The simple act of absorbing the Medals did almost nothing to abate the heaviness in Ankh's limbs; he would have found it more alarming if he'd been less tired. He was not too worn out to meticulously measure out precisely 5% of the Cell Medals and place them in the somehow still upright Ride Vendor bike. Flashing lights out of the corner of his eye turned out to be an ambulance attempting to navigate the former parking lot; Ankh waited until it had reached Satonaka and Goto before wearily climbing on the bike and driving home. He didn't remember actually getting there.

After waking disoriented to the hallway floor and Shingo's slightly panicked voice, Ankh tried leaving Eiji's body in the bed to sleep off whatever new damage it had incurred. It didn't really help much, and Eiji didn't react well to suddenly having Ankh's support withdrawn. Ankh sulked into the living room and picked up the guitar he'd been practicing with.

The next thing he was aware of was somebody taking it out of his hands. He tightened his grip, because he could damn well practice when and where he pleased, and he said so. It didn't quite sound like it had come out right. The same hands that had removed the guitar tugged him sideways, onto something soft, and he protested again. It still didn't come out right, but he cared less when soft warmth settled over his shoulders.

"That's not normal," he heard distantly. He thought it was Hina. "I don't remember that happening to you."

"It didn't," Shingo said, coming through a little more clearly. "But this is a different situation."

There was a rustling noise, and then Hina said something about Ankh's most recent call being from Goto. Ankh had a momentary flash of anger that she was touching his things, but it couldn't sustain itself.

"Goddammit," Shingo said, sounding almost as tired as Ankh felt. "So it was Ankh in the OOO suit." His voice faded into a badly-told explanation of the events of the early morning, and Ankh stopped listening. He was happy about precisely zero parts of that encounter, up to and including the gentle hand stroking his hair and sending him right back into sleep.

The terrible lethargy took three days to abate, during which Hina spent far too much time hovering over him like a mother hen. She brought Date along, even, though Date spent more time examining Eiji than focusing on the effects of the OOO Driver.

"It's hard to say," Date said finally, serious and sympathetic and professional in a way that made him look almost like a stranger. "The, ah, outlook isn't good, for most people with this type of injury."

"Injury?" Hina said from the door, and Date started an explanation that involved phrases Ankh didn't like. A high number of them involved the word neural in some capacity.

"In most cases, we just have to wait and see," Date said finally.

Ankh had known, somehow, that it would come down to him in the end, but Date's verdict made it that much more real. Hina's sympathy just added to the lingering exhaustion and made it that much worse.

"I'm not broken," Ankh finally snarled at her. She pressed her lips together and glared at him before stalking away. Ankh made a face at her retreating back, but stopped trying to climb down from the balcony. He could feel himself going slowly stir crazy at the same four walls and almost no sky, except for when nobody complained that outside in the sun was too hot and going to make things worse. Hina wasn't exactly wrong on that particular score, but Ankh wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of giving in.

Hina also insisted on telling him how Goto was doing, which was as well as could be expected given that he'd nearly bled out despite proper use of the Birth Driver and not happy about it. He was stuck under observation for nearly as long as Ankh was trapped in the Izumi apartment, and then showed up on crutches when nobody else was home.

"I was going to lose my mind," Goto said. Ankh wasn't sure how he'd navigated the stairs, but Goto was nothing if not stubborn.

Ankh left him sitting in the living room and went back to the balcony. To his very great annoyance, Goto shuffled out to join him a few minutes later.

"Hot out here," he said.

"What do you want?" Ankh asked that question far too often.

"I'm bored," Goto said.

"You didn't climb six flights of stairs on crutches because you're bored," Ankh returned. "Is this the Foundation's method of spying on me?"

"I would tell you the Foundation doesn't care what you do, but we both know I'd be lying," Goto said, shifting in the chair so that he was entirely out of the sun. It was late enough in the day for most of the balcony to be covered in shade, south-facing or no.

"The OOO Driver works just fine," Ankh said, aware that he sounded petulant.

"So I heard," Goto said mildly. "Thanks."

Ankh blinked. "For what?"

"You saved my life," Goto said. "If you hadn't shown up, I would have died."

"Whatever," Ankh muttered, slouching farther down in the chair. "I didn't do it for you."

"Of course not," Goto said, just a little too quickly, and Ankh bit down on further protest before the words could escape. Goto would only take it as more encouragement; he'd learned too much from Date not to. "Date's leaving at the end of the week," Goto said, as though he'd heard the man's name crossing Ankh's mind.

"Okay," Ankh said, after it became clear that Goto was expecting some sort of response. It occurred to him, as it hadn't over the past four weeks, that Date had offered to look at Eiji's medical file; the detective hadn't said anything to Ankh about it, and he'd simply forgotten.

"We're having a get-together at the café," Goto said, and Ankh couldn't stop the groan.

"Not again," he said, although there was a part of him that enjoyed being around people that Eiji had known. People that Eiji knew, he corrected himself into the right tense. It prompted a smile out of Goto, which was not the result Ankh had been looking for.

When Ankh finally escaped the apartment, he didn't go far; he took the guitar to the park and sat under a tree. He fully planned on climbing it to practice, but it could wait. While he sat in the shade, hand on the closed guitar case next to him he felt rather than heard someone approach from behind. Tense, he waited until the individuals were nearly close enough to touch before jumping to his feet and turning to face the potential assailants. At least, that had been his intent, but the sudden movement was accompanied by a wave of dizziness and he had to catch himself on the tree.

"Ah, Mr. Guitar," said one of the potential assailants, who appeared to be a perfectly ordinary human girl dressed identically to the other apparently perfectly ordinary human girl standing next to her. "Are you all right? We missed seeing you the past few days."

"What did you call me?" Ankh said. The brief dizziness was subsiding, and with it the urge to manifest his talons.

"I'm sorry," the second girl apologized. "We just kind of got used to seeing you playing up there." She gestured to the tree. "And, well. The name just sort of happened."

"We just wanted to say we're glad you came back," said the first girl. "Are you sure you're okay?"

He hadn't technically answered her the first time. "Fine," he said shortly. He maybe wasn't going to climb the tree today, although he wasn't about to say that to either of these two interfering strangers.

Ankh ended up just sitting underneath the tree, without practicing, leaning back to feel the wind against his face. His attempt to enjoy the weather was interrupted by his phone, which contained a message from the Foundation requesting his presence for making another Yummy.

"That's right," Ankh said. He'd wanted to ask what they'd done to the last one, that he was neither able to absorb nor control it. "You bastards."

Hina insisted on driving him to the Foundation at the requested time, although it had been two days since his episode of dizziness in the park, which she had not seen, and Ankh had been fine since then. He objected both on the basis of not needing the extra help, and also his lack of faith in Hina's ability to drive any sort of vehicle. He was entirely sure she was going to break the detective's car somehow.

"Get in the car, Ankh," she said finally, hand on the half-wall surrounding the parking lot, and he thought he heard the concrete crack under her grip.

"I'm going to die," he muttered, but he got in the car.

"Don't be ridiculous." Hina reached over him and he flailed at her ineffectually before she grabbed some sort of strap and tugged it across his chest. "Don't forget this."

Ankh took it in one hand, dubiously, and it slid right back where it had come from. "What is it?"

"Have you never been in a car before?" She paused. "Didn't you have access to all of my brother's memories?"

"I didn't pay attention to unimportant details," he said, which earned him what Hina probably thought was a gentle slap on the shoulder. It stung.

"That's a seat belt. It saves your life if there's an accident." She reached over him and took the belt again, this time clicking it into a receptacle on his right side. "See?"

"You're planning on something happening to this vehicle," he said, and if there was a slight note of hysteria in his voice, he would deny it to his dying day.

"You're being ridiculous again," Hina said. Ankh considered manifesting his entire body around Eiji, which would probably give both of them more protection. He was fairly sure he could do it. "Stop it," Hina said, as though she could tell what he was thinking.

"I didn't do anything," he muttered, and she started the car.

Despite Ankh's expectations, the detective's car at no point approached another in a manner that was inconsistent with the vehicles around them, and they arrived outside the Kougami Foundation in one piece. He tugged at the belt, trying to get it off, but the more he pulled at it, the more stubbornly it stayed attached.

"Ankh," Hina said, her tone implying that he was trying to be obnoxious on purpose. She reached over again and pressed a small button. The belt slithered back into its case, and Ankh all but flung himself out of the car. "I'll be waiting," Hina said.

"You really don't have to," Ankh told her. "You can give the car back to your brother," he added, taking a stab in the dark.

Hina twitched, just slightly, and looked guilty. "Are you sure?" she said.

"Yes," Ankh told her forcefully.

"Call me when you leave," Hina said, and Ankh nodded. He had no intention of behaving like a small child checking in with its parents, but if he pretended to agree, she'd leave more quickly. He didn't feel guilty about it, not in the slightest.

Instead of taking the by-now more familiar route to the complex where the Yummies were allegedly contained, Ankh went up to the laboratory. His thumbprint let him in the doors, but it took several moments before anyone noticed him. The room fell slowly silent as the four people present noticed that he was leaning on the wall against the door.

"Don't stop on my account," he said into the silence.

"The, ah," Fujii started, and then faltered to a stop under Ankh's flat stare.

"What did you do?" he asked, and none of them had the grace to look guilty. They wore almost identical expressions of confusion, although a small part of that could have been language barrier. "What did you do to the Yummy that escaped?" he said.

"Do?" said Pedersen. At least, Ankh was mostly sure the blonde's name was Pedersen. "What do you mean, what did we do?"

"You altered it," he said. "Did you think I couldn't tell?"

An exchange of glances, everyone's face carefully blank, told him that it wasn't the first Yummy they'd altered. He hadn't been able to tell, or he hadn't paid enough attention once creating them to know that something had been off.

"I know you did something to all of them," he said. "I want you to tell me what it is."

"With all due respect," said the Brazilian researcher. Da Costa, that was the man's name. He spoke in Portuguese, which he invariably did when speaking to Ankh, although his Japanese was passable and his English excellent.

"Say it in Japanese," Ankh interrupted harshly.

"With all due respect," da Costa repeated, this time in English. Ankh folded his arms across his chest just a little more tightly, and da Costa finally relented. "We didn't think you'd be interested," he said.

"Didn't think I'd be interested." Ankh glared at each of them in turn. "Do you have any idea how hard it was to stop that thing?"

They exchanged glances again and shrugged. Da Costa took the lead again. "It isn't easy to break them apart in here, either," he said. It was something they hadn't asked Ankh to do, something he wasn't sure they knew he was supposed to be able to do.

"People almost died because it didn't behave the way it should have," Ankh snapped. Technically it had just been Goto, but they didn't need to know the details. "Tell me what you did."

"How," said Zhao, and paused. She swallowed. "How could you tell?" she asked.

"What do you mean, how could I tell? I made it," Ankh said. "Of course I could tell."

"Yes, but how?" Zhao pressed, edging forward now. "You didn't say anything with the first two." She paused again. "Well, we didn't really do anything to the first one, but you didn't say anything with the second one, although we didn't think that was a success."

Ankh blinked at her, slightly disconcerted at the increasingly multilingual flood of information. She was switching back and forth between Mandarin and Japanese and he didn't think she was doing it on purpose.

"The alterations were mainly to limit the expression of the progenitor's desire," Zhao was saying. "In order to direct it in a constructive manner."

"Destructive is more like it," Ankh muttered, the words sliding out in Mandarin. Zhao winced, and then looked around at the confused team members who weren't following the conversation. "Whatever you're doing, stop it," Ankh said. "It's not working."

"Oh, sure," da Costa muttered. "That's a helpful directive."

"If I can't harvest the Yummy after it's matured, we all have problems," Ankh said.

"It was able to mature?" Pedersen breathed, and suddenly no one was paying attention to him at all. Ankh threw up his hands and stalked out, making his way to the reinforced complex with ill grace. He all but flung the Cell Medal at the waiting intern without waiting for the door to close. If they weren't going to take advantage of what he knew, he certainly wasn't going to volunteer information.

Contributing to Ankh's general displeasure with the day, his presence at the goodbye gathering for Date was assumed. He had been under the impression that he'd refused to attend. The detective drew him aside almost the moment Ankh walked in 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 opened the freezer, pulling out one of the popsicles Hina had bought when he'd first moved in with them, before he'd figured out that they didn't taste the same way he remembered. He bit down savagely on the tip of one anyway. It was cold and sweet, but he could taste the additives that gave it color and enhanced the sweetness; he hadn't noticed that while possessing Izumi.

The detective, for his part, almost never ate ice cream or anything else frozen; Ankh sometimes saw Hina hesitate when her brother ignored the freezer entirely. He rolled his eyes and wandered into the living room, still eating the popsicle. Hina was there, reaching under the couch. She looked over her shoulder at him, opened her mouth, closed it, and then went back to reaching.

"There you are," she said, but when Ankh looked back, she was addressing something in the palm of her hand.

Curious as to whether she was talking to something alive, Ankh made his way over to look. It was a hair clip, brightly colored and glittery and definitely not alive. He lost interest in it.

"I'd tell you not to spoil your appetite," Hina said, glancing up at him and the half-empty stick in his hand.

"Whatever," Ankh said automatically, and then, suspiciously, "Why?" That particular phrase was usually code for Hina experimenting in the kitchen. While her cooking had improved, the detective was still better at it. Ankh didn't really care one way or the other, except when Hina tried something new and insisted he try it.

"Don't tell me you forgot," she said. "Cous Coussier. Date. He's leaving tomorrow."

"Oh, is that why your brother was asking me about Eiji's file," Ankh said. "You two have fun."

"You're coming with," Hina said. "You said you would."

Ankh was fairly sure he'd actually said no such thing, but it was also entirely possible that Hina had misinterpreted something he'd said. He narrowed his eyes at her, ready to stand his ground, when another thought occurred to him. "I'm taking the guitar," he said.

"You what?" Hina, clearly prepared for an argument, found herself derailed, and just blinked at him.

"I'm taking the guitar," Ankh said, pleased to have gotten the upper hand for once, and bit off another section of the ice pop. He could see the wheels in Hina's head turning; she couldn't accuse him of being unfriendly, even if he was using the guitar as an excuse to not actually talk to anyone. He pushed down the small pang that deliberately arguing with Hina brought.

"That's wonderful," Hina said finally, and smiled as though she meant it. After a moment, Ankh was fairly sure she did mean it. "I'm so glad you found something you like," she said, and Ankh almost sputtered. That hadn't been his intent at all, and yet he was almost glad that Hina wasn't walking away upset.

Whether the conversation with Hina had been a victory or a loss was moot, Ankh decided later; taking the guitar had been a mistake. Chiyoko had been delighted when he'd shown up with it. She'd been a little more confused when he claimed a position in the general vicinity of the door and stayed there, but she had long ago proven herself willing to go along with almost anything. The rest of Date's friends, when they'd shown up, had given him looks of the same manner of confusion.

Ankh, for his part, had found that he enjoyed the concentration of people far more when he wasn't forced to interact with any of them on their terms, and had lost himself in playing what he'd spent the past weeks learning. It wasn't much, and he was still new to the instrument, but it had soothed the irritation and aggravation of the past few days and let him look at things without the inconvenient emotional reactions. That hadn't been the problem.

The difficulty had come when Chiyoko came up to him while he was stretching out his fingers; he wasn't used to playing for quite such long stretches at a time, and his left hand had been a little sore.

"Ankh," she'd said, a sparkle to her eye that he'd recognized and instantly wanted to run far away from.

"No," he'd said.

Chiyoko had plowed ahead as though he hadn't said anything at all. "Would you like to play here regularly?"

Ankh had blinked, nonplussed. "Are you going to pay me for it?" he'd asked, finally.

Chiyoko had looked almost offended. "Of course," she had said. "That would be only fair."

And just like that, things had settled into a routine. Ankh, somewhat to his own surprise, had found himself at the Cous Coussier a couple of times a week; Chiyoko kept presenting him with music she thought was appropriate for whatever theme she'd come up with that time, he would tell her if she wanted a trained monkey she could hire one, and then actually learn what she'd given him. It was challenging in a satisfying way, particularly when he figured out that using his talons instead of Eiji's fingers made it easier to keep playing for longer, and increased his range of movement just enough to make playing a little easier. No one at the café batted an eye, either, when he showed up with a scaled red hand; Chiyoko declared it a brilliant piece of costuming and that was that.

Somehow requests from other patrons of the café led to Ankh playing and then singing while playing at other places in the general area; he was occasionally recognized by people he'd never seen, which was oddly disconcerting, but he was enjoying the act of performing too much to not do it.

The Kougami Foundation left Ankh alone for long enough following the escaped Yummy and his subsequent argument in the lab that he started to get tempted to make Yummies on his own again, but the requests started up again as though nothing had happened. Ankh had been wary, at first, of what they were doing with the Yummies, and whether he'd have to chase one down again, but the next few didn't escape, and he began to relax a little.

Even the detective seemed less tense, showing up to listen to him play once in a while, and Hina was downright thrilled. Ankh couldn't decide if it was annoying or not. The one thing that wore at him was that Eiji still refused to wake up, and Date had no insights on anything useful after all, and that in and of itself connected to a vague sense of building tension that Ankh couldn't quite define.

The first break in that tension, or the first time things came to a head, depending on one's point of view – and Ankh would always look back on it later with a distinct sense of ambivalence – came after Ankh accidentally acquired an agent. The agent worked for a small company trying to get off the ground; Ankh was approached after he'd played for the first time in a new place, and he'd been curious enough to hear the man out. When he'd learned that the agent wanted him to sign a contract, he'd just walked away.

Not long after, Ankh ran into the man again, this time at the Cous Coussier. He was talking to Chiyoko when Ankh walked in, and she smiled at him. It was that manic smile again. Justifiably wary, Ankh approached the two of them.

"I'm not signing a contract," he said. "I do what I want, when I want."

"Deal," said the agent.

"What?"

"Sort of." The agent produced a sheaf of paper that bore a startling resemblance to the papers he'd signed for the Kougami Foundation. Chiyoko wasn't looking at them as though they were anything out of the ordinary, though, and Ankh took the papers to look them over. "We'll find you places to perform, on a regular basis, as long as you agree to a certain number of performances in any given month. You have final say in whether or not you perform somewhere, as long as you meet those requirements."

"It's actually really good to you," Chiyoko said, reading over his shoulder. "There's a lot of kindness and consideration for the artist in this."

Ankh glanced at her; she was farther into his personal space than he was used to. She smiled at him, rested her chin on his shoulder and reached around him to turn the page.

"See?" she said. "Most places wouldn't give you this much freedom, if you wanted to make a living as a musician. There are horror stories."

Ankh didn't care about horror stories that applied to other people. He flipped through the pages again and then looked at the agent and back at Chiyoko. "This is what it's like, being human?" he asked. The agent didn't even blink, just kept watching him with a bland smile.

"For some people," Chiyoko said, pulling away from him and turning him to face her directly. "Everyone has to make their own choices, find out what makes them happy."

"Huh." Ankh turned the papers over in his hands. It felt odd, having someone offer him something based on what he'd done, with the expectation that he'd continue to do it. "I want time."

"I understand," said the agent. Ankh thought for a very brief moment that there had been something like frustration on the man's face, but it was gone before it really registered. He held out a small white card. Ankh cocked his head at it. Chiyoko stepped forward, taking it with both hands and thanking the agent. "I'll need an answer by Wednesday," the agent said.

"Right." Ankh was looking at the contract again, and paid no attention to the man walking out the door. Chiyoko materialized at his side again, holding some sort of folder.

"Here." She took the contract out of his hands and put it in the folder; there was a pocket perfectly sized to hold the white card, which Ankh could now see had a business logo, a name, and some contact information. "You might want to ask Shingo or Hina what they think," she said.

"What do they know," Ankh said, but he didn't really mean it. Chiyoko smiled at him sympathetically.

"You going to get ready?" she said, and Ankh blinked. He was supposed to play for her that evening; he'd learned some of what she'd told him was British punk rock for whatever her theme was. As far as he was concerned, he'd learned how to play entire songs using no more than four chords, which was not necessarily particularly interesting. Keeping track of the lyrics had been a bit more of a challenge.

Whether or not Ankh had actually managed to keep track of the lyrics by the end of the evening was moot; he was fairly sure no one who might have been listening understood them anyway. Chiyoko looked thrilled, though, which he told himself he didn't actually care about in the slightest.

"Have them look over the contract," she reminded him, and he made a face at her. She just smiled in return, absolutely unfazed. There were moments Ankh was absolutely sure she couldn't possibly be real.

The contract was passed around to multiple people, all without Ankh's actual involvement. He'd decided that it was too much trouble for what it could be worth, and to ignore the entire thing, but Hina finally handed it back to him with a smile. "This could be really good for you," she said.

"Whatever." Ankh had a popsicle in one hand, still in its wrapper, and he tapped it against the countertop. "Doesn't matter. I'm not doing it."

"Yeah, but," Hina said, carefully. She was making the same face she did when she tried to convince him to do things that were allegedly good for either him or for Eiji. "It actually gives you a lot of freedom."

Ankh squished the popsicle between the fingers of his right hand, relishing the sensation of cold.

"Are you going to eat that?" Hina asked.

"It doesn't taste right," he said. "Eiji tastes things differently than the detective."

"Really," Hina said, sidling closer to him. "Different how?"

"Just different." He inched away, still reducing the popsicle to goo inside its wrapper. The wrapper split under the strain, and Ankh glared at the purple mush now dripping off of his hand.

"Oh, come on," Hina said.

Ankh dumped the remains of the popsicle in the sink. He found, much to his dismay, that the remains of the frozen treat were obnoxiously sticky. That really seemed like something that should have come up before, he felt.

"It's good, though," Hina said, and for a moment he thought she was talking about the popsicle.

"Whatever." He took the papers out of her hands. It did not occur to him to wonder what Eiji might have thought about this particular use of his body as he signed the papers where indicated and texted the number on the business card he'd been given.