Part 1
It was the hospital smell that woke him, an antiseptic stench he remembered less than fondly from his days at the Koneko, where Omi had been so prone to over-sterilize wounds when he was frazzled that the scent of rubbing alcohol had burned itself into the molding of the downstairs bathroom, sickly sweet and strong enough to make his palms sweaty and his heart race, half-formed remembrances of scrubbing blood and other noxious fluids from the floorboards rising to the surface as he fought to find consciousness if only to push himself away. Hidaka Ken sneezed, jerking gracelessly as awareness returned in a rush, an unpoetic way to return to the land of the living, by any standards. But then his entire pathetic history pretty much added up to a morbid comedy of errors, anyway.
The prickling in his arms came second, a strange itchy discomfort and his eyes fluttered open to focus on the webbing of tubes and wiring twisting outward from his exposed forearms, two IVs and countless electrodes tethered to a plethora of machines that beeped and whirred a constant flutter of white noise against the startling silence of the hospital. He hated that, the silence that went with hospital smell, hated hospitals in general, white washed buildings with over-waxed floors that echoed the smallest noise into infinity just because their halls were so damn empty there was nothing to catch the sound. An assassin never liked to be noisy, as a general rule, and Ken had seen one too many tragedies end in colorless, lifeless buildings just like this one to trust that anything approaching good could come from them.
He should have seen it coming, really. Asking Aya to run his skinny ass through had seemed like a good idea at the time, with Wonder kin the Super Boy thrashing the hell out of everything in sight and the building all but falling down around them, but passing out in front of Omi/Mamoru/whatever they were supposed to call him now was just asking to end up doped up and jacked in to every medical machine on the market. All with the best intentions, of course, and despite all his half-assed attempts at laughing it off, having a katana shoved through his gut had hurt enough that he'd all but kissed that little blonde kid from the Crashers team when he'd kindly supplied Persia with a convenient dose of morphine, but that didn't make the general claustrophobia go away when he looked down at his arms and found himself tied down by half a dozen little tethers, half of which were actually in his veins.
He wondered for a muzzy instant where everybody'd wandered off to after they'd shipped him here, whether Aya'd managed to extricate whatever was left of Yohji from the runs of Koua Academy after all and whether Omi had gone back to playing Boss Man full time yet or if there was time enough for one more decent conversation before his friend's massive martyr complex got in the way of his personality again. He wondered where the hell Sena'd wandered off to, when he was usually so eager to fret and fuss and call Ken six kinds of idiot every time he pulled one of his 'stunts'. Watching Junior League pull a hissy fit on him for being so reckless had to be better than the horrible, oppressive silence of this place. At least with Sena railing at him he knew someone gave a damn, wanted him to stop taking his chances not because of the mission or some overtaxed sense of fraternity, but because they wanted him alive and well and whining about cold feet and blanket theft in the morning, misguided though that affection really was. It was strange--for the first time since he'd so unceremoniously put his blades through Kase, Ken felt like somebody might actually care about him for his sake and not their own, and even with all the bitching and demanding and general fit throwing he was finding came along with sleeping with Izumi Sena, somewhere along the line the kid had become a necessity, the thing that kept what little of his addled psyche was still tethered to sanity from free floating. That was all kinds of frightening just as much as it was comforting, and none of the guys seemed to have any real answers for how to deal with it beyond some noncommittal suggestions from Aya that involved more subtle threats about what would happen to Ken if he fucked with the kid's head than they did real advice, and some cheesy ass jokes from Yohji about the irony of someone so bitchy having the ability to 'soothe the savage beast' that'd nearly gotten the smartass decked for his trouble. He'd had drugs that were less addictive than Izumi Sena, and that scared him, made him even more wary and defensive, high strung in ways that were so far off the normal meter he doubted he'd be finding his way back to anything approaching sanity anytime soon.
"Ken?"
It took a moment for him to focus on where the voice was coming from, gaze settling sluggishly on a lanky figure half-slumped against the window frame, and for one crazy moment he thought Sena had sprouted a few inches and really started to freak about how long he'd been unconscious. Then the sandy blonde of the figure's hair registered along with the wrinkled designer suit (an appropriately somber shade of gray, of course) that probably cost more than Ken made in a damn year, the familiar lines of self-deprecation that Sena had never quite learned to impose on himself worked into the figure's posture.
"Omi?" he asked, appalled at how faint his voice sounded through the haze of morphine-induced sluggishness. First chance he got he was ripping the damn IVs out so he could think clearly.
Or as clearly as someone as crazy as him was technically capable of, but whatever.
"For now," Omi replied, smiling faintly and crossing his arms over his chest, almost hugging himself. "Do you know where you are?"
"Hospital," Ken croaked, shifting towards a pitcher of water on one of those freaky little wheely trays by the bed. "Why'd you bring me here, man? You know I hate these places."
Omi was at the tray before he'd even begun to figure out how to disentangle himself and reach for it, pouring him a glass of water and helping him sit up enough to drink it. "Aya wasn't pulling his punches, Ken. You needed about five hours of surgery to repair the damage to your intestinal tract and that's not really covered in the field dressings and first aid manual." He paused, dropping into a chair by the bedside. "You were right about one thing though, you did lose a kidney."
Ken blinked at that, watching Omi fold himself into a comfortable position, somehow absurdly graceful despite the obvious fatigue he was feeling and for a moment it was like old times, waking in the Koneko after some stupid injury to find his comrade frazzled and fretting, sitting up in charmingly wrinkled clothes like he couldn't quite convince himself to sleep until he knew things were going to be alright. Things weren't alright this time, he could tell, and there was nothing charming about the starched suit that had always seemed to wear Omi a hell of a lot more comfortably than he wore it, the backwards baseball caps and childish cargo shorts that he'd all but considered synonymous with his friend replaced by something that looked like it belonged on Persia, as though the office itself had a personality all its own.
Maybe it did, creepy as that thought was. It'd driven enough of the Takatori off the deep end, nearly wiped the suckers out until the old man had finally grown ballsy enough to approach Mamoru-san and suggest he take over. Ken had been afraid in the beginning, watching the outward change overtake Omi as he stepped into Mamoru's shoes, as that deep seeded and patently ridiculous need to find some semblance of a family cemented into place with Ouka's passing seemed to override all reason in Omi even as they discovered things about the Takatori family that made Ken look calm and rational in comparison, and he damn well knew he was crazy.
He'd killed a whole lot of people, but he drew the line at playing with corpses, thanks.
But this was Omi, and Ken had a lot of faith that his friend was better than that. More importantly, Aya was better than that, and the Abyssinian was too big of a bitch to let someone he cared about go down that road without a good slap upside the head. (Or worse, because somehow ol' Ran tended to get more violent the closer he was to the person in question, and this was Omi.) Ken wasn't stupid, there was nothing subtle about Aya's less than gentle rebukes whenever 'Persia' seemed to lose sight of their purpose, those barely checked anger management moments that spoke volumes on a general theme of 'You're disappointing me again' with just a tense moment of silence and a hard stare at the shitty TV monitor in the break room. He was sure there were some seriously pissy status reports being sent Kritiker's way these days, the hard, strangely tired look in Aya's eyes telling him more than any interrogation would that his teammates' often stormy relationship was about to hit another 'off again' stage if Mamoru-san didn't get his shit together.
Then there was Sena, who was stuck right smack in the middle of the argument, the wayward child of the same Kisaragi Fumie they were investigating let loose into a situation Omi had damn well known would set him off in the hopes that the fumbling amateur hour to follow would be obvious enough to flush out the enemy. Ken hadn't had much patience for that, coming back to find that not only had the kid turned the entire Academy onto his cover in less than a month, but that he'd gotten Kyo killed in the process, half ready to email Persia himself and demand an explanation as to how it was possible to think it was a good idea to let him loose after that spectacular a fuck up without so much as a slap on the wrists. He'd noticed Aya's weird behavior towards the kid, the guilty, pained calm that settled over him whenever Sena really started angsting, but it hadn't really occurred to him to ask when everyone around him was already flailing at Kritiker's bureaucracy as though that was a deeper concern.
He still hadn't decided what he thought of Omi's intentions towards the kid, really. Finding out that Sena not only had pretty hefty trauma backing up his erratic behavior but was all but marked expendable went a long way towards upping his opinion of the kid, all that bluster seeming something more transient, less weighty and more the defensiveness of someone who couldn't afford to think too hard about what he was doing unless he wanted to crash, and Ken could relate to that, at least. He was going to crash if things kept up, Ken could see it as surely as he could where his own stupidity was leading, clinging that much tighter as their investigation neared its climax and the danger increased, so close to blowing Aya's trust and warning the kid off that he could hardly stand it. The whole relationship thing, confusing and fucked up though it was, was all he had to cling to these days and while he couldn't have really said when he'd realized things had changed between then they had long since crossed the point of no return and he didn't want it to end. Didn't want to bury another body because he was too damn stupid to spit out that extra intelligence to spare himself one of Aya's mood swings.
It wasn’t the mood swings that had stayed his hand, in the end. If Ken knew anything these days it was that Aya, in between all that self-obsessed angsting of his own, had gotten attached to Sena, another pseudo-sibling to fuss over in place of obsessing over other more dangerous things. More than that, Aya knew the kid meant something to him where very little had since they'd shunted Omi off to Kritiker, since what little stability he'd clung to with their little band of buggered had been dissolved for good. Somewhere between all the less than subtle threatening and gruff needling the Abyssinian had started consulting Ken when it came time to calculate just how much of the truth Sena needed to hear, wary of Ken's temper and the inevitable explosion should he decide that Sena's best interests weren't being taken into account, and that more than anything assured Ken that Aya would do his best to see Sena through this.
This was the guy who could walk point blank up to a woman firing bullets at him and survive. If he set his sights on keeping someone alive, they stayed alive.
At least the Koua mess was over, the building demolished with all the sweeping efficiency rumor suggested of the Crashers team, a pile of still flaming rubble when the Kritiker boys had shown up for evac and probably little more than dust in the wind now.
"And all it cost was a kidney."
Omi was blinking at him, hands tightening perceptively on the guardrail attached to the bed. "What?"
"Nothing," Ken said, gulping down the rest of the water in his little Styrofoam cup -- complete with tacky hospital flower motif -- and grinned. "Like I said before, it's no biggie. I've got a spare."
He patted his side gingerly, the bulk of a bandage settling against his midsection underneath a flimsy hospital gown, and grinned. Omi looked less than amused, and Ken watched him draw his composure back around him like a cloak, back stiffening painfully as he sat up and crossed his hands demurely over his knees, uncomfortable and strained. "Ken, there's something I need to tell you--"
"What?" he interrupted, head lolling against the pillow as another wave of dizziness rolled over him, and really the morphine was great, but it was inconvenient as hell when he tried to concentrate. "Yohji not make it out?"
Some part of him was surprised at his own glibness, but really it wasn't like Yohji hadn't been cruising for an opportunity to go out with a bang for months now. Ken'd been hauling his ass out of the fire (literally, that last time in Europe) for about as long as they'd been working on this case and given the eager thrashing their in depth look at Koua and the worldwide institutions like it had given the Takatori account balance that was one long freaking time. There was just no talking to Yohji when he went off anyway, the guy was crazier than he was most days, entirely convinced that his own insanity was just another sign that he knew better than the rest of the plebes inhabiting the planet and making his judgment that much more warped whenever they headed into the fray. They were lucky he hadn't bought it back when that Schelle chick went off.
Sucked he went out like that, though. Ken was going to miss having someone to point to whenever he was asked if there was anyone crazier than him around.
"No," Omi answered, making a thorough study of the pattern of Formica on the floor as his gaze shifted away. "He'd somehow dragged himself out of the worst of the rubble by the time Aya made it back. He's just... not himself right now."
"The hell does that mean?"
"Yohji doesn't remember us, Ken. Or anything else about his life before he woke up in the hospital."
"Well, shit."
It was a better end than Ken had imagined for their teammate, almost exactly what Yohji had wanted, in fact, but there was something unfair in the fact that it'd happened not ten minutes after (from what he'd caught in snippets of conversation over the mic) Aya'd finally talked some sense into Yohji about the whole memory thing. The idea of losing his memories, everything that he was just erased... it was so much like death Ken couldn't imagine why the hell anyone would want to mess around with it. Really, what was the point of living if you didn't have a past to hold onto, even if it hurt? Didn't that just devalue the sacrifices of everyone who had suffered with you, for you?
"That's freaky," he replied, crushing the cup in his hands and free throwing it in the general direction of a wastebasket in the corner, missing it by more than a meter in his morphine-induced laxity. "So Yohji's there, but nobody's home?"
"His doctors were hoping that it was just some sort of posttraumatic fugue state, but he's barely remembering anything and there was enough of a blow to the head that they're thinking it may be retrograde amnesia." Omi paused, hands tightening into fists, white-knuckled and tense. "From what they're saying now, he'll likely never remember more than a few seconds leading up to the building falling on his head. He's gone."
And that was it. Case closed, end of chapter on one Kudo Yohji and somehow the end didn't seem to do the story justice. Omi looked like he was fighting not to cry, face pinched and haggard as he dug his fingers tighter into the palms of his hands and Ken couldn't quite bring himself to let things lay like that, reaching out a shaky hand to pry his friend's fingers apart, squeezing in something attempting to be reassurance.
"Hey. It's what he wanted, yeah?"
Omi only looked more miserable at that, snatching his hands away like he'd been burned and hunching farther into his seat, breath hitching. It was enough to set off every warning bell in Ken's addled head, struggling into something resembling more of a sitting position against his pillows and dodging his head around in a sad attempt to maintain eye contact with the man next to him.
"Omi," he demanded, "What else? Did something happen to Aya?"
"No," Omi answered, scrubbing the heel of his hand against his eyes and running nervous fingers through his hair. "We're not exactly okay, but he's not injured."
"Not... okay?" Ken asked, trying not to fidget, the cloud of pain medication finally clearing enough that he was beginning to get a feel for his injury at last and damn but that incision hurt. "The fuck does that mean?"
And then it hit him, some perverse epiphany at just the right moment and every muscle in his body clenched painfully as the realization sunk in, tensing in anticipation of the blow he knew would follow as Omi finally raised his eyes enough for their gazes to lock -- resignation, sorrow, and most of all guilt washing over those mobile features.
If Yohji was alive and Aya was unhurt, if Omi was here without his lover and ready to take off on another one of his extended guilt trips, if no one was bitching Ken out for the stupidest stunt he'd pulled all year after he'd worked so damn hard to find a new level of crazy to drive his own lover up the wall with, then--
"Omi," said Ken, surprised at the icy calm laced into his own voice, cutting through the slur of the drugs. "Where's my boy?"