Description: It's all a failure.. with K' in the hospital in a coma after the affair with Southtown Syndicate is concluded, Whip has no choice but to locate someone who thinks little of her dream to help. Right?
It's hard to decide which twin is the more comatose, whether it's the brother who is suffering traumatic brain injury on top of everything else in his seven-story fall, or it's the sister who's calmly seated in the hospital waiting room and has not moved in the last two hours.
K' has been in this situation many times before, and now when the surgeon arrives to wearily communicate bad news, he took his sister's critical condition with fury and emotion. Whip just stares at it with glassy eyes, nodding every few times that she understands even if she looks like she doesn't. She doesn't do much more than that. K' is fighting for his life, and she's barely acknowledging her own.
And Whip remained that way for some time. No amount of Shurui's gentle presence and kind words could help her. The girl barely ever earned herself brief glances, as the Ikari soldier would look at her as though she were speaking in a foreign language. She waited with a simple patience that does not become hospital rooms. The nervousness and helplessness of hundreds of families that saturate its walls is lost on her.
Whip was a model next-of-kin for the entire staff.
Then, after few hours of waiting for more and more depressing news of her brother's condition (alive but facing infection, recoverable but possibly unable to ever wake up again,) Whip remained seated as the waiting room clock ticked, a nurse talked to herself as she read over a chart, and a city bird landed on the ledge outside a closed window. It stared in. She stared back.
That was when she moved, suddenly, purposefully, taking her bloodstained suede coat and moving fiercely for the door. She could hear Shurui calling after her and asking where she was going.
Whip stopped briefly, long enough to say one word that would speak volumes.
"Ryouhara."
Four hours later, snow falls serenely over the dark form of Southtown. And here, at the harbour, the wind pulls stingingly off the sea, cold, vicious, and feeling like razorblades against the skin. But Whip doesn't seem to mind the chill, warmed well enough by a blazing petroleum fire that bleeds voraciously into the night four feet away from her body. The firelight flickers shadows that dance across her body. It brings out the intensity in her brown eyes.
Four hours later, and she's waiting on a rooftop now of one warehouse among many that pock the harbour docks. Her choice of perch is far from random. She stands there, looking as well-placed as the roaring fire that burns next to her, its snarling and tattering flames moving in shapes she's poured with gasoline.
The signal burns in the shape of three leaves, able to be seen by eyes that would only be looking.
Whip looks prepared to wait there for hours, armed with a patience as timeless as the falling snow.
It will be hours. It is hours.
Few will notice the smouldering fire on this lonely harbor in the midst of a very, very cold winter's night. After all, the harbor was a breeding ground for all manner of vicious thing, even beside the viperine fang of mother nature. all things come to those who stray out of the way in these kinds of places--all kinds of trouble. Even the night has things that it fears.
But, this wasn't really any normal perch, was it?
The fire has been burning for some time with little trouble to the building's roofing or infrastructure. The harbor was a thing undisturbed by the billowing night, no danger of collapse even in the worst of intentions--speaking of technologies at work far beyond the hand of normal workwrights and carpenters. There was a force at work here. A thing that cannot be explained, esoteric not by nature, but by will. Found only by those who understand--comprehend the secret.
A will beyond the eye of men.
And then, some time after midnight, the fire gets its answer.
The fire that Whip keeps for him, the fire that reflects the one in the breast of that lonely family..one that would sacrifice anything to assure itself. But there are facets to the fire that Whip keeps now. There are prices paid. And things that are simply forbidden.
That gasoline fire turns a deep violet.
Dark lines of energy drip from the scorch, encircling the seal--and completing it, in a fashion, crawling across the rooftop and sliding down the building proper, limning it in a predetermined energy.
And all of a sudden, he is there.
"Leave."
A young man, almost young enough to be called a boy, stands behind her as if he'd stood there all his life. He is swathed in the silks and trappings of his familial lineage, pretty white things and sleeves that drift openly, minding not the culling winds of the dark that send the weak retreating into their warm homes. Sheathes upon sheathes hang at his back and hip, undercutting a satchel and the familiar trappings of a man called terrorist and genius in the same breath.
A safehouse--his safehouse--was her target. Located through methods even he found infuriatingly precise, and now threatened with an open mark that has set off scores of alerts in the jutsu he's set, storage places that time was supposed to have forgotten are now laid bare.
Inky bangs cast a darkness over glaring sharp eyes.
There is heat in his voice, but it is far from the idealistic passion that has been his sole savior grace. THis is twice now..
"Leave," he repeats. "Now."
Her eyes turn when the fire changes colour. They hood when the entire rooftop suddenly begins to vein with an energy she'll never understand. But Whip doesn't move until she hears the voice at her turned back. It's the one she's been searching for. It's the one she's been waiting for.
In one simple motion, she turns to face Ryouhara, as a breeze off the sea moves the dark hair over her shoulders and flicks one opened side of her suede coat. It hues strangely in the violet light, but it is visibly darkened and crumpled in places from setting stains. Even though the colour is hard to make out, the smell is not. The blood may be drying in the fire, but it's still fresh.
Whip has matching stains at her temples and under her fingernails. And, even more strangely, the streaks of someone's blood anointing her skin makes everything under it look all the more dead. She's never been so pale.
In all the times he has seen her, both as a kindly doctor and a criminal terrorist, Whip has always demonstrated herself a rarity for her kind. She is someone who has seen so much, and yet she continues to wear her heart on a sleeve. The warmth in her eyes has always been real, her smiles always sincere, and her ever-pervasive hope unbroken. She has had everything taken from her, family and memory and home, and neither does she possess her brother's rage nor even Ryouhara's surgical sense of purpose. She is merely someone who tries to make due with what she has left, and to do good, protect others, and eventually become something of use. She just wants to be happy.
Whip does not look happy now. She does not seem to express much of anything. Ryouhara has only even seen her an emotional creature: warm and receiving, angry and avenging, earnest and encouraging, but now she looks about as cold as the wintry night feels. The look on her face is solemn and unlined, and her eyes look close to empty. Like staring into taxadermy. They watch Seishirou with little care... but they're also not looking away.
He asks her twice to leave. She has only one reply to give that. Whip slowly shakes her head no, the movement both tired and defiant at the same time. Whatever threat he poses to her, she doesn't seem to notice.
"I need you," she tells him in a crisp, flat tone that sounds vaguely reminiscent of an order. Her voice is bleakly military. "I need you to help me."
Whatever the occaision to their meeting, it is wholly not intended and even less so desired--at least, by the scion. Someone whom reflects a pain he had long sought to silence in his life bears a reflection before him he hardly welcomes the sight of.
As always, he cuts against the wind. Strange then, that one whom seems he could easily blow away with that frigid gale could remain so still. Even more so that such a young boy could meet Whip's haggard and tired eyes with such deadly reproach, something that is without pity. Of chill and diamond as fine as the taste of cold steel on the tongue is that countenance formed.
And it seems to grow all the darker with the pretense of military authority.
"This is about your brother." the shinobi guesses.
"Did you think I wouldn't know?" Did you imagine that something like that could have escaped his notice? That it would be a surprise to him in the slightest? Not by someone whose eyes are as keenly focused on the movements of the world as his. He skips the trivialities. There is no surprise, no need for it. Nor is there worry, no compassion. It is part of what is necessary for him.
Who do you think told K' what fate had befallen Whip in the first place?
One could wonder if he had a similar reaction when Whip herself was so wounded some time ago.
"I told you," Seishirou continues. "Forget about me."
Tails of his haori flutter. It is the Byakuren Hagoromo ninkou that provides shelter and transportation for the shinobi. Though silk flies in the biting wind, this ninkou thrashes all the more in animation at the dispassionate chill in his voice, a thing animated and of its own volition, becoming tangible in the form of heat dragging off his form in distorted waves as he moves. Symbolism of his patience, and how it may run thin.
His boot steps near one of the chi lines that limn the building, and it seems to pulse at even his simple passage.
"Did you think...that you could simply set a candle by the sill, that I would come? That I would be able to..." he pauses, struggling briefly past a whip-thin frown, "...fix it?"
The shinobi closes distance quickly, moving until he can catch the scent of blood on the jacket Whip wears. Staring into the cold dead eyes of that soldier now, he seems simply a reflection of that itself. His voice drops beyond derision, into a low and dark intimacy of words spoken only for one other in all the world. Only one other who could understand their meaning. His neck cranes, until Whip can feel his heat.
"If he lives or dies, that is by his own will. There are consequences to living outside the dream. Did you think that I could be able to make it any different, for you and you alone?" His lip turns slightly, his eyes sliding over the dull expression in Whip's demeanor now.
Ryouhara.. is not moved.
"You thought wrong."
A hand opens, fingertips sliding out from his sleeve.
"I told you.. hate me." He looks up.
"And now I'm telling you to leave."
His words suggest no further choice in the matter.
His voice is equally silken, equally deadly.
"Defy me a third time."
Whip is not insensible; she's very aware that her actions keep her in grave danger. That he may have killed others for doing less. And the terrorist would not even need his eyes to see he has the tactical advantage over her, simply by means that she's just not all there right now. Her hands feel numb; how could they even hold a weapon? How does one find the heart to fight for a life they may never truly claim?
But she knows that she can easily be killed, and she knows that the right decision would be to leave while she has a choice. But what happens after that? She is allowed her life, for what? So she can retreat back to the hospital and watch her brother never wake up? So she can watch him waste away, and with him her entire past? What will she have left?
Whip watches Seishirou steadily, meeting his eyes calmly, patiently even when he moves so close. And she doesn't look away, not even when she defies him a third time. "...I can't," she admits, very simply and very honestly in a voice that's no more than a whisper. He has given her a choice, but there is no choice for her now. Not like this. There is no alternative to her brother's life. The look of gentle defiance in her face, however begging him to understand, is as unmoveable as stone. "I can't leave."
She doesn't even notice the slight movement of his hand. Whip is only focused on Ryouhara's face, searching his features, his expression for something that she knows is there. It's like she doesn't quite believe what he's saying. Or she doesn't quite believe anything that's happening. When emotion finally starts to threaten her face, her mouth twitches and she antsily backs away a step. Her head starts to shake again, telling no to either him or herself or the both of them. "You-- " she starts to stammer, her voice immediately changed. Not so militant anymore. She almost sounds afraid.
"You said that it was your destiny to lose everything. Is that my destiny too?" Whip blurts out suddenly, sounding like she honestly needs him to tell her the answer to this, as if he would have it.
She watches him quietly for a moment more, and keeps staring even as the tears blink out of those watchful eyes and roll down her cheeks. And Whip says quietly to Ryouhara, to all of his orders and all of his threats, "I'm not going anywhere until you help him."
Seishirou is accustomed to having the tactical advantage. Over the years, all the numbers, all the solitary confinement, all the data. There has been relatively few people he did not have outstripped in tactical versatility and guile. It was always the other factors that mattered, the simple things that rendered an opponent's victory. The feeling of a battle.
But then again.... Ryouhara wasn't really ever looking for victory...
Was he?
"So..."
The shinobi steps, closing the remaining distance between the two that had only prior been crossed by his head, the heat crawling from his bones as intense as the look in his dark brown almost-black eyes. His silks thrash. At this range, they seem to swallow the bloodstained woman in an indescribably pure white. It was as if he were trying to press sincerity out of the space between them, as if it were a venom to be leeched from an open wound.
"You prove you can say those adorable words."
Her stony whisper reaches his ear, but for all it seems to provoke in him, it might as well had been a shout into a canyon. There is simply too much lain in the sun. "But why can't you act on them yourself?" She moves, and he follows her inch for inch, his arms shifting with the motion. He doesn't give her an inch of space to gather herself. His voice grows white hot in an instant. "Destiny--" he chokes, temporarily unable to find words. Her tears seem to exacerbate him. Something twists inside him, violently.
Those veins pulse on their footing, gaining a glance from Seishirou.
Something--strangled into nothingness--crosses his eyes.
Before it is returned to the night.
"Get. =AWAY!=" he snaps.
Whirling, Seishirou explodes into motion. For all of the shinobi's swords, all of his inventions and wonders, all of his jutsu, everything that he could leverage against Whip; steel, fire, poison, distortion.. All of that. And in the end he chooses to let loose a simple kick, an intense knee to her solar plexus that extends out into a full kick, meant to throw Whip clear off the rooftop and, if his mind even turned the forces right, off a stack of warehouse pallets.
An instant later, Seishirou disappears in fire.
The safehouse goes up in an explosion that rocks the harbor.
It's a safety mechanism triggered upon Seishirou's arrival. The moment the safehouse was marked was the moment it could have summoned emergency response, or worse. So the only viable zero hour option was to scrub the entire location and annhilate everything inside. Trinkets easily replaced. But secrets not so easily kept.
Some time passes...
"It's all still a dream.."
Before the shinobi steps out of the curling red fires in resolution. His silks trail embers. His steps sizzle the earth pavement. Heat and light generate the shadows that ninja hide in. For Ryouhara, it is different. He could hide in even the brightest day..
"The Ryouhara legacy is equal parts genius and tragedy," the shinobi recites in contrast the words of Motomaro. Does she think he has the answers to everything? "Come any closer to me, and you really will find out what that means. Depending on someone who doesn't exist is--"
His back to the towering inferno, his expression is impossible to make out.
He hisses angrily, forcing each word out, a riled snake.
"--_pointless!!_ Can't you get it through your head!?"
Whip swears that she finds what she was searching for in Ryouhara's face. It's in his eyes, and she can see it, if just for a fleeting moment--
And then all she can see are stars. His knee catches her swiftly and solidly, meeting no resistence, not even a half-hearted attempt to defend herself. Her guard wasn't up. It hasn't been up since he found her here.
The kick snapping straight into her body, she has only the time to let a sighing gasp go before the well-calculated trajectory wings her free from the rooftop. The young woman slams violently down into that stack of wooden pallets, wood crunching and splintering noisily as it catches her fall with layers upon layers of shattered planks. It saves her any broken bones, but her hands are bleeding when they try to pull her free, her temple is split, and one pantleg is darkened when she frees one trapped ankle.
Still half-buried in her makeshift pyre, Whip blinks her eyes to focus them, giving her head a shake to make the running blood flow down a different path. She glances back up. Then the safehouse explodes.
Turning her face away, lifting both arms to protect her head, the Ikari braces automatically against the blast, shielding herself from the most of the heat and light. Snow and falling shrapnel falls around her, bits of steel and cement pelting the iron siding of neighbouring warehouses in a noisy song. The fragments steam against the icy earth. Soon enough, when her aching eyes are adjusted from the initial burn of the explosion, Whip opens her eyes and turns them back up. She stares at the ravenous fire and thick, chaw-black smoke that billows into the air. She watches the blowing snow fall peacefully into it. But she can't see Ryouhara.
She has to swipe at her brow when the blood tries again to run into her eyes. For an instant everything gets bleary; she swears she sees something move against her peripherals. And then he speaks, and her eyes open and stay that way, even if the blood is making it hard to see. But she can see enough: Whip freezes at the sight of him stepping free of the inferno like something that should not be alive. But he is. No matter what he says--
"I can't..." Whip says for the countless time, her voice low and rough, still gutted from the kick she took. She can't disguise the hiss of pain, but she tenaciously pulls herself free from the broken pallets, staggering back to her feet and slowly uncurling her back until she stands to her full height. She looks Ryouhara's total opposite; while he looks to step apart from the very world, she is smeared by it, covered in blood, melting snow, falling soot, splinters, and sadness. And she intends to counter more than his appearance. "Why... why do you want to deny your own life when so many others would gladly take it away?" she demands, calling suddenly, loudly over the thunderous burning of the safehouse, trying to focus her blurry eyes on his face even if she can no longer make it out. The firelight, on the contrary, reveals every last inch of her face. It's still searching for something. "Is it because there's nothing else left? Is that what happens when you lose it all?" The questions are not rhetoric. Whip wants to know this.
Her dark eyes, looking ambery when the reflect the glowing explosion, shine when they avert away. She starts to shake her head again, unwilling to believe any of this. Ghosting out a ragged, pained sigh, she goes on to tell him: "No." Her eyes return. "You do exist, Ryouhara. And so does your pain." And the look in them hardens. The accusation in her voice suddenly burns as hot as the safehouse at his back. "You know /exactly/ how I feel."
He tells her not to come closer. But Whip does it anyway, beginning a slow, staggering step towards Ryouhara. "...So you know why I can't leave."
Juxtaposed against the fire, Ryouhara is indistinct, his haori reflecting harshly the fire at his back just as shadow curls about his trunk, the eerie contrast born when the snow flash-melts against the boiling brightest heat, leaving only darkened plank to throw about the dampened light of his sky-high torch. The authorities would be on their way now, were they not before, but it was only a side detailfor someone like him, a registered thing deep in his subconscious.
He doesn't move towards the bleeding form bounced off the wooden piles like a rag doll, nor does he seem to show any particular concern for her wounds, a far cry from that figment Issei Miura he conjured long ago for the purposes of intelligence gathering. That purpose, and no other, is the fervent insistence in his mind. Endlessly calculating, all things in the world exist for his use. With Whip being one of the few to favor a true and unfiltered expression of his annoyance and anger, the youth insists--to himself--this must be the case. If telling yourself the facade is real until even you yourself believe it is what it takes...
K' would be strong enough to protect his sister on his own.
He had to be. There wasn't any other option.
"Can't?" he scoffs darkly, repeating her words.
"And why is that?"
The snow never touches him, though he remains unmoving. Skilled though his hands may be, they will not move at the insistence of someone like Whip, the one the young man transfixes with such derision that his eyes seem to flash gold in the ensconcing shadow that suffuses him. That heat bales a devil's hay across his back, dragging the fringes of his silks ahead of him, tugging his body but receiving no relief. Most will never understand.
In that fire, Seishirou is in complete control.
"Too much time.. too much time dreaming."
His mouth becomes a thin pressed line as Whip duels him in by the tongue, her words brooking an unbridled contempt in the shinobi. A storm of emotion leaches from the current, all manner of seething hot thing curling at his hip as a faithful dog, one he tightens the leash to, a leash in the form of his breath outwards.
He outstretches a hand.
He should not be alive.
Arguably, he never was.
"Don't," he warns. "Don't ask me that and think yourself clever, making empty comparisons, the fearful ideas of a child." He frowns, his pride riling. To think he feels pain? "I can't be killed. I don't exist. There is no time for that weakness. No pain for people like me," he insists, surveying--
A flash of a smile slides through his memory.
"--no pain," he repeats, venomously.
His words grow fast, uneven, as if he stopped for a moment to think about them he might lose resolve.
"For dreamers like you, it may be a crippling concept, but nothingness is..." the word itself seems to gnaw, "--banal and common for me. No fear. No pain. Only the goal, the mission and destiny of my family.. who..couldn't.."
..He raises a hand to his temple.
And spits a quiet curse.
His hand strays to the hilts at his back. His eye is sharp, he notices Whip's step. Senchakiri hisses lighlty as it slides free of its rawhide enclosure. "I TOLD YOU--"
A white flash.
A forklift topples in two pieces.
A long five meter slashmark is carved into the slick stone, sparks still flying from Seishirou's stroke, the weapon's strike drawing a distinct line that cuts between the two, separating Seishirou and Whip and demarcating a clear field of effect, communicating the range of his weapon--the Tea-cutter, sharpest of blades the ninkougakusha has forged.
His stance is open and plain, but his shoulders are weakened.
He pants evenly, as if fatigued.
"I don't care what you think you have to do," he hisses, abandoning eloquence entirely.
"Get out of my sight.. and don't come before me again!!"
Something about his words, or at least the way he speaks them, suddenly gives the young woman pause. Her slow, dragging, forward pace stops, not from any order or pretence of threat, but when Ryouhara dares to mention--
"You think I don't know nothingness?" Whip asks him suddenly, her pained voice low and rattling and yet still infused with feeling. The worst part is that, beneath all her blood and battery, remains the Ikari's unmatched patience, staring steadily back at the terrorist. She doesn't return a degree of his anger and aggravation. Her defiance is passive -- the worst kind.
Soon, her dark eyes close, and she continues laboriously, "That's all I've ever been. It starts when someone... gets into your head." Her eyes open again on his face. Whip begins to move again, taking one slow step at a time. She doesn't notice the blood dripping from her fingertips. She doesn't seem to notice much at all. The explosive fire highlights the strange, empty look that has gutted out the gentle features of her face.
She continues, her narrating voice knowledgeable but hollow, "And then takes it all out. You have no name." She takes another step. "You have no past." And another. "And, worst of all, you know you used to. Every day you wonder if you're still that same person, or you're just some impostor taking her place. You're not too sure if you're acting how you should be." Her eyebrows furrow distractedly with a familiar, offhanded confusion. "Or if anything left in you was ever real.
"And when you think hard enough," Whip explains, sharing a secret she's told no one, not even the twin brother she has lying comatose in the hospital, "and really concentrate... it's like... like a hole you can feel." Her step stops, and she reaches up to point it out. Her eyes blink a little sightlessly, her gaze turned inward in a dreamy, searching way as she takes one hand and explores her own temple. "Right... here."
Whip's hand falls away. Her eyes focus, sharpening suddenly with determination. Her hands clench at her sides. "That's nothingness. And yeah, it's common. It's banal. There's no pain when you're a ghost. But it's also so lonely. And when you find people that actually want you, you still feel like someone's not right. But then you start to feel... you start to hope... you-- you start to exist..."
It comes out of nowhere, but Whip's voice cracks on that last word. There is no preamble to the complete and utter devastation of her composure. Not even she is sure when it happens, but the tears are back and they're rolling uncontrollably down her face, and she has to grit her jaw and square her shoulders to try to fight off the sobs. Her body trembles with them. She grabs handfuls of her hair helplessly, her voice sounding like twisting metal as she forces to keep going on: "Until it's -- it's dying -- and you... you don't want to be nothing again..."
Whip looks up. Her eyes are bright in the firelight, gleaming as much as the bared length of Seishirou's weapon. She watches on, finally quieted when he demonstrates its viciousness for her audience only. She stares at it, and the imbued threat, at inevitability. He is still giving her a choice.
She keeps walking towards him. Even through the tears, her dark eyes are endlessly gentle. "Nothingness..." Whip whispers, "you can't threaten someone who has so little left. Who may just stop existing like you..."
There are hardly any words to describe this.
Ryouhara had become accustomed to nothingness. It was his sole reassurance and comfort; that reality was as he saw it. The concept of family had been an all important one, but it was a thing inverted in Ryouhara's mind--familial pride and piety, honor being the best tribute he could lay at the gravestones of what he'd lost long ago. An all consuming mission of that magnitude demands nothing less than his utter commitment..
He is by definition unreadable, the only expression in his voice just a moment prior one of livid fury, at his vision being questioned, at the strength of his heart being questioned. There is no room for weakness in the heart of a doomed Ryouhara. If he'd been weak...
But his face rises.
And the light reflected from the windblown edges of his haori catches his face just so, and there is no anger, no venom in his eyes. Only an oddly haunted look, unsettled and from a younger place than the shinobi ever .. truly acknowledged. A missive written from a foolish boy too young to understand why he never found her when he sought to find his mother that day.
Why he never found anyone..
He shifts, that perfect textbook 360 degree battle stance of his weakened, there is little focus to speak of from him. Only a unique kind of misery, stirred up by a girl who had found her kin. Who may.. lose him? Startling, the thought occurs to Ryouhara, in an instant.
"...You don't understand," he talks, aching and tired in a way he hadn't felt even after enduring that Shadaloo Master's deadliest that autumn. "He can't die," he states, "He won't die," he insists, "he--" he falters, the Ikari's words striking their lonely toll in him. He can't think, can't reach into the void to find the words he needs to make this go away. He can't find the move he needs to make. The blade slings loose in his grasp, the edge barely covering above the ground. And the nothingness seeps deeply into his chest...
So.. he has nothing.
Drained from his voice is the venom, the anger. Products of a facade that the boy cannot maintain. "I thought, that if you could live on your own," he admits in a whisper, ".. maybe I could live with that much."
"That I could focus on the thing my mind needs to be."
She approaches him, but the deadly blade Senchakiri never rises to take her limbs from her body, her head from her shoulders. She steps over the scar he rent in the stone, but the execution slash never materializes The stroke is not in him, that blade held in nerveless hands. His words follow forked roads.
"I thought .." he breathes softly, ".. it might be better, if I didn't exist."
He speaks not entirely of the present.
His eyes shut.
There were so many things he wanted.
His free hand rises, crooked fingers slipping free from silk and wool to cross the space between the two of them. At first, he is reluctant, a boy touching an open flame. But--if she'll let him, he'll take her by the shoulder. He'll draw her to him in one motion, in one arm, waves of dark hair casting inconsistent shadows over her bloodstained coat. "It's fine," he murmurs, deadened voice sliding past her ear. Words long ago recited are repeated. "the world is worse off.."
The hilt of Senchakiri rings as Seishirou, the last of the fallen Ryouhara clan, drops it to the ground carelessly like a common kitchen utensil, that right hand of his boneless in the wind. It feels.. if only for a moment, natural.
"If it means you can exist. I'll protect even him for you."
But his heart...can never awaken.
A blow to the nerve center at the solar plexus is rendered so quickly that Whip might not even feel anything at all. Surprisingly precise, he hits her hard enough to stop the heart, but only for a moment or two. Just long enough to give her something.
"This nothing world of mine is not for you."
Sleep.
Moving slowly, steadily through the falling snow and ash, Whip cuts a step towards Ryouhara that's as sharp and direct as the blade in his hand. She breathes calmly, and keeps her head high even if it makes the blood from her split temple ooze directly into her left eye. Doing so is a display of defiance and her passive dismissal to every one of the terrorist's murderous threats. It could be read an insult by how she seems to offer him her very throat. But it's not.
It's just the only choice she feels she has. She knows Ryouhara can bring her brother back. She knows he has the power to fix him. And she refuses to deny K' such a treatment because of her own fear.
He would be doing the same for her.
That last step brings her within the reach of that blade. But Whip doesn't even flicker an eyelid. She looks the most serene in months, a lost young woman who is close to having her destiny decided for her. She has spent her entire remembered life searching. What happens when she has nothing left to look for? What happens when she trades in her hope for the resignation that, without her family -- her roots -- she will be no more than that hole she can feel in her mind. She knows what will happen. And, it seems, so does he.
Standing patiently, waiting for deferrence or decapitation, her brown eyes watch Ryouhara fiercely. The wind blown off the wildfire moves her dark hair. She says no more; her piece is spoken. Now Whip merely expects her response.
And it comes. It's so hard to see, with his face hidden from the fire, with his features shadowed and her eyes finding it increasingly harder to see. But Whip knows it's there... Listening, she can do nothing else but watch him helplessly, searchingly.
He can tell by the impossible look on her face that Whip was expecting her throat to be slit before Ryouhara would ever reach out to her. And even in another time, another place, another person, she would tense against the nervous surprise of it, and grow immediately shy... but now she has no spirit left but to just give in.
Whip is as pliant as a rag doll when Seishirou pulls her close, tamed almost instantaneously inside his one arm. He can feel her trembling around the edges, and not because of the cold. The firelight and the fact they are so close reveals her face to him. She is so tired -- tired enough to no longer care. But even if the life has bleed out of her, one thing still remains: that look of hope. Her hooded, begging eyes never leave his face.
It's not until he makes his promise, until Senchakiri christians it with a noisy rattling against the ground does Whip finally close her eyes. She lets out the breath she's been holding. And she staggers as the crushing sensation of relief weighs her down. She has no energy left to do anything but sag wearily against him.
Then on the same heartbeat, reacting as though a strange, unknown thought has suddenly struck her, Whip opens her eyes again to look up at Ryouhara. Whatever she finds in his face seems to hold her enrapt. That's when she starts to curiously reach for him...
Until his strike silences her heart. It happens so fast she doesn't even realize. And, even if she does, Whip seems to accept the attack with a gentled indifference.
She crumples almost instantly. Her body sags into his, all of her dead weight feeling impossibly warm. Her head falls onto his shoulder. And Whip spends the next moment medically dead.
Then she inhales again, slowly and methodically, and life returns to the Ikari soldier in the form of her breath slanting warmly past his throat. She sleeps as the snow still falls.
He is murderous.
And if only for moments, he meant every word he said. He would not allow Whip near him and would sooner bleed her on the earth than take on the burden of any more that hope. Hope, he feared, may doom her more intimately than any scourge even gods and devils could muster. There were ways he could cut Whip without destroying her, his blade was that precise--
But the will drains from him to do so.
He can't. It's that simple.
This much would have to be.
Her last image of that face is Ryouhara, eye slitting to keep her in them in his dark eyes. This close, he seems incomprehensibly fatigued, a young boy charged with horrible things. It is a new sensation for him, being lost. But enduring. Always. Without fail.
Ryouhara catches the yielding weight of the young woman under his frame. A prior weak and boneless stance vivifies with the renewed purpose. His ankle shifts, and tired strength slides into his body to bear the weight of his and hers. His fist gentles against her body, bracing her slumping frame at the hip. She seemed so cold only a moment ago, but with this proximity, Ryouhara knows again the difference.
For a moment, he dares not move, dares not shift her any further. Striking where he did requires a high level of precision. If he were off by only a centimeter, his fist hitched or propelled by even a little, she might not wake up. Normally it is not the case with people of such strength. But then, Ryouhara only sees these two in misery.
It seems almost fitting, for one like him.
He holds her tight against him then, not daring to breathe. Cradling her head against his collar, he looks to the ground for want of attention. Blinking, he counts off seconds.
A heartbeat hitches again in her breast.
Warm breath trails his throat.
His own breath registers past his lips, the tension draining from sinew as Seishirou relaxes. Sparing a half glance at the towering inferno behind him, a tired and black smirk slips past his lips. He snorts.
"You're a troublesome woman.."
Kneeling down to gather his poor discarded and abused blade in one hand, he'll hitch Whip up, shifting her weight against him. "You're fortunate. Anyone else, and I would have left you here."
Eventually, they'll discover Whip, curled up in a ground floor waiting room of the hospital.
In the meantime, a young man strolls into the ICU wearing a white coat and a red cross cap. However, it's not really long before he's stopped by the security guards, two burly gentlemen in mockup provincial police uniform, whom quickly shuffle him off into an unoccupied partition of the ICU. "Who're you?"
"Miura, na."
"You look a lot like someone we've had trouble with sneaking in in the past."
"Ah~. I understand. That's unfortunate... have you caught this person?"
"No... can we ask to see your operations license?"
"na~. So troublesome. Mou.. mou.. how is this?"
"Other doctors at the hospital have these clipped to their coats...but... this is a strange one. Keisuke, have you seen this before?"
"Has he been drawing on it? Miura-san, what kind of license is this?"
"Ohhh, special ninkougakujutsu license, nya~?"
"What? What's that soun--ah!!--" "Keisuke! --nnhh.."
The young doctor walks out of the room quietly only a few minutes after he left it, straightening his coat. He enters K's unit in the ICU briskly, giving a nod, a wave, and a bright enough smile that he hopes the charge nurse will be too sunny to think about why the security patrol hasn't left their unit yet. Rolling the privacy blinds immediately, he looks around. No one. Nobody. But the ruined boy. His shock is muted, at the level of ruin that he was left in.
Ultimately, Ryouhara reminds himself, it's as expected.
With an intensity and methodical purpose, Miura crosses the room in only four steps to the rate monitor next to the bed, taking the clipboard from the foot of the bed to review the updated list of injuries since he pulled the list out of the database some time ago. One eye on the monitor, and the other eye on the page, he begins to think. He flips to the next page. Then the next.
.. And then the next.
Damn.
"Howard is not someone you take lightly, idiot.."
He discards the clipboard on a seat nearby with a light toss, the bill of his cap casting a black shadow across his face, leaving the only expression visible a darkened frown, full of more fang than his simple dismay would suggest. "A coma, nn?" They are really the only words he can muster. Unreadable, he turns towards the dawning light at the window. This will be nigh impossible. His jutsu was for mending physical wounds. Mental... that's a different story entirely. Only a select few on earth would enjoy the shinobi's intent to even try.
But he wouldn't be able to live comfortably knowing the hope had died in those eyes.
"There's something I need to tell you," he murmurs to the open air, to people who aren't listening.
"There won't always be a safety net. If you can't survive on your own, you're not really surviving. If you can't protect her and live to see the next day, you're not really protecting her. You're becoming stronger. But you're still weak. .. I won't condone that."
With great care, he cuts free the bandages about K's head with a knife, minding not the open bloodflow that stains the pillow, nor the alarm beeps on his monitor as he gently disengages cables and applies bypasses. He slides dual two inch long iron spikes from his coat.
"I'm not going to relieve your pain. That lesson is yours to learn."
Cradling each spike carefully against his palm with the last joints of his index, middle, and ring fingers, he slams a scribed length into K's temple at one side, hard enough to puncture the underlying bone, but only just so. Then, moving to the other side of the bed, he repeats the process with the other spike. Leaning back, he grips his wrist, spreading his fingers wide, fingertips trailing smoke and blood. Partially K's from having spikes driven into his skull, and part Seishirou's, from energy that wells in every tip. Searing into his fingertips, the flesh draws marks in kanji and rilled seal, a bizarre kind of henna. Five fingertips, five marks: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, CENTER. Seishirou hisses through grit teeth as his cuticles boil. He lifts that hand towards K'.
"But you're not going to die..."
Neither Miura nor Seishirou had any real experience in repairing a comatose person. There was no magic device or technique that he had stashed away that would even begin to look after this level of devastation. Ninkou were not portable miracles. But Seishirou is the last member of the doomed geniuses of the Ryouhara clan and preeminent amongst its number as the boy destined to realize that clan's sorry state and bring its style before the annals of history as the greatest style of ninjutsu ever devised.
It may tear his arm to pieces. It may drain every resource in his body. But as he is now, sacrificed everything that could have lived the life that the boy before him had led, he will not fail. If that means he has to be something more than he was the day before...
...So be it.
"Don't disappoint me.."
His fingers lock around the ragged boy's skull, smoke and tangible heat curling off his fingernails. I nthat exchange, Ryouhara gives more of his chi to K'--through K'--than he has ever before. The pins he placed in either side of K's skull are a sort of receiver for that massive chi influx, levelling it out evenly so the process doesn't melt K's brain into jelly. Or detonate it inside his braincase.
He grips his wrist with white knuckles, almost cutting off the blood supply to his hand. Most will never understand what he's doing, and he'll never have the chance to explain it. But it is his way. He doesn't have the ability to repair K's mind directly. He's forming a focusing matrix inside the very confines of K's skull, not unlike the kind he uses in ninkou construction.
He'll draw the dormant energy in K's skull out by force.
"You've.." he mutters, sweat trailing down his temple. "..slept long enough.."
Log created on 03:30:54 12/31/2008 by Seishirou, and last modified on 22:06:33 01/03/2009.