Description: A week after the NESTS attack upon the YFCC, Whip finally rouses to discover that K' is still struggling with the repercussions of removing his glove. The subsequent argument the siblings get into over this decision is rudely interrupted by a certain ninja, who seems to have his own ideas on where the two should recuperate; and Shurui arrives at the hospital for a visit only in time to witness as her new 'family' is apparently kidnapped?!
Nighttime in hospitals is a sombre thing, dragging on endlessly minute by minute, measured out in IV drips and the dreary pulse of sentinel EKGs. Drawn curtains and shut blinds hide patients from one another and from the outside world; for those who are awake, this isolation can become maddening.
One young man-- far too young to even be here, much less to bear the scars that he does-- is just about ready to be discharged, and no longer requires any of the hookups that were necessary to stabilize him for the first few days. The hospital is almost empty at this hour; he's thus found it a little easier to escape his room, and has done so: he has someone he needs to see.
He stops in front of the room he was told his sister is in. Resting his left hand on the door, he bows his head briefly against it, as if afraid to go in. No one notices him, even though his presence is constantly accompanied by the glow of firelight and the sound of flames eating flesh.
Fifteen minutes later, they say, and she would have been DOA. She certainly looked that way. When that mysterious young woman was brought in, there was little actual human being left inside all that gore. She was suffering profuse and diffuse trauma, had lost two-thirds of her blood, and had gone into hypovolemic shock. Beneath all that blood, her skin was pale, her lips were blue, and her eyes had gone cloudy.
But it was fifteen minutes into trauma surgery that Whip stopped breathing. She was clinically dead for two minutes; the long, unnerving, horrific two minutes it took the surgical team to shock her heart back into beating. Her breathing returned; even unconscious, Whip was stubborn not to give up the ghost.
It remains trapped inside that silent, broken body that lays nestled in the middle of a hospital bed and circuited with a web of cords and tubes. Machines circle her in a sleepless vigil, their beeps and blinking lights testifying faith in the little life that hangs in inside her unmoving limbs and behind her closed eyes.
The room that awaits K' is dark and cold. No signs of life or smells of cooking eggs and stolen cigarettes. No distracted, warm smiles from his sister as she perches over her laptop, or laughs madly at some old black-and-white comedy on TV, or hangs idiotically halfway out the window. There is only that sharp, sterile smell of medicine, the sound of rain pelting against the room's only window, and that body on the bed, with cords in its arms and a tube down its nose.
When the young man now looking at her was brought in, he hadn't looked much better. He was certainly not wounded enough to get anywhere near death... but there was a strange phenomenon centered around his right arm, a clearly-agonizing chi fire that would not go out, about which he had refused to speak. Only the fact that he was near collapse due to his injuries and the constant ravages of that chi kept him from hovering by his sister's bedside; hospital staff had literally chained him in place in a bed for the first few days, while they stabilized him and tried to protect his arm from the fires.
Once he roused enough from his half-unconscious state, he was able to focus enough to try and keep the flames away from his skin by sheer force of will. But he seemed incapable of putting them out, or of controlling them in any other fashion. He wasn't questioned very long about them, either... because every time he was, his eyes darkened and he looked fit to let the flames run loose of whatever sparse command he -did- possess.
Standing there at the foot of Whip's bed, K' casts a flickering red light throughout the room: bringing a warmth to the cold and clinical settings. The fire leaping about his arm looks like a tethered creature, kept from escape only by the leash of K''s constant attention and will. Effort lines his face, even as he looks at Whip; he thinks, bitterly, that his only sister is lying there, likely close to death, and he can't even devote all his thoughts to her because half of them have to stay fixed on reining in the flames.
Yet he could not bring himself to put the glove back on, no matter the constant agony and exhausting force of will he had to exercise with it off. No matter his doubts as to whether he could ever learn to live without it. He could not -bear- to rely on something from out of NESTS anymore. This was the final straw, this attempt NESTS had made-- yet again-- to take all that he treasured. They had taken his life and his family, and now had returned to take it all away again once he'd reclaimed some small part of it. He would no longer allow them to take his independence from him with that shackling glove, as well. Even if it killed him.
And depending what happened to Whip, he might not even care if it killed him.
"I shouldn't have let you come," he eventually says to the still figure. There is no emotion in his bleak voice, save for profound exhaustion, and he says nothing else afterwards. There's no room in his mind for anything but that single mantra.
Considerable time passes; minutes, maybe even an hour, and Whip's silent, unmoving body says nothing back.
But it seems as though she must have heard, and must have disagreed, because life returns to that body on the bed like a punch to the gut.
Something subconscious in Whip knows that you can't argue when you're dead.
The slow, dragging, hopeless beep of machine monitoring her pulse undergoes a sea change, the sound pausing imperceptibly -- then starting anew, its measure quickening into a sudden, growing allegro. The beeping gets stronger and stronger, faster and faster--
--and Whip's weapon hand closes down on the tube up her nose. Her fingers tremble, both from pain and disuse, but soon her clumsy fumbling secures her a tight grip. With total fear and little mercy, she pulls, grimacing and gagging as she yanks the long, uncomfortable length of plastic tubing from her lung, up the esophagus, and out the nose. When she's freed herself, the wounded soldier sags, wheezing and breathing shallowly, every last bit of her dying strength spent.
Her eyes have not even opened. It hasn't even struck her where she is. She may not even remember what brought her to this bed. Her fingers move numbly, her blunted fingernails scratching the grainy hospital sheets. And then her eyes start to flutter, very slowly and very blearily cracking their lids open. They have not been used in over a week, and her first brief, squinting glimpses of the world are cloudy and blurred over.
So very slowly, Whip tries to think. Her first thought, for some reason or another, is about fire.
K' is exhausted. Exhausted to the point every stimulus takes several minutes to process. He hasn't been able to sleep longer than one hour at a time for the past week, for a number of reasons: he hasn't been able to forget his sister's pale body lying in the hospital, and he hasn't been able to push down the incredible pain that wracks his entire body. Normally his tolerance is a formidable thing, able to block out even the worst of traumas and agonies. But the burn of the Kusanagi fire goes deeper than that.
He feels it in his blood, spread through every last inch of him-- a constant burn that reaches every nerve. The stolen flames weigh heavily in the pit of his stomach, adding a perpetual sick feeling to the pain, doubling him in his chair as he sits by Whip's bedside and tries to focus on control even despite the nauseating pain. He calls to mind everything Geese ever taught him, everything he's learned since he ran out of NESTS, and it still doesn't help him do much more than push the fires away from his skin so they don't render his arm to ash. His doubts may have grown less with time, but there are still too many fears clouding his mind.
He's so caught up in that agony that he doesn't notice the first few moments in which Whip's machines quicken with life. But he can't help but notice when the girl's hand abruptly lifts, seizing down on a tube with a spasmodic motion akin to the first lurch of some zombie out of a B movie. He jerks upright in his seat, staring widely, and when she drags herself free of the contraption he stumblingly stands out of his chair-- nearly knocking it over-- and backs away. He can't stop staring.
He had clung to a small sliver of hope ever since he saw that Whip had been spirited away to a hospital, but the passage of time and Whip's lack of improvement had nearly snuffed even that little thread. To see her reviving now is a shock to his system that the exhausted boy doesn't have the strength to process. As such, his reaction is severely delayed... but when he finally realizes his sister is reviving, he presses forward--
--and stops. The flames clawing furiously about his arm whoosh audibly as he retracts again, afraid of accidentally burning her.
With time and a soldier's enduring patience, Whip's breathing slows and her thoughts clear. Her eyes shut, and her body slackens, seemingly content after that sudden, violent removal of her trachoesophagal tube. The young woman looks inclined to lose herself back to unconsciousness.
However, and surprisingly so, her eyes crack open again, gazing warily out at the world through her heavy lashes. It presents itself to her in a vacant sort of darkness, the way a house looks and feels that has never been properly lived in. Combine that strange intuition with the distant whining and beeping of machines and the sharp smell of medical disenfectant... Whip realizes she's in a hospital.
Pulling on her arm and feeling the sting of an intraveneous needle confirms it. It's hard to remember what exactly brought her here. Everything is a blur. The only thing she's sure about is that her body hurts like hell, just trying to move her head makes her dizzy, her mouth is painfully dry, and she's not alone in this room.
The beckoning, yellowy glow of firelight draws her bleary, sticky gaze, Whip trying to focus as the sudden, hot light forces her unused eyes to immediately water. She squints at it, though the rest of her face remains unlined, watching the display with a simple, mindless nonchalance of someone who has more drugs in their veins than red blood cells. She blinks slowly, lethargically, and finally lets her gaze lift, following the arm up from the source of that fire.
Whip finds herself staring her brother in the face, a breath sighing out of her when she recognizes him. Her eyes flutter, as if wanting again to shut, to sleep, but something on the edge of her blurry memory keeps her from doing so. Her eyes lower back down on the fire, as if noticing how out of place it is in here, on him. She stares at it unreadably.
K''s entire body is a warzone of scorch marks and burned scars, but it's worst around his right arm. The look he levels on her, returning her blank stare, is the tired look of a sufferer who has hurt for so long it no longer registers in their expression. The sleeves of his black t-shirt have long since burned away, and fire has left its mark on what's left.
To protect his right arm the hospital staff helped him get a long glove to match the one he's always worn on his left. It's fingerless, and for the past few days he's often been seen watching his own fingers flex and move; curiously manipulating anything that wouldn't burn. It's as if he's never seen such dexterity from his right hand before.
The gloves, heavy black leather both, sheathe his arms all the way up to mid-bicep, and the flames twist around the material protecting his right arm: cracking it with its heat, but-- for now-- held back from penetrating through to reach already-ravaged flesh. They creak when he moves back in closer to Whip, warily returning to his seat and leaning in towards her. His right side he keeps away from her.
"...You've been out for a while," he rasps in a voice hoarse with disuse. He speaks haltingly, as if not sure what to say or where to even start. He doesn't seem to be expecting an answer, not right away; and impulsively, as the reality of how -fortunate- they are to still be alive and together hits him, he reaches forward with his left hand and awkwardly pushes some of her hair from her face: as if to make sure she's really there. His hand is trembling noticeably, but he doesn't seem forthcoming about explaining why.
Neither drugs nor traumatic injury can completely dismiss Whip's reflexes. Quickly, her closest hand tries to close down on whatever is touching her, hanging on until her fuzzy eyes and fuzzier mind realize that it's just her brother. The young woman relaxes, but doesn't let go. On the contrary, her grasp only tightens. She's only minutes reviving from a certain deathbed, and Whip is already prepared to be stubborn about things.
She is silent then, watching K' while she hangs onto his hand, the look in her eyes revealing the fight she is having against whatever medication is in her system. But Whip seems to be winning it; she stays conscious. Once she is sure she isn't going to fall back asleep, her eyes lower, drawn back again by that bright fire that tries to reach out from K''s right arm. Upon awakening, Whip makes her first expression: her mouth begins to cramp itself into one of her signature frowns. She breathes in slowly, her body tensing as she prepares to speak. At first, Whip's voice is no more than a sighing push of air, the tone broken up by her dry mouth and relaxed larynx. But, with enough effort, words happen.
"What's wrong?"
Might not be the best choice of them, however.
From any other person, the sudden movement would have been taken as a possible threat and reacted to as such. It's just how K' was raised... ingrained into his instincts by his upbringing as a weapon. Gestures of affection never even -existed- for him up until very recently. In the line of work he'd been engineered to pursue, any time somebody reached out it was to hurt him.
After months of close contact with his sister, however, some of that instinct has begun to wear off where she's concerned. Patiently, K' lets her hand latch to his wrist with barely even a twitch. It certainly seems as if her grasp on him is a lifeline to whatever meagre consciousness she can muster, and he's not about to deny her some anchor to that.
Even if he doesn't particularly -feel- all that stable himself right now.
And he knows Whip is aware of that. He's seen her eyes drawn to his right arm. The line of his jaw tightens, and for a moment he looks like he wants to pull away. But he doesn't. What's wrong, she asks, and for a moment he looks incredulous that such a thing could be the first thing out of her mouth. That surprise doesn't last long, though. Soon enough, to match the predictability of her frown, his own expression lapses into its default. He starts to look angry.
"Look at where you are, Whip." His voice, despite his expression, tries its very best to carry no inflection. "That's what's wrong."
Despite being in a hospital bed, hooked up to no less than five machines, and regrettably tasting blood as a punishment for speaking, Whip summons the energy to roll her eyes. She looks as though K' had said the most unspeakably stupid thing ever uttered in the English language. Her hand squeezes around his wrist in reprimand. "I'm fine," she huffs back impatiently, her voice grinding dangerously, the sound of it suggesting that she doesn't want that brought up again.
Her tired face mollifies, head turning to crane K' a look in the eye. The right side of her face whose cheek had been hidden by the pillow reveals jagged stitches -- right where Igniz's chain sword had got her. The closed rip seems to curl upwards like one side of a mocking smile, contrasting against the annoyed downward slant of the rest of her mouth. "I meant your arm," Whip explains. Her eyes narrow, suspicious and uncertain. She says, very matter-of-factly, as though he hadn't quite realized it yet. "Y-- you're on fire, K'."
"You weren't fine for over a week," K' reminds obstinately, as stubborn as his sister... and seemingly happy to ignore that warning note in her voice. His eyes narrow on hers. "You let Igniz know you were important," he says, trying and failing to keep the accusatory tone out of his voice. He struggles briefly for words, before he just pulls away, unable-- for the time being-- to feel her touch. Perhaps out of guilt. "And he did this to you just to get at me."
But it seems that's not what's concerning Whip right now. You're on fire, she insists, still thinking of him despite her own condition, and K''s mouth thins. He looks, very tiredly, at his arm, as if noticing the violent flames for the first time. "I know," is all he can think to say, eventually. The absence of his everpresent glove is conspicuous, his right hand seeming naked without the heavy metal. "I took it off."
Whip tries to hang on, something in her needing that physical contact, something that never quite shows up on her frowning face. But she just doesn't have a sliver of her usual strength, and her exhausted hand soon falls away, releasing K' reluctantly. With a slight, hitching cough, his sister sags back to the bed, her head turned against the pillow. She looks away from the pointed accusations to follow, refusing to acknowledge them as much as she would a fart in the hospital room.
She only gets cooperative once more when K' finally looks at his own arm, watching him waspily and hating how tired he sounds about it. It's starting to make her feel like she's missed out on something big, something important. It's hard to string her most recent memories together.
Then K' mentions his glove. Or it's lack thereof. Whip seems to realize all at once, in her pained, three-quarters conscious stupor, that it's been removed. The last sleepy quarter of her mind sobers up with disapproval. Looking away, Whip chides K' impatiently, "Don't be stupid."
"The only thing that was stupid," K' corrects, his voice still weighted by that uncharacteristic exhaustion, "was leaving it on as long as I did." He's lifted his own right hand in the interim, looking at it as if he's never seen it before (a statement that is, sadly, almost true), idly watching its fingers flex and move. He has to squint a little to look through the flames obscuring it. "But I won't ever let anything out of NESTS touch me again."
He thinks back on Kula. How the girl had had the temerity to call him pathetic, when she could never understand what he'd gone through. When she was so SPOILED as to have control built directly into her. GIVEN to her. She'd never had to work a day in her life for it. She was just like Kyo in that regard, and he hated them both for it with a raw and undiluted hatred. The both of them were presumptuous fools, preaching to him about shit they'd never understand-- never even have the first IDEA about.
If the two of them thought it was so EASY and he was so -weak-, then maybe they'd like to spend a day in his place. Maybe they'd like to experience firsthand the constant buzz of pain, the inability to remove the shackle, and the shame attendant with bearing a flaw one had never even ASKED for. A flaw that had been -forced- upon him by the incompetence of others, but which he was nonetheless BLAMED for every day of his life.
And yet... the girl was right in a way, wasn't she? He was pathetic to not have come out right in the first place... and pathetic to continue letting that glove fix his fundamental flaw. The thought, far from upsetting him or drawing a sad look from him, angers him; his eyes narrow, his right hand shutting despite the pain it causes him just to move it, and he grits a dissatisfied sound from the back of his throat.
"You're one to talk about stupid acts, anyway," he eventually retorts dully to Miss Tell Igniz My Greatest Weakness. His voice lacks its customary bite, however, and it's clear enough-- even to a drugged-up patient like Whip-- why it is he's so worn out.
Whip doesn't let herself sit and ponder why K' seems and sounds so tired. It wouldn't help her anger any. And right now, she needs to get angry. Her brother's right arm is depending on it.
She sounds one last, breathless grown, and then, very decisively, extricates herself from all her drugged domestication. Having enough of laying there and doing nothing, especially when K' going on about how third-degree burns are part of his new self-medication, she plants her arms and hooks her hands on either railings of the bed. With an audible grimace, Whip starts pulling herself up.
It's not until she's two-thirds the way to sitting up does she talk, needing to lean her side against one rail and take a break to get her breath back. "At least," Whip grunts, "I'm being stupid for something realistic, like saving your life. Not to prove some damn point." She sags, closing her eyes briefly as she balefully orders, "Get the glove and put it on. You want it off-- find a way to take it slow." A sudden coughing fit interrupts her words, and Whip sneers through it, rubbing a half-numb hand against her jaw, before her fingers start detachedly poking at the stitches on her face. "Not like this. You're gonna kill yourself."
Looking to be mere moments away from reaching over and shoving Whip right back down, K' hesitates when the girl grates her opinion of his decision. He stops, frowning, and then slowly leans back with the deliberate, languorous lack of care of a cat: head lowering until his eyes glare up through his lashes. His arms settle on the rests of the chair, and the cheap material begins to scorch.
The entire movement, from start to finish, speaks of imminent danger.
"Realistic?" K' grunts a disbelieving sound. Finally noticing what he's doing to the poor armrest, he irritatedly lifts his arm. "I had it under control, Whip. There was nothing realistic about you pitching yourself at Igniz like that." Grasping his right wrist with his left hand in what's presumably an attempt to rein in the fire, all he really succeeds in doing is scorching his palm.
Hissing out a breath, he growls back at his sister, "I'm not just proving a point. I'm gonna learn to do without this. Even if it -does- kill me. I've tried to 'take it slow' for three years, and it hasn't been working. I'm sick of letting NESTS rule my life even now."
She can feel a headache building, the weight pressing against her temple like a tumour. Her head droops a little, sagging like the rest of her body against the bedrail.
"Yeah, you're all about control," Whip gravels back sarcastically, watching the fire lance up and down her brother's arm. She doesn't look impressed. "All I know is I saw him go after you. My memory gets bad after that. But you can't compare my wanting to protect you with you wanting to destroy yourself. You don't look like you know what you're doing. You weren't taking it slow. You were hiding. Big difference. You--"
Whip's voice cracks under another sudden, hoarse coughing fit, her body hunching over itself reflexively to protect against the fits. When she comes to, reality greets her again with her brother remarking casually on his own death while burning himself on his wildfire arm, and staring at the sight, shocked, the tears in her eyes aren't just from the pain of wheezing on her dry throat.
She's not even sure herself where the strength came from. But faster than a snake strike, the bedridden Whip is snatching out one hand -- the one with all the cords needled into it -- to try to grab a handful out of her brother's collar and wrench him in close. Whip is the epitome of silent fury. Her voice, low and whispery with pain, drugs, and sheer outrage, warns him: "Stop. Being a fucking idiot."
"Your memory gets bad," K' retorts sarcastically, "because you were getting murdered. And you were getting murdered because you let him know I gave a shit about you--"
K' gets cut off then by Whip's litany of hard truths. His expression tightens visibly, stung by her insult against his ability to control himself, his left hand shutting with a creak of leather on the armest. The sulkily-recalcitrant look of a young man who doesn't want to admit to anything seizes his face. "You think I was hiding from it? Okay. Fine. Maybe I was. And maybe it's time to -stop- fucking hiding--"
Shock strangles off whatever he was going to say when Whip abruptly lunges forward. A surprised, startled little noise kicks out of his throat when her hand sinks into his collar and drags him in close. One instant, he's wide-eyed and guileless; the next, he looks like he's trying HARD to shove down the instinctive and violent impulse to neutralize this sudden threat. Once he's struggled past -that-, he just looks venomous. His yellow eyes fix on her teary ones.
"You first," he growls, his voice the deep and low snarl of a big dog that isn't looking for a fight-- but will gladly end one. "Lie. Back."
"I'm not the one who's ON FIRE!" Whip barks, her voice cracking. She nearly starts coughing again, but swallows it back, every ounce of this unlikely energy reaped from her force of will. She's exhausted, she's visibly in pain, and her tethered, I.V'd hand is tremoring around K''s seized collar, but she's not letting go or backing down. Because she isn't finished yet.
Her grip tightens. Whip leans in close and whispers with her half-stranged, broken voice, "You dirty hypocritical son of a bitch. How dare you go on and threaten me, and then say something like that? How /could/ you?"
All that poisonous anger seethes under her skin like an extra layer of muscle -- up to the point when her brother tries to order her back down. Rather than complying, Whip narrows her eyes and gets that stubborn slant to her jaw. She's officially had enough of all her brother's threats and intimidation. She might not be the most socialized person in the world, but she knows that it's not supposed to work like that. They're supposed to reach their compromises through other ways -- better ways. The underdog looks the big dog back in the eye. And she says, very simply, "No."
"-Threaten- you?" His eyes, inches from her own, still somehow look calm and cold despite Whip's proximity, her anger, and the fact he's in considerable pain. Perhaps it's the training he's undergone in recent months that lets him keep his temper... or perhaps, it's just all the exhaustion built up in him, weighing him down. "When the fuck did I threaten you?" Apparently, either K''s memory is short, or he never registered anything he said as a threat.
K' -does- have a very different conception of what constitutes hostility than the normal person, after all.
Narrowing his eyes on Whip, K' seems prepared to settle in and wait for her to just drop off him. This approach he takes possesses an insult and a reminder all its own, in a terrible and understated way; it says, quite clearly, that even tired as he is, in pain as he is, he knows her strength will give out before his. She thinks she can deny his order? Thinks she can say no, she won't lie back? K' has only one answer for that, delivered in that particular tone of voice that infuriates his sister so easily: "I think you will."
"You /threatened me/," Whip enunciates slowly in a slow, broken hiss, "when you told me what you'd do if I died." Her fist tightens around K''s collar until her knuckles turn white. "It makes me responsible for more -- more than my own life." She pauses to wheeze briefly, her voice rattling and her breathing shallowed from her injuries. But Whip still presses on, driven only by her anger. She leans closer, every feature of her face burned with outrage -- her dangerous sneering consuming all except for the way her set of stitches grin up her right cheek. With a deadly certainty, she spits out, "You do /not/ get to do that -- you do /not/ get to say that, and then sit here and tell me how this -- this little experiment in independence may or may not KILL you."
Her body all but falls into the bedrail, her weight supported haphazardly on the spot and breathing heavily with exertion. It becomes apparent that all of Whip's last, lingering energy has been transferred to that arm of hers, to keeping it strong, to keeping it stubborn, to keeping those five angry fingers tangling a tearing handful out of her brother's shirt collar. His last remark only narrows her eyes. But Whip doesn't pause. She just plays russian roulette with her flesh and blood. "--Is that a dare?"
"That wasn't a threat," K' retorts levelly, evenly, his voice the kind of frozen-river calm that's about two minutes away from the first crack of spring melt. "That was me answering a question you asked. Why am I responsible for how you choose to interpret things I say? Besides. Did it occur to you I might've exaggerated a little?" Snared in close as he is-- and very uncomfortable in the position-- K' can't help but take the opportunity for a little revenge: giving Whip one of his smirks from right close up. He doesn't seem to be taking this as seriously as he should. "I don't intend to die that easily. It's not like I forgot what'd happen to -you- if I died."
And he really -doesn't- intend to be killed quite so easily as that. Kula's words are still pinging around in his head, for all that he's still angry with her for being a presumptuous little twit just like Kusanagi. You -have- the strength to control it. Why would she tell him that? Is it some kind of trick, or does she know something he doesn't...?
Whip's last little comment and dangerous look, however, draw K' out of his brief musing. His eyes narrow back on her warily, remembering quite clearly what it is Whip always does when she's dared: the stupidest possible thing she can. His pride wars with his concern-- his awareness that she needs to lay back soon before she causes herself any more damage.
The flames about his arm intensify, growing wild and reckless, when his concentration on them slips; his focus transferred to her, there's little left to keep the fire in check. His expression flinches briefly when a particularly wracking shift of the foreign power within him sears his insides painfully. His voice is a little raw when he finally sits back, trying to rip his collar out of her hand. "...You're gonna hurt yourself. Idiot."
"We wouldn't want that now, nya~~"
He ducks into the room rather quickly, a familiar young man in a hip-length bright white labcoat with golden clips at the wrists. The coat is new, and a rather loose fit, but the paramedic's cap on his head is jsut the same as it was before. Tied back hair, eyes that are just a little hard to see.
'Issei Miura... rogue medic.'
Of course, that was hardly the story he used to get in here. That sort of thing works on random NESTS soldiers, but not so much so in the traditional hospital environment. Even so. You'd be amazed at how many nurses don't know exactly how many doctors are assigned to the Radiology department if you insist smarmily enough.
One of the triumphs of the day was a full medical history on both of the two. Not that it was particularly useful, but adding to the burgeoning stack of papers sheathed in the clipboard he carried is useful.
Monkstrap shoes clicking over the tile with purpose, the medical officer shuts the door behind him--and locks it. Most lever latches in the more privatized 'these people are fighters, isolate them' units in the ICU ward tend not to lock to prevent very embarassing accidents and suicides. However, the functional equivalent--melting the latch shut--will serve for the immediate moment.
He won't be here long enough for the distinction to matter for people on the outside.
A certain snap in his step predicates his movement. Haste being of the utmost concern, he slips past Whip's bed without a word of greeting--or even, really, much acknowledgment at all--to either of them. A box is slid from a wood case hanging low at his hip, with telltale nibs at the bottom sides. The box looks like an elaboration of a 12 year old's science fair project, little more than a pattery taped to a circuitboard and a few leads. With a shift towards the wall, the doctor gets to work splicing. His work is fast enough that sparks fly from the wire systems. His work is in fact enough to cause the vitals monitor next to Whip's bed to flicker noticeably.
In a moment, the monitor is completely blank, save for the Ryouhara kamon lingering on the screen.
The entire process from entry took only a few seconds. But that alone might be enough to get their attention. Leaving the first box hanging off the wall tenuously suspended by shorn cabling and a rather ugly-looking splice, he moves across the room. He elects to say something this time.
"Dash-sama," he stresses, "wouldn't dare anybody in his condition anyway," he assures, smiling a whip thin smile that glints in the muted light. "There's no reason to kill yourself," he assures.
Didn't K' actually say 'hurt?'
There is an uncomfortable distinction there, for people who always keep one eye to details.
"That WAS a threat," Whip snaps back, eyes widening, not so easy to let K' take himself off that particular hook. Her crumbly, half-wheezing voice finds some way to fit in the accusation. "You can't sit there and tell me -- you want to talk about responsibility! I apologize--" she amends, curling her lip with sarcasm, "it never occured to me. Excuse my not having the time of day to sit and analyze whether what someone told me was nothing short of LITERAL." That sentence seems to wind her. Whip gasps for air, coughing briefly, painfully, grimacing at herself for not having the right strength to back her outrage. Her eyes fix back on K', where they immediately narrow. "You know I'm dead serious about shit like that and if you -- and if you don't wipe that fucking smirk off your mouth I'll... I swear to god-- I--"
She'll just exhale in a very weary defeat when her brother merely leans back and frees his collar from her deathgrip. Whip lets go all too pitifully, having no strength to do anything but sag against the rail of her bed and let her head fall until her chin touches her clavicle. Her wing of dark hair falls over her face, hiding its tired, tormented expression. She doesn't have the strength to argue, and it's killing her.
Rather than snarling or imposing another order, Whip ragged voice is pleading of K', "Please. Do it for me. Just for now. Then we can figure something ou--"
They're no longer alone. Tiredly, Whip turns her head, her still-bleary eyes trying to focus on the third figure addressing the room. Looks like hospital personnel. But in Southtown, looks almost are all entirely deceiving.
She stares. The look on her face reveals nothing. It doesn't need to.
Whip's heart monitor speaks volumes.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep beep beep beep beepbeepbeepBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP--
The monitor flickers and shuts down. But Whip's brown eyes, shining distinctly in the yellowy glow of her brother's perpetual firelight, do not even twitch.
Her hands are tightening into fists. "You. Dirty. Son of a--"
K' says nothing. It's about the best thing he's got to say in the face of a girl as obstinate as he is. He still doesn't believe he meant those words as a threat in any way-- or at least, he wouldn't apply the word 'threat' to them-- and so he'll believe until he dies: or more likely, is killed. He just leans back in his chair, awkwardly holding his right arm away from anything that might go up in flames, regarding his sister in unmoved silence.
At the least, the smirk is gone. He can't maintain it, looking at her like this.
"I can't put it back on," he says simply. "I won't. If I let it touch me again I'll never want to take it off again." He talks like he's trying to get over dependence on some drug... and really, he kind of is. "I'll learn to--"
He cuts off when the sound of a third person entering hits his senses. He looks sharply over his shoulder at what Whip's staring at, and when his eyes fall on the shinobi he lunges instantly and silently to his feet. The flames twisting around his arm react to his suspicion and sudden agitation, flaring higher and louder with a sound like the rip of cloth.
Instantly K' puts himself between Whip and Seishirou, bristling with literal hackles of flame, eyes narrowed and glinting a hint of promising red. "What do you want, Ryouhara? /What are you doing?/" He doesn't like the way Seishirou is tampering with Whip's monitors, and he doesn't like the way the shinobi sealed them into this room.
Miura pauses, giving K' a sidelong look of dire curiosity. For a moment, he seems genuinely offput, interrupted from moving across the room to shut shades. Luckily, his disguise renders him more or less nondescript to casual observes. He's probably there telling K' to get back to his bed--after all, a few of the nurses were probably blown off on the way here. Admit it, they were, weren't they?
Miura frowns faintly, something expressing the vaguest and least defined of pains as Whip growls something unladylike from behind K's protection.
"--I'm sorry," Miura finally asides to interrupt the profanity. He continues in a chill butchered Nanshin dialect over the lighter kansai-ben Miura normally uses, "did I interrupt something?" He only barged right in as Whip was this close to strangling K'. Partially a tactical concern--the longer they weren't paying attention, after all.. But now it's a little different. K' is blocking his further work. He still needs to shut the shades and move the bed..
As if terrified, the device spliced into the wall sparks noticeably.
The Ryouhara kamon fades from view on the monitor.
Miura seems not to be bothered in the slightest by the ominous sparking. He explains. "If you turn off someone's vitals monitor, the charge nurse will notice in about a minute. If you disconnect someone, every nurse within earshot will notice." As if that was all the explanation that was necessary.
He's still blocked.
He glances down at the fires crackling at K's hip, 'Miura' frowns distinctly.
"That.. will be a problem." he suggests, raising a arm to point a finger at K'.
"I don't have time. Ninkou Hikumoiki."
A glowing cloud blasts from Miura's sleeve. A ninkou vapor, first concepted and used by Hiretsu Ryouhara. Most trained ninja are resistant to the normal spectrum of aerosolized incapacitants much like poisons. A diversionary tactic is generally necessary, necessitating the charging of a particular cocktail with aura-binding chi. Weakening a subject's aura around the torso will create an anxiety effect in most.. allowing for airborne chloroforms and mild nerve agents (!) to work.
One of the few knockout gasses that has a measurably large chance of working against weakened fighters.
Unfortunately, it's at the expense of anonymity. He can only hope a nurse is not watching.
Nothing Seishirou says explains -anything-. K' is about to point this out-- about to retort sarcastically that yes, Seishirou -did- interrupt something-- about to do /something/ to stop the ninja from enacting whatever it is he has planned. Seishirou may have expressed some surprising sentiments the last time the two met, but that still doesn't mean K' trusts him in the least.
He doesn't get far, whatever he might have been gearing up to do. Seishirou pulls out something K' should have expected... but which, in his current state, he can do little about. The ninja brings out nerve gas.
The sudden enervation of his aura catches his attention first, his extant tension and anxiety only bolstered by the instinctive panic at the sensation. But even despite that, K' presses forward a step, desperate to keep anything from happening to Whip, to demand what Seishirou is going to /do/--
He crumples. Even the constitution of a fighter and trained assassin like K' can't hold up against the cumulative effects of a week of no sleep, the constant ravages of the Kusanagi fire, slow-healing injuries, worry, and ninja nerve gas. Eyes shutting, the young man drops like a drugged wolf, slumping to the floor. His flames, freed of what meagre restraint K' could muster, threaten to spread if something isn't done about them quick.
Injured as she is, tired as she is, in pain as she is, Whip's blood surges against all the drugs in her system and focuses her bleary attention into a razor point, focused right on--
K''s turned back, which swiftly interjects itself into the fray. Momentarily, she forgets her own rage to look up at her brother, frowning up at him and looking anything but impressed by his sudden heroics. Her mind is suddenly swirling, and Whip tries to regain her focus by mentally tallying the weapons she has within arm's reach. The I.V in her arm may be her best choice. Worst comes to worst, she's sure her metal bedpan could impart some blunt trauma.
Hidden partially behind the wall of her brother, Whip slowly and systematically wakes the rest of her body, her guard finding a way to raise being only minutes into her night's revival. Arguing with K' seems to have prepared her well enough for this; she wouldn't be able to even begin to confront someone like Ryouhara straight from neutral gear. But this can't bode well. In fact, it's probably going to be deadly.
Something happens that she can't quite see, but Whip gets a sure front row audience to the scene of her brother collapsing to the floor. Immediately, the training in her tells her to turn her head, close her eyes, and raise her hand to cover her nose and mouth, protecting herself against what airbourne aerosol decked the much stronger K' so easily. After a few moments, unable to wait and hold her silence for long, the soldier looks back, immediately fixing the doctor with an unreadable look.
There's so much emotion that she doesn't know which to express first. But the first contender soon arrives, staring straight out of Whip's dark, hollowed, red-rimmed eyes. She glares at Miura -- at Ryouhara -- in sheer, tight-lipped anger, looking on at him with a look of such betrayal. She did not know him that long, but she /trusted/ him. And that hurt shines transparently off every corner of her face.
Then she looks down again, and seeing K' truly unmoving there on the ground -- except for his fire -- makes worry surge through her so strongly she almost chokes on it. With a feeble, gasping, dying strength in her, she's pulling on the bedrail, grimacing as she gives it the yank enough to fold it down into the bed. The soldier audibly hurts for every single one of her movements. But still she's pulling to begin to swing her bare legs over the bed. Glimpses of them tell stories of scars and fresh stitches, matching the line of them that cross up the right side of her face, cirling up the parody of some mindless grin.
The rest of her face is anything but that, torn between two words of anxiety and grief. Her brother's not moving, and he's on fire. It looks like it's getting worse. "What -- what the /hell/ do you--" she starts to seethe, her voice broken up by her attempts to move, before despair just cuts off her voice entirely. Her mind is swirling, and she suddenly wants to sleep so badly. It hurts so much to move. She doesn't know if she can do this. Whip looks back up at Miura, her eyes creasing as she makes the most unlikely of pleas: "Please. Help him."
Whether it's unfortunate for Seishirou *or* the viewer in question, chance brings someone to the hospital room, even at this late hour. One Shurui Chiang, complete with a bag of assorted goodies to tide the siblings over as they find themselves subjected to hospital food. Not that this is a *bad* thing- free food is good food, to Shurui. But not everyone looks at a garbage bin behind a boutique and thinks 'i must remember this'. Or sees a backroom as a treasure trove, with no idea of how it may look to someone else to see them there.
Almost on auto pilot from a mix of school and keeping tabs on K', Kenji, and Whip, Shurui goes up to the door of Whip's room, and gives the knob a quick turn.
Only, it doesn't turn. What? Did someone lock the door? Pushing her shades off the bridge of her nose and onto the top of her head, ample evidence of foul play becomes quickly evident as familiar auras leak through the context of the door separating them. Most telling is K''s aura, positioned on the floor and steadily growing more and more unstable, Whip's pained aura, and.... someone unfamiliar. Someone new. A NESTS agent?!
The bag drops down to the floor. She panicks.
Before Shurui can think, she's ramming a hand against the small glass window of the door, futilely pressing on the locked knob. Her mouth opens and screams in anger and frustration. "His powers are going out of control! Fucking DO something!" ..... Of course, the muffled command wasn't directed at Whip, but rather desperately uttered at Seishirou, the only other person in the room. But, with K' seeming to be unconscious, what *could* either of them do?
If Shurui doesn't get the door open, she'll lose the closest thing to a family she has right now.
As K' collapses into a sum of his acculumated misery at his feet, Issei adjusts the clips at his cuffs, looking over as Whip makes her agonizing phoenician rise. Simply, his eyes roll over the scene. As quickly as Whip can, he assesses weapons available to her. The difference between a drug and familially induced dysphoria and complete lucidity is about five extra weapons. The I.V., yes, is a stabbing weapon, the bedpan, a blunt weapon. The hospital gown is a strangling weapon, as is the bedsheets. Electrical shocks could be administered by connecting wires to the electrical socket in the wall powering the bed and monitoring equipment. The monitor itself could be tipped over, or the rollaway table for food used as a bludgeon or cutting weapon. However, that does not acknowledge the simple facts.
She cannot pose a measurable threat to him in this condition.
He stands there a moment, as K' burns.
"There is nothing you can do that will stop the flow of events at this point favorably. I've hurt your brother. That is a crime. Hate me. With every ounce of the love you have for your brother, hate me and bear a grudge. Lose all that is beautiful you once felt towards me. Blacken it harshly. I'll cherish that loss."
For someone whom has so many voices and identities that he is hardly aware of himself as a persona anymore, his home dialect, continental though it may be, takes precidence yet still. Devastating clarity drips from every word, the length and breadth of words spoken by a ghost. A boy so young, but who has no 'desire' of his own. It necessarily cannot provide consolation. There can be no explanation that would make sense for a boy who does not want..a..thing.
In the history of Seishirou's lonely mote at the tail end of the clan of Ryouhara, there are precious few words ever spake with such sincerity.
Miura, the doctor, looks over his shoulder to see a small hand pounding against reinforced glass, and a familiar voice. Shit. They'll notify security. By now the nurses will already be aware of his intrusion. ..But he doesn't see her /eyes/. ...? He follows the tone to the subject of that shrill voice. His eyes snap to the burning K'. The flames.. seem to be spreading.
Usually, inflicting unconsciousness is enough to stop people from randomly flaring up chi. He should have expected that much. The anomaly that is K' cannot be quantified so easily. Bewildered, he regards Whip silently. There is no verbal answer to her plea.
Quickly now, he whips off a sash which remained concealed underneath his work shirt, laying it beside K's body and unrolling it flat. Sliding two tools from the wooden case at his hip, he reaches towards the flames with his opposite hand--and immediately bitterly curses as, within moments, they almost take off his hand. A strong energy. But it /is/ fire..
He knows a thing or two about that.
He sets to work, taking the first tool, a knife to lance open the charred skin of his palm, and then a second, a brush to put his blood to the silk page of his sash. His hand works quickly, even as the seconds that roll by eat up K's body like so much overburnt ash. Feverish is the ninkougakusha as he creates a "gyouretsu" on that sash without even a second thought. Byakuren is naturally fire resistant due to being a ninkou of aura retention--by imparting his blood to his sash, he can temporarily imbue the fabric...
Leaning over K's midsection and shying from the flame, he pulls the sash about K's waist, still dripping with Seishirou's hasted calculations. Seishirou doesn't /have/ a device or spray that will deal with that.
Essentially, he has to build one.
One handseal. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen.
He slams his hands into the tile around K'.
"Ninkou Chikuzou - Naitou no Jutsu. _release._"
Almost abruptly, Seishirou writhes, and claps both hands over his mouth, eyes breaching wide as he suddenly breaks character, brown eyes a thin thing as blood literally explodes from the small apertures between his fingers, some sort of violent reaction giving inside his body. All the same, the sash that used to be around /his/ waist flashes, the matrix written out in record time on the inner band shining bright enough to be perceived as a dull glow shining throguht he fabric.
The simplistic unnamed ninkou will impart a rather overkill amount of Seishirou's aura through his chi to K'. Seishirou's will being what it is, it should have a temporary, if dramatic suppressant effect.
Should.
Whip is paling with upset. The worst kind of grief has to be the impotent sort, when you know there's nothing you can do, nothing you can possibly even try to make it stop. She doesn't know what to do about K''s out of control fire, which seems to have escalated into a growing inferno. He took off the god damned glove, and now -- and now she doesn't know what's going to happen. Out of her peripherals, she can hear Shurui's sudden scream, and it's even loud enough and sudden enough to momentarily draw Whip's eyes. But she doesn't even acknowledge the girl. Her drug-addled brain has only room for one thing at a time, and right now it's her unconscious brother.
She shares only the briefest of glances with Issei Miura -- with the so-called terrorist Ryouhara -- before he immediately dispatches himself to K''s side. It pains Whip subconsciously to have a potential enemy so close to her brother, but she knows that despite whatever criminal reputation that man has garnered, something in him performs like a doctor. He managed to heal her once. She's hoping -- she's truly pleading -- that he'll do the same for K'.
There Whip remains, half-off, half-on her hospital bed, staring desperately down at Miura as he begins treatment on K'. She watches him with wide eyes and a certain nervous wonderment, having never seen anything like this before. As light burns against the growing, hellish fire, Whip steels her jaw, her eyes blinking constantly to try to keep them focused. One moment, the fire is building so much that she can feel the painful heat pressing against her, then--
It's over.
Whip sags the instant the fire goes out. She's not sure if her brother has been healed, or possibly for how long, but--
"...Thank you," she tells Miura sincerely, her tired voice meaning every syllable of it. "Now... whatever you've come for?"
And then she's just trying to kick him straight in the head. Rising to sit up despite every single injury, Whip finds a reserve of strength meant only for the protection of her brother. Sneering, she turns one hand and rolls up a handful of the cords stuck into her right hand, and clasping down on them, RIPS the fistful straight out of their silent machines.
Following up from that swung kick, Whip levers herself off her hospital bed, having no strength but just to try to /fall/ straight on Seishirou, lanky body, papery hospital gown, and all. She tries to swing her knees on either sides of his hips, on top and bearing down. Her handful of cords SNAP taut between her two hands. "Take it out on me."
And if he doesn't move fast, she's going to try to garotte him.
He has a limited amount of time.
With Shurui at the door and now with the nature of the ninkoujutsu he had to make use of, the shinobi's effective mission time in the hospital was measured in the minutes. With K' stabilized, he'd need to move quickly. Luckily, he warded the door from entry, so Shurui's attempts to get inside roughly after his transferrance of chi to K' will fail for the required period of time.
But. That still leaves--
The engineer is kicked in the face by a bared foot.
Slamming into the ground calamitously, Ryouhara's light frame is battered about fairly easily by a smaller, more powerful person, especially in his own spiritually traumatized state. The shinobi smashes into the ground, his cap sliding across the room spinning with the act. Then he is pinned beneath the woman's angry weight, the young soldier holding him down at the hip.
But despite all of it, he doesn't respond straightaway. There is no evasion, or even any real response from the shinobi. He goes down like a rag doll and is pinned beneath Whip's body in the same fashion. Black hair, free from the confines of the paramedic's cap now spills out tousled on the hospital tile, his right cheek touching the cool tile.
She is warm. But he riles not in the slightest, despite the uneven beat of his heart. He looks not directly at her, but instead a middle distance faraway to the left across the floor. It is no surprise that when she pulls the wire's taut, he is caught and chokes noisily, a flinch following the cut of his eye as he is slowly forced to look at Whip. His left eye is dark and cool, studying her even despite the visible beat of blood past his cheek.
His right is a bizarre shade of pale sick green.
"... I told you," the shinobi gasps, "there's nothing left..."
His touch chances across her right leg. With the injured soldier's legs bared at either side of him and her arms busy with the process of strangling a confession out of him, it's not hard for him to find the greater vein in her thigh through that touch alone.
You see. He brought Hikumoiki for K'.
For Whip?
A very large dose of sodium thiopental, a rapid onset general anaesthetic.
He is about as fast with a syringe as he is with a knife.
*BOMM* *BOMM*
Short this interloper may be, but they're just as insistant. Psycho power-laced punches pummels the door repeatedly, creating a sizable dent but still not entirely giving way. Shurui never trained or focused her expertise on barreling down things with brute force, but she's managing, adrenaline rush and bloody knuckle imprinting on the outside of the door. ... It won't be long before the door will be held only by Seishirou's machinations, but for someone as quick as the ninja, it may be long enough.
"Damn it!" Shurui yells as her sight picks up on Seishirou's aura closing in on Whip's, the two struggling. "Leave them alone!" *BOMM* *BOM* The aching fist she'll recieve from this may all be in vain at this rate. She screams Whip's name, panic rising her voice. "Whip! WHIP!" The dent warps further.
She can't stop.
It takes all her strength just to keep her eyes open. It is getting harder to see, and the world for her now is no more than a few dark, blurry shapes. Her head is reeling, and she wants nothing more than to give up, fall asleep, and never want to wake up again. But Whip knows there will be time for sleep later. Right now she needs to dispatch of Ryouhara while she's still awake. If she can take him out before her consciousness runs out, then her brother will be safe, and her sleep -- which is beginning to feel like it may be permanent -- will be guiltless. She can hear Shurui screaming and slamming on the door. It will all be fine in just a few minutes. She just needs to hang on.
Every inch of her body burns with agony, and she knows she would not be able to move her legs if she tried -- if her life depended on it, if her brother's life depended on it. Mantled over Ryouhara, Whip looks less human and more like some unforgiving, avenging angel, with her torn gown darkening with blood from her many torn stitches, gaunt, sunlessly skin glowing dully by some distant light, and her eyes bright with fury. With strength she should not have, she twists the two ends of her medical cords against the doctor's neck, drawing it tighter and tighter, allowing the machination of a garotte to assist her feeble, fumbling hands. There's no pause in Whip's actions, no mercy, only a soldier's cold vigil which waits infinitely for her enemy to collapse, to stop breathing. She didn't want it to come to this, but for K''s sake it's necessary.
Blood is spreading up and down her gown, and her tired arms begin to tremble. But Whip presses on. Miura's strange, intangible way of speaking only seems to encourage her further, his surreal wording making her wonder if she's already lost consciousness, or if this is some dream and she's already dead. Whip doesn't like that idea. She seethes back, her tortured voice no more than a wet, breathless whisper: "You... you better give me a straight answer while you can still /breathe./"
Gritting her teeth, the garotte turns once more. All Whip can feel is pain, exhaustion, survival, and sheer protective wrath -- and not the momentary sting of a needle into her thigh and the uncomfortable, heavy cold of anaesthetic creeping into her vein. One moment, she is staring murderously, hurtfully down at Issei Miura. Then the garotta suddenly loosens. Her teary eyes roll to one side. And Whip collapses into a dead heap right on top of him.
"Hold on, what's going on here?!"
The bark of the dogs.
The crisp and jangled background noise of radio transmission and metal jingling. Unmistakable in context. Security staff at the hospital mobilize relatively quickly to Shurui's side, pausing just long enough to gape wide-eyed as the five foot nothing pummels the door in on its hinges. Even made of steel and heavy gauge board, it won't hold up to much more of that punishment, the latch solved tight or not.
Honestly, for a moment, they're simply not sure who is the larger problem right now. The girl here, or the 'doctor' inside the unit, according to the charge nurse's rather hectic phone call..
At agonizing pace, blood seeps into his clothing.
It seems an eternity that Ryouhara breathes.
He exhales a grateful heat to the open chill air. The source of that heat.. from his face, most of it. The blood drains from his cheeks as once lethal cords lay slack at the base of his neck. From his core, the rest of it, the hurt, hateful soldier impacted against his chest, her body rising and falling necessarily with the slow hitch of his breast with every ragged lull. She was out.
A hand rises in that same dialated pace to take Whip's pulse at her neck.
He frowns.
For someone who hadn't the slightest concern of facing both siblings in their conditions, Ryouhara's attempt to get to his feet is certainly a long, soul-tired process for all of the simplicity of mechanics. Getting an arm underneath her shoulder, he lifts the limp form off of him--and stands with her, cradling the form as a jeweller might an unidentified stone. Hefting that weight with no trouble but not an insignificant amount of effort, he shifts her onto the bed, standing with the chaotic dark blotches of blood that is simply not his goring through every weave of fabric he has availed of his body.
He seems a murder witness, tired and worn, but moving onward in spite.
The syringe is still spinning lazyily on the tiled floor as he passes. To the screams outside and the blows that rattle the door's heavy grade bolts and hinges, it seems all the slower. For all of Ryouhara's attention devoted to it--not more than a glance--it is a minor annoyance. His jutsu fused the door's locking mechanism into a lump of metal and integrated it with adjacent pieces of steel and the surrounding wood fiber. Though the door itself is in danger, the latch might as well be deadbolted forever.
Kicking his paramedic's cap away from the door, he undoes the gold clips at either of the two cuffs of his labcoat, absently snapping his arms to either side, the sleeves snapping open and widening with the act, unrolling until they reveal a doubled volume and a telltale black band, covering his hands. Shutting his eyes and releasing some colorform jutsu in the back of his mind, the signature Ryouhara kamon appears at the back of that bright white labcoat. He flips the collar up. Not quite a labcoat. Not quite so white anymore, either.
Attaching some kind of harness to K', he pulls the unconscious beast up and away, positioning him halfway over the bed crossways with Whip. The details of it are exacting to Seishirou, but it's likely not to have meaning for anyone else. The sleeves of his haori move as he moves, walking over behind the bed as he makes a handseal.
Outside, a massive Ryouhara seal glows bright and telltale on the outer wall of the building.
The explosion guts the room entirely and shakes the entire hospital to its foundation.
A flock of crows fly away from the building, flooding the sky with loud and brittle complaint.
With every bulb in the room shattered from the shockwave, the only lighting in the room at all is the dim lighting from the rest of the ICU. And the lights from the Southtown cityline, because Seishirou is currently looking past what used to be an entire wall and window into the void of night sky beyond solemnly.
"Time to go..." he sighs.
The few moments that pass between the time Seishirou rises and the time he steps out to the foot of that open chasm seems slow on the inside. Agonizing, even.
On the other side of that door... they must seem doubly so.
Only a few moments left.
*BOMM* *BOMM* The door's not budging at all. At this point, even when the pattering of boots and security gear, it seems that ten men can't break down this door. But when Whip's aura and position slacken in unison, everything else becomes unneccessary noise in Shurui's eyes.
... Senseless cussing makes things easier. "YOU FUCKING DOOR, OPEN! FUCKING METAL!" *BOMM* "FUCKING DOOR!" *BOMM* *BOMM* "OPEN UP! FUCKING!" *BOMM* "OPEN-" *BOMM* "UP!" The secruity squad stand slack-jawed at the combination of the enraged short girl and the door's unforgiving denting, warping from the repeated blows of psycho power and bloody fist towards metal but refusing to give.
One of them silently remarks to himself that they need to get these doors at the police department.
But before the security team could even think about pulling the seemingly insane girl away to see if bullets and batons could do what energy couldn't, the world explodes. At least, the wall disallowing Seishirou from readily escaping does. Now, the entire hospital is compromised. Security and nurse staff disperse, rushing to make sure no casualities are made from dislodged equipment, while others attempt to position themselves to the escape Sei.
Shurui, is still there, helpless. Or well, not entirely helpless. The bloodied right hand comes in view of the tiny glass window, shaking as it attempts to curl into a fist, one middle finger raising up to perform a wordless gesture of discontent. That is, it would have, but the smashing of Shurui's fist against a hard metal wall has made such movement difficult.
..... This is a bad day.
He stands at the edge of the chasm and expanse of the gutted hospital, the wall he removed raining to the ground stories below in an erratic staccato bass, so much rumbling mortar and wood slapping off cars and blacktop, scattering civilians in all directions. For Shurui's cursing outside, far less scrupulous people with far less reason utter quadruple the epithets, the idiom of both reaching Ryouhara's ear for want of proximity as small and distant things, faraway from his vaunted position of ideals and shadow.
Ryouhara turns away from the night.
Checking only briefly to make sure that the edges of the bed prevented stray debris from bulleting into either body in a critical location, he begins to work. Hooking the harness securing one experiment to a small tether somewhere beneath his haori, Seishirou moves the bed to the edge of the chasm, as if to push it over. Then he braces on top of it. Whip he takes just as is, hooking legs beneath her hips astraddle and securing the bleeding thing's midsection with his knees, holdinging her tight to his chest and against the bed.
He glances back at Shurui just for a moment, the cold heterochromatic dual-eyed gaze flicking across her failed insult only briefly. He pauses, not smiling, but hardly frowning.
And raises two fingers of his own.
A handseal.
The same symbol on the outside of the building appears on Miura's Paramedic Cap, which is still sitting on the floor somewhere near the door... Then the rest of the room is blown to pieces.
The bed is chucked clear out into the expanse, including the three of them, ejected forcibly on the wave of flame that Ryouhara's second bomb generates, a shockwave of hot air causing the wound in the hospital to hemohrrage furniture. But as the hospital bed tumbles away into the void, the three... do not follow.
A white crow flying with the cackling black, Ryouhara takes wing with the two, his haori filling with the heat of the explosion and using it as a kind of propulsion. It catches the wind in as he kites higher, flying dagger-like towards the horizon.
Log created on 23:14:46 09/01/2008 by K', and last modified on 06:30:56 09/07/2008.