desire a little dulled, a building sense of frustration. "If it doesn't get what it wants, it won't be pretty," Ankh warned.
"Yes, we've read the reports," Fujii said, and the door finally unlocked.
Ankh shrugged and left. What the Yummy did or didn't do to the research team wasn't his problem. The sense that the intern apparently wanted desperately to perform well on exams and aptitude tests came dimly through Ankh's bond with the Yummy, and Ankh chuckled. Such a small desire for how much strength it had.
"Can you tell what it wants?" Fujii asked. He'd followed Ankh through the first door, placing a barrier between himself and the larval Yummy. Ankh told him. Fujii frowned and consulted his notes. "Interesting," he said, and started tapping at the tablet. He looked like a completely different person, absorbed in his work. "Do you have a telepathic link with it?"
"No," Ankh said shortly.
"How can you tell what it's thinking?"
"Answering questions isn't part of my contract," Ankh said, and then paused. There had been a line specifically about providing information relevant to the research at hand, although what precisely constituted research hadn't been entirely clear. "It's mine," he said finally, and left before Fujii could think of something else to ask.
Feeling the Yummy in the back of his mind made Ankh's fingers itch for the medal case he no longer had. Even knowing the Yummy was his, even feeling that it was part of him, he still had the urge to find Eiji and toss him a trio of medals.
"Idiot," he muttered at himself, tilting his face up to catch the sunlight outside. "Idiot, idiot, idiot." He meant the words as much for Eiji as for himself.
The apartment was a welcome relief in that for once it wasn't full of half-familiar ghosts; Hina's project was spread out over the floor, nearly finished, and she pounced on him as soon as he walked in the door. "I need you to hold this," she said.
Drowning out the persistent sensation of a frustrated Yummy in the back of his mind was worth standing in the living room being literally poked by pins as a distracted and harried Hina made some alterations. "Weren't you done with this?" he asked.
"It's due next week," she said. "But there are a few changes." She stopped talking, staring fiercely at part of the costume he couldn't see. "Okay, now I need you to hold \this," she said for the second time in half an hour, but this time she actually handed him something.
"What is that," Ankh said, as Hina manhandled a strap attached to a ridiculous something with strings over his head.
"It's a guitar," she said absently. "Just hold still."
"That's not a guitar." Ankh knew what a guitar was. He was fairly sure of it. The piece of vibrantly colored plastic currently banging against his hip was no sort of musical instrument, no matter how many strings it pretended to have.
"It's electric," Hina said, moving it slightly to one side and reaching underneath it. She placed another pin.
"Stop poking me!" Ankh snapped, and Hina paused.
"I'm sorry," she said, a sincere note of contrition in her voice. "I just only have this for a few hours and then for the actual presentation itself, and I need to get this part done now."
Ankh rolled his eyes and ran his right hand across the strings. They felt odd, the new sensation pleasant under his fingertips, along with the sound almost too soft to hear.
"You play?" Hina asked, looking up at him with surprise.
"No," Ankh said, but he kept his hand where it was.
Hina shook her head and went back to her work. At some point she removed the guitar, but that didn't mean that Ankh was free; it was the longest he'd stood in one spot, modeling for Hina, since he'd first moved in. He was so caught up in glaring at her that he almost didn't notice the sudden spike in satisfaction from the Yummy until the sensation ran through him in a wave. Hina smacked his thigh. "Hold still."
The Yummy had matured, Ankh realized. He could feel it. Bare moments later, his link with it snapped and he shivered again.
"Are you okay?" Hina asked.
Ankh wasn't sure whether to be annoyed that the Foundation was manipulating his Yummy without him or smug that he had an alleged source of Cell Medals for very little effort on his part. "Fine," he said, when Hina started to stand and he realized he hadn't given her an answer.
"Is Eiji okay?"
"He's fine," Ankh said shortly. "Are we done?"
"Almost." Hina was pinning something near the floor while Ankh stood on top of a chair. She grazed his ankle with a pin at the sound of the door opening. "Welcome home," she called over her shoulder without actually looking.
The detective didn't greet Ankh, although he hadn't spoken to him much since Ankh's unannounced and precipitous temporary absence. "I'm back," he said. "Whose guitar?"
Hina launched into an explanation of her last-minute alterations. Ankh started to carefully strip the current piece off, intent on using Hina's distraction to make a quiet escape. She noticed anyway, telling him to hold still, she was almost done.
The detective, for his part, picked up the guitar and fiddled around with part of it, settling it on one knee and pulling sound out of the strings.
"You used to play," Hina said, pausing again as she watched her brother.
"It's been a long time." The detective played a series of notes – chords, Ankh remembered – that sounded familiar in a way that should have warned him away. Words accompanied the music, a song about loneliness and never quite fitting in.
The notes faded away, and Ankh opened his eyes. Hina and the detective were both watching him, almost warily, and Ankh realized that the voice singing had been his own. "What," he snapped, and felt the wetness on his face. He reached up to scrub it away, the sight of Hina's project pulling his hand up short. He stared at it, torn between not wanting to potentially ruin the project and not caring in the slightest what happened to it.
Hina slipped it off Ankh's shoulders and handed him a tissue. "I didn't know you could sing," she said. "Although birds sing. I should have expected it."
"That was Eiji," Ankh whispered, the tissue balled in one fist. He recognized the memories for what they were, now; lessons Eiji had taken in childhood to learn what his parents had called international culture. He'd tried to play the guitar later, a way of distancing himself from unhappy memories while holding on to the comfort that the music had brought, and a way to communicate with people when he didn't share a common language. He hadn't been particularly good at it. Ankh pushed the memories back down.
"Oh," Hina said, surprised. "I didn't know."
"Always full of surprises," the detective said, but he was more relaxed than he had been in days. He looked straight at Ankh for a moment, even, before returning his attention to his sister, who nodded. "You want to try?" he asked, holding out the guitar to Ankh.
"No," Ankh said, but he was already reaching for it. Eiji's memories hurt less, this time, less emotionally fraught as they were full of concentration and sometimes frustration at not being able to move his fingers properly. "He didn't play well," he said, quietly, fumbling at the strings.
Hina giggled, her eyes suspiciously bright. "It's just as well," she said, but refused to explain what she meant by it. Ankh rolled his eyes, but he held on to the guitar while Hina finished with her work around him.
Ankh wouldn't have given the guitar a second thought, afterwards, if Hina hadn't produced one out of somewhere with a half-rushed story about inventory updates and school property donation and something else he paid precisely zero attention to. But she did, and the guitar somehow ended up on the pullout couch, and then it kept ending up in his hands.
Somewhere between Ankh stalking across an improvised stage to model Hina's midterm project and his third Yummy for the Foundation's mysterious research, Ankh found himself deliberately using the guitar as a way to handle Eiji's memories. Every time he walked into the Foundation, someone was asking him to clarify a point of translation, or Hina brought up something the three of them had done together, and Ankh wasn't about to continue demonstrating an adverse reaction.
"What's wrong with the inside of your head, anyway?" he asked one afternoon, hands poised above the strings. Eiji, as usual, didn't answer, even though Ankh had taken his practice outside to a park that Eiji would have loved, if he'd been awake enough to see it.
The difference between Ankh's playing and Eiji's was partly that once he'd started, Ankh was determined to actually be good at it. There was no reason to do anything badly, he felt, and this stupid instrument was no exception. That led to friction with the detective again, and a strict limit on when, precisely, Ankh was allowed to practice in the apartment, even though Ankh did the majority of his practicing at what he was coming to think of as Eiji's park for absolutely no good reason.
Three in the morning was apparently not a reasonable time for practicing anything, according to the detective.
Ankh made a face at the detective's retreating back after that particular conversation, and then spent the rest of the night pacing the balcony out of a sense of restlessness he couldn't quite explain. It finally faded near dawn, and Ankh was able to watch the sunrise with some semblance of calm. Or possibly just fatigue; he was running low on Cell Medals again, if he wanted to keep healing Eiji. Not, he thought, that he really had much of a conscious choice in the matter.
The lingering sense of discomfort almost led to him throwing his phone over the balcony rather than answer it when it buzzed insistently in his pocket. The fact that it was Goto's name on the caller ID – and Goto never called, though he was reasonably polite in person – prompted him to answer the call. "This had better be good," he said.
"We have a minor problem," Goto said, and in the background Ankh could hear the distinctive sounds of someone firing the Birth Buster.
"Oh?" Ankh said.
"The Yummy escaped the Foundation." Goto's voice was tight with something it took several seconds for Ankh to recognize as pain, and the restlessness Ankh felt crystallized. The Yummy had matured, and then gone on to continue growing Cell Medals. It was ready for harvesting; it had been ready for harvesting, and Ankh hadn't gone to deal with it. "We need OOO."
"Of course you do." Ankh said. "That doesn't come without a price. OOO wasn't part of the original agreement." As he spoke, he was already stuffing his feet into Eiji's boots – shoes were the one thing he hadn't bought – and running for the street.
Goto started to say something, breaking off at the last second. Ankh wedged the phone between his ear and his shoulder and stuffed a coin into the Ride Vendor conveniently and deliberately located less than twenty meters from the Izumi apartment. It folded in on itself, and Ankh straddled the bike. Goto still hadn't said a word.
"Well?" Ankh demanded.
"I'm authorized to offer you 80%," Goto said.
"Not good enough." Ankh didn't start the bike, just rested on it. He placed the OOO Driver against his waist, letting it fasten itself snugly above his hips. He was going to harvest the Yummy either way, and he suspected that Kougami or whoever Goto was talking to knew it. He would, however, wait until he was good and ready.
"90%," Goto said, and something in the background exploded.
"95%," Ankh said. There was a brief silence, broken again by the sound of the Birth Buster.
"Agreed," Goto said.
"Pleasure doing business with you." Ankh hung up on whatever Goto was saying; he knew exactly where the Yummy was. Navigating Tokyo's streets was a little harder, particularly when no one saw fit to get out of his way, and it took far too long for Ankh's liking before he pulled up to a scene of utter chaos.
The Yummy had been baited into an empty parking lot in an attempt to contain the damage. It had ripped holes in the concrete, littering the formerly-flat surface with chunks of pavement. The early morning sun cast dark shadows across the pavement, both hiding and exaggerating cracks and ripples. Ankh nearly tripped on one hole that simply looked like a shadow in the simple act of climbing off the Ride Vendor.
Goto was leaning against a pile of debris, one thigh stained dark and the Birth Driver around his waist. The Birth Buster was still in his hands, but his lax grip was doing him no good. Ankh wasn't even sure he was conscious. Satonaka crouched near him, holding off the Yummy with the prototype Birth Buster. Or maybe it was a weapon made just for her; Ankh didn't know or care. She looked as calm as ever, for all that she had clearly dressed rapidly and in the dark.
"About time you showed up," she said. "I do not get paid enough for this shit."
The Yummy hissed and charged toward her again, and this time the Buster clicked empty in Satonaka's hands. Ankh moved forward gracefully, running an intercept path and swinging up onto the Yummy's shoulders just as it angled past him. It hadn't seen him coming, and he hauled it up short with his left arm. It might have been a seagull, he thought, long wicked beak echoed in its long and narrow arms.
Satonaka was reloading the Buster in the corner of Ankh's vision, paying very little attention to him. He manifested his left arm and plunged it into the core of the Yummy. It slid around him like greasy smoke; he couldn't grasp any of the medals, although he could tell they were there.
"What the hell did you do to this thing?" he demanded, struggling to maintain a grip with his knees around its ribcage and his right arm around its throat. It should have fallen apart the moment he willed it to; that was how a Yummy worked.
"Just kill it already," Satonaka said. "Or get out of the way."
Ankh flung himself off the Yummy, kicking it to the side and rolling across the ground. He fetched up on the wrong side of Satonaka's cover and scrambled over it as she held off the Yummy again.
"Are you going to transform or what?" she asked. "I'm running out of Medals."
Ankh glared at her. She had one knee against Goto's thigh, above the dark stain that had turned out to be a makeshift pressure bandage, and she looked almost frightened. Satonaka didn't ever look frightened; she was the epitome of cool and collected, even in the face of the Medal Vessel trying to absorb Tokyo. He filed it away for future reference. "Hold this."
He left Eiji tucked up against Goto and climbed the pile of broken concrete in his full glory, wings spread against the morning sun. The Yummy fell back, but it didn't run at first. Ankh stalked toward it, hands outstretched and talons prominent, and then the Yummy tried to flee. Ankh chased it, taking to the air before diving to catch his prey. He hit its spine, hearing it crack under his weight and knowing that the Yummy was far from incapacitated.
Ankh plunged both hands into the Yummy's back, intending to tear it apart, but his talons were met with the same greasy smoke sensation and infuriating almost-void. He pulled himself free, balled up a fist, and punched it in the back of the head. That, at least, went satisfyingly well – he heard the crunch of what wasn't really bone as a few Cell Medals bounced across the pavement. He hit it again, out of frustration.
"What the hell are you doing?" Satonaka called from halfway across the parking lot.
"What did you people do?" Ankh repeated, punctuating each word by slamming the Yummy's head into the widening crater in the pavement. "This is all wrong. It's all wrong!"
He had no desire to beat the Yummy to death, although he was fairly sure he could. Ankh stood and slammed a heel into its spine. For a moment he contemplated dragging it back to the OOO Driver, but it was heavy. He took to the air again instead, landing lightly behind Satonaka and slipping back into Eiji.
"Something is wrong with that thing," he said, pushing the medals into the OOO Driver. It felt familiar, muscle memory guiding his actions. The scanner sang as he slid it across the Driver, and Ankh had a bare moment to realize he'd used Eiji's standard combination before the feeling of transformation rushed over him. It was nauseating, disorientation grabbing him and shaking him like a dog with a small toy, and Ankh staggered. Fire burned along his veins, and he swallowed hard.
"You okay?" Satonaka said, and he could barely hear her.
Letting muscle memory guide him again, Ankh vaulted over the stupid pile of concrete for what had to be the fourth time and just missed the Yummy trying to pull off his head. He ducked, sweeping his leg out against the Yummy's knees, and it went part of the way down. Ankh drew back a fist and punched it again and again, until it stopped trying to attack and again started trying to flee.
For a long moment, Ankh let it think it was going to escape. He was furious at whatever the Foundation had done that wouldn't let him harvest the Yummy, but he couldn't take that out on Satonaka. No one responsible was here for him to confront. He watched it darting across the uneven surface, trying and failing to use the evidence of its own destructive nature as cover.
"I don't think so," he said, and then had to swallow the nausea down again before he could start running after it. The O Scanner was exactly where he expected it to be; he tilted the Driver and slid the scanner across it again. Scanning Charge, it said, the words familiar and unexpected, and he leapt up lightly before momentum and the OOO system pulled him rapidly through the three colored rings of TaToBa's finishing kick.
The Yummy exploded, Cell Medals falling to the ground in a pool. Something in its center shimmered for a moment before dissolving into dark smoke that lingered briefly before dissipating. Ankh landed on his feet, tugging at the Driver to disengage the transformation. Beyond the nausea, it hurt, the suit burning like fire along his skin. Ankh shuddered at the humid breeze that swept over him, the roiling sensation in his stomach fading along with the pain to leave a leaden sense of exhaustion behind. Eiji whimpered in the back of his head, and it was so out of character and unexpected that Ankh froze.
"Eiji?" he whispered, but the sensation of weeping didn't abate. "Hey!"
"What's wrong?" Satonaka was doing something to Goto, who hadn't stirred during the fight, as far as Ankh could tell, but she looked at him sharply when Ankh spoke.
"Nothing," Ankh returned through gritted teeth. Eiji was quieting now, returning to the barely-there sleeping presence to which Ankh had almost grown accustomed. "Everything is fine." He jerked his chin. "What about him?"
"Paramedics are on the way." Satonaka looked back down. "The Foundation thanks you for your assistance," she said, sounding detached.
"The Foundation can go fuck itself," Ankh muttered too quietly for her to hear, and went to collect his Cell Medals.