Chapter Forty-Nine

"Hey, man, this is a misunderstanding—"

Kurogane's fist slammed into Jet's face, knuckles connecting with his jaw and throwing him against the wall. "Misunderstanding?" he echoed, cold fury seeping into his voice, sending a chill down Syaoran's back. Kurogane glared at the red-haired man, fists trembling at his side.

Relief swelled in Syaoran's chest. He slumped where he sat, breathing hard, sweat dripping down his face and chest, mingling with the blood, the tears. And when Kurogane punched Jet in the stomach, the relief morphed into a sort of visceral satisfaction.

"You," Kurogane snarled, grabbing the redhead's neck and smashing his back against the wall. Jet clawed at the ninja's hands, blunt fingernails scraping against the tan skin. "You're lucky Tomoyo put that curse on me, otherwise I'd cut out your liver and feed it to you."

The threat, so sharply reminiscent of his last few hours here, sent a shudder down Syaoran's spine. He watched Jet's face turn red, then purple, then blue as Kurogane clamped down on his throat. When the man's hands fell limp at his side, Kurogane released him, letting him slide down the sheetrock.

Fai peered around the edge of the doorway, his face grim. "I took care of the other two. They won't wake up for a few hours, at least."

"We ought to kill them," Kurogane said. Syaoran fidgeted, trying to match his frigid tone with that of the man who'd kissed him so tenderly just a few days ago. Who had rejected him only to show up here to save him. The two images battled in his mind, refusing to meld together.

Fai hurried over and crouched at his side, his shoes sending ripples through the pool of bleach. Chains jingled at Syaoran's back, and his hands twitched, itching for freedom. When the restraints fell away, he wrapped his arms around his torso and pushed himself away from the puddle, his injured knee dragging across the cement, sending jolts of pain up his leg.

"Don't move too much," Fai said, unsheathing his claws and dragging them over the bleach-soaked cloth of his pants. The fabric fell away, and Fai wiped a cloth handkerchief from Jade Country over the back of his leg, wiping away the stinging liquid. "Where else are you hurt?"

"I'm fine," he said, more out of reflex than honesty.

Kurogane approached, his footsteps silent even over the cement floor. "You're not fine," he said. "We're taking you to the hospital."

Syaoran said nothing. For once, he had to agree that he needed professional medical treatment, no matter how costly. He relaxed against the wall, still shivering from the cold. As his sweat had cooled, it had started to feel like someone had poured ice water across his back. More than anything, he wanted to get away from this place.

"Mokona, get him a blanket," Fai said, fingertips probing the skin just beneath one of the lacerations. His own skin felt like ice beside the magician's, and Syaoran wondered if he'd survived all this just to die of hypothermia.

A moment later, he felt a layer of cloth wrap around his shoulders and fall over his shredded chest. His hands coiled around the fabric, pulling it flush against his body, and he sighed in relief.

"C'mon kid," Kurogane said, crouching beside him and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. "I'll carry you out."

"Careful of his knee," Fai warned. "I think it's broken."

Broken, he thought, flinching as sparks of pain danced through his body. I'm broken, I'm broken . . . Syaoran inhaled sharply as Kurogane picked him up. He pressed his face against the man's shirt, trying to ignore his headache, holding back the tears of relief even as part of him feared he might never recover, might never be able to see his Sakura again.

"What are we going to do about them?" Fai asked. Eyes closed, Syaoran could only assume he meant his tormentors.

"Leave them or kill them," Kurogane growled. "I don't care. "

The world swayed beneath him as the ninja moved, and he tucked his head in the crease between the man's elbow and his chest. After hours of freezing on the cement floor, the ninja's body felt almost feverish. Syaoran allowed himself to go limp as the warmth worked its way through him. Only when a door squeaked open did a rush of cold air bring him out of his stupor. His eyes popped open. "It's cold."

"Yeah." Kurogane shifted, surrounding him with his arms to keep the worst of the cold at bay. "I know."

"You came for me."

"Of course we did."

Syaoran closed his eyes again. "Of course we did," he'd said, as if he hadn't, even for a moment, considered leaving him. Yet even as those words echoed in his head, another chorus rippled through his mind, one that left him aching.

"You don't love me, and I don't love you."

The kid's body went limp in his arms, and for one awful second, Kurogane thought the boy had died, that he'd gotten here too late, that the internal damage was too severe. Then the mage spoke. "I put him under a sleep spell. He'll be out for a few hours."

"You might've mentioned that before you did it," Kurogane snapped, wishing he had a free hand to punch the idiot with. Instead, he cradled the sleeping boy closer to his chest, picking up the pace as he headed toward the arena. There was a hospital ward for the competitors there, the only place he could think of where someone could deal with injuries like the kid's.

"Would you really want to be awake through that kind of pain?" Fai asked, nodding toward the boy. Kurogane glanced down, forcing himself to take stock of the kid's injuries. The beige blanket concealed most of the damage, but the purple welts on his head remained visible, and Kurogane could see part of a blistering burn on his neck, as if someone had heated a piece of metal and used it to brand him. Which was almost certainly what had happened, given some of the tools he'd seen beside the stove after he'd knocked that redheaded bastard unconscious. The mage had also mentioned a possible broken knee, which, depending on its severity, could leave the kid with a permanent limp.

He sighed, feeling even more exhausted than he'd felt half an hour ago. "No. But I'd rather he not have to go through the pain at all." It was a stupid thing to say—he knew that. Still, a tiny part of him wanted to talk to the witch, to make a deal and wipe the memory of the last sixteen hours from the kid's mind. Not that Kurogane ever would've admitted to wanting to talk to Yuuko. The price would be too high.

But damn, he wanted to.

They made it to the hospital after just a few minutes. It seemed strange how they'd searched all night, and Syaoran had been less than a mile from their apartment complex, barely a few blocks from the arena. Close enough that he would've been in the meat bun's translation range the whole time, he thought irrelevantly, pausing outside the main entrance as Fai walked around him and pulled open the door. As soon as they walked in, a flurry of hospital staff rushed over.

"Oh, goodness, what happened?"

Fai opened his mouth to explain. Kurogane thrust the boy into the nearest nurse's arms. "Take care of him. He's hurt."

The man blinked, as if unsure what to do with his new patient, then turned and set Syaoran on one of those wheeled hospital carts they used to transport injured fighters from the arena. Meanwhile, other staff members swarmed around Fai as he explained where they'd found Syaoran, and the poor condition he'd been in. Midway through his explanation, one of the employees left, only to return a moment later on the phone with some sort of local law enforcement (did they have ninjas in this world, Kurogane wondered, or was it like the police force patrolling the Hanshin Republic?), and several official-looking documents in hand.

Half an hour passed before a woman in blue scrubs approached from his flank. He turned, pulling his hands from his pockets. "Excuse me, sir," she said. "Are you related to that boy you brought in?"

"Yes," he said because it would yield quicker results.

When he didn't elaborate, the woman raised one eyebrow. "Are you his father? His brother?"

Well, he supposed trying to tell the truth was pointless. Most worlds had no concept of dimensional traveling, and he wasn't about to attempt to explain the complicated series of events that had led up to this conversation. "I'm his father," he lied.

Relief swept across the woman's face. "I'm Doctor Yamura. I'm the primary physician for your son."

Kurogane nodded, feigning comprehension. For a world that had a written language so similar to his own, they'd made up a lot of unnecessary words—nurse and doctor in place of the word healer, physician as an alternate word to doctor, and a whole bunch of other words Kurogane could barely grasp, even with the pork bun modifying everyone's accents and making the new words comprehensible.

So for ten minutes, he listened to Doctor Yamura outline several procedures for which she needed parental consent (which Kurogane thought was ridiculous, since any parent in their right mind ought to want their kid treated, and, in his opinion, any healer or variation thereof should just assume so). When Doctor Yamura produced a pen and handed him the paper, he reluctantly started paging through the document to figure out where he needed to sign, and where he merely needed to put his initials or other pertinent information. When the doctor quizzed him about Syaoran's medical history, he told her the kid had never had much need of medical treatment until he'd started fighting in the chess tournaments, which the hospital staff already had records of. Apart from what he'd seen for himself, he really had no idea what sort of health issues the kid might have.

When Doctor Yamura finally stopped peppering him with questions, Kurogane took a seat in the padded chair next to the mage, tilting his head back so his hair brushed against the sheetrock. "I hate this world."

He wasn't looking at Fai's face, but he could hear the faint twinge of amusement in his voice. "Why?"

"Too many rules. Too much bullshit. Things are so much simpler in Nihon."

"In my world as well."

Kurogane glanced at him, surprised he'd mentioned his home world. Even the vague agreement was more than he'd alluded to in the past several months. Kurogane almost called him on it, almost demanded a more detailed explanation of what was so horrible about the mage's world that he'd been forced to run away from it. And then he closed his eyes again, sinking deeper into the chair's cushions.

He was too tired to deal with any more bullshit today.