Eiji couldn't sleep.
Seven months spent sleeping might give someone insomnia, he supposed, but his eyes wouldn't stay closed. Every time he tried, he kept seeing the dreams. He remembered feeling pain, fire running through his veins along with the rush of power that brought TaJaDor, and then nothing again for a while. But after that, the dreams had started. Eiji knew now that they hadn't been dreams so much as tangled and distorted impressions of Ankh wearing his body, trying his best to heal Eiji the way he'd healed Shingo. The difference was that Shingo had been awake for most of it.
He had nightmares now, when he did manage to fall asleep, though he could never remember them when he woke trembling and paralyzed. All he could remember was bitter cold, seeping into his bones and freezing him into utter immobility, and it would take him what felt like forever to get warm again. He'd tried running, to tire himself out, but all that had done was make it harder to wake up when the nightmares really got going, and he'd given up. At least when he started dreaming now, he could open his eyes and escape.
Eiji didn't want to keep presuming on the Izumis' hospitality, either, but he didn't have anywhere else to go. His passport had been left behind and while he'd gone to get it replaced, he was still waiting for the new one to arrive. He couldn't sleep outside in winter, and he didn't have the mental energy to deal with the mess Ankh had created with his family. Eiji groaned at the thought and rubbed his face with both hands. He couldn't presume on Chiyoko, either, no matter that she probably wouldn't bat a perfectly manicured eyelid if he showed up in her attic again.
Whatever he did, Eiji didn't want to be alone, and that more than anything kept him tethered to Tokyo, but he couldn't help feeling trapped at the same time. Sleeping in the bottom half of a daybed clearly designed with Ankh in mind wasn't doing him any favors, either. He thought he could hear Shingo and Hina breathing on either side of the wall, and he finally rolled off the bed and crept as quietly as he could out onto the balcony.
"What are you doing?" Ankh asked, and Eiji flinched.
In retrospect, the lack of noise from above his head should have clued him in to the fact that Ankh wasn't there, but then again, Ankh didn't technically need to breathe. Eiji sometimes thought he did it out of habit. Ankh certainly didn't sleep, although he would sometimes lie still and listen to music on a set of headphones. Eiji slept easier on those nights, when he could hear Ankh's imitation of human breath.
"I couldn't sleep," he said, aware that he sounded like a child. It was cold on the balcony, and he wished he'd thought to bring a jacket. He'd felt scatterbrained, since waking in the hotel in Hakone, although he thought it was slowly getting better.
Ankh sighed. "If you don't sleep, you don't finish healing, and then Hina's going to have to wear the OOO suit forever. Is that what you want?" He sounded bored, repeating the same words he said every time Eiji wandered around in the middle of the night and then ended up tired and irritable during the day.
"I know," Eiji said. "I just." He curled up on one of the chairs, seeing his breath hang in the air under the artificial lights illuminating the street below. "I can't," he said finally.
"I know where the Spider Greeed is," Ankh said in an apparent non sequitur. Eiji went with it.
"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.
"Hina's going to equip the OOO suit, and we're going to kill it," Ankh said easily. "It's too dangerous to leave running around."
Setting the issue of Hina wearing the OOO armor aside for the moment, Eiji asked, "What's going to stop the Foundation from making another one?"
Ankh sighed. "I don't think they know how they made this one," he said. "Or they would have replicated it by now. Kougami never holds back with anything."
"I suppose," Eiji said. He could feel Ankh frowning, even if he couldn't see his face clearly. "What?"
"You," Ankh said, unexpectedly. "There's something off about you." He was blunt, more open and honest than he had been since Eiji had gotten control of his body back to find out what Ankh had been doing with it while he had been keeping himself locked in a void.
"I haven't changed," Eiji said.
"Bullshit." Ankh bared his teeth, gleaming white in the darkness. "Someone showed up looking for you," he said after a moment of waiting for a reply Eiji didn't know how to give. "I told him to show up at the Cous Coussier tomorrow."
"Who?" That word was easier to get out, at least.
"How should I know who you met while you were wandering around doing stupid shit?" Ankh looked away again, apparently having exhausted his supply of interest.
"I wasn't – I was trying to figure out how to bring you back!" Eiji hissed, keeping his voice down. "I wasn't doing something stupid and pointless."
"Well, here I am," Ankh said. "Now what?" He seemed to be enjoying the question in some way that Eiji didn't quite grasp, like he knew what answer Eiji was going to give and was waiting for it to flop.
"I don't know," Eiji said. "I don't know what I want."
"Ah," Ankh said, and fell silent again.
Eiji mulled over the sentence; it didn't quite ring true. "I want Hina to be safe," he said. "And you. And Shingo." All of those were part of it, but they didn't encompass everything. "I want Hina to not have to transform into OOO," he said. "I want her to be able to finish school without worrying about fighting."
"Those are all things for other people," Ankh said. "What do you want?"
Eiji didn't have an answer for that.
The grayish morning light shone in his eyes, and he blinked, wondering if he'd dreamed the entire conversation with Ankh. He didn't remember going back inside, but he was curled under the heavy blankets on his part of the bed, warm enough for once. Hina was in the kitchen when he wandered out, still dressed in the loose clothing he'd worn for sleep, and she handed him a cup of tea.
"This was yours," he said, trying to hand it back. He hadn't intended to take her tea.
"There's more," she said, pouring a second cup and taking it into the living room. After a moment, Eiji followed. "My classes start tomorrow," Hina said, taking a small sip of the tea.
"Can you be OOO and still do your schoolwork?" Eiji's tea wasn't too hot; he liked the way it nearly burned his tongue, and that he could feel it all the way down.
"Really?" Hina smiled and picked up her tea again. "The RideVendors help," she said. "They're very convenient."
"You know how to ride a motorcycle." Eiji grinned at her. That one small thing slightly eased the knot that had taken up all but permanent residence in his stomach since Ankh had stopped possessing him, knowing that Hina had learned a new and maybe valuable skill because she'd met him.
"Ankh does like to do the driving," Hina said, and grinned back. "But it's a lot of fun."
"It is." The tea was gone. He set the cup down and stretched. "Did Ankh find the Greeed?" he asked.
Hina shook her head. "I think he's still looking," she said. "I don't know what he wants to do after he gets rid of it." She pushed her hair back over her shoulder. "What do you want to do?" she asked.
Eiji shook his head. "I don't know," he said. It echoed his dream, the same question Ankh had asked. What had he said then? "I want you to be safe. You and your brother, and Ankh." Ha paused. "I want you to be able to finish school and do things you love, without having to worry about OOO or fighting."
"Eiji," Hina said, and she had exactly the same expression Ankh had had. "I'm flattered, but those are things for other people. What is it that you want for yourself?"
He was no more able to answer in daylight than he had been able to answer in his dream. "I don't know," he said. "I got the last thing I wanted."
Hina leaned forward, face full of compassion. "That was something you wanted for someone else, too," she said. "You wanted it for Ankh, not for yourself. What do you want?"
"I don't know," he said again, and the second layer of the dream fell apart around him. He opened his eyes to find himself on the floor, half-tangled in the blanket and one foot still up on the bed where he'd started. Bright sunlight streamed in the room, the sliver of sky he could see through the window a dazzling blue. Eiji groaned and levered himself off the floor, pinching himself to see if he was really awake that time.
"I don't know what I want," he said, irritated that the inside of his own head was grilling him for answers that he didn't have. He didn't remember what it felt like to want something.
No one was in the apartment when Eiji finally emerged from the bedroom to bathe and dress; once dressed, he couldn't stay in the empty space with nothing but silence to keep him company. He didn't plan on visiting Fuuto City, but the familiar and almost desperate urge to go anywhere-but-here coupled with the warring desire to stay close to the people he loved kept him close to Tokyo while still going outside the city limits.
The rooftop where he ended up was a vaguely familiar one; Eiji remembered, back when he'd first met Ankh and started fighting as OOO, that he'd missed a Medal and had to chase it down. It had led him into someone else's fight. He leaned on the railing and looked out at the giant wind tower dominating the skyline; even Fuuto City knew what it wanted, he thought with a tinge of bitterness. Fuuto City's Rider wasn't holding onto his transformation equipment and title out of pity, because the person who'd inherited said equipment and title actually had a life and goals and was working toward achieving them and had given them back when he'd unceremoniously been dropped back into her life. Eiji dropped his forehead onto his folded arms and tried to ignore his runaway train of thought; he had the Driver because it had been his to begin with, not because Ankh and Hina somehow felt sorry for him. OOO was his responsibility, for all that he was grateful that Hina had taken up the weight of it for a while.
"Why," said someone behind him, "do you kids keep insisting on lurking on rooftops?"
Eiji blinked and turned around. Hidari Shotaro – Kamen Rider Double, or at least the left half – stood behind him, one hand on his omnipresent hat. "You can't be more than thirty," Eiji said, but Shotaro had reminded him that he'd missed his birthday while Ankh had been possessing him. He'd turned twenty-four, but he felt so much older.
Shotaro took the hand off his hat and clapped it to his heart in a melodramatic gesture. "I'm not even twenty-nine, Eiji," he said. "You wound me to the core."
Despite himself, the Eiji felt the corners of his mouth twist upwards. "You're the one who called someone four years younger than you a kid," he said.
"Touché." Despite his words, Shotaro put his hands on his hips, looking Eiji up and down in a distinctly parental fashion. Not wanting to have anything to do with whatever wisdom Shotaro was about to attempt to impart, Eiji opened his mouth to excuse himself. Shotaro beat him to the punch. "Want some coffee?" he asked brightly, the penetrating look fading into something innocuously pleasant.
Eiji closed his mouth with a snap after letting it hang open just a little too long. "Sure," he said finally, when Shotaro just kept smiling at him in invitation.
"Philip will be glad to see you." Shotaro ambled toward the rooftop door.
Eiji, who hadn't taken the building's internal staircase, had also not been aware there was a door. He jogged to catch up, the cold of mid-January finally penetrating his senses. He hadn't thought to bring a jacket. "Philip," he said. "How is he?"
"Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have offered you coffee," Shotaro said, holding the door open. "He's been – you know the civet cat coffee? He's been experimenting with a chemical replication process. The results are, um. Interesting."
The mental image of Philip's experiments made Eiji laugh a little, and he realized that the last time he'd laughed was when he'd seen Kenzaki in Russia. The memory spurred another pang of guilt; Kenzaki had been a friend, a good one, and Eiji hadn't let him know that he was even still alive. Without his phone, though, he had no way of contacting the former Rider, and he'd left it behind along with his passport. In the days since waking up in a hotel room in Hakone, he'd refused to get a new one without knowing why he felt so strongly about it.
The experiments in question were both exactly what Eiji had pictured and far more extensive than he'd thought; nearly every flat surface in the Narumi Detective Agency's front room held at least one of some type of container, with the sole exception of Shotaro's desk. There was a sweet-sour smell to the air halfway between tantalizing and nauseating, and Shotaro sighed as they walked in the door. "I keep telling him to open a window," he said, hanging his hat on a peg and pushing said window open. "Not that it helps."
"I don't understand," Philip said, coming out from behind the basement door without actually looking up. "It doesn't taste right, but the chemical compounds are exactly the same. The temperature is the same."
"Philip," Shotaro said, and Philip waved distractedly at Eiji.
"Good to see you, Hino," he said, and went right back to complaining about the taste of his latest test batch. "It's supposed to be smooth," he finished, and then pinned Eiji with a calculating stare. "You want to test it, right."
"Uh." Eiji blinked. Philip was treating him normally, he thought suddenly, instead of walking on eggshells or trying too hard for a facsimile of casual. "Sure," he said, over Shotaro's protests that it was socially inappropriate to hijack guests for culinary experiments. "I don't mind."
Philip smiled at him and vanished down the stairs. Shotaro watched him go with a speculative look. "He may or may not actually come back with the coffee," he said, and then snapped his fingers. "Which reminds me." He held out a package with Eiji's name on it in neat handwriting, the only visible part of the original address buried beneath a veritable stack of forwarding-address stickers. "This is yours."
Eiji wasn't sure he wanted to know what particular train of thought had driven that association, but he took the package. "What is it?"
Shotaro shrugged. "Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how it got here, instead of to Detective Izumi, or that café where you used to live, or, you know." He leaned against the desk with one hip, barely settling his weight before jumping upright and heading for the kitchen. "Tea," he said, over his shoulder. "I can promise that it will at least be drinkable."
"Thanks," Eiji said absently, turning the package over in his hands. It was an unassuming brown paper envelope, neatly taped together, with enough give beneath the surface to indicate some sort of padding, and enough weight to imply an object rather than simply a letter. The return address was in Cyrillic letters, which he'd never learned to read.
The tape stuck to Eiji's fingers in long, thin strips as he pulled it free, and eventually he just tore open the side of the package instead. A piece of paper fluttered out, landing on the sealed top of one of Philip's experimental tanks. Eiji ignored it for the moment, reaching inside the package for whatever heavy object was inside it. His questing fingers met with a slim book and a smooth slender brick; his passport and his cell phone. The phone was dead, no charge at all, and the passport was creased where he'd stuffed it into the bicycle basket in the hopes that Kenzaki would miss it entirely.
"Do you have a phone charger?" Eiji called into the kitchen.
Shotaro called back a half-audible reply that seemed positive enough and included the word desk; Eiji found the cable in question, attached to another dead phone and not actually plugged into the wall. He shook his head and attached the cord to both the outlet and his phone, surprised that the phone flickered to life after only a few seconds. He left it to charge, returning to the piece of mystery paper.
The paper turned out to be a note, written in the same neat script that was on the outside of the package.
Hino, it read. I hope this finds you well, or at all. I hope you found your friend, and that it worked out, but either way, let me know that you're okay.
The guilt Eiji had felt earlier returned in full force, yet one more thing that he hadn't done properly to add to his list of inadequacies. His phone hadn't charged enough to power up, even connected to the wall; he still couldn't rectify even this one little thing. A noise behind him turned out to be Shotaro, holding two mismatched mugs, one chipped at the base. Neither of them was an appropriate vessel for tea, as far as Eiji remembered.
"Lot of coffee around here," Shotaro said, holding out the intact mug. It was bright red, and bespoke a cheerfulness that Shotaro wasn't displaying and that Eiji certainly didn't feel. "Sit down," Shotaro added, gesturing to the only open seat in the room. Eiji sat in what was clearly Shotaro's chair, watching mutely as Shotaro made himself comfortable on the other side of the desk.
"I," Eiji said, and then found he didn't know what he wanted to say. He took a sip of the tea, hot and bitter. Shotaro clearly had no idea how to make tea, but the gesture was almost overwhelmingly kind. "Thank you," Eiji said suddenly.
"That is the first time anyone has tasted my tea and thanked me for it," Shotaro said, deliberately misinterpreting Eiji's words.
"No, I mean." Eiji's hands were full of the coffee mug masquerading as a teacup, and he clutched it tightly. "For. For everything. The – the detective told me you were the one who went looking for me."
Shotaro took a deep breath, holding it before releasing it in what wasn't quite a sigh. "Eiji, I'm sorry."
Eiji blinked. "What?"
"Gentaro says to tell you thank you, for whatever you did for him," Shotaro said in an apparent non sequitur, and Eiji had to think about that for a moment before the memory of a brief trip surfaced, a few well-timed minutes fighting something that wasn't a Greeed and hadn't resonated with any of his past regrets.
"We help each other out," he said. "If you stretch out your hand…"
"I'll be there to grab it," Shotaro finished, and took a sip of tea, his eyes staying on Eiji over the rim of his chipped mug. He grimaced and set the mug down without looking where he put it. "I think you're reaching out now," he said.
"I," Eiji said again, and his voice caught in his throat. "I don't – I don't know why," he said in a rush, the words hard at first but easier the more he spoke. "I got – Ankh is – I did it, but I don't know why it isn't enough. It should be enough. I don't know why I can't just accept it and be happy." He couldn't meet Shotaro's eyes any longer; it was easier just to look at the murky surface of the mostly-untouched tea. "I should be."
"Eiji," Shotaro said, and paused. After a moment, Eiji glanced upwards, but Shotaro wasn't looking at him. He was staring out the window, one finger tapping against his thigh in an irregular rhythm. "You, um." Shotaro tousled the hair at the back of his head, making it stand up more wildly than it had before. "You didn't have an easy time of it," he said finally.
"No one does," Eiji said. "That doesn't – it's not an excuse."
"You don't need an excuse," Shotaro said, an edge to his voice. "It's okay if something is difficult for you."
"But –"
"This might be the half-boiled part of me talking," Shotaro said, more gently this time, "but it's okay if you need help. It's okay to ask for it."
"How can I tell him?" Eiji tried to swallow the lump out of his throat, but it stuck there stubbornly. "How can I look at him, or at her, and tell them that they're not – that I'm still not – that I don't."
"Your friends aren't going to hate you because you're – how do I say this." Shotaro turned to look at him head on. "Your friends and family aren't going to hate you because you're having trouble adjusting."
"You haven't met my father," Eiji muttered. "And there's something else that I don't know how to fix."
"I was talking about Detective Izumi. Hina. Ankh." Shotaro smiled slightly. "But your parents and siblings probably wouldn't hate you either."
"But they've already done so much." Eiji squeezed his eyes closed, the reality of what he was doing abruptly and painfully clear. "You've already done so much, and here I am, just – I should go." He set the mug down, hastily, barely managing not to spill the cooling liquid over the sides. "Thank you, for the tea, and for. For. For everything." He was halfway out of the chair when he remembered his phone, and in the resulting grab for it, Eiji managed to trip over his own feet and land back in the chair, phone in hand and still firmly attached to the wall.
"Eiji," Shotaro said, a tremor in his voice that clearly said he was suppressing laughter. "I'm your friend, too. I'm not going to hate you either." He reached across the desk to open a drawer on the other side, groping around its contents before coming out with a small, unassuming box. He flipped it open, sifting through its contents until he came up with two small rectangles of stiff white paper. "Take these."
Even though Shotaro was holding the business cards as informally as possible, between thumb and two fingers of one hand, all but shoving them at Eiji, Eiji still stood to accept them with both hands and bowed. "Thank you," he said, and then he actually looked at the cards. Neither of them had Shotaro's name, and Eiji looked back at Shotaro, puzzled.
"I know people who know people," Shotaro said vaguely. "And sometimes it helps to talk to people about difficult things. If you decide you want to, just let them know I was the one who sent you, okay?"
The cards were for – oh. Eiji blinked, returning his attention to the business cards. No one had ever suggested he talk about anything; his father had just told him to handle it like a man, and everyone else had just assumed that if Eiji was smiling, everything was fine. "Maybe," he said quietly. "I'll think about it."
"That's good." Shotaro clapped him on the shoulder, the impact almost jarring the cards out of Eiji's hands. He glanced toward the basement door. "Uh. Sorry."
The door burst open, disgorging Philip and two cups of something that smelled like coffee, but judging from Shotaro's expression, was something else entirely. "What do you think of this one?" Philip all but demanded, failing to indicate which concoction he meant, and Eiji stuffed the cards into one of his pockets before taking a cup at random.
"It's, uh. It's interesting," he said, after the first sip. It was definitely not coffee. Eiji wondered for a moment if he trusted Philip not to poison him accidentally.
"Philip," Shotaro said in a long-suffering tone. "You can't subject guests to your experiments. We've talked about this."
"Eiji's not a guest. He's a friend." Philip peered at him, pushing the second cup forward impatiently. "Well?"
It was better than the first, and Eiji told him so. He did not say that he could actually taste coffee in it, unlike the first cup of whatever it was, but Philip seemed to know what he was thinking anyway.
"I told you people could tell the difference," Philip said smugly, and Shotaro threw up his hands in resignation.
"Fine, fine, you win." He clapped his hat back on his head. "Eiji, I'll give you a lift to the train station, unless you feel the need to help Philip taste-test his concoctions."
"The next batch isn't ready yet," Philip said absently, staring at the second cup. Eiji surrendered it and retrieved his phone, finally powering it on. "I mean, you're welcome to stay, if you want. Absolutely welcome." It was clearly an afterthought, but just as clearly the result of Philip being distracted rather than objecting to his company.
Eiji found himself genuinely smiling for the second time. "I think I should head home," he said. The phrase felt good, the knowledge that he had somewhere to call home more comforting than confining for the first time in a long time. Messy and unresolved his life might be, but it was his again, and he could make of it what he would - an opportunity and not a trap. The last traces of the smile stayed with him at that thought.
"Train station it is," Shotaro said, and held the door open.
By the time Eiji's phone had finished booting up and loading the missed calls and texts from its months of inactivity, he was on the train back to Tokyo. He ignored most of them, scrolling through his contacts until he found Gentaro and Kenzaki, sending each of them a brief message. He would have to send something longer to Kenzaki, he thought, but it could wait until he knew how to express what he wanted to say.
The number Ankh had had before was still saved, and Eiji dialed it on a whim. Much to his surprise, the call went through, and was answered. "Where are you?" Ankh said. "I've been looking for you all morning. I was about to drag Hina out of class."
"On a train," Eiji said. "Why?"
"Because I found the Spider Greeed," Ankh said. "You're supposed to come kill it."
"Don't bother Hina, just tell me where to go," Eiji said, obscurely comforted by Ankh's total lack of surprise at the call and his perfectly normal conversation. He wasn't surprised when Ankh rattled off a location as remote as it was possible to be and still be part of the city. "It'll take me a while to get there."
"Whatever," Ankh said, and hung up without saying goodbye. That, too, was comfortingly familiar.
It took Eiji longer than he'd thought to reach the address Ankh had given him, and he could see his friend standing impatiently on the street corner, arms folded and tapping his foot. "What took you?" Ankh demanded, pushing the Driver into his hands. "We have a Greeed to kill."
"I don't want to be OOO," Eiji said, hands closing around the Driver and the Scanner anyway. He hadn't known he was going to say it until he heard himself speak. The bulk and weight brought memory with it, both good and bad, along with the certainty that he at least knew something he didn't want.
Ankh stared at him as though he'd suddenly started speaking nonsense. "Of course you don't," he snapped. "Nobody sane wants it. Hina didn't want it either, not after the first time. But we have work to do. You can worry about what to do with it later."
"Kougami doesn't care if you kill his creation?" Eiji asked, gesturing at the building.
"Tch." Ankh smirked at him. "I negotiated with him." He pointed Eiji toward a RideVendor. "It's not that far away, but if it goes into the east block, it's going to be a pain in the ass to get it back out."
"This is the last time," Eiji said. He didn't think Ankh was actually listening.
"Okay, fine, we'll worry about that later. Getting rid of the competition, which also happens to be a dangerous creature, right now." Ankh gave up pointing and started physically tugging at Eiji's shoulder.
Eiji dug in his heels. "I mean it, Ankh. This is the last time."
Ankh stopped. "Did you have to pick now to find something you wanted? I thought you wanted to help people."
Eiji blinked. "I do," he said, and after the rawness of the morning, it was surprising how right the sentiment felt. He didn't know how, exactly, but he knew he wanted to do something. The cards in his pocket were a comforting, barely-felt reminder that he could ask for and get help in figuring out what, or just in figuring out how to be, if he needed it. "But this isn't how I want to do it. Not anymore."
"Aren't you lucky this is the last living Greeed," Ankh said. "Excepting yours truly, who's as dangerous as a fluffy bunny. Get moving, Eiji."
"Fluffy bunny," Eiji repeated. "Yeah, if you were the bunny from Monty Python."
Ankh cocked his head to the side in a very birdlike gesture. "What's that?" He shook his head. "Don't try to distract me. Philosophy later, killing monster now." He glared at Eiji. "For the last time. The last time I will ask you to put that suit on and kill something."
"Okay." Eiji buckled on the Driver, already feeling immeasurably lighter despite the weight of the Driver and the Scanner. "TaToBa?" he asked, catching the Medals Ankh tossed his way without looking directly at them.
"As if you'd ever start with anything else," Ankh said, and Eiji slid the Medals into the Driver. It sang as the armor settled over his skin, and he rolled his shoulders under its familiar weight. It felt odd, knowing that this was the last time he planned on wearing it, but he was ready to move on. Another thought occurred to him.
"What about what you want?" Eiji turned his attention to his friend, holding the familiar Medal case, long legs straddling a second RideVendor. He'd been so wrapped up in not knowing what he wanted that he hadn't thought to ask Ankh the same question.
"Now is not the time," Ankh said, dodging the question. Eiji folded his arms, keeping one foot firmly planted on the ground. "Fine, I don't know either," Ankh said irritably. "Except for this Greeed in my city, dead. After that, I'll figure it out."
"I guess I will, too." Eiji started the RideVendor, following Ankh in and out of traffic as though he'd done it only yesterday. The Greeed had gone to ground in a construction zone under a closed-off section of a major highway, with plenty of space for an arachnid creature to hide, and Ankh parked the bike as close as he could get to the edge of the paved road.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
Eiji nodded, unable to feel the Greeed lurking below the street but trusting Ankh that it was there. "I'm ready," he said, and ran into the dark.
END