(Fic) Heirs of a Cold War (part 4 (END))
Fandom: TOKIO RPS
Title: Heirs of a Cold War
Category: AU, drama, supernatural, some humor
Pairing: Gen (Gussan's only 19 in this which means Nagase's only 12, so while I won't promise that in my head Nagase's not got a crush, Gussan's just seeing a kid ;)
Rating: PG-13 for language and a little violence in later chapters
Warnings: None.
Summary: If you're seeing things running through your head... you might be crazy. Or you might be them.
A/N: Ye gods, this took forever, mostly because it turned out it needed to be longer than I'd thought (too many things were glossed over in the previous draft, which it turns out was what had been bothering me about it), and there are still parts of it I know should be reworked more, but it would be a monster if I were to do that (it's already almost 17K words all told as it is), so we'll just have to let sleeping, er, monsters lie. ;)
For those that actually remember the first two parts of this, feel free to just start from part 3 with the new stuff, but you can always use the tokiofic tag on the sidebar to find the previous chapters, or you can view the whole thing at once over on AO3.
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[4. They wasted a lot of time on disbelief at first.]4.
They wasted a lot of time on disbelief at first. Searching all around the yard, asking the nurses and the orderlies they could find, even getting them to open the laundry room just in case someone had stuffed Nagase's body there or something (Tatsuya hadn't been prone to pessimism when he was younger, but three years after the worst dog bite ever, and worst case scenarios were second nature to him). But no one knew where he'd gone (though the staff was just treating it like the kid had run away, ignoring Mabo (which had to be a first) when he swore that wasn't it), and he wasn't there. He just wasn't anywhere.
They wasted even more time after that calling themselves stupid (among other, less polite, things). They should never have trusted Taichi and Joshima in the first place, it was all too suspicious now that they thought about it, too coincidental, too much good luck to have happened to them, etc etc spilling out until even Mabo's new-found tendency towards self-flagellation had had enough.
After giving themselves one last mental slap for wasting time Nagase might not have, they focused down to what needed to be done. Tatsuya shifted, putting his nose to work while Mabo schmoozed (and sometimes outright conned/snuck/stole) his way into looking at the paperwork the Institute had on Joshima and Taichi. Tatsuya found a trail that went out the back door, and Mabo found a smoking gun.
"They weren't here as a favor to an orderly, for sure, nor even to any academic group. The name of the organization was redacted on the hard copies of the files, and the computer files were outright deleted, but they used a bunch of initials throughout, and it had government agency written all over it. Well, not written, but… you know what I mean."
The kid was flustered, tongue almost tripping over itself trying to get the info out, and Tatsuya could understand the urgency. It was one thing if Nagase were taken by some rogue academic group looking to make their name proving some phenomena or other. Neither one of them wanted to consider what use an at least semi-secret government agency would be putting the kid to, especially when they already had at least two people with odd abilities already on board. Nor how they were going to get him the hell back.
Tatsuya felt like growling (or maybe crying, depending on whether the dog or the boy was holding the reins). He'd followed the scent out the rear service door, but the staff had been on alert because of Nagase's disappearance and there was no way, even shifted, that he was slipping past the locked and (now) guarded gate out back. The front door was an even greater impossibility, and Tatsuya could almost feel the trail growing colder while they floundered around trying to find the way.
Mabo snapped his fingers. "Do we have anything that we know Taichi or Joshima touched a lot? Or even touched recently? Because maybe we don't have to rely on you finding Nagase's trail in order to find him… maybe I can find him instead."
He could have wasted even more time calling himself stupid (because why have a friend who's a psychometrer if you're not going to use him), but Tatsuya wasn't going down that road again. He had a twelve-year-old kid who talked to ghosts to find, he had a fourteen-year-old kid that was going to touch things to find him, and he had a Cocker Spaniel's nose that would know just what things Mabo needed to touch to do it.
Tatsuya might have been wrong yesterday about Taichi being one of them, but he definitely hadn't been wrong about them protecting their own. They were going to find Nagase, and nothing and no one was going to stand in their way.
~*~
It was anti-climatic in the end. The first thing Mabo touched (a toothbrush Joshima left) gave him a pastiche of images: Taichi sitting behind a desk (complaining) in a (sort of normal) looking office, a slightly older (than any of them, anyway) man in black fatigues rubbing his face and looking tired as he said, "Orders are orders, and this one will be followed even if it's not you that does it", Joshima seeing his reflection in the glass on a door as he walked in, the address on the plate beside the door. An old warehouse, from what Mabo could guess, hiding something far less mundane behind its rundown façade.
Their escape was a little less anti-climatic. They used a borrowed uniform (too big for Mabo, which might raise suspicions, but was necessary for their plan), lunch time (when half the staff and a lot of the patients were busy in the cafeteria), and a stray dog that the guard on the back gate had to let out, confused about how it got in in the first place and not paying enough attention to the orderly in the ill-fitting uniform that slipped out behind him. It was more luck than planning, really, and Tatsuya had been sure the guard would notice something, but they managed to slip away without setting off any alarms.
Mabo shucked the uniform when they were a couple of blocks away, his own clothes underneath it. Then Tatsuya shifted back and slipped into the uniform (a little tight on him), and hoped that the money he'd had on him when his parents had committed him was enough to get them to where they needed to go.
~*~
The subway had cost too much, but they'd managed to find a bus that went near their destination. It was a long trip, a crosstown route that stopped often, weekend shoppers and the lunch time crowd making for a lot of stops, and it gave Tatsuya too much time to think. About everything that could go wrong, and about how maybe he shouldn't be taking Mabo with him, and about how Joshima had left that toothbrush even knowing what Mabo could do, and confused about the sadness he could still remember on both their faces, and… well, just confused in general. He wished there was something they could be planning, some trick they had up their sleeve that would give him something to concentrate on, but all he had was worry and too little information to go on.
They had decided that Tatsuya would scout out the warehouse first, Mabo holding onto the uniform while he looked around, but when it came to it, they didn't need to scout out anything, Joshima and Taichi waiting at the bus stop when they got off.
Joshima looked frantic and Taichi looked irritated (and maybe a little frantic underneath that), and Tatsuya was already expecting the worst before Joshima even managed to get out, "We lost him!"
Okay, that wasn't quite as bad as Tatsuya had feared, but it still made him want to punch the hell out of the two idiots in front of him, but Mabo put his hand on Tatsuya's shoulder, holding him still. "Let's hear what's going on before you start biting anything."
Joshima, apparently just then realizing how close he was to losing blood, vehemently nodded at that, though he lost some of his bounce when Mabo added, "You can always do it afterward."
Taichi started to posture a little, but then he deflated, just saying, "Yeah, we'll deal with that later. Let's just go… okay, not back to the office, because that's just going to lead to other people getting involved, and we don't have time for that, so let's just go to the ramen shop on the corner. The guy we left watching the hospital said you two didn't eat lunch and I somehow doubt you ate breakfast either, and who knows when we'll get a chance to eat later."
Tatsuya had a moment of disconnect at how normal the whole thing was. Nagase was missing, and that was still gnawing at him, but Taichi's pragmatic solution to filling them in on what was happening and yet still making sure they were okay for later made him feel more in control, oddly enough. Like maybe there really was a way out of this whole mess, even with the colossal fuckup it looked to be.
It also made Tatsuya even more sure that the toothbrush had been left behind on purpose, that maybe Joshima had even deliberately thought about the address when he was holding it, because even beyond the spy they'd left at the Institute, it was so obvious that Joshima and Taichi had been expecting them. For the first time since he'd woken up and found Nagase gone, Tatsuya wondered if he'd really been all that wrong about the other two after all.
Joshima got them a table, ordered their food, and got them drinks, all with a minimum of fuss, like he had a lot of practice taking care of people, and Taichi just let him do it, as if it were nothing unusual. Tatsuya wondered if maybe Joshima felt about Taichi the same way he did about Mabo and Nagase, like he was Joshima's to take care of even if he was only a few years younger. He'd have to ask more about how they'd met later, saying he didn't have to beat the shit out of the two of them before then.
Unlike the night before, this time both Joshima and Taichi did the talking, cutting each other off now and then to fill in details, but mainly getting what they needed to say out quickly. It followed fairly closely to the story they'd told before, just substituting a secret government crime fighting group for a research group, and the fact that they'd been hunting for a 'weapon' they could use against a terrorist group that was far too elusive for anyone's good. Their boss, who they just referred to as Higashi, really did have a nephew that worked at the Institute, and he'd mentioned Mabo's talent before. They'd considered bringing him in to see if he could help, but even (theoretically) hard as nails secret agents tended to balk at using kids to catch criminals, not even liking how young Taichi was, let alone Mabo.
But Higashi wasn't the big boss, and he'd been instructed to use whoever and whatever he could get, the terrorists they were after far too dangerous and far too elusive. Which had meant that Joshima and Taichi had been called in, in the hopes that they could sound out Mabo to see exactly what it was he could do. They'd had Nagase's name, too, but the orderly had left before Tatsuya had come in, which had thrown them off for a while. But, "Well, you know what happened from there," Taichi finished.
Tatsuya shook his head, his anger, which had been squarely directed at the two in front of him now spread out to pretty much cover the world. "I get that you guys were desperate. Big bad guys, big bad plans, destruction on a grand scale, and so on and so on, but Nagase's just a kid. A kid who sees ghosts, yeah, but just a kid. How the fuck did you think he was going to be able to help you out. Hell, how did you think Mabo was going to be able to help you out."
Joshima hadn't looked happy, but he looked even more miserable at that. "We… well, actually we'd hoped none of you would have anything helpful to contribute. At first, anyway. I mean even if it hadn't been now, your names were already on a list, so you'd have gotten a visit one day, regardless, but Higashi was trying to hold out until you were all older at least. Trying to find someone who was older in the first place, too, but apparently, um, people like us are hard to find, and by the time they get to be adults they've either gotten really good at hiding what they can do or not doing it at all, so we're… well, as much as the higher-ups think that a 'paranormal' division, one that would operate underground and do things a 'normal' group wouldn't be able to do, is a good idea, and have sunk a fair amount of time and effort-"
"And money," Taichi added.
"And money into getting, they really only have Taichi and me right now, and neither one of our abilities is all that useful for this case, at least not yet. I can spy on people, and I have managed to find some info that was helpful, but for the most part I'm mainly a good eavesdropper. I can't just randomly find secret lairs, and even if I could, I can't walk through walls-"
"Or even pick locks," Taichi said (again, and it was apparently a sore point, as he'd brought it up at the Institute, too).
"Or pick locks," Joshima admitted, obviously too used to the complaint to care that much about it. "But Nagase, he can talk to, er, people that can walk through walls. And some of the agents even thought he might be able to get ghosts to scout out places for him and then report back anything they found. Higashi thought it was worth checking out, anyway, and that there'd be minimal danger."
Mabo, who'd been conspicuously chewing his ramen rather than yelling at anyone, had enough at that. "Obviously it wasn't minimal enough if you lost him!"
Taichi had the decency to wince at that. "Yeah, it didn't exactly go to plan. Higashi's boss wanted the kid brought in, end of story, and he wanted him as tractable as possible, so, well, that meant leaving you two, and any objections you might have, behind, especially since they felt Nagase would be easier to, um, manage if they used the same meds the Institute had him on. We did try to explain that it apparently gave him less control, but, hey, we're just peons, so the kid got doped up big."
Joshima rolled his eyes at Taichi's phrasing, but he didn't correct it, which told Tatsuya that it was pretty much the truth. He had to take a cue from Mabo and stuff a big bite of ramen in his mouth to keep from detailing exactly all the ways that sucked. "If he was drugged, he wouldn't have just wandered off. The drugs tend to make him tired. So how did you wind up losing him and why haven't you been able to find him since?"
They both looked to the other to answer, but eventually Joshima gave in and explained. "We didn't have any location on these guys, nothing we could trace back to any one person or any one place. But what we did have were dead bodies. Unfortunately we had lots of those. They've been keeping a lid on things so the public didn't panic, but the higher-ups aren't wrong about these terrorists really needing to be stopped. The plan that was finally agreed on was that we'd bring Nagase to the sites where the deaths had occurred and he'd see if there were any ghosts left. Then maybe we'd get some descriptions of the people who'd been involved, or at least maybe be able to get some kind of info on where they'd gone to afterwards. Something, anyway.
It worked, too. Nagase found any number of ghosts, and they were willing to talk about what had happened. Apparently they wanted to talk too much, from the way he reacted. But he got us descriptions of some of the terrorists-"
"Though it was like pulling teeth to get a composite drawing from a drugged kid describing what a ghost had told him." Taichi rolled his eyes at the memory, but Joshima just ignored him this time and went on. "We even got a general vicinity that the base of operations is likely in, since some of the ghosts had tried to follow, though they lost them after a while. What we hadn't realized at the time was that one of the dead bodies was… well, was one of the terrorists. We only found out when we ran the composites and got some hits and then saw their known associates. But…"
Joshima trailed off, apparently looking for just the right way to phrase something, but Taichi just rolled his eyes again and took over. "We're only guessing, because we obviously we're paying enough attention to the kid, and no one actually saw what happened, but either the dead terrorist was a real true believer type, or maybe just a plain mean bastard, or, hell, I don't know, but since Nagase just seemed to have disappeared, and we couldn't find any sign that he'd either wandered off or left with an actual living person, we can only assume that it was the ghost that took him and we can only guess that he didn't have any good intentions in doing it."
Taichi shook his head, looking (for once) older than he actually was and even more irritated than usual. "And how fucked up is your life when you have to admit that you're afraid the kid that you were supposed to be looking after got stolen by a dead terrorist and the only thing you can do while waiting for someone to narrow down where the terrorists' base is, is hope that's where the dead asshole actually took the kid… saying he actually took him anywhere at all?"
There wasn't enough ramen in the world to keep Tatsuya from saying (or maybe more like yelling) exactly what he thought about that, but at least he had the satisfaction of telling Taichi just how wrong he was about something (besides taking Nagase in the first place). Because they weren't going to sit there and just wait and hope that the kid was okay. "You have a psychometrer sitting at this table and a guy with a nose like the best bloodhound you could hope to find. Fuck waiting. Let's go find some bad guys."
~*~
Even understanding that it really hadn't been Joshima and Taichi's decision to take Nagase, nor even their boss' to some degree, Tatsuya wasn't over being angry at them. He could guess that their reasons for doing the whole secret freak crimebusters things probably weren't all good (or even maybe completely voluntary), and that they'd been trying to make the best of the bad choices they had, but the whole lot of them had been far too cavalier about putting a kid in danger (and Tatsuya thought he should probably put Taichi in the kid category while he was at it), and the impulse he had to just start punching hadn't totally gone away even with having better things to do.
Oddly, though, for all that none of them were quite happy with the others, they worked well together. Joshima coordinated their search with the other agents, passing information back and forth between all the groups, so smooth at liaising between everyone that Tatsuya thought the Leader nickname might not be that far off after all. And while Tatsuya was shifted, focused on following what faint traces of Nagase's scent he could find (and just happy that there actually were any, and that he didn't have to imagine the worst case scenario quite yet), Taichi kept a careful watch on Mabo, keeping him near just in case his talent came in handy, but doing a better job of looking out for him than he'd obviously done with Nagase.
The search came to an end at another warehouse (and Tatsuya could have almost laughed that both sides of the law liked the use the same type of hideout), the location verified both by Tatsuya's nose and Mabo's hands. Mabo looked a little shaken by whatever he'd seen when he'd touched one of the door handles, but he just shook his head when Taichi asked him if he was okay. Whatever he'd seen, Tatsuya was relieved that at least it wasn't about Nagase.
They finally got to meet Higashi then (who gave Taichi a hard glare when Tatsuya called him that). He at least had the decency to look embarrassed about how things had turned out even while he was thanking them for their help. Tatsuya could tell he wanted to sideline them now that they were at the end game, to at least try to keep them out of harm's way, but he was obviously smart enough to know that they weren’t likely to trust Nagase's safety to those who'd lost him in the first place.
Apparently he was smart enough to use the resources he had at hand, too, having Joshima go see-through long enough to scout the exterior of the building for any obvious traps or alarms. He did keep the Freak Squad (as Taichi had taken to calling them) back behind the first wave of agents entering the warehouse, and he assigned a couple of the more experienced agents (the ones that didn't even blink when Tatsuya switched from dog to naked human and then back again) to give them extra cover, but he also gave them the go-ahead to lead the search for Nagase.
Mabo balked when Tatsuya told him to stay behind, but he eventually settled down to wait with the field techs, mollified when Joshima said that the fewer of them sneaking around meant the fewer of them that might get seen and attract attention (and not saying anything about being too young like Tatsuya likely would have). By the time they were just entering the building, Mabo already had the techs pretty much eating out of his hand. Tatsuya looked back, feeling a frission of fear at leaving him alone, but he knew the techs were probably better at fighting than he was if it came to it, and that at least this time someone was actually paying attention to the kid in their care.
The warehouse was dark and crowded with dusty shelves and towers of rusting oil drums. It was also a warren of enclosures and screened-off rooms, and since all the good body-heat reading tech had gone along with the main force, it was just as well they had someone with them who had a good sense of smell, because they'd have been nearly blind otherwise. As it was, Tatsuya had to fight with the warring impulses of taking his time to make sure they didn't walk into anything nasty versus finding Nagase as fast as he could, and the periodic bouts of shouting and gunfire that kept erupting in other parts of the building weren't helping either impulse.
Five minutes of search time wound up feeling like hours, and Tatsuya would have to remember to tell Nagase that searching a terrorist hideout was another thing he was adding to the list of Things That Freaked Them Out, but luckily, regardless of Taichi's insisting he'd like a chance to kick a little ass, they managed to find Nagase without coming across any actual terrorists. Any live ones, at any rate.
As it was, Tatsuya had barely had a chance to get through the door of the room Nagase was in before it slammed shut again, leaving everyone but one beat up kid and one (not all that large) dog alone to face whatever it was that had beat up the kid in the first place. Tatsuya could hear Joshima and Taichi (and probably the two agents) hitting at the door, but even though it rattled and bowed at the force Taichi was applying, Tatsuya still only had Nagase on his side when the ghost first struck out at him.
The blow seemed to come out of nowhere, Tatsuya's were-senses getting a general idea of where the ghost was, but not enough to pinpoint him. It sent him bowling across the room, his paws having little traction on the cheap linoleum under them, but it turned out to be an advantage, since he wound up next to the kid. Nagase was awake, but he wasn't tracking all that well, his head tilting a little to the side as he tried to focus in on the dog right in front of him. He was aware, though, because he sighed out, "You came," like the cavalry had arrived. Tatsuya, already feeling like cavalry might be overstating things a little, felt even less like a rescue when another blow sent him smacking into the wall.
Nagase tried to stand up to help, but overbalanced before he even got halfway up, adding yet another couple of bruises to the ones already showing. He sat there, hunched over, shaking a little as he started to cry, something Tatsuya had never seen him do, even on the worst of days. His voice was more tired than scared, though, when he said, "Just fucking leave us alone already! You're dead. You're not going to get any less dead no matter what you do. Bringing me here certainly didn't do anything for you, it just scared the jerks you said were your friends. Even the few of them that believed me when I told them what you said didn't want to know about it, because dead is dead to them. So just… just stop."
Tatsuya hadn't ever been able to hear the ghosts like Nagase could, but he could tell the dead bastard had a lot to say to that, Nagase just sitting there resigned until something made him flinch, the precursor to the blow that knocked him flat again. Nagase's lip, already split and swollen, started bleeding, the blood smearing over his chin and fingers as Nagase tried to wipe it away.
The red of it barely showed in the dim room, dark against the too pale face, but Tatsuya could smell it, down to his bones even. Could smell the fear on the kid, and the pain and exhaustion. He could smell the drugs that were still holding Nagase's ability in check, that wouldn't let him exorcise the fucking bastard like he should have been able to (or at least might have been able to, though considering the dead guy had managed to transport Nagase all the way here, he might have been one of the ones that were strong enough to make that difficult). Tatsuya could smell that one of the two people he truly loved was hurting and he was terrified he wouldn't be able to stop him from being hurt worse. It was the straw that finally broke denial's back.
He'd already had a weird couple of days, and this one had just topped them all. He'd been holding it in most of a day after the nurses just dismissed Nagase as a runaway. He'd been holding it in for hours after Joshima and Taichi had explained just how they'd fucked up. He'd been holding it in for minutes after a bunch of secret agent types had prioritized catching bad guys over saving a kid that they'd put in danger in the first place, though they'd at least let him take up their slack. He'd been holding it in for years, what he'd truly become and what he might become from there. But enough was enough, and he (whatever he truly was) wasn't fucking holding it in anymore.
It was all a blur after that, the only clear thing the smell of Nagase's blood and the feeling of shifting into something that wasn't the him he'd ever been before. It all ran together until he couldn't tell any part of it from the next, and he never was sure what he actually did. Nagase just said he got really, really scary, but then Nagase had had a concussion and was hardly the most articulate guy in the first place. All Taichi would say (from what he'd seen after he'd finally managed to break the door into tiny little pieces) was that he hadn't looked so much like a Cocker Spaniel any more so much as Cujo; still tiny and furry, but feral and dangerous for all that.
All Tatsuya really knew was that he'd scared himself; like he'd shifted into something that he never wanted to be again, and the loss of awareness, the loss of control was just another thing on the freak out list. But whatever had actually happened, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing he'd apparently freaked the hell out of a ghost, since Nagase never saw it again, and in the end… Tatsuya knew he'd do it again (wouldn't hesitate to do it again) if that's what it took to keep the others safe.
~*~
A lot of Tatsuya's pleasure in getting Nagase back was muted when Higashi had him patched up by their medic rather than taking the kid to the hospital. It wasn't quite the same thing as Higashi telling them that they were basically prisoners, but it wasn't that far away from it, either.
By the time they were taken back to the other secret headquarters (the warehouse that the theoretical good guys used, which, Tatsuya had to admit, was much cleaner and less scary looking than the other one had been), even Nagase (still not tracking all that well) had figured out that they were screwed. He just sighed and sat next to Mabo on the couch in Joshima and Taichi's office, falling asleep against the other boy because he was just too tired (and crashing a little now that the drugs were wearing off) to care anymore.
It made Tatsuya angry all over again, but he was still trying to process what had happened the last time he got really angry, so he bit it back and reminded himself that even though they hadn't handled things all that well, he was still pretty sure that Joshima and Taichi (and maybe Higashi to some degree) weren't the ones actually screwing them over.
While Joshima was fussing over getting drinks and food for everyone (Coke and cup ramen, the staff of life), Tatsuya looked around their office, hoping it would tell him more about how things really were than either Joshima or Taichi had so far.
It was a pretty typical office; two desks, two chairs, two computers (the one with a screensaver of Kazu obviously Taichi's, so the one of Boøwy must be Joshima's (which told Tatsuya that at least the guy had decent taste about something). The carpet was worn but fairly clean, and the dust on the cabinets was light, so Tatsuya knew that neither of them were total slobs (or that at least they were forced to clean ever once in a while). There were some personal touches here and there, the most notable being an X-Files - I Want To Believe poster taped to the wall. At one point someone had whited it out to read I Want To Be Free, but then it had been edited to I Want To Eat Free. Tatsuya suspected he knew who had done that last one, at least.
He had been going over how he was going to respond to the 'offer' that was sure to come as he looked around. But even after seeing what the place said about them, even after seeing that Joshima and Taichi, while maybe not there entirely of their own free will, weren't entirely unhappy with things, either, Tatsuya was still a little torn. Though, really, if they refused outright, how long would it be until someone (and maybe it would be a new set of someones than the ones they'd already seen, which would likely suck even more than it already did) decided that Nagase or Mabo (or, heck, even him) was a useful commodity and decided to conscript them, maybe even by force. Better to be here where they knew the score and could stay together, wasn't it? He might be able to protect the others at least a little that way.
While he'd been debating how to handle a sales pitch in his head, though, Taichi had apparently been preparing a whole other type of offer. After Joshima had passed out the food and drinks (Mabo waking Nagase so he could get something in him, even if he just threw it back up again later), Taichi stood up, staring at all of them like they'd insulted his mother (or worse, his Winning 11 team) and slammed his hand against his desk. "Here's how it's going to be! You do what I say, when I say it, and you'll be damn snappy about it, too. After all, you've all already been locked up for being crazy. If you don't play your cards right, who knows what might happen."
Tatsuya actually had a moment where he was just a little afraid of Taichi, but even that faded when Joshima clucked at him, "Taichi!" He looked back at them and said, "He's just joking. If you don't want to work with us, it's okay. I'm sure Higashi will take care of… things." He paused, apparently lost for how to phrase that in a less vague but still non-scary way, but then he decided to just brush past it and continued, "Well, I don't mean he'd get you out of the hospital, since you were all committed for a reason, after all, but nothing bad… well, nothing worse than what's already happened will, um, happen." He trailed off, glaring at Taichi as if daring him to start it up again.
Taichi just shrugged. "Hey, I don't get paid much. I have to take my fun where I can."
As sales pitches went, it was a little indirect (so far no one had actually asked them to work there) and more than a little odd (but then Tatsuya had already come to expect that from these two, even with knowing them less than a week), but in a weird way it was easier to take than a real attempt to convince them would have been.
He knew Mabo (alarmingly quiet) and Nagase (asleep again) were pretty much leaving the decision to him, both of them more disturbed by what had happened than they were willing to show and basically just treading water, trying to hold on until things either went back to the way it had been or at least until something made sense again. Saying it ever did. But even with the weight of all their lives resting on him, it wasn't hard to make his choice.
In the end it came down to simple pros and cons. Con, they were none of them exactly old enough for this kind of thing, and Tatsuya was the only one of them whose talent had any kind of martial ability whatsoever tied into it. Con, he didn't want to work for a group that would take advantage of kids just trying to live the most normal life they could. Con, they'd probably have to share the office with Taichi and Joshima and it would be damned crowded, Taichi, Mabo, and Nagase likely to take up more room (and be far noisier) than any three skinny kids ought to.
But it was the pros that carried the day all the same. Pro, it wasn't like Tatsuya fully believed that Higashi would (or maybe could was the better word) take care of things for them, and it was better to make the best deal for themselves going in than it was to wait to be drafted.
Pro, Mabo might be better off at the Institute, surrounded by the crazy people he could almost understand, the mostly sane king ruling in the land of madness, but even that wasn't a guarantee. Mabo tended to just gloss over the subject when Tatsuya tried to mention it, but his power was getting stronger little by little, and the gloves he used to dampen his ability (that he'd rarely used when Tatsuya first met him) were getting worn more often as time went by. And it wasn't like there was a manual they could look at to tell them just where that was going to end and what Mabo was likely to be when it did… if it did.
And perhaps an even more worrying pro was Nagase. The kid wasn't crazy, no, but he could easily become so. Day in and day out, even on the good days, the kid had little privacy at the Institute, hospitals being basically a breeding ground for ghosts, and even the nicer ones tended not to care if they were disturbing him. But even worse, how many years of spending half the week at the mercy of things that were pretty scary even when he wasn't doped to the gills could the kid take before it took its toll? Sure, Nagase had been placed in the middle of a dangerous situation and had it bite him in the ass, but it wasn't like he couldn't have run into a ghost just as dangerous at the Institute. There might very well come a day (likely Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, but it wasn't like Tatsuya could be sure to stop it (not without maybe losing himself in the process) on one of the better days, either) when another ghost showed up that didn't just stop with punching the kid around.
And though he wished he didn't have to include himself in the list, the last pro was Tatsuya. He could lie and say it was only the kids he was thinking about, but he'd tried to stop doing that since he came to the Institute. It was a big step forward to just admit what he was; no denial, no shame (though, okay, still a little embarrassment). But as big as that step had been, as great as the Institute had oddly turned out to be, it was still just a resting place. There were still too many things he didn't know about himself and what he could do, and he couldn't hide from it forever.
~*~
Tatsuya would have thought Higashi would be the one to make the deal with when he finally said yes, but Joshima turned out to be the 'contract' guy, going over the ins and outs of what would be expected from them (lots of things) and what they could expect from the agency (not as much as he'd have hoped), with an eye to detail that was almost scary. Tatsuya made a note to himself to stop thinking of Joshima as mostly harmless, when it was obvious something much sharper was resting under the surface of the mother hen.
Though since Joshima made sure to take them to their assigned apartment himself (saying he thought they'd be more comfortable sharing a room for the meantime), and since Joshima made the kids hot chocolate before they went to bed, and since he even made sure to tuck them all into their futons, Tatsuya figured the sharp thing must be pretty far down.
It had been a long day and all of them were tired (plus one of them was concussed and all, the Things To Watch Out For In The Case Of Concussion list the medic had given them firmly committed to Mabo and Tatsuya's memories), but even though they were being quiet, Tatsuya could tell the other two weren't asleep, all three of them lying there and trying to make sense of the whirlwind they'd been thrown into. When he finally couldn't take going over it (and over it and over it) in his mind anymore, Tatsuya threw back the covers to his futon, shifting before he settled back down to wait. He didn't have to wait long, Mabo shoving Nagase between them before he pretty much draped himself right over both of them, Tatsuya's fur caught in both their hands as they all finally drifted off.
/story
Enjoy (finally)!
Title: Heirs of a Cold War
Category: AU, drama, supernatural, some humor
Pairing: Gen (Gussan's only 19 in this which means Nagase's only 12, so while I won't promise that in my head Nagase's not got a crush, Gussan's just seeing a kid ;)
Rating: PG-13 for language and a little violence in later chapters
Warnings: None.
Summary: If you're seeing things running through your head... you might be crazy. Or you might be them.
A/N: Ye gods, this took forever, mostly because it turned out it needed to be longer than I'd thought (too many things were glossed over in the previous draft, which it turns out was what had been bothering me about it), and there are still parts of it I know should be reworked more, but it would be a monster if I were to do that (it's already almost 17K words all told as it is), so we'll just have to let sleeping, er, monsters lie. ;)
For those that actually remember the first two parts of this, feel free to just start from part 3 with the new stuff, but you can always use the tokiofic tag on the sidebar to find the previous chapters, or you can view the whole thing at once over on AO3.
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[4. They wasted a lot of time on disbelief at first.]4.
They wasted a lot of time on disbelief at first. Searching all around the yard, asking the nurses and the orderlies they could find, even getting them to open the laundry room just in case someone had stuffed Nagase's body there or something (Tatsuya hadn't been prone to pessimism when he was younger, but three years after the worst dog bite ever, and worst case scenarios were second nature to him). But no one knew where he'd gone (though the staff was just treating it like the kid had run away, ignoring Mabo (which had to be a first) when he swore that wasn't it), and he wasn't there. He just wasn't anywhere.
They wasted even more time after that calling themselves stupid (among other, less polite, things). They should never have trusted Taichi and Joshima in the first place, it was all too suspicious now that they thought about it, too coincidental, too much good luck to have happened to them, etc etc spilling out until even Mabo's new-found tendency towards self-flagellation had had enough.
After giving themselves one last mental slap for wasting time Nagase might not have, they focused down to what needed to be done. Tatsuya shifted, putting his nose to work while Mabo schmoozed (and sometimes outright conned/snuck/stole) his way into looking at the paperwork the Institute had on Joshima and Taichi. Tatsuya found a trail that went out the back door, and Mabo found a smoking gun.
"They weren't here as a favor to an orderly, for sure, nor even to any academic group. The name of the organization was redacted on the hard copies of the files, and the computer files were outright deleted, but they used a bunch of initials throughout, and it had government agency written all over it. Well, not written, but… you know what I mean."
The kid was flustered, tongue almost tripping over itself trying to get the info out, and Tatsuya could understand the urgency. It was one thing if Nagase were taken by some rogue academic group looking to make their name proving some phenomena or other. Neither one of them wanted to consider what use an at least semi-secret government agency would be putting the kid to, especially when they already had at least two people with odd abilities already on board. Nor how they were going to get him the hell back.
Tatsuya felt like growling (or maybe crying, depending on whether the dog or the boy was holding the reins). He'd followed the scent out the rear service door, but the staff had been on alert because of Nagase's disappearance and there was no way, even shifted, that he was slipping past the locked and (now) guarded gate out back. The front door was an even greater impossibility, and Tatsuya could almost feel the trail growing colder while they floundered around trying to find the way.
Mabo snapped his fingers. "Do we have anything that we know Taichi or Joshima touched a lot? Or even touched recently? Because maybe we don't have to rely on you finding Nagase's trail in order to find him… maybe I can find him instead."
He could have wasted even more time calling himself stupid (because why have a friend who's a psychometrer if you're not going to use him), but Tatsuya wasn't going down that road again. He had a twelve-year-old kid who talked to ghosts to find, he had a fourteen-year-old kid that was going to touch things to find him, and he had a Cocker Spaniel's nose that would know just what things Mabo needed to touch to do it.
Tatsuya might have been wrong yesterday about Taichi being one of them, but he definitely hadn't been wrong about them protecting their own. They were going to find Nagase, and nothing and no one was going to stand in their way.
~*~
It was anti-climatic in the end. The first thing Mabo touched (a toothbrush Joshima left) gave him a pastiche of images: Taichi sitting behind a desk (complaining) in a (sort of normal) looking office, a slightly older (than any of them, anyway) man in black fatigues rubbing his face and looking tired as he said, "Orders are orders, and this one will be followed even if it's not you that does it", Joshima seeing his reflection in the glass on a door as he walked in, the address on the plate beside the door. An old warehouse, from what Mabo could guess, hiding something far less mundane behind its rundown façade.
Their escape was a little less anti-climatic. They used a borrowed uniform (too big for Mabo, which might raise suspicions, but was necessary for their plan), lunch time (when half the staff and a lot of the patients were busy in the cafeteria), and a stray dog that the guard on the back gate had to let out, confused about how it got in in the first place and not paying enough attention to the orderly in the ill-fitting uniform that slipped out behind him. It was more luck than planning, really, and Tatsuya had been sure the guard would notice something, but they managed to slip away without setting off any alarms.
Mabo shucked the uniform when they were a couple of blocks away, his own clothes underneath it. Then Tatsuya shifted back and slipped into the uniform (a little tight on him), and hoped that the money he'd had on him when his parents had committed him was enough to get them to where they needed to go.
~*~
The subway had cost too much, but they'd managed to find a bus that went near their destination. It was a long trip, a crosstown route that stopped often, weekend shoppers and the lunch time crowd making for a lot of stops, and it gave Tatsuya too much time to think. About everything that could go wrong, and about how maybe he shouldn't be taking Mabo with him, and about how Joshima had left that toothbrush even knowing what Mabo could do, and confused about the sadness he could still remember on both their faces, and… well, just confused in general. He wished there was something they could be planning, some trick they had up their sleeve that would give him something to concentrate on, but all he had was worry and too little information to go on.
They had decided that Tatsuya would scout out the warehouse first, Mabo holding onto the uniform while he looked around, but when it came to it, they didn't need to scout out anything, Joshima and Taichi waiting at the bus stop when they got off.
Joshima looked frantic and Taichi looked irritated (and maybe a little frantic underneath that), and Tatsuya was already expecting the worst before Joshima even managed to get out, "We lost him!"
Okay, that wasn't quite as bad as Tatsuya had feared, but it still made him want to punch the hell out of the two idiots in front of him, but Mabo put his hand on Tatsuya's shoulder, holding him still. "Let's hear what's going on before you start biting anything."
Joshima, apparently just then realizing how close he was to losing blood, vehemently nodded at that, though he lost some of his bounce when Mabo added, "You can always do it afterward."
Taichi started to posture a little, but then he deflated, just saying, "Yeah, we'll deal with that later. Let's just go… okay, not back to the office, because that's just going to lead to other people getting involved, and we don't have time for that, so let's just go to the ramen shop on the corner. The guy we left watching the hospital said you two didn't eat lunch and I somehow doubt you ate breakfast either, and who knows when we'll get a chance to eat later."
Tatsuya had a moment of disconnect at how normal the whole thing was. Nagase was missing, and that was still gnawing at him, but Taichi's pragmatic solution to filling them in on what was happening and yet still making sure they were okay for later made him feel more in control, oddly enough. Like maybe there really was a way out of this whole mess, even with the colossal fuckup it looked to be.
It also made Tatsuya even more sure that the toothbrush had been left behind on purpose, that maybe Joshima had even deliberately thought about the address when he was holding it, because even beyond the spy they'd left at the Institute, it was so obvious that Joshima and Taichi had been expecting them. For the first time since he'd woken up and found Nagase gone, Tatsuya wondered if he'd really been all that wrong about the other two after all.
Joshima got them a table, ordered their food, and got them drinks, all with a minimum of fuss, like he had a lot of practice taking care of people, and Taichi just let him do it, as if it were nothing unusual. Tatsuya wondered if maybe Joshima felt about Taichi the same way he did about Mabo and Nagase, like he was Joshima's to take care of even if he was only a few years younger. He'd have to ask more about how they'd met later, saying he didn't have to beat the shit out of the two of them before then.
Unlike the night before, this time both Joshima and Taichi did the talking, cutting each other off now and then to fill in details, but mainly getting what they needed to say out quickly. It followed fairly closely to the story they'd told before, just substituting a secret government crime fighting group for a research group, and the fact that they'd been hunting for a 'weapon' they could use against a terrorist group that was far too elusive for anyone's good. Their boss, who they just referred to as Higashi, really did have a nephew that worked at the Institute, and he'd mentioned Mabo's talent before. They'd considered bringing him in to see if he could help, but even (theoretically) hard as nails secret agents tended to balk at using kids to catch criminals, not even liking how young Taichi was, let alone Mabo.
But Higashi wasn't the big boss, and he'd been instructed to use whoever and whatever he could get, the terrorists they were after far too dangerous and far too elusive. Which had meant that Joshima and Taichi had been called in, in the hopes that they could sound out Mabo to see exactly what it was he could do. They'd had Nagase's name, too, but the orderly had left before Tatsuya had come in, which had thrown them off for a while. But, "Well, you know what happened from there," Taichi finished.
Tatsuya shook his head, his anger, which had been squarely directed at the two in front of him now spread out to pretty much cover the world. "I get that you guys were desperate. Big bad guys, big bad plans, destruction on a grand scale, and so on and so on, but Nagase's just a kid. A kid who sees ghosts, yeah, but just a kid. How the fuck did you think he was going to be able to help you out. Hell, how did you think Mabo was going to be able to help you out."
Joshima hadn't looked happy, but he looked even more miserable at that. "We… well, actually we'd hoped none of you would have anything helpful to contribute. At first, anyway. I mean even if it hadn't been now, your names were already on a list, so you'd have gotten a visit one day, regardless, but Higashi was trying to hold out until you were all older at least. Trying to find someone who was older in the first place, too, but apparently, um, people like us are hard to find, and by the time they get to be adults they've either gotten really good at hiding what they can do or not doing it at all, so we're… well, as much as the higher-ups think that a 'paranormal' division, one that would operate underground and do things a 'normal' group wouldn't be able to do, is a good idea, and have sunk a fair amount of time and effort-"
"And money," Taichi added.
"And money into getting, they really only have Taichi and me right now, and neither one of our abilities is all that useful for this case, at least not yet. I can spy on people, and I have managed to find some info that was helpful, but for the most part I'm mainly a good eavesdropper. I can't just randomly find secret lairs, and even if I could, I can't walk through walls-"
"Or even pick locks," Taichi said (again, and it was apparently a sore point, as he'd brought it up at the Institute, too).
"Or pick locks," Joshima admitted, obviously too used to the complaint to care that much about it. "But Nagase, he can talk to, er, people that can walk through walls. And some of the agents even thought he might be able to get ghosts to scout out places for him and then report back anything they found. Higashi thought it was worth checking out, anyway, and that there'd be minimal danger."
Mabo, who'd been conspicuously chewing his ramen rather than yelling at anyone, had enough at that. "Obviously it wasn't minimal enough if you lost him!"
Taichi had the decency to wince at that. "Yeah, it didn't exactly go to plan. Higashi's boss wanted the kid brought in, end of story, and he wanted him as tractable as possible, so, well, that meant leaving you two, and any objections you might have, behind, especially since they felt Nagase would be easier to, um, manage if they used the same meds the Institute had him on. We did try to explain that it apparently gave him less control, but, hey, we're just peons, so the kid got doped up big."
Joshima rolled his eyes at Taichi's phrasing, but he didn't correct it, which told Tatsuya that it was pretty much the truth. He had to take a cue from Mabo and stuff a big bite of ramen in his mouth to keep from detailing exactly all the ways that sucked. "If he was drugged, he wouldn't have just wandered off. The drugs tend to make him tired. So how did you wind up losing him and why haven't you been able to find him since?"
They both looked to the other to answer, but eventually Joshima gave in and explained. "We didn't have any location on these guys, nothing we could trace back to any one person or any one place. But what we did have were dead bodies. Unfortunately we had lots of those. They've been keeping a lid on things so the public didn't panic, but the higher-ups aren't wrong about these terrorists really needing to be stopped. The plan that was finally agreed on was that we'd bring Nagase to the sites where the deaths had occurred and he'd see if there were any ghosts left. Then maybe we'd get some descriptions of the people who'd been involved, or at least maybe be able to get some kind of info on where they'd gone to afterwards. Something, anyway.
It worked, too. Nagase found any number of ghosts, and they were willing to talk about what had happened. Apparently they wanted to talk too much, from the way he reacted. But he got us descriptions of some of the terrorists-"
"Though it was like pulling teeth to get a composite drawing from a drugged kid describing what a ghost had told him." Taichi rolled his eyes at the memory, but Joshima just ignored him this time and went on. "We even got a general vicinity that the base of operations is likely in, since some of the ghosts had tried to follow, though they lost them after a while. What we hadn't realized at the time was that one of the dead bodies was… well, was one of the terrorists. We only found out when we ran the composites and got some hits and then saw their known associates. But…"
Joshima trailed off, apparently looking for just the right way to phrase something, but Taichi just rolled his eyes again and took over. "We're only guessing, because we obviously we're paying enough attention to the kid, and no one actually saw what happened, but either the dead terrorist was a real true believer type, or maybe just a plain mean bastard, or, hell, I don't know, but since Nagase just seemed to have disappeared, and we couldn't find any sign that he'd either wandered off or left with an actual living person, we can only assume that it was the ghost that took him and we can only guess that he didn't have any good intentions in doing it."
Taichi shook his head, looking (for once) older than he actually was and even more irritated than usual. "And how fucked up is your life when you have to admit that you're afraid the kid that you were supposed to be looking after got stolen by a dead terrorist and the only thing you can do while waiting for someone to narrow down where the terrorists' base is, is hope that's where the dead asshole actually took the kid… saying he actually took him anywhere at all?"
There wasn't enough ramen in the world to keep Tatsuya from saying (or maybe more like yelling) exactly what he thought about that, but at least he had the satisfaction of telling Taichi just how wrong he was about something (besides taking Nagase in the first place). Because they weren't going to sit there and just wait and hope that the kid was okay. "You have a psychometrer sitting at this table and a guy with a nose like the best bloodhound you could hope to find. Fuck waiting. Let's go find some bad guys."
~*~
Even understanding that it really hadn't been Joshima and Taichi's decision to take Nagase, nor even their boss' to some degree, Tatsuya wasn't over being angry at them. He could guess that their reasons for doing the whole secret freak crimebusters things probably weren't all good (or even maybe completely voluntary), and that they'd been trying to make the best of the bad choices they had, but the whole lot of them had been far too cavalier about putting a kid in danger (and Tatsuya thought he should probably put Taichi in the kid category while he was at it), and the impulse he had to just start punching hadn't totally gone away even with having better things to do.
Oddly, though, for all that none of them were quite happy with the others, they worked well together. Joshima coordinated their search with the other agents, passing information back and forth between all the groups, so smooth at liaising between everyone that Tatsuya thought the Leader nickname might not be that far off after all. And while Tatsuya was shifted, focused on following what faint traces of Nagase's scent he could find (and just happy that there actually were any, and that he didn't have to imagine the worst case scenario quite yet), Taichi kept a careful watch on Mabo, keeping him near just in case his talent came in handy, but doing a better job of looking out for him than he'd obviously done with Nagase.
The search came to an end at another warehouse (and Tatsuya could have almost laughed that both sides of the law liked the use the same type of hideout), the location verified both by Tatsuya's nose and Mabo's hands. Mabo looked a little shaken by whatever he'd seen when he'd touched one of the door handles, but he just shook his head when Taichi asked him if he was okay. Whatever he'd seen, Tatsuya was relieved that at least it wasn't about Nagase.
They finally got to meet Higashi then (who gave Taichi a hard glare when Tatsuya called him that). He at least had the decency to look embarrassed about how things had turned out even while he was thanking them for their help. Tatsuya could tell he wanted to sideline them now that they were at the end game, to at least try to keep them out of harm's way, but he was obviously smart enough to know that they weren’t likely to trust Nagase's safety to those who'd lost him in the first place.
Apparently he was smart enough to use the resources he had at hand, too, having Joshima go see-through long enough to scout the exterior of the building for any obvious traps or alarms. He did keep the Freak Squad (as Taichi had taken to calling them) back behind the first wave of agents entering the warehouse, and he assigned a couple of the more experienced agents (the ones that didn't even blink when Tatsuya switched from dog to naked human and then back again) to give them extra cover, but he also gave them the go-ahead to lead the search for Nagase.
Mabo balked when Tatsuya told him to stay behind, but he eventually settled down to wait with the field techs, mollified when Joshima said that the fewer of them sneaking around meant the fewer of them that might get seen and attract attention (and not saying anything about being too young like Tatsuya likely would have). By the time they were just entering the building, Mabo already had the techs pretty much eating out of his hand. Tatsuya looked back, feeling a frission of fear at leaving him alone, but he knew the techs were probably better at fighting than he was if it came to it, and that at least this time someone was actually paying attention to the kid in their care.
The warehouse was dark and crowded with dusty shelves and towers of rusting oil drums. It was also a warren of enclosures and screened-off rooms, and since all the good body-heat reading tech had gone along with the main force, it was just as well they had someone with them who had a good sense of smell, because they'd have been nearly blind otherwise. As it was, Tatsuya had to fight with the warring impulses of taking his time to make sure they didn't walk into anything nasty versus finding Nagase as fast as he could, and the periodic bouts of shouting and gunfire that kept erupting in other parts of the building weren't helping either impulse.
Five minutes of search time wound up feeling like hours, and Tatsuya would have to remember to tell Nagase that searching a terrorist hideout was another thing he was adding to the list of Things That Freaked Them Out, but luckily, regardless of Taichi's insisting he'd like a chance to kick a little ass, they managed to find Nagase without coming across any actual terrorists. Any live ones, at any rate.
As it was, Tatsuya had barely had a chance to get through the door of the room Nagase was in before it slammed shut again, leaving everyone but one beat up kid and one (not all that large) dog alone to face whatever it was that had beat up the kid in the first place. Tatsuya could hear Joshima and Taichi (and probably the two agents) hitting at the door, but even though it rattled and bowed at the force Taichi was applying, Tatsuya still only had Nagase on his side when the ghost first struck out at him.
The blow seemed to come out of nowhere, Tatsuya's were-senses getting a general idea of where the ghost was, but not enough to pinpoint him. It sent him bowling across the room, his paws having little traction on the cheap linoleum under them, but it turned out to be an advantage, since he wound up next to the kid. Nagase was awake, but he wasn't tracking all that well, his head tilting a little to the side as he tried to focus in on the dog right in front of him. He was aware, though, because he sighed out, "You came," like the cavalry had arrived. Tatsuya, already feeling like cavalry might be overstating things a little, felt even less like a rescue when another blow sent him smacking into the wall.
Nagase tried to stand up to help, but overbalanced before he even got halfway up, adding yet another couple of bruises to the ones already showing. He sat there, hunched over, shaking a little as he started to cry, something Tatsuya had never seen him do, even on the worst of days. His voice was more tired than scared, though, when he said, "Just fucking leave us alone already! You're dead. You're not going to get any less dead no matter what you do. Bringing me here certainly didn't do anything for you, it just scared the jerks you said were your friends. Even the few of them that believed me when I told them what you said didn't want to know about it, because dead is dead to them. So just… just stop."
Tatsuya hadn't ever been able to hear the ghosts like Nagase could, but he could tell the dead bastard had a lot to say to that, Nagase just sitting there resigned until something made him flinch, the precursor to the blow that knocked him flat again. Nagase's lip, already split and swollen, started bleeding, the blood smearing over his chin and fingers as Nagase tried to wipe it away.
The red of it barely showed in the dim room, dark against the too pale face, but Tatsuya could smell it, down to his bones even. Could smell the fear on the kid, and the pain and exhaustion. He could smell the drugs that were still holding Nagase's ability in check, that wouldn't let him exorcise the fucking bastard like he should have been able to (or at least might have been able to, though considering the dead guy had managed to transport Nagase all the way here, he might have been one of the ones that were strong enough to make that difficult). Tatsuya could smell that one of the two people he truly loved was hurting and he was terrified he wouldn't be able to stop him from being hurt worse. It was the straw that finally broke denial's back.
He'd already had a weird couple of days, and this one had just topped them all. He'd been holding it in most of a day after the nurses just dismissed Nagase as a runaway. He'd been holding it in for hours after Joshima and Taichi had explained just how they'd fucked up. He'd been holding it in for minutes after a bunch of secret agent types had prioritized catching bad guys over saving a kid that they'd put in danger in the first place, though they'd at least let him take up their slack. He'd been holding it in for years, what he'd truly become and what he might become from there. But enough was enough, and he (whatever he truly was) wasn't fucking holding it in anymore.
It was all a blur after that, the only clear thing the smell of Nagase's blood and the feeling of shifting into something that wasn't the him he'd ever been before. It all ran together until he couldn't tell any part of it from the next, and he never was sure what he actually did. Nagase just said he got really, really scary, but then Nagase had had a concussion and was hardly the most articulate guy in the first place. All Taichi would say (from what he'd seen after he'd finally managed to break the door into tiny little pieces) was that he hadn't looked so much like a Cocker Spaniel any more so much as Cujo; still tiny and furry, but feral and dangerous for all that.
All Tatsuya really knew was that he'd scared himself; like he'd shifted into something that he never wanted to be again, and the loss of awareness, the loss of control was just another thing on the freak out list. But whatever had actually happened, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing he'd apparently freaked the hell out of a ghost, since Nagase never saw it again, and in the end… Tatsuya knew he'd do it again (wouldn't hesitate to do it again) if that's what it took to keep the others safe.
~*~
A lot of Tatsuya's pleasure in getting Nagase back was muted when Higashi had him patched up by their medic rather than taking the kid to the hospital. It wasn't quite the same thing as Higashi telling them that they were basically prisoners, but it wasn't that far away from it, either.
By the time they were taken back to the other secret headquarters (the warehouse that the theoretical good guys used, which, Tatsuya had to admit, was much cleaner and less scary looking than the other one had been), even Nagase (still not tracking all that well) had figured out that they were screwed. He just sighed and sat next to Mabo on the couch in Joshima and Taichi's office, falling asleep against the other boy because he was just too tired (and crashing a little now that the drugs were wearing off) to care anymore.
It made Tatsuya angry all over again, but he was still trying to process what had happened the last time he got really angry, so he bit it back and reminded himself that even though they hadn't handled things all that well, he was still pretty sure that Joshima and Taichi (and maybe Higashi to some degree) weren't the ones actually screwing them over.
While Joshima was fussing over getting drinks and food for everyone (Coke and cup ramen, the staff of life), Tatsuya looked around their office, hoping it would tell him more about how things really were than either Joshima or Taichi had so far.
It was a pretty typical office; two desks, two chairs, two computers (the one with a screensaver of Kazu obviously Taichi's, so the one of Boøwy must be Joshima's (which told Tatsuya that at least the guy had decent taste about something). The carpet was worn but fairly clean, and the dust on the cabinets was light, so Tatsuya knew that neither of them were total slobs (or that at least they were forced to clean ever once in a while). There were some personal touches here and there, the most notable being an X-Files - I Want To Believe poster taped to the wall. At one point someone had whited it out to read I Want To Be Free, but then it had been edited to I Want To Eat Free. Tatsuya suspected he knew who had done that last one, at least.
He had been going over how he was going to respond to the 'offer' that was sure to come as he looked around. But even after seeing what the place said about them, even after seeing that Joshima and Taichi, while maybe not there entirely of their own free will, weren't entirely unhappy with things, either, Tatsuya was still a little torn. Though, really, if they refused outright, how long would it be until someone (and maybe it would be a new set of someones than the ones they'd already seen, which would likely suck even more than it already did) decided that Nagase or Mabo (or, heck, even him) was a useful commodity and decided to conscript them, maybe even by force. Better to be here where they knew the score and could stay together, wasn't it? He might be able to protect the others at least a little that way.
While he'd been debating how to handle a sales pitch in his head, though, Taichi had apparently been preparing a whole other type of offer. After Joshima had passed out the food and drinks (Mabo waking Nagase so he could get something in him, even if he just threw it back up again later), Taichi stood up, staring at all of them like they'd insulted his mother (or worse, his Winning 11 team) and slammed his hand against his desk. "Here's how it's going to be! You do what I say, when I say it, and you'll be damn snappy about it, too. After all, you've all already been locked up for being crazy. If you don't play your cards right, who knows what might happen."
Tatsuya actually had a moment where he was just a little afraid of Taichi, but even that faded when Joshima clucked at him, "Taichi!" He looked back at them and said, "He's just joking. If you don't want to work with us, it's okay. I'm sure Higashi will take care of… things." He paused, apparently lost for how to phrase that in a less vague but still non-scary way, but then he decided to just brush past it and continued, "Well, I don't mean he'd get you out of the hospital, since you were all committed for a reason, after all, but nothing bad… well, nothing worse than what's already happened will, um, happen." He trailed off, glaring at Taichi as if daring him to start it up again.
Taichi just shrugged. "Hey, I don't get paid much. I have to take my fun where I can."
As sales pitches went, it was a little indirect (so far no one had actually asked them to work there) and more than a little odd (but then Tatsuya had already come to expect that from these two, even with knowing them less than a week), but in a weird way it was easier to take than a real attempt to convince them would have been.
He knew Mabo (alarmingly quiet) and Nagase (asleep again) were pretty much leaving the decision to him, both of them more disturbed by what had happened than they were willing to show and basically just treading water, trying to hold on until things either went back to the way it had been or at least until something made sense again. Saying it ever did. But even with the weight of all their lives resting on him, it wasn't hard to make his choice.
In the end it came down to simple pros and cons. Con, they were none of them exactly old enough for this kind of thing, and Tatsuya was the only one of them whose talent had any kind of martial ability whatsoever tied into it. Con, he didn't want to work for a group that would take advantage of kids just trying to live the most normal life they could. Con, they'd probably have to share the office with Taichi and Joshima and it would be damned crowded, Taichi, Mabo, and Nagase likely to take up more room (and be far noisier) than any three skinny kids ought to.
But it was the pros that carried the day all the same. Pro, it wasn't like Tatsuya fully believed that Higashi would (or maybe could was the better word) take care of things for them, and it was better to make the best deal for themselves going in than it was to wait to be drafted.
Pro, Mabo might be better off at the Institute, surrounded by the crazy people he could almost understand, the mostly sane king ruling in the land of madness, but even that wasn't a guarantee. Mabo tended to just gloss over the subject when Tatsuya tried to mention it, but his power was getting stronger little by little, and the gloves he used to dampen his ability (that he'd rarely used when Tatsuya first met him) were getting worn more often as time went by. And it wasn't like there was a manual they could look at to tell them just where that was going to end and what Mabo was likely to be when it did… if it did.
And perhaps an even more worrying pro was Nagase. The kid wasn't crazy, no, but he could easily become so. Day in and day out, even on the good days, the kid had little privacy at the Institute, hospitals being basically a breeding ground for ghosts, and even the nicer ones tended not to care if they were disturbing him. But even worse, how many years of spending half the week at the mercy of things that were pretty scary even when he wasn't doped to the gills could the kid take before it took its toll? Sure, Nagase had been placed in the middle of a dangerous situation and had it bite him in the ass, but it wasn't like he couldn't have run into a ghost just as dangerous at the Institute. There might very well come a day (likely Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, but it wasn't like Tatsuya could be sure to stop it (not without maybe losing himself in the process) on one of the better days, either) when another ghost showed up that didn't just stop with punching the kid around.
And though he wished he didn't have to include himself in the list, the last pro was Tatsuya. He could lie and say it was only the kids he was thinking about, but he'd tried to stop doing that since he came to the Institute. It was a big step forward to just admit what he was; no denial, no shame (though, okay, still a little embarrassment). But as big as that step had been, as great as the Institute had oddly turned out to be, it was still just a resting place. There were still too many things he didn't know about himself and what he could do, and he couldn't hide from it forever.
~*~
Tatsuya would have thought Higashi would be the one to make the deal with when he finally said yes, but Joshima turned out to be the 'contract' guy, going over the ins and outs of what would be expected from them (lots of things) and what they could expect from the agency (not as much as he'd have hoped), with an eye to detail that was almost scary. Tatsuya made a note to himself to stop thinking of Joshima as mostly harmless, when it was obvious something much sharper was resting under the surface of the mother hen.
Though since Joshima made sure to take them to their assigned apartment himself (saying he thought they'd be more comfortable sharing a room for the meantime), and since Joshima made the kids hot chocolate before they went to bed, and since he even made sure to tuck them all into their futons, Tatsuya figured the sharp thing must be pretty far down.
It had been a long day and all of them were tired (plus one of them was concussed and all, the Things To Watch Out For In The Case Of Concussion list the medic had given them firmly committed to Mabo and Tatsuya's memories), but even though they were being quiet, Tatsuya could tell the other two weren't asleep, all three of them lying there and trying to make sense of the whirlwind they'd been thrown into. When he finally couldn't take going over it (and over it and over it) in his mind anymore, Tatsuya threw back the covers to his futon, shifting before he settled back down to wait. He didn't have to wait long, Mabo shoving Nagase between them before he pretty much draped himself right over both of them, Tatsuya's fur caught in both their hands as they all finally drifted off.
/story
Enjoy (finally)!