Ankh flopped onto the Izumi couch with a feeling of bone weariness. He'd forgotten how exhausting it was, wearing Eiji, but it was worth it to have seen Eiji's father in the rear window of the taxi as he commandeered it to drive away using Eiji's father's money. By the door was a stupid place to leave a wallet; the man was lucky Ankh hadn't just swiped the whole thing.
He would have to replace the clothes, though; there had been a great deal of clothing in Eiji's size, but none of it was anything he actually would have worn. None of it was what Ankh preferred to wear, either, which was more relevant, and he'd taken a great deal of satisfaction in shredding the carefully tailored slacks and button-down shirt that had been representative of what had been in the closet. It had been even more satisfying to climb the outside of the sixty-four story building in broad daylight before punching his way through a window, and then laugh because no one except the people who already knew would figure out who the intruder was.
Ankh had seen police cars racing toward the building as the taxi had driven away, and it had been funny then, too, but he'd looked respectable enough dressed in Eiji's family's idea of appropriate clothing despite his hair and eyes that no one had questioned him when he'd gone right out the front door.
When the dream started wasn't entirely clear; Ankh felt something in the back of his mind shifting, and sent a tentative thought towards it. "Eiji?"
There was no answer, not that he expected one. Ankh wrapped Eiji's unconscious mind up again, trying to prevent the sort of bleed-through that he'd experienced before, but the barrier seemed insubstantial. He heard footsteps by the door, and then he was falling through a thunderstorm.
The ground was wet and cold when he hit it, feeling the unmistakable sensation of the Medals being ripped out of his chest. Uva stood over him, shaking his head mournfully before rippling into Kazari with his claws full of Ankh's medals. They were neatly lined up, red and blue and purple and orange, and Ankh clapped a hand to his chest. It was warm and sticky, and he felt blood pumping out between his fingers.
"These are not for you," Doctor Maki said, and the doll on his shoulder was a mass of Core Medals twisted obscenely into the approximate shape of a human being. Ankh stumbled backwards, falling even though he was sure he'd been lying down only a moment ago, and the flow beneath his fingers trickled away to nothing. He looked down to see silver coating his hands, Cell Medals melted into nothing.
"What did you do to me?" he asked, but the words came out garbled.
"Do? Nothing," Gamel said, and stretched into a mockery of a spider, eight white eyes staring blindly while it wrapped him tightly in silken sticky strands until he couldn't so much as twitch. Silver stained the threads at his heart, and he could feel the Medals draining away. The spider hissed at him, inhuman jaws clacking, and it melted into the most stunningly beautiful man Ankh had ever seen. The man held up a Cell Medal, and Ankh felt a slot open in his forehead.
"You can't do this to me," he said. "I'm a Greeed, not a human."
The man smiled, cocking his head to the side. "Wake up," he said, and flicked the medal at Ankh. It slid home, the sensation of wrongness exploding inside Ankh's skin. "You're having a nightmare." Ankh opened his eyes to Hina's worried face.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
The sense of wrongness from the dream took several moments to fade away, and Ankh had to swallow before he could speak. "I'm fine," he said, but he couldn't speak at a higher volume than a whisper. Hina frowned and left, returning a few moments later with her hands full of something glinting in the half light.
"Cell Medals," she said, and dropped them one by one onto his left palm. Ankh felt better almost immediately, and had a horrifying thought. Remembering the dream, he felt frantically for his Core Medals. They were all present, the six red Cores and the variously colored others he'd chosen to keep absorbed, and he sighed in relief, even if his Cell Medal count had depleted again.
"How do I make them stay away?" he asked once the final medal had been absorbed.
"The Takaichi family?" Hina asked, and shrugged when he nodded. "I don't know." She looked troubled.
Ankh stretched out, his feet stretching past the edge of the couch, and rolled off it. "It's late," he said, and closed the door to his room to stave off any further questions. The lingering sense of wrongness from the dream was still barely tangible against his skin, and he rubbed at his chest where the dream Uva had reached inside his body.
His temporary solution to not dealing with Eiji's parents ended up being another trip out of Tokyo; they couldn't harass Eiji if they didn't know where he was. He traveled south to Japan's smaller islands instead of north, this time, leaving Kougami's lab with a complement of Yummies to occupy their time and simply exploring areas outside of Tokyo. Hina caught up with him after the first day, citing boredom at home and the fact that her spring classes wouldn't start for another two weeks. Ankh was privately certain that she was making sure he wasn't going to run off again, but having her around wasn't unpleasant.
"Shouldn't you be spending New Year with your brother?" he asked, after a few days had passed and she showed no signs of going home. He remembered a conversation about the holiday the previous year, a whispered argument between Eiji and Hina that they hadn't intended for him to hear, and Hina's unusually bleak mood for the few days at the end of one calendar year and the beginning of the next. At the time, he'd dismissed it as ridiculous; now, he still found it ridiculous, but it meant something to Hina.
"He's working," she said. "It's his turn, this year. We'll spend some time together afterwards."
"Oh." Ankh was learning more about the people living in this time, the humans living and breathing and wanting, the force driving the world. He drained his can of heated coffee, deciding that the novel experience had been worthwhile but would not bear repeating, even if the warmth was welcome in the chill of the early morning.
"You should wear a jacket," Hina said, and Ankh rolled his eyes.
It didn't make a difference whether or not he wore a jacket; keeping Eiji warm took so little energy as to be insignificant, and he preferred not to have his movements limited. His clever nonverbal rejoinder was interrupted by the unmistakable feel of a Yummy nearby, and Ankh cursed instead.
"You don't have to be rude about it," Hina said.
"What? No." He pushed the Driver and Scanner toward her; even here, he still kept it on hand. "There's a Yummy."
"All the way down here?" Hina frowned doubtfully at him, but she strapped the belt on. She struggled somewhat to fasten it over her thick coat, and he gave her a significant look. It wasn't even like it was that cold, but she wasn't wearing warm clothing underneath it.
The Yummy burst into the open just as Hina scanned the Driver, and Ankh pelted it with his empty coffee can. It was oddly shaped, looking almost like an immature larval Yummy, but covered in a shiny white carapace instead of the blotchy white and black strips that his own immature Yummies possessed, or those of Uva or Kazari. Its face was completely blank, and he felt an atavistic repulsion. It dodged his flung can with surprising agility, but Hina's transformation had taken hold.
OOO swiped at the Yummy with the tiger's claws, scoring long gray lines along its chest. The lines slowly faded, and Hina spun around to kick it in the jaw. It tumbled backwards, coming up in a crouch, and launched itself at Hina. She used its momentum against it to fling it against the nearby concrete blockade, leaving the wall cracked and dented. The Yummy hit the ground, apparently stunned, and Hina viciously drove her heel into its skull.
The Yummy caught her foot on the second downward kick, flipping Hina backwards. She landed awkwardly, giving the Yummy enough time to scramble to its feet, and Ankh pulled a set of three Medals out to let Hina switch forms. She caught them more easily than she had during their last outing, the OOO armor shifting to SaGohZo. Hina hadn't used this combo before, and it took her a few seconds to catch on.
The Yummy grabbed her by the shoulders as she was figuring out how the combo worked, although Ankh couldn't see what it was attempting to do, and Hina bashed it in the forehead with her own helmet. The Yummy staggered backwards, giving Hina enough time to slam it into the ground with SaGohZo Impact and grind it into so much dust. It melted into a pile of Cell Medals, and Hina disengaged the transformation.
"That was different," she said, breathing hard and slowly sitting down. Ankh collected the Medals before checking on her; she was half-asleep, sitting in the middle of the street, and he pulled her upright. He left her in the hotel room they hadn't yet checked out of, paying for another night's stay, and decided to be smug that she could handle TaJaDor better than the other combos rather than annoyed that she didn't have enough stamina for the other monochrome combos yet.
More important was the question of why, precisely, a Yummy had shown up so far from Tokyo; Ankh knew he hadn't created it, unless there had been far more extensive experimentation done in the Foundation lab than he'd been led to believe. The most reasonable explanation was that Kougami's Spider Greeed had been wandering. Ankh dropped his head to the table, hitting it a couple of times for good measure, and concluded that everything involved with the Kougami foundation went wrong somehow.
"Maybe it will just go home," he said to no one in particular. He was currently in no mood to chase the baby Greeed around, for all that he was going to kill it eventually.
Ankh didn't have to chase the Greeed; the Yummies kept coming to him. Every two or three days, a new larval Yummy would show up, with its odd featureless carapace and provoking the same frisson of disgust as the first. Hina figured out the second time out that she enjoyed equipping GataKiriBa to trap the Yummy and pound it into submission, and she adapted to its particular physiological stressors with remarkable speed.
Ankh, on the other hand, disliked the Yummies more every time they showed up, and abruptly decided that the trip was over. At least Tokyo had RideVendors and potential backup so that he didn't have to feel his skin try to crawl away every time one of the Yummies showed up. Hina, to his surprise, objected to leaving an area so obviously needing Rider involvement.
"I don't think it's Shikoku," Ankh said.
"Kyushu," Hina corrected him. "We were on Shikoku last week."
"Whatever." Ankh flipped a Cell Medal back and forth across the fingers of his right hand and sprawled across one of the seats on the train platform. Hina pulled her small suitcase close enough to touch and sat with significantly more decorum in the seat next to him, still dubious as to Ankh's motivations. "It's going where we are. We're being followed."
Hina did not look convinced, particularly when the third day post-Yummy-incident came and went in Tokyo without one of the maybe-larval Yummies showing its lack of a face. Since there were no news reports of Yummies in either of Japan's smaller southern islands, Ankh still regarded his statements to have been vindicated.
The trip Hina had planned to visit a shrine during the first week of January - just because she couldn't spend the holiday with her brother was no reason not to celebrate at all, she'd said, and Ankh had rolled his eyes - was spoiled by a clearly larval Yummy, black and white skin and all, attempting to set a completely different shrine on fire. Hina was annoyed enough that Ankh found her pouting hilarious, but she dispatched the Yummy in record time before deciding that Ankh was going to experience a proper New Year celebration and it was suddenly much less funny.
The detective, who had barely twitched when Ankh had thrown the Driver and Scanner toward Hina, hid a smile. Ankh had seen him watching his sister carefully, though, and it occurred to him that this was the first time the detective had seen Hina transform. The detective pulled Hina aside for a whispered conversation after she handed the Driver and Scanner back to Ankh, coming back with an easier expression.
Ankh, perched on the parked RideVendor, rubbed his bare arms pointedly.
"If you wore more layers, you'd be less cold," she said.
"I'm not cold, I'm bored," he retorted, which only served to get him shushed.
As if the first Yummy had been bait for the second, one of the pure white Yummies showed up as Hina rode behind him on the RideVendor for the trip home, and Ankh skidded to a halt before running it over. Not that he didn't want to hit it, but he didn't want to damage the bike. The Foundation tended to bill for repairs.
"Another one?" Hina grabbed the Driver out of his hand. "This is ridiculous."
"I told you they were following us," he said, and she pushed the Cell Medals into the Driver with more force than she really needed.
"Coincidence."
Ankh sat back on the RideVendor and watched her beat the Yummy into the ground. She stuck with TaToBa, working out her apparently considerable frustration before dispatching it with TaToBa's signature kick. The detective hung back, eyes narrow as he watched his sister.
"It's coincidence," Hina said again after the fight, not quite throwing the Driver and Scanner at Ankh.
"Uh huh," Ankh said.
The detective apparently had the same reservations about the monochromatic Yummies that Ankh did; Ankh suddenly found his presence expected and assumed on Hina's planned trip to the nearby Hakone shrine and surrounding district that he was fairly sure had been intended for Izumi siblings only no matter what Hina had said about Ankh participating in holiday traditions. The detective didn't say as much to Ankh, just that the trip would be fun. Ankh could recognize a fight he wasn't going to win when he saw it.
The train station had yet another surprise; Date had arrived back in Japan at some point, although no one had told Ankh, and he was on the train platform with both Goto and Satonaka. "Izumi!" he called. "Ankh! Little Hina!"
"Don't call me little," Hina muttered, and Date ruffled her hair as though she were his little sister.
The detective seemed to find it amusing. Ankh eyed the three current and former Foundation employees with a high level of skepticism; either one of them knew something he didn't, or the detective was more paranoid than he should have been about a string of Yummies. None of them had come close to defeating Hina as OOO.
"I'm worried about her," the detective said in an undertone while Date distracted Hina with a slew of questions about her classes and enthusiastically looked at her photos of the work she'd done over the last semester. "I can't tell if she's upset because of the holiday, or if OOO is affecting her."
"She's fine," Ankh said, fairly sure he was correct. Hina wasn't poised on the slippery slope to madness and attempted world conquest, she was just cranky.
"Please keep an eye on her," the detective said instead of arguing, which was a fairly effective method of getting Ankh's agreement.
The shrine turned out to be Ankh's least favorite part of the area; Hina and the detective, while not engaging in the full New Year's ceremonies, still spent an inordinate amount of time doing nothing at all that he could see, leaving Ankh with Satonaka for company. He concluded that she was awful company; she spent the majority of the time on her phone, except for the brief interval in which she found a soft-serve ice cream vendor inexplicably open despite the weather. She did present him with the only flavor of ice cream that tasted as good as he remembered the ice pops tasting, but given that it was wasabi he wasn't sure if he forgave her for it.
"Eiji likes spicy food," she said by way of explanation when he took the first bite.
"Of course he does," Ankh said. He ate the ice cream anyway.
The shrine was followed by an experience that justified the entirety of the trip, including being bored out of his mind at the shrine itself and Satonaka's abomination of dessert – Ankh was treated to his first hot spring. The ritual of bathing first mimicked the process before soaking in a bath, although Ankh generally eschewed the latter part for the efficiency of getting clean and then getting dressed again.
Hot springs were so many steps above and beyond the cramped bath in the Izumi apartment that Ankh wasn't sure he wanted to leave. He didn't even care how many other people were around, not even when Date lazily reached over to pluck the small towel out of Ankh's hands and place it on his head.
"Can't get it wet," Date said.
Ankh opened one eye enough to glare at him half-heartedly before going back to reveling in the heat. It went clear through to his bones, leaving him with a sense of wellbeing he hadn't felt since possessing Eiji for the first time, and he protested when the detective poked at his shoulder to tell him it was time to climb back out.
"It's not good for you to spend too long in here," Izumi said mercilessly over Ankh's statement that he wasn't bound by the normal rules of human physiology and could do what he wanted. The cold air felt good on his heated skin when he reluctantly followed the others, though, and he only grumbled a little during the process of wrapping his still-damp body in a yukata.
Hina and Satonaka had apparently also taken advantage of the hot springs; they had both pinned up their hair and were flushed pink and smiling when Ankh saw them outside the facility.
"Did you like it?" Hina asked, eyes sparkling.
"He loved it and don't let him tell you otherwise," Date said, his wide grin having more than a hint of smugness to it.
"It was fine," Ankh said shortly, and Hina giggled. The mood was spoiled by the unmistakable stomach-turning sensation of one of the monochromatic Yummies approaching the hot spring, and Ankh ran for the bag containing the Driver and Scanner.
"What's going on?" Date asked, but Goto was barely half a step behind Ankh and Hina was keeping up with him without effort.
"Give me the Driver," Hina said when Ankh hesitated; they'd worked hard to maintain the illusion that Ankh was the one wearing the OOO armor.
"Wait, what?" Date said again, looking back and forth between them. "Since when is Hina OOO?"
Goto fastened the Birth Driver around his yukata half a second before Hina clicked the OOO Driver into place and scanned the Core Medals Ankh flung her way without looking. The Yummy was nearly invisible against the snow, but Hina pounced on it as soon as it moved.
"It's been a couple of months, right?" Goto said, keeping out of the fight and offering remote support via the Birth Buster. "Right, Erika?"
Satonaka nodded once, sharply, which Date apparently took as an invitation to start asking for details. She deflected him with what looked like practiced ease.
Ankh sighed.
The Yummy went down quickly enough, Cell Medals showering the snowy landscape. "It's clearly following us," Hina said, disengaging the transformation and handing the equipment back to Ankh.
"Keep it," he said, busy collecting Cell Medals, and she gave him a surprised look. He ignored it in favor of replenishing his energy levels; he was using less in healing Eiji than he had before leaving him to his own devices for a week, but he was still burning through them more quickly with Eiji than he had with the detective.
The Spider Greeed was another matter, one that Ankh wanted resolved. He didn't care what it was that Kougami had thought he was doing when he'd set the thing loose, but he was done with its creepy monochromatic Yummies making his skin crawl and his stomach turn. It had to die.
"Satonaka," he said, shaking the snow off his bare feet as he got back to the building.
"I'm not getting paid for this," she told him.
Ankh simply looked at her, unimpressed, until she produced the tablet she used to videoconference with Kougami.
Despite the late hour and the holiday season, Kougami was in the office, still impeccably dressed and meticulously decorating an oddly-shaped cake with pale blue icing. "Ankh!" he roared. "What a pleasant surprise."
"You and I both know that's a lie," Ankh said. He had no desire to play Kougami's word games. "Your new Greeed. It's stalking me, and I want you to know that I'm going to kill it."
"You're in Hakone," Kougami said, putting the icing down and stepping closer to the camera.
"And before that Kyushu, and before that, Shikoku." Ankh folded his arms. "What's your point?"
"The Spider Greeed hasn't left Tokyo," Kougami said mildly. Ankh didn't know if he was more surprised to hear Kougami casually acknowledge the existence of the monster he'd deliberately created and released, or to hear a flat-out denial of what he knew to be true. There was no other Greeed to create Yummies, unless Kougami had been busier than he seemed. "It's the only one we've successfully engendered," Kougami added, as if it was an afterthought.
"You're lying," Ankh said.
"It was fitted with a GPS tracker before it left the Foundation's active custody," Kougami said. "It hasn't left the city."
"It removed the chip, then," Ankh said, a hint of desperation in his voice. He wasn't accidentally creating Yummies that turned around and assaulted him, he was sure of it. He wanted to be sure of it. He wanted to know that he wasn't creating the creatures that exuded such a sense of wrongness.
"It has not!" Kougami shouted. "It's defined a territory, and it has been moving through that territory." He grinned sharply, showing too many teeth. "It's fascinating," he said, his voice dropping. "But it has not left Tokyo."
Ankh grabbed the tablet with the express intent of flinging it against the nearest wall. Satonaka rescued it, turning it off. "Then what's been creating those… those things?"
Satonaka wasn't listening; she packed away the tablet and looked at Goto. "I expect overtime for this," she said.
Goto sighed melodramatically. "I'll fill out the paperwork when I get back," he said.
Ankh left them to their discussion. He pulled his clothes on with the jerky motions of aggravation, and in the process of picking up his bag to move it, realized it felt oddly light. He pulled out the Medal case and looked inside before remembering that he'd told Hina to hang on to the Driver and Scanner. She could hold them without a problem, he thought, as long as she didn't have the Medals. He could feel his six Cores, along with the single yellow Core and the sets of green and gray Cores he'd chosen to absorb, and the rest should have been in the case.
Ankh idly flipped the case open, expecting to see the full set of blue Cores, along with the remaining two yellow Cores, and the orange and purple sets that he preferred to pretend didn't exist. Apparently his pretending had had an effect on reality, because the purple Cores were gone. Ankh felt around inside his bag, knowing that they hadn't fallen out but needing to check anyway. They weren't there.
"Hina," he breathed, snapped the case shut, and stalked down to the room she was sharing with Satonaka. Ankh flung the door open without knocking, getting an eyeful of Satonaka pulling on her shirt and Hina fastening a skirt over her tights.
"Hey," Satonaka said sharply once her eyes had cleared the neckline of her shirt, and she flung the nearest object at hand toward his head. Ankh dodged, focused on Hina.
"Where are they?" he asked.
"Where are what?" Hina looked bewildered; it was a good act, better than he'd thought she could pull off. The Driver was affecting her more than he'd thought it was, if she'd gained this level of duplicity.
"Don't play games," he snapped. "The Purple Cores. Where are they?"
"How should I know?" She was past confused and well into indignant now, folding her arms across her chest. "You've never let me use them."
"There's a reason for that!" He wasn't quite shouting. "Those Cores are dangerous!"
"Well, I don't have them!" Hina was shouting, loudly enough that Ankh could hear an audience gathering outside the door. Satonaka crossed the room and closed the door in Goto's face.
Ankh held up the Medal case. "They're not in here. What did you do with them?"
"I can't believe you don't trust me," Hina hissed, and pushed past him. She shoved her way through the small crowd in front of the door, but not before Ankh saw the start of angry tears spilling out of her eyes. There was a brief scuffle outside the door, and then Goto followed Hina.
"What's going on?" the detective asked, nearly as angry as his sister but voice much more level.
"She did something with the purple Cores," Ankh said, knowing that the detective understood how much of a risk those specific Cores posed.
"Let me see that." The detective reached for the medal case, and after a brief moment's hesitation, Ankh surrendered it. The detective flipped it open, visually confirming the lack of purple Cores. "Are you sure she has them?" he asked.
"Who else could?" Ankh demanded, snatching the case back out of the detective's hands. "Who else even knows what this is?"
"Don't look at me," Date said. "Maybe they just wandered off."
"Tch." Ankh snorted. "That's ridiculous."
"Can't you feel the Cores?" Satonaka asked, sounding both bored and curious. Ankh wasn't sure how she pulled that particular vocal trick off, but she was more or less right.
"I can't feel them if they're not active," he said.
"Are they?" Satonaka asked.
"Are they what?"
"Active," Satonaka said, as if it were incredibly obvious.
Ankh heaved a huge, put-upon sigh and shouldered his way past Date and the detective toward the door leading to the balcony stretching across the southern wall of the hotel. It was harder to catch the trace of Core Medals in action in Eiji's body than it had been in Izumi's, if he were to be completely honest with himself, and even the Yummies took longer to register. He wasn't sure he'd actually feel active Cores without trying unless they were right in front of him, and being outside the building would reduce the sense of interference.
An entourage of three fell in behind him, and Ankh almost snapped at them to keep back, but it wasn't like they were going to interfere. Probably.
The temperature had dropped while he'd been inside the building, and a light snow had begun to fall. It glittered in the artificial lights surrounding the building, stinging Ankh's skin where it landed on it. He closed his eyes and extended his senses, searching for the flavor of the purple Cores. To his very great surprise, he registered a reaction not far away, lurking in the wooded hills outside the hotel. Distantly, he thought he'd have to apologize to Hina, and then was surprised at himself for the urge. I've changed, he thought, but the sense of the purple Cores was more important than potential future apologies.
"There's something there," he said reluctantly, and pointed. Hina emerged from the door behind him, and the vague thought that she'd fled with the Medals died. She clearly didn't have them, not if she was standing right next to him and the reaction was coming from almost exactly the opposite direction.
Ankh vaulted over the balcony railing, landing lightly in the snow below, and took off running. He wanted answers. Goto was right behind him, Birth Driver already belted around his waist. He'd landed a little harder than Ankh had, from the sound of it, but he was running easily. Ankh sped up, pushing Eiji's body to its limits, and felt the purple Cores move. Whoever or whatever had them was trying not to get caught, trying to maintain a consistent distance between Ankh and the Cores. He wasn't having it.
The Cores switched directions twice, Ankh altering his trajectory smoothly both times. Goto kept up, running with frankly impressive speed and lack of effort. If Ankh hadn't been burning through Cell Medals, he didn't think he would have been able to maintain velocity, but Goto just kept right on going. "You've trained for this," he said. Goto shot him a look that very clearly read, Of course I did without wasting breath on actual words.
Ankh rolled his eyes and ducked to the left. He thought he recognized the area from one of their earlier activities, after Hina and Izumi had finished at the shrine, but before they'd returned to the hotel, and he thought he could head off the Medal thief. He was right, although when he caught sight of the fleeing figure, he almost wished he hadn't been.
As though it felt his eyes on it, the figure stopped running and turned to face him. Ankh stumbled to a halt, Goto clipping his shoulder from behind in an attempt to not run him over entirely, and stared. The Medal thief wasn't human, or if it had started out that way it wasn't human now. He could feel it clearly now, though, and all he felt was a writhing mass of Cell Medals around the three purple Cores, bearing the unmistakable face and form of the Dinosaur Greeed Eiji had turned into all those months ago.
"That's…" Goto's eyes darted back and forth between Ankh and the impossible Greeed. "Forgive me, Ankh, but you are possessing Hino, right?"
"Of course I am," Ankh said. "That isn't him."
The Greeed charged at them, and Ankh ducked out of the way. Goto rolled and came up with a Cell Medal in hand, dropping it into the Birth Driver with a practiced motion. The transformation unfolded over him, and the Greeed stopped eyeing Ankh and looked at Goto with confusion. He fired on it with the Birth Buster, but not having brought the canister of Cell Medals with him was putting him at a disadvantage.
Ankh hung back, not wanting to damage either Eiji or himself if Goto didn't need the help, but the Greeed was tough enough to survive a barrage from the Birth Buster and threw Goto into the nearest tree before turning and darting towards Ankh. Timing was of paramount importance; Ankh gritted his teeth and stood his ground, ducking at the last possible second and sliding sideways. He let a burst of flame pour over the Greed as it went by, and it responded with an outpouring of ice. Ankh barely avoided being trapped.
The sound of the Buster was welcome, even if it wasn't doing any good, but it gave Ankh enough of a respite to fall back and regroup. He didn't have to go far before Hina crashed through the undergrowth, cheeks flushed and boots caked in snow. She had the Scanner in one hand and the Driver fastened around her waist. Ankh tossed Taka, Kujaku, and Condor at her; TaToBa wasn't going to be useful, not when what they needed was fire. She nodded once, and the transformation washed over her.
The Greeed took to the air at the first gout of fire Hina spat towards it, and she launched herself after it. Date had been right behind Hina, and he'd had the foresight to bring the arsenal of Cell Medals. Goto hurriedly loaded them into the Driver before following Hina upwards.
Ash and ice rained downwards as Ankh watched helplessly from below. He couldn't even shout advice to Hina from this distance, but she was holding her own. With Goto providing backup, they were doing more than holding their own – they were forcing the Greeed downwards, until Hina drove it into the ground. TaJaDor's finishing move wasn't enough to kill it, though, and it charged toward Ankh.
He ducked, but Date wasn't quite so lucky. He took a blow to the ribs, folding over the Greeed's fist and falling bonelessly to the ground. The detective swung at the Greeed with an insubstantial stick, and the Greeed swatted it out of his hands. Ice crawled along the ground toward the detective, and Ankh tackled the Greeed from behind. The Greeed stopped trying to freeze the detective, fixing one baleful eye on Ankh.
"Up here!" Hina shouted, catching the Greeed with a perfectly aimed spout of flame. Ankh could feel its heat as he and the detective pulled a protesting Date away from the Greeed. It flung itself upward, but not toward Hina; it caught Goto by surprise and sent him crashing through multiple treetops. The Birth transformation melted away as Goto fell, and he fell the last few feet with no protection.
"Take Date," the detective said, and Ankh narrowed his eyes. Date was on his feet again, grimacing with one hand pressed against his side.
"I'm good," he said. "Go help Goto."
"Tch." It was Hina that needed the help, Ankh thought, but she was making a good show even without it. The Greeed was slower than it had been, and this time when she smashed it into the ground, it didn't get up. It twitched, moving weakly, and Ankh ran forward.
The Greeed wasn't strong enough to fend off Ankh's reaching hand, and he pulled all three purple Cores out of its chest. It held its shape for a long moment, staring at him with haunting familiar eyes, before dissolving into a flood of silver. Ankh absorbed the pile of Cell Medals and then stood, dusting the snow off his knees with one hand and holding the purple Cores in the other.
Hina landed behind him, heat rolling off her in waves as TaJaDor's translucent wings folded and then faded away. She tilted the Driver, releasing the transformation, and walked through the slush. "It looked like Eiji," she said.
"That wasn't Hino." Ankh closed his hand around the purple Cores, feeling them creak under his grip but knowing they wouldn't break. "He's here." He tapped his chest with his other hand.
"I didn't mean that it was," Hina said, and then appeared to remember that there were other people present. "Shingo!"
Goto was bleeding badly, and Date was unable to stand entirely upright. The detective had a bruise along one temple that Ankh hadn't noticed previously, making it a battered group that emerged onto a public road in the dark. Ankh was the only one with a working cell phone, and was therefore tapped to call emergency services; an ambulance failed to arrive before Goto folded entirely, looking paler than the snow.
Hina, who had been trying to hide a limp, was harangued by her brother to get her ankle treated even as he was strongly convinced to have his brain scanned for possible trauma, and Ankh was left alone in a waiting room. He didn't like it. There was no volume to the television in the corner, and none of the scattered and out of date magazines were an appropriate distraction. Ankh could feel the purple Cores in his pocket, and he wanted them away from his skin.
"How did you get out?" he murmured, rubbing the lump with his palm. Medals required intent and consciousness to form a body, but what he had been able to feel when he plunged his hand into its chest was that the Greeed had had neither; it had been more of a pseudo-Greeed than something even nominally alive. "Something must have made you."
Shivers of energy flickered outward from the Cores, and Ankh pulled them out of his pocket. "Stop that." He clenched his left hand around them, cutting off any attempt to radiate power with his own aura. It flickered again and subsided, and Ankh felt a response from Eiji before the Cores became quiescent again. "Eiji?"
There was no answer from inside his mind, but Ankh closed his eyes and carefully extended his awareness downwards. He could feel the vague shape of thoughts, half-formed and incoherent, coupled with muted emotions rising and falling in a regular rhythm. He resurfaced, blinking. Eiji was no longer comatose; he was simply asleep, and had been for a while.
Looking around to confirm that he was still alone in the waiting room, Ankh dove back under the surface of his mind, carefully exploring the traces of energy left by his attempts to heal Eiji. He could feel where his transformation into TaJaDor had jolted something, changing the overlay of his presence enough to actually drive the energy from the Cell Medals where it needed to go, but the abrupt changes when he'd left Eiji's body on its own and then repossessed it were what had brought Eiji out of his vegetative state.
Ankh opened his eyes again, not trying to wake Eiji, and blinked to clear his vision. Hina was sitting next to him, boots on and apparently fine. "You're awake," she said.
"Of course I'm awake." His hand was still clenched around the purple Cores, and he put them back in his pocket. "Where's everyone else?"
"Staying overnight," Hina said. "Mostly for observation, but they're all okay. I think the staff is bored. There aren't many people here."
"Oh, good, we can leave."
Hina vanished into the room she was sharing with Satonaka as soon as they got back; Ankh hadn't seen her since vaulting off the balcony, and wondered if she was in the room before dismissing the thought as irrelevant. Satonaka could do what she wanted. He let himself into the shared room that was currently empty, and lay down before exiting Eiji's body.
Ankh had more than enough Cell Medals to create a physical body, with a significant surplus; the sensation of Medals leaving a physical form reminded him strongly of the nightmare he'd had the day he'd possessed Eiji again, and he wondered if the reason he'd been so depleted that day was because the purple Cores had drawn the Medals out of him. It was certainly possible; it had been afterwards that he'd seen the monochromatic Yummies for the first time.
Eiji sighed as Ankh's features settled into a by-now familiar face, and he shifted in his sleep. Ankh reached out, touching his shoulder lightly. "Eiji, wake up."
"I'm awake," Eiji said, voice thick with sleep, and slowly opened his eyes. Ankh leaned back, waiting. Eiji looked at him with an absolute lack of curiosity and sat up slowly, blinking. "You look like someone I know," he said slowly.
"Idiot," Ankh said. "I am someone you know."
Eiji drew his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them, arms wrapped loosely around his legs. "I failed him," he said, still speaking slowly. "I failed him, and I wanted to be done, but I'm still here."
Ankh was beginning to lose patience. "I'm right here," he said, and Eiji's eyes flicked to him once before he went right back to staring at nothing.
"Am I dreaming?" He raised a hand, looking at his palm with not quite focused eyes. "I tried to reach out, but no one was there."
"You're not dreaming," Ankh said. Maybe pinching him would work, or maybe a punch. Possibly just a slap, if it would make Eiji stop talking in an awful vague tone about things that were no longer true.
"I thought… I thought I'd turned into a monster again, but it's all in here," Eiji said, and pulled himself into a tighter huddle. "None of it was real." He laughed, a sad and bitter sound. "I failed her, too, if she had to wear the belt and transform."
"Eiji," Ankh said, flexing his fingers and telling himself that he was not going to hit his clearly traumatized friend upside the head.
"It was wearing my face," Eiji said. "I dreamed that it was wearing my face." He looked at Ankh and frowned. "Almost like you are now."
Ankh took a deep breath. "You weren't dreaming. You created a baby Greeed, which kept trying to kill me, and I am not happy about that."
Eiji blinked again, his eyes clearing a little. "Ankh?" he asked, as if they hadn't been having an entire conversation for the past several minutes.
"Yes, you idiot." Ankh shook him, just slightly, reasoning that it was an acceptable level of physical force to try and get Eiji to finish waking up already.
"Am I dreaming?" Eiji asked again, sounding much less sure of himself this time.
"No, but I will punch you into unconsciousness if you don't stop asking me stupid questions." Ankh let go and backed away just enough to give Eiji some space.
"You… you're back?" Eiji breathed. "It worked?" Sudden hope lit his face. He uncurled and surged forward, tripping over his own feet and knocking Ankh backwards. Eiji landed on top of him, touching Ankh's chest and shoulders and feeling down his face with shaking hands. "You're really here?"
It had finally gone too far; he wasn't going to lie here and let Eiji crawl all over him. Ankh pitched him across the floor and stood. "Stop asking me that!"
Eiji sat up, slowly, eyes wide and finally alert, and then he started sobbing. Ankh threw a pillow at him; he didn't have the patience for this, not now. Not after Eiji had apparently unconsciously recreated the Greeed he'd turned into out of some twisted desire for oblivion, because he'd failed to save Ankh, while Ankh was possessing and healing him from the damage he'd done to himself. It was ridiculous. It was Eiji-esque. Ankh had missed him.
Eiji caught the pillow and curled around it, still crying. Ankh paced over to the door, making sure it was closed and locked, and then strolled over to the window. He couldn't see much, with the lights in the room still on, but he could tell that it had stopped snowing. Behind him, Eiji slowly quieted down. After a moment, Ankh glanced over his shoulder to see Eiji asleep on the floor. He rolled his eyes and climbed out the window to spend the rest of the night looking at the stars from the roof.
He thought he'd worked out when Eiji had woken up, and knowing that it had been the Dinosaur Greeed that had created the monochromatic Yummies went a long way toward explaining why they made his skin crawl; they were born out of a desire for nothingness, rather than a pure desire for something. The idea of nothing was antithetical to everything Ankh was. Harder to figure out was how he'd missed the creation of the Dinosaur Greeed to begin with, but he eventually came to the conclusion that it had to have happened while he was dreaming, after repossessing Eiji. There was simply no other option.
The window was still open when the sun rose the next morning, and Ankh heard the door to the room open. He started to climb down, but didn't get more than halfway before he recognized Hina's voice.
"Eiji," she said, sounding extremely pissed off, and then, slightly louder, "Ankh! Get back here!"
"Hina?" he heard Eiji say, sounding groggy, and Hina shrieked. Ankh laughed hard enough to nearly lose his grip on the window and missed the majority of the subsequent conversation, only starting to listen again when he heard his name.
"…Ankh?" Eiji asked. "He possessed me? Where is he?"
"Not far away, if he knows what's good for him," Hina said fiercely, and Ankh ducked inside the window.
"I was up there," he said, and pointed toward the roof.
Whatever Hina might have said was drowned out by Eiji's full-body hug. Even not having to breathe, Ankh was starting to get light-headed by the time Eiji finally let go. "You're really back," he said happily. "I've missed you."
"We covered that last night," Ankh said, letting annoyance sharpen his voice. "I've been back for seven months. You're the one who slept through all of it."
"I thought I was dreaming." Eiji dropped his gaze and fiddled with the hem of what had been Ankh's shirt. He frowned at it, seeming to notice the one red sleeve for the first time. "I thought I failed."
"It was a stupid thing you did," Hina said, not looking pleased at the reminder of how, exactly, Eiji had restored Ankh's medal. "You could have died." Eiji looked down, not answering. Hina made an abortive movement with one hand and then gathered him into a carefully gentle hug. "Don't do something like that again," she said.
"It worked, though," Eiji said.
"It worked so well that when I healed you, you dreamed that I was still dead, put the Dinosaur Greeed back together, and kept sending Yummies after me." Ankh pulled Eiji's hands away from the bottom of the shirt. "It was less than pleasant."
"That was Eiji?" Hina looked back and forth between them.
"I was dreaming that someone was pretending to be Ankh with my face," Eiji said, somewhat sheepishly. "Ankh was still – still gone, and it hurt."
Hina gave him another long, hard look before letting the comment go and changing tacks. "Shingo is going to be so happy you're awake," she said, and hugged both of them. Eiji was gasping for breath when she finally let go.
"So what did I miss?" he asked.