Now

Kogami woke up to a loud, fast beeping. He rarely slept deeply enough to wake up disoriented, but today, chronic sleep deprivation gave him about a half-second of confusion.

Then his eyes snapped wide. Ginoza.

Kogami had been sleeping upright, curled in a chair - one of many things he was trying in an attempt to keep from falling too deeply asleep. He unfurled his legs, ignoring a sort of bone deep stiffness that would take a thousand hot baths to go away, and was crossing the room less than five seconds after he'd first opened his eyes.

Ginoza was lying on his back in their bed. He looked asleep. Kogami supposed in a way, he was asleep. His chest was bare and uncovered, which made it easier and less invasive for Kogami to track the faint rise and fall of his breathing. He was mostly flat, but a few pillows were propped under his head and back, as Kogami had read on the internet that that made it a bit easier for an unconscious person to get enough air.

An IV snaked into Ginoza's pale, slender arm. The other arm, the metal one, was gone. All that was left was the stump, marked by a few rough metal edges and trailing wires that Kogami hadn't been able to fix.

Kogami scanned briefly across Ginoza's face. He was searching for any sign of change, whether good or bad. Ginoza's lips were as pale as the surrounding skin, and as much as Kogami had applied vaseline to try to moisten them, they were so horribly chapped that Kogami was shocked they weren't bleeding. There was no bluish tint though, and that was the important thing - Ginoza couldn't be struggling too much for oxygen.

Ginoza's eyes were sunken and bruised-looking. His normally soft-looking face had hollowed out into shadows and edges. Most of his hair was braided back, but the pieces that had escaped were dull and visibly dirty. Even as Kogami bent over him, he didn't open his eyes or so much as stir.

But there were no changes, and that was all that mattered.

Ginoza was still wearing his watch, and Kogami had set it to alert if his heart rate got either too low or too high. That was what had woken Kogami - the alarm from Ginoza's watch. His heart was beating at over 100 beats per minute, which meant that his blood pressure was dropping. His heart was trying - and failing - to compensate.

But that's what Kogami was for. He had a bag of IV fluid taped across his stomach, which he'd found was the easiest way to make sure it was warmed to body temperature. He carefully pried the tape up, wincing as it pulled at his skin. His side was red from pulling up at least thirty pieces of tape over the course of the past week, and he hoped he didn't start bleeding.

Mechanically, Kogami began to add the fluid to Ginoza's IV. The alarm shrieked, clanging around the inside of his head and muddling his already-exhausted brain, but he didn't dare turn it off. Nor did he hurry with the IV fluid. In a state like this, he could easily fumble something, and he didn't want to drop it again.

He could make more - in fact, his current bag had been assembled at home. In the beginning, he'd had blood, supplies that he'd taken from the hospital. It turned out that you could change the settings of a normal refrigerator to make it safe for storing blood, as long as you didn't care about eating the food that had been in there. And aside from keeping Ginoza alive, Kogami didn't care about anything.

He'd run out of the blood, of course. From there, he'd had a few bags of saline. And from there, he'd had to make his own. Kogami was sure that broke approximately a thousand laws, but it had actually turned out to be pretty easy. Still, it took time - he had to boil all of his equipment to make it sterile, and even once it was done, he had to wait for the fluid to reach the right temperature.

But the fluid was added without issue, and Kogami's hands immediately began to shake as they left the IV line. He ignored them. They hadn't stopped trembling for days now, and he knew they wouldn't until he got a real night of sleep.

Mercifully, the alarm stopped. Kogami checked Ginoza's watch to make sure his heartbeat was actually slowing, then checked it himself with his fingers. He counted, automatically slipping into his routine as his mind lost itself in the numbers.

Ginoza's pulse was definitely better. Kogami reached over him, pulling his computer off the bedside table and beginning to enter his vitals in the table he'd been creating. He didn't exactly know what he was looking for, aside from a dramatic dip that would signal Ginoza's decline. He hoped that eventually, he'd be able to recognize the signs of a recovery.

In the moments he wasn't actively tending to Ginoza, before he fell back asleep, Kogami researched heartbeat and blood pressure, respiration and body temperature. He tried to find trends in his own observations, grasping at any straw that might mean Ginoza was coming back to him.

It hadn't happened yet, but at least Kogami was teaching himself what to look for.

Kogami entered the last of Ginoza's vitals as his stomach growled loudly. He ignored it. The fridge didn't have blood in it anymore, but it also didn't have anything else. Blood needed to be kept at a higher temperature than food did, and he'd thrown out everything anyway in order to keep his fridge sterile. He had some dry supplies, but not many. And Kogami knew from considerable experience how long he could push himself before he needed to eat. He still had a while left in him. Once he was done checking over Ginoza, assuming nothing had changed and nothing else went wrong, maybe he would make himself some stovetop ramen or something.

Kogami realized he'd started recording Ginoza's vitals without actually writing down the time he was recording it from. How long had it been since he'd last checked everything? Kogami glanced at his watch, and was alarmed when the numbers started to swim slightly in front of him.

It was three. He had no intuitive sense of whether it was three in the afternoon or three in the morning. He'd blacked out his bedroom windows on the off-chance the light prevented Ginoza from getting proper rest. He'd also thought that losing all sense of time might make it easier to stay awake for long, irregular stretches.

Kogami blinked at the watch face for another minute, and then remembered that he'd switched his watch to military time for exactly this reason. Three in the morning then.

Kogami recorded that, then he finished checking and recording the rest of Ginoza's vitals, writing them in a neat little row.

Yesterday, Kogami had given Ginoza a few intermittent sips of water by mouth. Kogami had antibiotics that he could - and was - adding to his IV solution, but he would eventually run out of those, and if Ginoza still couldn't take anything by mouth at that point, then he would probably die. Kogami had half-expected it not to work, but Ginoza had managed to swallow, which was probably the actual most encouraging sign that Kogami had seen from him yet.

Kogami wet a clean cloth, and then settled himself on the bed next to Ginoza, so he had a good angle. This was the most delicate part - Kogami needed to wake Ginoza up enough to swallow, or he would need to wait a few more hours to try water again. Ginoza was so weak, his body so close to giving out, that his swallow reflex was gone. If he was completely unconscious when Kogami gave him water, even a mouthful would probably be enough to choke him.

Kogami held the cloth in one hand, and tapped Ginoza's cheekbone with the other. No response.

"Come on, Gino," Kogami whispered. He didn't remember how long it had been since he'd last spoken. His voice was hoarse with disuse. "Wake up."

Kogami tapped Ginoza's cheek again, already preparing to give up and put the water aside for later. But to Kogami's surprise, Ginoza's head rolled slightly to the left. It was a subtle enough movement that it would have been easy for Kogami to miss it, but at this point he was practiced in interpreting the tiniest signs from Ginoza.

"That's it," Kogami said. "Come on."

Ginoza opened his mouth a little, and if he'd been more conscious, Kogami would have expected some sort of protest. Instead, he tapped Ginoza one more time, and his mouth opened a little more.

Gently, Kogami placed a few drops of water on Ginoza's tongue. He saw Ginoza's throat start to work reflexively, and held his breath to see which way this would go. If even this small of an amount choked Ginoza….

But he swallowed the water in a weak movement, and Kogami's tension left him in a rush. It carried most of his energy with it, and Kogami bowed his head over Ginoza until the room stopped tipping around him.

He placed the cloth back in the water and brought it back to Ginoza's mouth, trying to keep himself focused in the moment. It was hard, with this little sleep and no sense of time, to stop his mind from slipping away. There were things he didn't want to revisit.

Kogami tapped Ginoza on the cheek again, water waiting.


One Week Earlier

"He's very sick. I'm sure you can see that."

Kogami didn't pay much attention to the doctor, not yet. Ginoza had been awake a little today, and Kogami was hoping that if he sat with him long enough, held his hand, Ginoza would open his eyes again and see that he was there.

"It's been difficult to get him on the road to recovery," the doctor was saying. "The wound to his arm wasn't particularly serious originally, but when sepsis developed…."

Kogami cringed and tuned the doctor out again. He knew what had happened to Ginoza. He didn't need to hear a doctor go over it again, and again, just reminding him of what he should have caught earlier. He'd trained as a field medic, only to miss something as obvious as an infected wound. If Kogami had caught it earlier, it would have been easier to treat.

Kogami squeezed Ginoza's hand, gently. Just enough to see if he'd wake up. He didn't.

"The antibiotics haven't been working." Now the doctor sounded apologetic. He probably didn't mean it, probably wasn't losing sleep over the latent criminal under his care. "He's been here two weeks-"

It was a long time. Kogami was here as much as possible, working strange shifts in order to spend as much time with Ginoza as he physically could. In case he woke up. When he woke up.

"But there's no sign of recovery," the doctor explained, and his tone sent chills through Kogami. He froze, still not looking towards the doctor.

"His vitals have been dropping steadily." The doctor's voice was quiet. "We aren't sure what more we can do, and SIBYL hasn't authorized a more…aggressive…form of care for a latent criminal."

"So you're saying there is more to do," Kogami said. His voice was low. Ginoza told him that he was frightening when he talked like that. Good. He'd been branded as a latent criminal anyways - what more did he have to lose?

The last thing he had to lose was this.

"We…you need to understand-"

"No, you need to understand," Kogami growled. "You just told me that there was more that could be done if he were a normal citizen. You could keep trying new treatments, and you might…you might be able to save him. This man has been labeled a latent criminal, but he's never committed a crime. And you're condemning him to die."

The doctor turned slightly away from Kogami, and began checking over the numbers spilling across the monitor that Ginoza was hooked up to. Kogami knew it was just pretext. He'd already told Kogami he was giving up - he just didn't want to have to look into Kogami's face anymore.

Kogami realized he'd started squeezing Ginoza's pale, limp hand very hard. With some effort, he forced himself to relax. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt Ginoza, not when he was already-

"You're arguing with the wrong person," the doctor said softly. "I don't decide people's crime coefficients. If the normal treatment methods aren't working, I ask if more extensive treatment might be an option. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't."

"That's bull-"

"I would help him if I could. Any doctor would. But as it is…you should probably say your goodbyes. I don't know how many more opportunities you'll have to see him."

Kogami's brain seemed to short circuit. When he came back to himself, he was no longer holding Ginoza's hand. Instead, he was standing in front of a wall, and he seemed to have created a hole in it with his fist. His knuckles were bleeding. There was no pain yet, but this wasn't his first time punching a wall, and so he knew that that would come later.

Kogami spun around, and saw that the doctor was backing frantically out of the room. Kogami had no idea if he was going for help. He hoped he wasn't. That would probably involve Kogami being forcefully removed from the room, which was the last thing he wanted now.

If this was all the time he had left with Ginoza, every second mattered.

That…didn't feel real. It was too big of a thought, promising an emptiness so vast that Kogami felt like he couldn't breathe. It was unimaginable.

Kogami didn't realize he was swaying, possibly about to fall, until he looked down and saw the floor tipping beneath him. His knuckles twinged with pain, and the floor rose up to catch the falling drop of blood.

Kogami sat down. Hard, in a chair. He wasn't thinking anymore. He couldn't think. There had to be something he could do, some last-minute miracle he could achieve. He always could.

But his head was too noisy to think straight, and Kogami found himself reaching out for Ginoza's hand again. He wrapped his fingers around his husband's, despite the blood.

At the contact, Ginoza's eyelids flickered faintly. Kogami held his breath, everything else driven from his mind, terrified that he might have imagined it.

But on the bed, Ginoza's eyes were open. They were barely slits, bloodshot in his ashy face, but they flickered towards Kogami. Towards their interlocked hands.

Ginoza moved his head, ever so slightly, and Kogami scooted closer.

"H-hey, Gino," he said. He didn't know when he'd lost the strength his voice had carried when he was yelling at the doctor, but now he could barely get the words out. "You awake?"

Ginoza's lips twitched in a pale approximation of his usual scowl. Kogami smiled in answer, moving his free hand up to peel damp, clingy bangs from his husband's forehead. Ginoza's fingers twitched in his, and the frown became a little more pronounced.

"Wh…." Ginoza's voice was lower than a whisper, almost impossible to hear above the beeping of the countless machines he was hooked up to. He rolled his head again, looking towards their hands, and Kogami let him go as his fingers twitched again.

Ginoza swallowed hard, the sound more audible than his words had been, and lifted his fingers a few inches off the bed. He blinked at them, then showed them to Kogami. The frown was back. Even without words, it was clear what Ginoza was trying to say.

"Still worried about me, huh?" Kogami asked, trying to ignore the familiar sense of guilt stabbing its way through him.

Ginoza just blinked at him, waiting. Kogami couldn't tell if Ginoza even remembered what he'd asked. He supposed he should be grateful that Ginoza wasn't conscious enough that Kogami would have to explain what the doctors had told him, but he wasn't. Ginoza was the person he talked things through with, the person that stopped him from getting too far into a situation to come back out again. He wanted that now.

"Everything will be fine," Kogami said. "You don't need to worry about me, just focus on yourself, okay?"

Kogami reached out a hand to touch Ginoza's papery cheek, but he saw that whatever dim recognition had been in Ginoza's gaze was gone again now. His eyes were small, pale slits, and he was unresponsive to the sound of Kogami's voice. The fever, the malnutrition, the week of fighting his body from the inside out - they'd all taken their toll. Ginoza could hardly stay conscious for more than a few seconds at a time. Kogami couldn't talk things through with him. He'd never be able to again, unless….

Unless Ginoza miraculously recovered.

But Kogami had just been informed that that wasn't going to happen. The doctors were out of options. Ginoza was still too weak to take anything by mouth, the antibiotics weren't cutting through the infection, the fever wouldn't break. He was going to die - there was nothing more they could do, nothing more they would do.

But Kogami didn't give up that easily.

Kogami looked slowly around the room, taking in the flurry of machines Ginoza was hooked up to, the row of medications lined up on the plastic tray beside him, the tangle of tubes and wires providing him oxygen, antibiotics, blood. An idea was starting to take shape - a very dumb and dangerous idea. The sort of thing only Kogami could pull off.

"Don't worry," Kogami repeated almost mindlessly, even knowing that Ginoza couldn't hear. "Everything will be fine."


Ginoza hated hospitals. Most people who had spent any length of time as an Enforcer did - the medical system wasn't exactly kind to latent criminals. If Kogami knew one thing about Ginoza, it was that if he were to die, he wouldn't want it to be there.

That was the only reason Kogami was doing this. He told himself that over and over and over. Ginoza wouldn't want to die in a hospital, and Kogami had always been a slave to whatever Ginoza wanted.

That was the only reason Ginoza was slumped over in a wheelchair, head down and breathing raspy. Kogami needed to get him out of the hospital, and Kogami would do what it took.

Kogami didn't know what being forced into a wheelchair would do to Ginoza, but he was pretty sure it wouldn't be great. Ginoza was completely unconscious, as far as Kogami could tell, and he had no ability to hold himself up.

So Kogami was doing that for him, keeping one hand gently against Ginoza's metal shoulder while he pushed the chair with the other. Ginoza's head lolled against his hand, and he winced at how oily his hair felt. That was something else he could fix when he got Ginoza home.

The doctors hadn't put up much of a fight when Kogami informed them that he'd be taking Ginoza home. "To die there" had been left unsaid, and the doctors claimed that it wasn't typical, but Kogami had seen the truth on their faces. They were scared of him, and they didn't want him anywhere nearby when Ginoza finally stopped breathing.

Kogami winced and pushed the wheelchair further along the hallway. He didn't want to think about Ginoza dying. He didn't want to think about what he'd do, to the doctors and people and system that had failed him.

And then they were passing a storage closet, and the other things Kogami had been trying not to think about suddenly rushed back into his mind.

Kogami had the door open and him and Ginoza inside before he could think about it. He'd recognized the room as one that typically contained medical supplies, medication, rather than janitorial products or extra bedding. This wasn't the first time he'd stolen from a hospital.

And that's what he was doing. That's what he'd been planning all along, deep in the part of himself that he still allowed to hope. If they refused to keep Ginoza alive, Kogami would just have to do it himself.

He recognized pretty much everything that he was looking for on sight. They hadn't had much of a doctor in SEA-UN, and most of them had learned what they could. Kogami had learned a lot, very quickly, in conditions intense enough to ensure that forgetting would be a matter of life and death.

Ginoza listed against his hand again, and Kogami tilted him back against the wheelchair. He patted his cheek, knowing Ginoza couldn't feel him, but unable to stop himself from doing it anyway.

"Fuck them, right?" Kogami asked Ginoza quietly, pulling IV fluid antibiotics off the shelf and packing them carefully into the pouch on the back of Ginoza's wheelchair. "I'm going to fix this."

He couldn't take too many of any given supply. He didn't have room, and besides, that would be a sure tipoff that someone unauthorized had been here. Kogami moved silently to the shelf above, where sterile saline pouches sat, fresh IV lines coiled beneath them. These went into his pockets.

Did Kogami feel bad? He wasn't sure. The medical supplies stored here were needed for people who were admitted to the hospital, presumably. But Kogami had been on the run before, and he knew that it was possible to do a lot more with less. No one would die because the hospital was missing a few yards of tubing.

Ginoza may be a latent criminal, but Kogami had, in all honesty, always been an actual criminal. He had moral lines, obviously, but if he had known that the hospital would suffer because of the supplies he was taking, would that really have stopped him?

Ginoza was more important anyways.

Luckily, none of the medications Ginoza had been on were either uncommon or protected. A few different kinds of antibiotics - Kogami didn't see every variety that he'd seen lined up next to Ginoza's bed here, but there were enough, he thought. They clearly hadn't all been working anyways. Kogami took a few bottles of each, not sure how long Ginoza would need the antibiotics until his body learned to support itself again.

Painkillers went into the pouch too - Ginoza wasn't conscious enough to be in pain yet, but when he was, he might need them. And anyways, the doctors had made it sound like there was a good chance Ginoza was going to go into organ failure anyways. The fact that he couldn't even keep down the smallest sips of water apparently wasn't a very good sign. If that did happen, Kogami wanted painkillers on hand. There wouldn't be anything further he could do at that point, he wanted a way to ease Ginoza's-

No. He wouldn't think like that. It wouldn't come to that.

Kogami knew Ginoza's medical team had been relying heavily on a drug that would raise Ginoza's blood pressure when it got too low, and make it easier for oxygen to circulate throughout his body. Kogami recognized the name, luckily, even if they hadn't have anything like it in SEA-UN. Those went into the pouch too.

There were sterile scalpels and clean bandages in thin, papery packaging. The infected wound on Ginoza's arm - the thing that had originally caused this whole mess - hadn't really healed. His body didn't have leftover resources to devote to it. Right now, it was still neatly dressed, but Kogami was sure he would have to deal with it at some point and he wanted to be ready.

"Almost done, almost done," Kogami said. He knew Ginoza wouldn't - couldn't - respond. It was just second nature to update him. But Kogami was worried over how long this was taking - sitting Ginoza up in the wheelchair surely wasn't doing him any favors. The last thing he wanted was to somehow damage him worse.

But he didn't want to hurry this too much, either. This would be the last chance he had to get any supplies. Once he got Ginoza home, Kogami knew he wouldn't be able to leave him until he was better.

Kogami did one last search of the shelves, trying to remember anything else he could possibly need. This supply area didn't have a refrigerator, which meant no blood. Kogami couldn't transport a lot of that, and he didn't know how much of Ginoza's blood type the hospital would have on hand anyway. But he would find their supply on his way out, and he would take some of that too.

Kogami pushed Ginoza towards the door, lingering as his eye fell on a small bin containing, among other things, nicotine patches.

It had only been a few hours, but Kogami could already feel the desperate urge for a cigarette. A cigarette he absolutely couldn't have, not around his desperately ill husband who was now no longer receiving supplemental oxygen.

Kogami grimaced. He hated his nicotine dependency, and it certainly meant that he couldn't afford to quit cold turkey now. He'd gone through withdrawal before, and it made him wildly anxious at best and almost unable to function at worst, and he couldn't afford any of those symptoms right now.

Sighing, Kogami pocketed the nicotine patches, as many as he thought he could take. He'd need them.

Before leaving, he listened at the door of the supply closet for footsteps. When the hall was clear, he placed a steadying hand on Ginoza's shoulder and exited smoothly. If anyone did walk around the corner, Kogami knew that his body language would make them think that he was supposed to be exactly where he was.