Ankh didn't get much longer before the situation he'd dismissed came to a head. It had even been a good day, for the most part; Hina had fought with a Yummy, dispatched it before it had matured, and made it to her first class on time. Ankh had gotten a sizable haul of Cell Medals out of the Yummy despite it not maturing, and then he'd spent a significant chunk of time in Kougami's lab so that various measurements of the process of creating a Yummy could be measured. The lab time was more boring than unpleasant, but it had been beautiful enough outside that he'd elected to walk most of the way back to the Izumi residence.
The few leaves that were left were brightly colored and the sky was an unusually clear and deep blue. Ankh breathed deeply, irrationally disappointed that the air still smelled like the city. A few white fluffy clouds scudded overhead in the brisk wind, leaving the warmth of the late afternoon sun a pleasant counterpoint to the cool briskness of the breeze. The people on the street, Ankh noticed, were bundled up as though they were freezing, but he was enjoying the air.
When he got to the apartment building, he didn't want to go inside; it had gotten dark enough that his climbing the outside of the building would go unnoticed, with the only remnants of what had been a spectacular sunset being a paler strip along the western edge of the sky. It wasn't really even visible from the ground. Ankh went up his usual route and sat back in one of the balcony chairs, stretching all four of Eiji's limbs. It felt good, and he could just barely make out a rare sense of contentment coming from Eiji's unconscious mind.
The strange voices coming from inside the living room, clearly audible through the partly open balcony door, were not a welcome addition to Ankh's environment.
"He's my son," said the first voice Ankh heard. It was male, with an air that suggested that the owner was used to being obeyed.
"Our son," came another voice, much quieter than the first but clear for all of that; Ankh thought the owner might be standing closer to the open door. The second voice was female, and vaguely familiar. The image of a well-dressed middle-aged woman in a crowd flashed behind Ankh's eyes, but he couldn't place it.
"Your son isn't here," said the detective. He was remarkably calm, for someone who seemed to have had his home invaded. "Even if he was, he's an adult who can make his own decisions on whether or not he wants to talk to you."
"I'm not leaving him in this… this den of iniquity," said the man, and Ankh suppressed a laugh. Den of iniquity, indeed, he thought; what did this man think his son was doing? "It's out of the question for him to be living with a young woman without supervision."
"Excuse me," the detective said, and Ankh could hear that he'd reached the end of his patience, although he wasn't sure the man speaking could tell, given that he kept right on going.
"If you and your harlot wish to continue an unseemly lifestyle, you can go right ahead, but leave my son out of it. I won't stand for you putting your hands on him."
"Get out," Shingo said, having lost any semblance of calm. "That's my sister you're – get out."
"I will not," the man said. "I refuse to leave until I see my son. Where is Eiji?"
Ankh felt he should have put the pieces together more quickly; he remembered now that he'd seen the woman at one of his performances, and that she'd called him with Eiji's name.
"Filing a restraining order against his brothers, refusing to talk to his mother – produce my son, immediately, or I will have you arrested."
"You're trespassing," the detective returned. "Get out, before I throw you both out."
Ankh had had enough of the conversation, and he'd had enough of the interference from someone who had done nothing but make his life difficult in an attempt to get Eiji to stop doing something that Ankh enjoyed, something that wasn't causing anyone any harm. "If you want him, you can have him," he muttered, and slipped out of Eiji's body.
If Ankh had given it a second's thought, he wouldn't have disengaged from Eiji until he'd at least put the body into a sitting position. As it was, Eiji crashed to the ground, knocking over one of the detective's chairs and the glass side table. Ankh had a spare moment of guilt before he slipped out of sight over the balcony rail, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
"Ankh?" he heard from the detective, and the balcony door was flung wide open. "Eiji," the detective said, surprised, and knelt down. "Ankh," he hissed. "Get back here."
Before Ankh could make any sort of answer, the owner of the voice shouldered his way through the door. He was tall and broad, wearing both his years and his weight well. "Eiji!" he said, and then shouted over his shoulder for his wife to call an ambulance.
"No," the detective started to say, but then he caught sight of Ankh lurking just below the balcony rail. He pointed at Eiji, mouth set in a straight line. Ankh gave him the middle finger, and the detective stepped toward him with a clearly predatory intent. Ankh backed away a bare millimeter, ready to dodge if the detective actually tried to grab him, but temporary salvation came from an unlikely source.
"Mr. Izumi," said Eiji's mother. "Has anything like this happened to my son before?"
"I think that is something you should discuss with your son," the detective said tactfully, throwing one last glance over his shoulder at Ankh.
By that point, it was too late to stop the paramedics from showing up and carting Eiji's unconscious body off; Ankh waited until everyone had left and the apartment was dark and quiet to emerge from the balcony. He stretched, using Cell Medals to create the same body he'd used the last time he'd left Eiji for more than a few minutes; the face settled somewhere between the detective's and Eiji's, although he'd thought he had more Cell Medals than the pile that he apparently did.
Hina, with spectacular timing, showed up not five minute after everyone else had left. "Shingo?" she called, kicking off her shoes. "I saw an ambulance outside. Do you know who it was for? Shingo?"
"Not here," Ankh said, walking through his door.
"Ankh!" Hina flinched back, and then fumbled on the wall for a light switch. She blinked when she saw Ankh clearly, and looked around the room at the scattered detritus left behind. "What happened?"
"Eiji's parents," Ankh said, which should have been enough explanation. It wasn't.
"Where's Eiji?" Hina asked carefully.
"Probably in some hospital," Ankh said. "They want to talk to him, they're welcome to try. Persistent assholes that they are."
"Ankh," Hina started, and he rounded on her.
"I am done," he said. "I didn't sign up to referee Eiji's family drama. Either he'll get better on his own, or he won't, but I am not putting up with any of this." Without Eiji's presence influencing and undermining his thoughts, Ankh could finally clearly understand how he felt. He wasn't doing anything he wanted to be doing – what did he care if the Kougami Foundation managed to work out whatever it was doing with his Yummies, or with its newborn Greeed, and he liked performing well enough but not enough to suffer through the associated drama.
"You can't just leave him," Hina said, and her insistence that she could tell him what to do just made Ankh angrier.
"Watch me," he said.
His sense of righteous fury carried him all the way to the airport and onto the last plane of the day bound for Sapporo, but by the time he'd been in the air for an hour, it had started to fade. He thumped his head on the back of his seat with more force than was necessary. What am I doing, he asked silently.
"You okay?"
The voice speaking English came from his left, a small non-Japanese child looking up at him with huge gray eyes. He blinked down at it.
"I'm so sorry," said someone who Ankh presumed was related to the child somehow. "Don't just ask strangers questions, sweetie."
"It's okay," Ankh said. He looked down at the child. "My friend is very sick," he said. "I don't know if he'll get better."
The child tilted its head to the side. "Did you give him chicken soup?" it asked. "Mommy gives me chicken soup when I'm sick."
"No," Ankh said, struggling to get the words out past a lump in his throat that had put itself there without his permission. He wasn't supposed to have these problems in a body made exclusively of Medals. "No, I haven't tried feeding him chicken soup."
"I'm sorry," said the child's companion. "Are you on your way to see your friend?"
"He's in Tokyo," Ankh said. "I can't – I can't help him. I'm not going to stand there and talk to his parents, who keep accusing him of – why am I saying this to you." It was easier to talk to someone he knew he was never going to see again, but he shouldn't have felt better after talking about something so ridiculous and so personal in the first place. The child's companion was giving him an odd look now, and pulled the child closer to her. She ignored him for the rest of the flight, making some sort of ritualized gesture and removing herself and the child from Ankh's immediate vicinity the second the plane touched down.
The whole episode made Ankh feel even worse.
"Stupid Eiji," he muttered and swiped at his burning eyes. His hand came away wet, and he stared at it in near shock. He hadn't thought this body could cry. "Stupid, stupid Eiji," he said again, and walked out of the airport into the cold Hokkaido night without bothering to turn his phone back on.
Ankh didn't know what he'd wanted to accomplish by returning to Hokkaido, only that it was the farthest destination from Tokyo that he could think of that didn't require a passport. Sapporo as a city brought back a flood of memories that he tried to shove back down, but they kept coming, and the image that was the most vivid was the cemetery pretending to be a park where Eiji had been found unconscious months before.
"Fine," Ankh growled, and tried to work out how to get there.
He was too late for the majority of the buses and trains, but he eventually made his way to the park in question. It was closed, but that didn't stop him from simply walking inside. The spot where Eiji had been found was outside the park proper, far enough away from populated or visited areas that Ankh was surprised that Eiji had been found at all. He stared down at the patch of ground that he knew was where Eiji had done whatever it was he'd done, now covered in untouched snow. Memory threatened again, and he pushed back at it. "I don't know what Eiji did," he said out loud. "I don't want to know."
Standing in the same spot, he couldn't deny that he knew exactly what had happened; whether he'd accessed the information and then pushed it away or whether it had seeped into his mind in an unintended transfer, Ankh could see and hear what Eiji had done as clearly as if it was happening right before his no-longer-borrowed eyes. With a shudder, Ankh closed his eyes and let the memory play out.
Eiji's clothes were still wet; his feet squished in his shoes and the bag holding the medals he'd found was still clinging to itself, although it was no longer dripping. He was distantly grateful that the weather was warm enough for him not to freeze to death, although the ocean certainly hadn't approximated any definition of warm, and he was shivering. He put the Medals down, carefully, and belted the Driver around his waist.
The first Medals were, as always, Taka, Tora, and Batta, the Driver singing the TaToBa melody with its unrestrained cheerfulness. Eiji felt the tears prickle the backs of his eyelids and blinked to keep his vision clear. Tora and Batta were replaced by Kujaku and Condor, the copies of those Medals Ankh had held onto the longest, and the Driver sang for TaJaDor. Eiji took a deep breath and pulled the Taka Medal out, placing it with the others, and removing the two halves of Ankh's broken Core from the medal case.
Energy from the transformation process might fuse the two halves of the Medal together again, Eiji had thought in the middle of some night. The transformation process was what had exposed the weaknesses of the reconstituted Cores, and he'd had the fleeting thought as the one successful transformation failed that it might kill him, too. He'd almost been disappointed to wake up, but if he didn't put Ankh's Core back together, no one would. It had been some time after that that he'd had the idea that the Driver might be the key.
Tonight was his last-ditch effort; he'd exhausted every other avenue, he'd run out of options. If something went wrong, at least there was no one around to get hurt; he'd been told there had been some injuries during the energetic final failure of the reconstituted Cores, and that was a part of history he had no interest in repeating. Eiji was going to put Ankh's Core back together or he was going to die trying.
You're an idiot, he could imagine Ankh saying, and he smiled at the illusion. "At least if I fail, I'm already in a cemetery," he pointed out to the spirit that wasn't there. The illusion-Ankh didn't think it was funny in the slightest, but that was all right. TaJaDor was hot against his skin. With another deep breath, Eiji carefully inserted the broken halves of the Medal into the slot. It took a little bit of maneuvering to make sure it was positioned correctly, but Eiji could feel it lock into place as if it was coming home. He pulled the Scanner off his belt and ran it across the Driver.
The Driver stuttered, repeating Taka over and over and over again, heat building in it each time until heat became pain, pain became agony, and Eiji screamed. The suit crackled against his skin, red energy washing over him in a wave. It picked apart his brain, overwhelming his mind with fiery red and driving him straight into featureless darkness.
Ankh surfaced from the memory to find himself on his knees in the snow, chill moisture seeping through to his skin. "You are an idiot," he said. "You were right about that."
He'd told Eiji that he'd gotten what he'd wanted, when Eiji had been falling to Earth after destroying Maki's mad creation. He'd spent the last of his energy making sure Eiji had half of his Medal and Hina had the other half, so they'd know he appreciated what they'd done. They'd helped him – a pile of Medals with a thought process – have enough of a life to be able to die, and being alive was all he'd ever wanted. His energy had gone toward making sure Eiji would keep the life he had, and Eiji had damaged himself almost certainly beyond repair. But he had succeeded in putting Ankh's Core back together.
"Idiot," he said again. "I won't cry over you. I'm not fixing the mess you put yourself in."
Tears were already streaking his cheeks; he brushed them away and stood. He could go any number of places, but he didn't want to visit any of them. Right at that moment, he wanted nothing to do with Eiji or with his former life. Ankh walked deeper into the mountains.