"Anything?" Shingo asked.

Hina shook her head. "It's still going straight to voicemail. Either the battery's run out or he's turned it off." She didn't want to ask her brother to track Ankh's cell phone via his work; Shingo felt strongly about the misuse of public resources for private matters, even if it probably wouldn't have come with a reprimand.

"If you file a missing person report," Shingo said, but his eyes flicked over to the closed door. If Hina tried to file a missing person report for Hino Eiji, he would turn up in the hospital where he was currently being treated for an unknown condition, and Ankh didn't technically legally exist.

Hina shook her head. "It was a good thought," she said. She squeezed Shingo's hand tighter, and he squeezed back in sympathy.

He had a great deal less sympathy for hospital security a few minutes later, when two guards came up to them radiating a wordless apology and told them that they would have to leave the hospital grounds.

"What?" Hina said.

"The patient in room 4077," said the guard. "His parents have requested that you be removed in order to prevent a disturbance."

"You can't be serious," Hina gasped.

"Hina, it's not worth it. We'll go," Shingo said, tugging her toward the door.

"Not worth it? We're Eiji's friends!" Hina pulled away and stalked toward the room they'd been unceremoniously thrown out of when they'd tried to see Eiji earlier. They'd retreated to the nearest waiting room in the hope of reaching some sort of agreement with the Takaichis, but the effort had been in vain. "We're the one who were there for him, not them!"

Hina was simultaneously acutely aware that she'd been the one urging Eiji to speak to his family while he'd been OOO for a year, and absolutely furious at being shut out. The door to Eiji's room stayed stubbornly closed, but now the security guards were moving to intercept her and one of them was calling for backup.

"Hina, stop." Shingo stepped in front of her.

Hina stopped, breathing heavily. "Shingo," she said. "You know it's wrong."

"We can't do anything from here," Shingo said. "Come on."

Reluctantly, Hina followed her brother to the elevator and out the door. She tried Ankh's phone again; he was the only shot they had at getting Eiji's body out of the hospital without literally kidnapping him, and even if they did, they couldn't take care of him unless he woke up on his own. She fumed all the way home, directing her energy into cleaning up everything the paramedics had left behind and then cleaning the apartment. She carefully threw out the broken glass on the balcony and righted the fallen chair.

Eiji had bled all over the balcony. Her stomach twisted, and she pressed a hand to her mouth before going after bleach and a pair of rubber gloves. By the time she'd finished, Shingo was deeply asleep on the couch and she'd curled up on the now-wobbly chair with a cup of strong coffee to watch the rising sun. Hina was still sitting in the cool morning air, wearing a heavy jacket, her coffee long gone cold, when Shingo stepped out onto the balcony a few hours later. "Have you slept?" he asked, pulling his inadequate shirt more tightly around his torso.

"I can't believe he would do this," Hina said. She wasn't crying; the moisture in her eyes was from the fitful breeze that curled through the balcony, refusing to either die or turn into something resembling wind.

Shingo sighed heavily, and Hina could hear everything he wasn't saying. She let him herd her inside, where it was warmer; she hadn't realized quite how cold she was until she was no longer freezing. "This was always a possibility," he said, handing her a cup of hot tea. That he was almost apologetic as he said it lessened her initial instinct to smack the cup to the floor to a simple convulsive tightening of her grip.

She took a sip before she could say something she regretted to her brother, who wasn't the target of her anger. He was simply there. The tea burned her tongue, but it was worth it for the warmth spreading through her stomach, and the physical sensation helped her bring her emotions under control. Dimly she thought of Ankh warning her of what the OOO suit might do, and took a deep breath until the automatic swell of rage subsided. "It shouldn't have been," she said finally. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."

"I know." Shingo fiddled with the edge of his shirt in an uncharacteristic display of restlessness. "I'm a little surprised he stayed this long," he said finally, his voice low, and Hina remembered how Ankh had borrowed her brother for most of a year. How Shingo had been awake through the majority of it. How well Shingo knew Ankh; better than any of them, in a lot of ways, and she wanted to tell him anyway that her friend was better than that.

"He was supposed to -" she started to say, and her throat closed off. She wasn't sure what she would have said. Hina took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "You're late for work," she said, trying to keep her voice even. She almost succeeded.

"You going to be okay alone?" Shingo asked.

"Go ahead." Hina gave him as bright of a smile as she could manage. "I'll… think of something to do." She'd had her final exam for her last class on the last day she'd fought a Yummy as OOO; she was just waiting on results, now, and then winter break was hers to do with as she chose. She'd initially thought the longer-than-usual winter break was a positive part of the program in which she'd enrolled, but now she had no distractions.

An attempt to get into the hospital only got her recognized and thrown back out again; as if that wasn't enough, the alert she'd set started going off, and Hina found on-the-spot reports of a Yummy rampaging around another district. She tried Ankh again, to tell him that she needed the Driver and the Scanner, but the number continued to go straight to voicemail.

A RideVendor was close enough for her to activate it and drive to the area in question – she had a ready supply of Cell Medals, specifically for that purpose. She didn't know what she was going to do to the Yummy without the OOO suit, except maybe punch it or drop something heavy on it. Maybe she could throw the RideVendor at it. She glanced down at the bike. It didn't deserve that.

Birth was already fighting with the Yummy when she arrived, but as it had chosen a construction site for its tantrum, there were plenty of handy chunks of concrete around. Hina picked one up and threw it at the Yummy just as its skin began to ripple in maturation. It crashed to the ground, spitting out a shower of Cell Medals. Birth hopped to his feet with a jaunty little salute and Hina threw another rock at the Yummy. More Cell Medals scattered across the street, and Birth finished it off with no further trouble.

"What are you doing here?" Goto asked, disengaging the transformation and removing the belt.

"I'm having a very weird day," Hina said, and went to pick up some of the Cell Medals.

"Uh, I'm not sure I'm supposed to let you do that," Goto said apologetically.

"I did help," she said. "And I need them for the RideVendor."

"Since when do you use the RideVendor?" Goto frowned at her, and she belatedly realized that he was going to start putting the pieces together.

"I asked for lessons," she said. "Sometimes it's quicker than taking the train to class." She didn't think Goto was falling for it, but at least he stopped asking.

"How did you know there was a Yummy?" he said instead, which wasn't much better, and she wordlessly held up her phone to show him the alerts. "Then why are you here?"

She didn't have to lie to answer that question. "I was hoping Ankh would show up," she said. The adrenaline and exhaustion caught up to her, and she was sobbing into Goto's shoulder, and telling him about Eiji's parents and Ankh leaving and that she hadn't been able to get in touch with him. Goto patted her on the back, awkwardly, until Hina stepped away. "I'm sorry," she said finally.

Goto gave her a look halfway between scandalized and reassuring. "You have no idea where he went?" he asked, clearly choosing the safest topic.

"No, it's a nightmare." Hina tried to dry off her cheeks without removing what remained of her mascara, but she didn't think she was succeeding too well. "Eiji's parents won't let us see him, and Ankh won't answer his phone."

"The Foundation might be able to track it," Goto said.

Hina considered the offer for less than half a second. "Please," she said.

"I'll let you know what I find." Goto nodded to her. Hina drove the RideVendor back toward home, leaving Goto to collect the Cell Medals.

Results weren't expected immediately, and Hina was both unsurprised and somewhat disappointed to hear that Ankh's phone had gone in the general direction of Narita before being shut off. Goto could try something else to track it, he said, but it would take some time. Goto also mentioned that he would appreciate if word of his doing this particular favor didn't get spread around, which Hina assumed meant that he was doing it without his boss's knowledge.

"Thank you," she said, trying to convey how much the gesture meant to her.

"It's nothing," Goto said. "Hino's my friend, too, and Ankh, well. Ankh is Ankh."

Hina was tired enough to laugh at that, grateful that Goto had hung up before the slightly hysterical giggle found its way out, but then she found herself playing a waiting game. Waiting to see if Ankh answered the phone, waiting to see if Eiji had healed enough to wake up, waiting to see if Goto could find Ankh, waiting for her grades, although the latter seemed less important with each passing day. The day that Hina found out through what she refused to classify as eavesdropping that Eiji's parents were moving him out of the hospital into longer-term care was a difficult day, for all that she memorized every piece of information she overheard.

One week to the day after Ankh had left, Goto sent the location of his phone. Ankh had apparently finally turned it back on, she saw, and he was in Sendai. "What's in Sendai?" Goto asked, innocently enough.

"I have no idea," Hina said, with perfect honesty. She had no idea what Ankh was doing, but Goto had sent her a small executable file that would allow her to use her phone to continue to track Ankh's. She was on a train heading northward within the hour.

Whatever Hina had expected to find, Ankh toying with a Yummy wasn't it; it was in its larval form and hadn't matured, and he was dancing backwards to avoid its increasingly frustrated attacks. He was playing his game in the middle of a busy city street, while passersby filmed the confrontation on their phones, until a stray burst of flame set a nearby tree on fire. Hina reached them just as the crowd scattered.

"Ankh!" she shouted.

"Don't worry," he said easily, and the Yummy dissolved into a pile of Cell Medals. Ankh absorbed them and sauntered down the street right past her. He was close enough that Hina could see he wasn't wearing a human face until he was out of sight of the few people still in the area, and then he abruptly shifted into the face she'd seen him wear the first time she'd thought he'd abandoned Eiji; it was somewhere between Eiji and her brother, and it was oddly unsettling. The hair was the same, between the both of them, and the smirk, and that made it a little easier to look at a face that was both too familiar and not familiar enough.

"What did you think you were doing?" It was clear that the Yummy had been his, but she knew he'd agreed not to cause chaos for the sake of generating Cell Medals.

"I was running low," he said with a careless shrug. "I had less than I thought I did when I started out."

"Still – that's not why I'm here."

"You're here because I let you know where I was," Ankh said loftily. He turned down a side street without warning and Hina had to jog to catch up. "I noticed you called," he added, looking a little less sure of himself, and then closed his mouth as if he'd wanted to say something else but changed his mind at the last moment.

"Eiji's parents still have him," Hina said. "They moved him out of the hospital, though."

"Tch." Ankh grimaced, an expression that she'd gotten used to first on her brother and then on Eiji, and one that finally cemented this new face as neither one nor the other. He didn't stop walking or look at her directly.

"Come home," Hina said, which wasn't what she'd planned on saying. She planted herself in the middle of the street and refused to budge. "You made a commitment."

"You just want me to try to heal Eiji," Ankh said, turning back and physically pushing her through a nondescript door with a sign she didn't have a chance to read. The building turned out to be a small café; the proprietor behind the counter handed Ankh a chocolate-covered banana on a stick and a mug without asking, and turned to Hina. Flustered, she ordered tea and tried to pay for it, but Ankh nudged her toward a table. "There's an agreement," he said.

Hina swallowed whatever argument she might have made about Ankh's arrangement regarding candied bananas and milk tea. "I do want you to heal Eiji," she said. "But you're my friend, too, Ankh. And you made me a promise." She was less angry, now, than she had been a week previously; seven days to think had simply left her tired and disappointed over what she felt she was justified in describing as Ankh's betrayal of them both. She couldn't fix any of it if Ankh kept hiding, though.

Ankh dropped his eyes to the table in an uncharacteristic display of reticence, moodily biting the tip off the banana and chewing it thoroughly before swallowing. "I don't know if he'll ever get better," he said bluntly. "Even with me helping."

The bottom dropped out of Hina's stomach; of all the things Ankh could have said, that was what she would have least expected. Even if it did seem to be taking longer to heal Eiji than it had taken to heal Shingo, the word never hadn't occurred to her. "Why didn't you say anything?" she asked, when she finally found her voice.

"I didn't know how," Ankh said. He shifted on his chair and ate more banana. Hina waited, but he didn't say anything else.

"Don't you want to try anyway?" she prompted.

"I don't think Eiji wants me to," Ankh said, so quietly that she wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly.

"Excuse me?" Ankh straightened and glared at her for the tone in her voice, but Hina held her ground. "That's ridiculous," she said, but her voice was trailing off in hesitation by the end of it, at the expression on Ankh's face.

"I remember what he did to repair me," he hissed, and he told her in gut-wrenching detail exactly what he remembered.

"You –" Words failed her. She cleared her throat. "You think he was trying – he wouldn't."

"I know what I remember," Ankh snapped. "He has what he wants, right now."

"Do you want to try anyway?" Her voice came out small and almost scared, but she was sure that if Eiji knew that he'd brought Ankh back, that he'd be happy about it.

"I don't know if –" Ankh broke off abruptly, mouth twisting downwards, and stared right through her. "Screw that," he said, heat creeping into his voice. He bit down savagely on the banana, crunching right through the end of the stick. He didn't seem to notice the splinters, even though Hina could hear them grinding in his teeth.

"What?" she asked, partly for clarification but partly as a distraction from the unsettling sound.

"Screw that," Ankh said. "If he thinks he can get away with pulling idiotic stunts, he's got another think coming."

Hina cheered internally and did her best to keep her face straight, or at least limit herself to a kind smile. Ankh agreeing to come back wasn't enough to entirely mitigate his running off in the first place, but it went a long way.

"Stop smirking," Ankh said, and she smacked his arm. "How does that still hurt?" he demanded, rubbing the spot she'd hit. "This body is made of Cell Medals. How can it possibly hurt?"

"You deserved that," she said. "I'm not going to apologize."

Ankh grumbled, but he was on a train with her the following morning bound for Tokyo, as Hina fielded calls and texts from her brother demanding to know where she'd gone without leaving him so much as a note. He was not pleased with her explanation, either, even if he was relieved that Ankh was coming home.

"But don't tell him I said that," Shingo said.

As the train outpaced the northern promise of snow for the relatively warmer weather farther south, Hina watched Ankh's blurry reflection in the window. He kept glancing over at her, and then looking away. "I'm still upset with you," she said after he had opened his mouth for the third time. She saw him flinch before she turned around to look at him head on.

Ankh bristled, mouth flattening out to a thin straight line before he sighed and deflated. "That's... fair," he said grudgingly, the words sounding as if they had to fight to get out. "I - I acted quickly."

Hina blinked at him, utterly nonplussed. "Are you trying to play head games with me?" she demanded, when she finally found her voice. Ankh didn't apologize for anything, and the only way he could have gotten closer to an apology would have been to include the word sorry.

"I'm not saying it again," Ankh said, and Hina bit down on telling him that he hadn't said it the first time. "I won't do it again," he added quietly, and Hina found herself going along with it just to put a stop to the uncharacteristic moodiness.

"Why?" she asked instead. "And don't tell me it's because you didn't think you could heal Eiji. That's why you didn't come back. I want to know why you left."

"It doesn't matter why," Ankh snapped. "I made a mistake. I'm trying to fix it."

"It matters," Hina said, "because I don't think you were trying to deliberately hurt anyone. Even if we ended up hurt."

"This is stupid," Ankh muttered. Hina just kept looking at him, until he started avoiding her gaze. "I was angry, okay?" he said. "I'm not here to fix the mess Eiji made of his personal life, but they wouldn't just leave me alone."

Hina sighed. For all that Ankh was both centuries old and not human to begin with, he was capable of acting eerily like a teenager with too few restrictions on his behavior when there was something that inconvenienced him. She didn't know if she was relieved or disappointed that the precipitating incident had ultimately amounted to a temper tantrum.

"I said I wasn't going to do it again," Ankh muttered, and Hina chose to believe that he was sincere.