Story Warnings: Some violence and strong language. Mentions of deceased OCs.
Disclaimer: If you recognize any names, terms, or concepts it's because they don't belong to me.
CHAPTER 2 - Intervention
When Oga returned, he had both Takamiya and Akahoshi in tow. The former had reverted to his original dreary appearance, and seemed disgruntled to have been summoned. Akahoshi appeared mildly concerned and curious, and a looming Toujou brought up the rear and then planted himself firmly in the doorway, blocking access. Natsume joined him, leaning back against the doorframe. As soon as they stepped into the office, Oga addressed them unceremoniously, tone brusque and firm.
"What're the side affects to having your soul removed and split?"
The trio of freshmen turned to look at Furuichi, and it grated on him how they took in his burned face, his dark, bloodshot eyes, and his shivering form, bundled in heavy winter gear and all the sheets and blankets from the nurse's office.
"I- I don't know. Mammon said there wouldn't be any side effects. Maybe. Probably," Akahoshi grimaced at the end.
"No one's ever survived when Lucifer's split their souls before," Takamiya added unconcernedly.
"Well, there's obviously some fucking side effects! Just look at him! Bring out your fucking demons and ask already," Oga growled. Baby Beel shook his tiny, round fist and gave an angry screech from over his shoulder.
"Stop talking about me like I'm not here," Furuichi stuttered through chattering teeth. He was ignored in favor of Mammon, whom Akahoshi had just called up with a burst of flame.
"I did everything right, his soul's all fixed. I'm still waiting for my full payment, by the way," the bizarre looking demon said, shooting an expressionless glare at Akahoshi. "If there's something wrong, there must have been something wrong with his soul itself. You, boy! What are your symptoms?"
Furuichi frowned. He really didn't want to tell them about the nightmares. It was bad enough they could see this weird cold thing that was happening to him. He looked up at Oga and was met by serious, determined eyes. Shit, he thought. There's no getting away from eyes like that. Those eyes said that Oga would not stop until he accomplished his goal, and right now, that goal was figuring out what was wrong with Furuichi. He sighed resignedly.
"Besides that I'm freezing like this? It's- I can't sleep. Weird dreams," he admitted quietly, staring down at the floor.
"Nightmares of the fight?" Akahoshi asked neutrally. Furuichi shook his head.
"No, it's… I mean, yeah, sometimes, but mostly– I don't even know how to describe them. It's in weird places, with weird people, and weird situations, and- and it's like I'm not even me," he finished a little helplessly.
"Ah, it's that," Mammon said, pounding a fist into an open palm.
"Right, that," Hilda agreed from where she had hopped up into the third-storey windowsill.
"I see, it's that!" Alaindelon's head popped out from underneath the bed, which shifted awkwardly to accommodate his sudden mass beneath it. He was nodding quite seriously. Toujou and Natsume eyed the demon nervously, although if asked, they couldn't quite tell why.
"That?" Furuichi asked, too accustomed to surprise demon appearances by now to be overly startled.
"Precisely that," Mammon said again, crossing his arms and nodding wisely. What the fuck is that?! Inner Furuichi screeched. Outer Furuichi was about to vocalize the question, but was beaten to the punch by Oga.
"Oi, stop being stupid and tell us already!"
"Your soul was scrambled up when it was split. Interference like that sometimes triggers memories of a past life. That's it, you're fine," Mammon said breezily, flapping a hand cavalierly. "I expect compensation for the answer, by the way."
"What about the cold?" Furuichi asked. The demon shrugged.
"It's just in your head. Maybe you died somewhere cold."
"It's not in my fucking head! Look, you can see my breath, and my nails are all blue! I'm seriously freezing here, you shitty demon miser!" he snarled.
"Look, kid, if your body temperature was genuinely below normal, you would be more sensitive to heat than normal. Touching a boiler normally would be extremely painful. For someone who's already 'freezing,' it would have been enough to send you into shock, but you barely even felt it."
"Yeah, because I'm numb! Oh, for the love of…" Furuichi exclaimed, rising up out of his pile and slapping a hand against Mammon's bare arm. The demon gasped at the feeling of icicles scraping across his skin and jumped. He hummed a bit.
"Well. I don't know. Bye." He disappeared in a small burst of flame, leaving Furuichi to gape incredulously. Akahoshi winced apologetically.
"I don't know why you are experiencing physical effects. Perhaps it's because you're human," Hilda shrugged, "but this phenomenon is not unheard of in the demon world. Some demons even intentionally cause themselves soul injuries to obtain the wisdom of a previous life."
"How lucky you are, Furuichi-dono!" Alaindelon exclaimed with starry eyes.
"How do we make it stop?" Furuichi asked determinedly. He paused when he took in the surprised expressions on the demons' faces.
"Why would you want to make it stop?" Hilda asked incredulously, her visible eye wide. "This is a powerful gift!"
Furuichi frowned. "It's nothing I want to see. Watching people die every night isn't gonna make me wiser, it just makes me sick to my stomach," he said stiffly.
"Wait, what do you mean you see people die? You only said they were weird dreams," Oga said forcefully, shoving closer to Furuichi again.
"Well, some of them are sort of mundane, I guess… I mean, they're all pretty abstract, and sometimes I kind of recall stuff like sitting around a campfire, or working out strategies, or sharpening a blade. Mostly, though, it's been fighting these- these horrible battles, or walking around the aftermath of them. So, yeah. I see a lot of people die," he finished softly.
Hilda leaned forward to rest her chin on her palm, eyeing him contemplatively. "Then you were a military officer in a past life? This is a good thing. The master can only benefit from having a slave with military expertise. Your value is increasing, Furuichi."
He stared at her blankly for a long moment, dumbfounded. "You… you think it's a good thing that I saw my best friend's face get ripped off last night?" he asked quietly, more to himself than to the demoness. I don't need to put up with this, he thought vitriolically.
Beautiful though she may be, Hilda was completely lacking anything similar to empathy when it came to him, and while he had approximately zero desire for pity, he also had no wish to deal with her callousness. He could handle it later, when he wasn't already humiliated by having to talk about his nightmares, but not now.
He didn't want to be here anymore, he just wanted to go home and sleep and forget everything, but none of that was possible, not with his nightmares and not with his mother's concern. He started fiddling with the sheets, trying to untangle himself to leave and go… Somewhere. Anywhere that wasn't here, it didn't matter. A calloused hand covering his wrists stopped him.
Furuichi looked up to see Oga standing over him, face blank, but with intense eyes. He looked over his friend's shoulder to see Toujou herding everyone else out of the room. The tall senior turned to offer them a brief nod over his broad shoulder before slamming the door on Natsume's pout and Alaindelon's worried, tearful eyes.
"Beel needs a nap, so I'm gonna stay here for a while. You should stay too," Oga said in the sudden silence, awkwardly rubbing at the back of his head. "It's fine if everyone's gone, right?"
Furuichi stared up at his best friend. Yeah, he'd be safe here. He could trust Oga to wake him up when he had another nightmare, the same way he'd always trusted in Oga to come through for him. The thick knot of scar tissue on his back and chest right over his heart seemed to ache a little less when Oga was around.
Furuichi wondered vaguely what it had been like for Oga to see Lucifer rip out his soul. He probably would have just puked if their situations had been reversed, he thought as he shoved at his friend's shoulder for stealing one of his blankets for Beel. He would have tried to save him, of course, after gathering himself, but it would have been entirely hopeless. He'd barely been able to scratch Takamiya, even with the assistance of several demons.
Which wasn't surprising, really; he never been good at fighting, and had never wanted to be, until recently. His advantage had always been his intelligence and tactical mind, but looking back at the past few months, at the way Himekawa had pulled through for them in amazing ways with money and technology and brilliant strategies… Furuichi couldn't really fathom why anyone was even pretending that he was Ishiyama's General, because he sure as hell didn't feel like it.
"Oi!" Oga called, splaying his hand across Furuichi's face and pushing his head flat against the pillow. Furuichi flailed weakly. "Stop thinking and get that stupid look off your face. Go to sleep."
"Yeah," he said, offering a tired grin and batting away Oga's arm. He knew objectively that he was feeling so awful about himself right now because of exhaustion, and he seriously hoped he felt better after a nap – it wasn't like him to be so morose. He settled back into bed and pulled the nest of blankets more tightly around himself. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was Oga seated on the foot of the bed, reclining against the wall with Beel curled up to his chest, his face arranged in its typical relaxed scowl. Heh, Child-Rearing Badass indeed.
Thousands of faces stare up at him, pale and eager, proud and fierce. His heart swells, bursting, these people, HIS people, trusting and fervent and he will lead them to victory. They can do this, they can WIN, they can bury those filthy, pig-fucking savages and home will be home again and there will be peace.
Raise the arm, raise the spear, both strong, both flexible, both glinting with metal in the morning sun. The army meets his war cry with a fierce cacophony, echoes across the mountain, rides the wind, sharp and clear as their ice, reaches the enemy ears and makes them shiver and dread. Their combined armor and blades shine more brightly than the snow around them.
But then anything would shine more brightly than red and brown and grey – is it really snow when it's mostly blood and mud and crumpled bodies?
Thousands of faces stare up at him from the ground, but there's no pride in their eyes now. There's nothing.
And now there's nothing in his eyes, either. Because there's nothing in his chest. Well, nothing that's his, anyway. Just a hand, a pretty lily-white hand, fine-boned and delicate and shattering his crushed ribs further and making him gasp and gurgle and BLEED–
Firm hands shaking his shoulders jolted Furuichi into awareness. He sat up quickly, shaking and sweating with fear and revulsion, and forced his way out of the nest of blankets, pushing past Oga, and diving face-first into the nurse's sink to vomit. He was distantly aware of Oga shifting uncomfortably behind him and Baby Beel babbling quietly. When he was finished, he sank to the ground and leaned back against the counter, barely glancing over when his friend settled beside him.
"Are they always like that?" Oga muttered, pulling his son off his shoulder and into his lap to poke at baby-fat cheeks.
Furuichi made a vague noise of agreement. "Thanks for waking me. How long was I out?"
"Couple hours," Oga grunted. "You need more than that."
"Heh, you're telling me," he sighed despondently. "What I really need is to have never been kidnapped."
"…That was Glasses' fault, wasn't it."
Furuichi shrugged. "I mean, I guess, but I'm sure he didn't know how far Takamiya was willing to go. And it was a great plan, it just kinda sucks that I was collateral damage."
Oga didn't say anything, just kept poking distractedly at Beel's cheeks. The baby was starting to get fussy, but Oga did not seem to notice. Furuichi watched him a moment longer, unnerved by the silence and by the way Oga's eyes seemed a bit darker, before heaving himself up.
"C'mon, let's have lunch. I'm hungry. Oga," he repeated when his friend made no move to stand. The other man finally glanced up and settled Beel on his shoulder, rising to stalk out of the nurse's office.
Unfortunately, they had chosen precisely the wrong moment to leave to room. As soon as they stepped out, they walked right into the middle of a melee fight involving no less than twelve delinquents, all apparently fighting for the right to call the hallway their territory.
Oga had no problems navigating the horde, of course, batting flying thugs away like insects, clearing the path for Furuichi to follow. From his position up ahead, however, he was unable to see the metal pipe a thug threw at one of his opponents, which flew off course when it ricocheted comically off another punk's skull and headed straight at Furuichi.
Furuichi's gaze narrowed to a laser focus, his eyes trained on a spot three quarters of the way down the pipe. He followed that spot as it spun through the air, anticipating the trajectory and stretching to catch it right before his nose with a harsh smack of flesh on metal and a sudden sting that he had no time to contemplate. Without a second's pause, he brought the pipe down to his side and parallel to the floor, before pushing off the ground with both feet and twisting at the hips to smack a thug across the belly, the force of the hit sending him crashing into another.
Furuichi's momentum carried him through to the other side of the hallway, knocking another thug to the ground with a shoulder and elbow, then bringing the pipe up to jam the end of it into someone's solar plexus. With his feet planted firmly once more, he put all the force of his body's alignment into pushing the other up off the ground and back over Furuichi's shoulder.
That was the intention, anyway. Halfway to heaving the thug all the way across his back, Furuichi heard a sickening pop just before an incredible pain in the shoulder of his leading arm had him dropping both pipe and thug and falling to his knees.
"Fuck," he hissed, grasping at his shoulder as Oga became a sudden flurry of violent activity, planting each delinquent shoulder deep in the walls and ceiling. Less than a minute later, Oga was kneeling beside him, carefully pulling his hand away to check the injured shoulder.
"Furuichi, what the fuck was that? You weren't even using the demon tissues!"
"I dunno. Just- It was just automatic. Fuck, stop touching!" he yelped as Oga jostled the joint too roughly as he pulled off the thick layer of Furuichi's winter coat.
"Looks dislocated. Hold on, this'll hurt," the teen muttered, taking the arm and slowly rotating it, bracing with one hand and pulling steadily with the other, until the limb suddenly popped back into place. Furuichi couldn't quite bite down on an exclamation of pain.
"Sit here a sec, I'll get ice," Oga said, darting quickly back into the nurse's office to grab a bag of ice. He affixed the pack to the top of Furuichi's shoulder with a length of bandages, then used his own black jacket as a sling to support the sore joint.
"What did you mean 'automatic,'" Oga said, surveying his handiwork with an accomplished eye.
"It was weird," Furuichi responded, testing the knot the sleeves of the makeshift sling made behind his neck. "Like, I saw the pipe flying, and felt like I've seen it a thousand times, and then I just knew what to do. Heh, guess I just wasn't strong enough to follow through," he finished self-deprecatingly.
"Your body's not used to moving like that, not without a demon to help. S'why your shoulder got dislocated," Oga affirmed. He paused a bit before continuing. "…Think it had something to do with those dreams?"
Furuichi had already come to the same conclusion. "Mm. I think I use a spear when I fight in those memory nightmares, sometimes. Guess that's that shitty 'wisdom of a past life' Hilda was talking about."
"How the fuck is it wise if you just hurt yourself, eh?" Oga barked, poking harshly at Furuichi's good shoulder.
He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, that's why I asked how to make it stop."
"I'll ask Hilda again later," Oga promised as he settled against the wall beside Furuichi. The paler teen let his head fall back with a light thunk against the crumbling plaster.
"Jesus, what a shitty day," Furuichi said with a laugh that edged on hysterical, bringing his good hand up to poke at the bandage covering the burn on his cheek. He still felt no pain from that particular injury, the cold numbing the damaging heat transfer. Actually, he mused, it was probably good for his shoulder that he was so cold. It would keep the swelling down.
Oga said nothing, but tilted his body more towards his Furuichi so that their shoulders brushed with each breath. They sat quietly for a long moment, surveying the field of planted thugs. One of them looked particularly artful, with his legs splayed at an elegant angle, colorful socks on display, and pants dusted with an intricate, abstract pattern of mortar. He said as much to Oga.
"Heh, what can I say?" the badass said modestly.
The rest of the day passed slowly and quietly, thankfully. Exhaustion and pain dragged at Furuichi's steps, but Oga didn't seem to mind the slower pace. No one bothered them for the rest of the day, not even any fools from other temporary schools who had gotten it into their heads to challenge Oga. A few times Furuichi saw someone make to step forward into their path, but each time a hand shot out and snagged the thug by the collar, dragging him into some dark side hallway like a low budget horror film. Once he was even sure he saw chains like Nene's burst from a classroom, tangle around the unlucky delinquent, and yank him into the shadowy doorway. Furuichi and Oga ignored the screams as par course for Ishiyama High.
When the final bell rang, Oga waved him off to Kanzaki and Co.'s company, saying he had something to take care of and ordering the three seniors to escort him home, much to his humiliation. Kanzaki growled something about uppity freshman but didn't object as he led them through the streets in the direction of Furuichi's house. The freshman did not want to know how they knew where he lived.
On the walk, Kanzaki and Shiroyama ignored him for the most part, while Natsume kept eyeing him with the same sort of intent curiosity a cat offers a caged bird. Furuichi had rarely been so eager to see his house. He accepted Kanzaki's parting nod and Shiroyama's grunt of 'Later,' thanking them for the escort.
He couldn't help the shiver that had nothing to due with cold when Natsume grinned brightly, patted him on his uninjured shoulder, and told him to take better care of himself, or he'd regret it.
AN: Hey guys, thanks for all the reviews! So by majority vote, this story will remain GEN. However, I might be posting alternative chapters separately that would be something like 'how would this scene go, if this story was slash…?' No promises about those though, I've got a lot on my plate already.
Also, I got a few reviews about people being unfamiliar with the Elder Scrolls video games. All you really need to know is that it's a series of fantasy RPGs with magic and swords and demons and gods and races other than humans. It also has a shit ton of history and backstory, which is what I'll be delving into here. The bits I'll be using will be explained throughout the story, so I won't spoil anything now. You don't need to have ever even played the games, as I won't be going into playable content. Anything that isn't obvious in the actual chapter content or requires a little more knowledge or the series, I'll clarify in author's notes.
Hope you enjoyed this chapter!