Chinese Takeout (DDS/X, O'Brian/Subaru)
The first of a few full-length(ish) holiday fics, for those especially dear to me. After that, Yulestravaganza stuff (and the rest of the Object of Desire ficbits AHAHA REMEMBER THOSE), and then Yuletide reposting, and then new stuff. Woo!
Will also do a Year in Review post later, I think.
Brief context for this:
a) mithrigil is awesome.
b) Everything is lucent_world's fault.
c) Heat from Digital Devil Saga and Subaru Sumeragi from Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 are crossover OTP.
d) Wayward Dawn is why. That and various other fics. Including the sequel to this one.
e) I expect mmmmmaybe two people to read this, but it's a present, dammit.
Therefore.
Chinese Takeout. Digital Devil Saga/X; Heat O'Brian/Subaru. PG-13 (for language more than anything); ~3000 words. Spoilers for DDS2 and, indirectly, for X.
First, do no harm...
The beef lo mein isn’t half bad. It’s nothing like real Chinese food, of course, he grew up eating the real stuff in San Francisco and the noodles weren’t nearly as big and soft (in a way that reminds Heat of flabby pale stomachs and rolls of hip fat, for some reason) as these are now. But for what it is, it isn’t half bad. He doesn’t bother to dump the noodles on a plate-most of the plates here have cultures growing on them-just digs his chopsticks into the carton and shovels the lo mein down his throat. On the other side of the glass, Joseph-no, he corrects himself, or tries to, number sixteen, but those reminders never stick-Joseph’s chest hitches and falls. No artificial respiration, that’ll make his pneumothorax deteriorate back into a tension pneumothorax and they just performed the needle thoracostomy four hours ago, released as much of the pressure building up in the pleural cavity between his lungs and the rest of him as they could and now they’re siphoning off the excess air with a chest tube. There’s a separate hiss from that, from the air dribbling out of Joseph’s lungs and into the underwater seal. Or he thinks there is, it might just be the vents rattling. This whole building rattles. He isn’t sure why, it’s brand new, but everywhere he walks he hears air being sucked away, choked groans sputtering in the vents, the pipes clinking in the walls. The IV drips, and Heat picks up Joseph’s chart and scribbles down a note for himself: switch from half-saline to normal saline in two hours if patient’s condition holds steady.
(You don’t name your cadavers, do you? Dr. Sheffield said once, when Heat asked him about the taboo on mentioning the patients’-children’s-names.
Actually, Heat replied, talked to keep his teeth from grinding together, we do. My group named ours Sally.)
Joseph’s vitals hold steady. Heat sets the carton of beef lo mein down; juice and seasoning leaks from the bottom and pools on the corner of Joseph’s chart and Heat says “Shit” and tries to blot the stain away with a napkin. He sloughs more of the sauce off his hands, wads the napkins up, flings them like basketballs into the trashcan. His fingers still smell like seasoned beef.
He fishes an egg roll out of the bag. It sags in the middle. He splits it in half before the skin breaks and spills limp lettuce over his papers, tosses one half back in the bag and pops the other half in his mouth. He chews at about the same rate Joseph’s monitor beeps. Everything beeps, beats, breathes. Aspiration, exhalation. Systole, diastole. Heat slurps up stringy steamed vegetables and air gets shoved into Joseph’s lungs. They had to slap an oxygen mask on him but that’s better, cleaner than what he’d be getting in the EGG, than he’d been getting in the EGG if Heat’s right about an irritant in the air aggravating Joseph’s asthma and triggering this mess in the first place. Either way, he’s not letting the kid back in until he isolates whatever it is that made him sick in the first place. If he can’t breathe, he can’t speak, and if he can’t speak they can’t expect him to talk to God.
Do they have tests to determine whether or not God’s listening in the first place?
Someone knocks on the door and almost makes Heat drop the lo mein. Is it one of the janitors? It shouldn’t be, they aren’t supposed to clean this room until six in the morning, but they might’ve screwed up the schedule, so he swings out of his seat and heads over to the door to correct them. When he opens the door, though, the man standing there isn’t a janitor. He’s Japanese-tall, for a Japanese-thin and pale and dressed in a neat charcoal-gray suit. He doesn’t bow, just presses his hands, which are clad in brown gloves, against his thighs and nods once. He’s Angel’s guest, Heat thinks, she was showing him around the facility earlier today and Heat spent around ten minutes talking to him about Joseph. The hardest part was-is-not staring at the man’s eyes; they’re heterochromatic, one green and one gold., pronounced in a way he’s seen in animals before but never in humans. What’s the man’s name, though, it’s on the tip of Heat’s tongue-
“Sumeragi,” he says, and corrects himself. “Mr. Sumeragi. Sorry.”
“Sumeragi is acceptable,” Sumeragi says. He doesn’t smile, exactly, but the corners of his mouth relax for a second. “I apologize for my intrusion.”
“No, it’s fine.” He steps back from the door. “Do you need to come in?” He’s performing some kind of inspection, Heat remembers, he just doesn’t remember what it’s for. Building inspection? Health inspection? He should probably just be relieved that Jenna Angel and the Karma Society are still subject to some oversight, that there are still some laws they have to obey here.
Sumeragi hesitates. “I do not need to, but I would like to.”
Heat surreptitiously shuffles some of the graphs and papers littering his workstation as Sumeragi enters. He sneaks another look through the glass, but Joseph’s still sleeping.
“That is the child?” Sumeragi asks. He’s looking through the glass, too.
“That’s him,” Heat says. “Joseph. We’re keeping him in a sterile environment right now, as few allergens as possible. I can’t risk him developing another tension pneumothorax-” He stops when he sees Sumeragi’s brow furrow. Right, he’s not a doctor. “A collapsed lung,” he explains. “A pneumothorax is a collapsed lung, and a tension pneumothorax happens when a piece of tissue lets air leave the lung but not get back into it.”
Sumeragi nods.
“Joseph has asthma, and his left lung tore during his last asthma attack…” Heat pauses, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I thought the tear was smaller than it was, so I just gave him oxygen, and three hours later his heart started failing.” His jugular veins distended, swelled, and Heat remembers how his skin tinted blue, how he gasped for air and couldn’t draw any in. Now Joseph needs surgery and he wouldn’t if Heat had actually bothered to study the fucking x-rays but no, he let Sheffield needle him about naming cadavers instead and Joseph is not a fucking cadaver and you know what, Sheffield wouldn’t know a thing about bedside manner if it bit him on his frigid part-Russian ass-
-fuck, he snapped the corner of his clipboard off. Sumeragi watches the cardboard chip clatter against the tile. “Sorry,” he mutters again. “Flimsy pieces of shit.” He probably shouldn’t swear so much around Sumeragi, but Sumeragi doesn’t say anything about it, at least.
“I see,” Sumeragi says.
“Do you?” Heat says, because open mouth, insert foot seems to be how he operates.
There’s a pause, a long one. Sumeragi shoves his gloved hands into his pockets. “I see enough.”
“Like what?” he asks.
Sumeragi stares at the space above Joseph’s head; his green eye sucks the fluorescence in and his gold one reflects it. Heat can’t help but wonder how, why, that developed, blame scientific curiosity or blame something else entirely but what do you see, what kinds of things do you see when your eyes don’t match up, don’t align? “There are dead children here,” he says quietly, so quietly that Heat isn’t sure he heard him at first.
-oh. Heat’s stomach plummets to his knees. He busies himself with reshuffling the papers on his desk; if he got some kitsch for his desk, little wind-up toys or funny-shaped erasers or even coffee mugs that don’t have BERKELY or KARMA SOCIETY stamped across them, this place might feel more like home, more like his, but that thought disturbs him so he pushes it towards the very back of his mind and Sumeragi’s still waiting, isn’t he. “That’s not what we’re trying to do,” he says, more to Sumeragi’s reflection in the glass than to the man himself.
“What are you trying to do, O’Brian-sensei?”
Heat winces. “Just ‘Heat’ is fine.”
“O’Brian-san,” Sumeragi compromises. Heat opens his mouth to press the point, but closes it; O’Brian-san is about as informal as Sumeragi’s going to get, probably. Is it a Japanese thing or is it him? Both, probably.
“Angel-Doctor Angel-gave you the overview, didn’t she?” He sneaks another glance at Joseph. Everything’s-not normal, but everything’s regular. “We’re trying to ask God not to kill us all. Nicely.” Angel phrased it differently than that, he imagines, but it’s the same thing.
“And you think he will listen?”
“Does He ever?” Heat retorts. His elbow swings around when he spins on his heel, knocks a sheaf of papers off his desk and sends them fluttering to the floor. He paces over them, grinds them into the ground, he should stop and pick up, Sumeragi’s probably appalled by the way this place looks but Heat just-he can’t really walk away, he’s fenced in by walls and glass, but he can still walk.
“Forgive me,” Sumeragi says, resting his back against the glass. Heat wonders how old he is. There’s no gray in his hair, none that Heat can see; his skin’s pale and frozen and perfect when it’s not broken up by shadows, lines, crows’ feet and bags under his eyes and furrows framing the corners of his mouth. Even his eyes don’t look the same age. He could be in his late twenties, he could be in his early fifties. Heat doesn’t know, doesn’t know what to do when he can’t trust what he sees, but given what he’s seen…yeah.
“You haven’t done anything I need to forgive you for,” he says. “I’m a doctor, I don’t offer absolution. I can’t.”
“Some in your profession do.”
Yeah, and some of them are his colleagues. “I’m not God. I’ve never thought I was God. I’m just trying to talk to him.” He laughs. It isn’t real. He wonders what exactly about this place is. “This whole place-just everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve been taught, everything someone with my degree’s supposed to do. That all led to this, somehow.” He doesn’t even know how. He knows the steps he took to secure this job, of course, he remembers his doctoral research and securing letters of recommendation (and scrubbing any traces of his personal history-he really hates that phrase-out of them), but why all that led here…is there a reason for it? Is there ever? Is he asking himself all these rhetorical questions because he hasn’t had enough caffeine?
That’s probably it.
“Do you want tea?” he asks Sumeragi. “I have beef lo mein, too, but I don’t know if you eat that.”
“I abstain from meat while I work, generally,” Sumeragi says. “But thank you for the offer.”
Heat nods, pulls the teapot out of the cabinet and lights the Bunsen burner. “What exactly do you do, again?”
Sumeragi deliberates, or it looks like that’s what he’s doing, runs his thumb over the seam of his glove. “I have several professions,” he says. “But I do not come here to represent their interests.”
“Who are you here for, then?”
“I knew-” Sumeragi hesitates. “I knew someone close to Doctor Angel. I am here for him, and his memory.”
His memory. “He’s dead?” Heat asks.
“Yes.” Sumeragi doesn’t elaborate. Is it a respect thing? Probably. Or maybe he doesn’t know, either.
Explains a lot about Angel, though. He wonders if Sheffield knows, knows who it was. Of course he does, that asshole knows everything about everyone here and that’s how he got his job and that’s how he’s keeping it. Well, fuck it, Heat doesn’t need to play office politics and all those little undercurrents, there’s more important shit than that to deal with. “You still haven’t told me what you do.”
“I am an onmyoji,” Sumeragi says. Heat blinks, and Sumeragi continues. “I do not think there is an equivalent position in your culture. I am called upon to mediate between the living and the dead, and to use my arts to protect my country.”
“Like Doctor Strange.”
Now it’s Sumeragi’s turn to blink. “He’s a comic book hero. He kind of does what you do,” Heat says. “I used to love the Avengers when I was a kid…it’s a stretch, I was just trying to think of something that fit.”
Sumeragi nods, but at least he doesn’t say I see this time. The kettle whistles, and Heat whisks it off the Bunsen burner and pours the water into two of the cleanest mugs. “Earl Grey, green, or chamomile?” he asks.
“Green will do, thank you.”
Heat passes him the mug, wonders how much of the warmth filters through Sumeragi’s gloves, how much of the steam permeates the leather. (Does anything?) While the bag’s stewing, he asks, “Doctor Angel invited you?”
“She did.”
“Why, does she want you to try and chat up God for us, too?” -that came out wrong. He sighs, grinds his teeth together. Why not ask Sumeragi, though? When he thinks about it, it’s not like they’re working with-the problem with Cuvier’s Syndrome is that he can isolate all the C-affected data strains he wants, and that work’s supposed to be what leads to the cure, that accumulation of data and research and method, but it’s bullshit and he guesses he’s known that as far back as Berkeley, or at least suspected. These are the facts: a dozen children, at least a dozen, are dead because their voices couldn’t stretch over millions of miles. From your mouth to God’s ears, he remembers his mother telling him that. People’s skin turns to stone. Not paralysis in the affected limbs marked by mottled grayish skin discoloration, stone. And Heat’s drinking tea and eating mediocre Chinese food with a man who talks to ghosts for a living, and he’s not even sure what to make of that, he’s too tired to. Tired, or tired of.
“That is not what I do,” Sumeragi says, looks into the swirling depths of his cup. “I am a different sort of intermediary than that.”
“You aren’t a priest.”
“No. I am not a priest.”
“So what do you believe in, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking,” he adds.
“I believe in what I have seen,” Sumeragi says, and his voice is still measured, even, but it’s like he has to force that kind of cadence now, it’s not happening on its own. “And I have seen many things.”
Heat looks at Joseph over the rim of his mug, watches his breath condense beneath the oxygen mask. He tries to remember Joseph’s favorite color, his favorite song, what subjects he liked to study with his tutors, whether or not he spent time playing with the other kids in the God Project, anything other than the concentration of oxygen in his blood or his average body temperature. He can’t.
“And you see dead children here,” he says.
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do about it? About them?”
“Nothing, unless I am asked,” Sumeragi says. “I do not think I will be asked.”
“Guess we can’t ask you to clean up our shit,” Heat says, and his mug shakes in his hand and his knuckles turn the shade of Joseph’s hospital gown and he pillows his forehead on the glass and-the glass is there to protect Joseph. He knows that, he’s always known that, but now he realizes it and it’s almost enough to send him hurtling back in his seat.
“You could,” Sumeragi says softly.
“But we won’t.” Heat straightens, rises, pours himself another cup and jams what’s left of the carton of lo mein into the microwave perched on the kitchenette’s counter. “If we did, we’d have to admit we did something wrong.”
“Is that what you believe, O’Brian-san?” Sumeragi asks, and he’s really good at deflecting questions away from himself, Heat just picked up on that now.
“It’s one in the morning, Sumeragi.” He sighs. He’s been doing that a lot lately. “I don’t know why you’re here,” I don’t know why I’mhere, “I’m tired and my patient’s on deathwatch and I’m stuck in a building with a bunch of scientists who think talking to God will stop the world from turning into stone. And I’m one of those scientists,” God help him, “and my job is to understand and I don’t and it pisses me off, and I don’t know what’s left for me to believe in.” His cup clinks against the sink’s basin when he lets it go, lets it tumble in. “How’s that?”
“Enlightening,” Sumeragi says. He looks down-looks older than he did before, somehow, maybe it’s the light playing across his hair and skin differently but the lines seem sharper now, more pronounced. “I used to believe in death.”
The cup’s stopped steaming in his hands. Heat reaches for it-“I’ll take that,” he says-his fingers brush over Sumeragi’s gloves and the leather feels nothing like skin, it’s older, thicker. He should put the cup in the sink now. He doesn’t. His hand’s still overlapping Sumeragi’s, right there on the mug.
“Why did you stop?” Heat asks.
“Everything-” Sumeragi’s voice breaks. “Everything about me stopped.”
Water drips into the sink, splashes into the basin. He left the faucet on, he must have. The fluorescents flicker and hum and Sumeragi’s eyes-eye, it’s just that one eye-it sucks the light in, sucks Heat in with it. Gold like the sun, like Heat’s hair, like molten metal and burnished surfaces and the crucifix his sister used to wear around her neck…Sumeragi’s breath passes through Heat’s lips, they’re close enough for that, close enough for more than that, there’s a tiny scar at the corner of Sumeragi’s mouth and Heat wonders how it got there, what it tastes like-
The microwave dings.
“The noodles,” Heat mutters, and tugs the cup from Sumeragi’s hands. “You sure you don’t want any?”
“Do not trouble yourself on my account,” Sumeragi says.
Too late for that, Heat thinks. Too late for everything.
I love you, honey. May the next year be happier, for both of us. *kiss*
Will also do a Year in Review post later, I think.
Brief context for this:
a) mithrigil is awesome.
b) Everything is lucent_world's fault.
c) Heat from Digital Devil Saga and Subaru Sumeragi from Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 are crossover OTP.
d) Wayward Dawn is why. That and various other fics. Including the sequel to this one.
e) I expect mmmmmaybe two people to read this, but it's a present, dammit.
Therefore.
Chinese Takeout. Digital Devil Saga/X; Heat O'Brian/Subaru. PG-13 (for language more than anything); ~3000 words. Spoilers for DDS2 and, indirectly, for X.
First, do no harm...
The beef lo mein isn’t half bad. It’s nothing like real Chinese food, of course, he grew up eating the real stuff in San Francisco and the noodles weren’t nearly as big and soft (in a way that reminds Heat of flabby pale stomachs and rolls of hip fat, for some reason) as these are now. But for what it is, it isn’t half bad. He doesn’t bother to dump the noodles on a plate-most of the plates here have cultures growing on them-just digs his chopsticks into the carton and shovels the lo mein down his throat. On the other side of the glass, Joseph-no, he corrects himself, or tries to, number sixteen, but those reminders never stick-Joseph’s chest hitches and falls. No artificial respiration, that’ll make his pneumothorax deteriorate back into a tension pneumothorax and they just performed the needle thoracostomy four hours ago, released as much of the pressure building up in the pleural cavity between his lungs and the rest of him as they could and now they’re siphoning off the excess air with a chest tube. There’s a separate hiss from that, from the air dribbling out of Joseph’s lungs and into the underwater seal. Or he thinks there is, it might just be the vents rattling. This whole building rattles. He isn’t sure why, it’s brand new, but everywhere he walks he hears air being sucked away, choked groans sputtering in the vents, the pipes clinking in the walls. The IV drips, and Heat picks up Joseph’s chart and scribbles down a note for himself: switch from half-saline to normal saline in two hours if patient’s condition holds steady.
(You don’t name your cadavers, do you? Dr. Sheffield said once, when Heat asked him about the taboo on mentioning the patients’-children’s-names.
Actually, Heat replied, talked to keep his teeth from grinding together, we do. My group named ours Sally.)
Joseph’s vitals hold steady. Heat sets the carton of beef lo mein down; juice and seasoning leaks from the bottom and pools on the corner of Joseph’s chart and Heat says “Shit” and tries to blot the stain away with a napkin. He sloughs more of the sauce off his hands, wads the napkins up, flings them like basketballs into the trashcan. His fingers still smell like seasoned beef.
He fishes an egg roll out of the bag. It sags in the middle. He splits it in half before the skin breaks and spills limp lettuce over his papers, tosses one half back in the bag and pops the other half in his mouth. He chews at about the same rate Joseph’s monitor beeps. Everything beeps, beats, breathes. Aspiration, exhalation. Systole, diastole. Heat slurps up stringy steamed vegetables and air gets shoved into Joseph’s lungs. They had to slap an oxygen mask on him but that’s better, cleaner than what he’d be getting in the EGG, than he’d been getting in the EGG if Heat’s right about an irritant in the air aggravating Joseph’s asthma and triggering this mess in the first place. Either way, he’s not letting the kid back in until he isolates whatever it is that made him sick in the first place. If he can’t breathe, he can’t speak, and if he can’t speak they can’t expect him to talk to God.
Do they have tests to determine whether or not God’s listening in the first place?
Someone knocks on the door and almost makes Heat drop the lo mein. Is it one of the janitors? It shouldn’t be, they aren’t supposed to clean this room until six in the morning, but they might’ve screwed up the schedule, so he swings out of his seat and heads over to the door to correct them. When he opens the door, though, the man standing there isn’t a janitor. He’s Japanese-tall, for a Japanese-thin and pale and dressed in a neat charcoal-gray suit. He doesn’t bow, just presses his hands, which are clad in brown gloves, against his thighs and nods once. He’s Angel’s guest, Heat thinks, she was showing him around the facility earlier today and Heat spent around ten minutes talking to him about Joseph. The hardest part was-is-not staring at the man’s eyes; they’re heterochromatic, one green and one gold., pronounced in a way he’s seen in animals before but never in humans. What’s the man’s name, though, it’s on the tip of Heat’s tongue-
“Sumeragi,” he says, and corrects himself. “Mr. Sumeragi. Sorry.”
“Sumeragi is acceptable,” Sumeragi says. He doesn’t smile, exactly, but the corners of his mouth relax for a second. “I apologize for my intrusion.”
“No, it’s fine.” He steps back from the door. “Do you need to come in?” He’s performing some kind of inspection, Heat remembers, he just doesn’t remember what it’s for. Building inspection? Health inspection? He should probably just be relieved that Jenna Angel and the Karma Society are still subject to some oversight, that there are still some laws they have to obey here.
Sumeragi hesitates. “I do not need to, but I would like to.”
Heat surreptitiously shuffles some of the graphs and papers littering his workstation as Sumeragi enters. He sneaks another look through the glass, but Joseph’s still sleeping.
“That is the child?” Sumeragi asks. He’s looking through the glass, too.
“That’s him,” Heat says. “Joseph. We’re keeping him in a sterile environment right now, as few allergens as possible. I can’t risk him developing another tension pneumothorax-” He stops when he sees Sumeragi’s brow furrow. Right, he’s not a doctor. “A collapsed lung,” he explains. “A pneumothorax is a collapsed lung, and a tension pneumothorax happens when a piece of tissue lets air leave the lung but not get back into it.”
Sumeragi nods.
“Joseph has asthma, and his left lung tore during his last asthma attack…” Heat pauses, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I thought the tear was smaller than it was, so I just gave him oxygen, and three hours later his heart started failing.” His jugular veins distended, swelled, and Heat remembers how his skin tinted blue, how he gasped for air and couldn’t draw any in. Now Joseph needs surgery and he wouldn’t if Heat had actually bothered to study the fucking x-rays but no, he let Sheffield needle him about naming cadavers instead and Joseph is not a fucking cadaver and you know what, Sheffield wouldn’t know a thing about bedside manner if it bit him on his frigid part-Russian ass-
-fuck, he snapped the corner of his clipboard off. Sumeragi watches the cardboard chip clatter against the tile. “Sorry,” he mutters again. “Flimsy pieces of shit.” He probably shouldn’t swear so much around Sumeragi, but Sumeragi doesn’t say anything about it, at least.
“I see,” Sumeragi says.
“Do you?” Heat says, because open mouth, insert foot seems to be how he operates.
There’s a pause, a long one. Sumeragi shoves his gloved hands into his pockets. “I see enough.”
“Like what?” he asks.
Sumeragi stares at the space above Joseph’s head; his green eye sucks the fluorescence in and his gold one reflects it. Heat can’t help but wonder how, why, that developed, blame scientific curiosity or blame something else entirely but what do you see, what kinds of things do you see when your eyes don’t match up, don’t align? “There are dead children here,” he says quietly, so quietly that Heat isn’t sure he heard him at first.
-oh. Heat’s stomach plummets to his knees. He busies himself with reshuffling the papers on his desk; if he got some kitsch for his desk, little wind-up toys or funny-shaped erasers or even coffee mugs that don’t have BERKELY or KARMA SOCIETY stamped across them, this place might feel more like home, more like his, but that thought disturbs him so he pushes it towards the very back of his mind and Sumeragi’s still waiting, isn’t he. “That’s not what we’re trying to do,” he says, more to Sumeragi’s reflection in the glass than to the man himself.
“What are you trying to do, O’Brian-sensei?”
Heat winces. “Just ‘Heat’ is fine.”
“O’Brian-san,” Sumeragi compromises. Heat opens his mouth to press the point, but closes it; O’Brian-san is about as informal as Sumeragi’s going to get, probably. Is it a Japanese thing or is it him? Both, probably.
“Angel-Doctor Angel-gave you the overview, didn’t she?” He sneaks another glance at Joseph. Everything’s-not normal, but everything’s regular. “We’re trying to ask God not to kill us all. Nicely.” Angel phrased it differently than that, he imagines, but it’s the same thing.
“And you think he will listen?”
“Does He ever?” Heat retorts. His elbow swings around when he spins on his heel, knocks a sheaf of papers off his desk and sends them fluttering to the floor. He paces over them, grinds them into the ground, he should stop and pick up, Sumeragi’s probably appalled by the way this place looks but Heat just-he can’t really walk away, he’s fenced in by walls and glass, but he can still walk.
“Forgive me,” Sumeragi says, resting his back against the glass. Heat wonders how old he is. There’s no gray in his hair, none that Heat can see; his skin’s pale and frozen and perfect when it’s not broken up by shadows, lines, crows’ feet and bags under his eyes and furrows framing the corners of his mouth. Even his eyes don’t look the same age. He could be in his late twenties, he could be in his early fifties. Heat doesn’t know, doesn’t know what to do when he can’t trust what he sees, but given what he’s seen…yeah.
“You haven’t done anything I need to forgive you for,” he says. “I’m a doctor, I don’t offer absolution. I can’t.”
“Some in your profession do.”
Yeah, and some of them are his colleagues. “I’m not God. I’ve never thought I was God. I’m just trying to talk to him.” He laughs. It isn’t real. He wonders what exactly about this place is. “This whole place-just everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve been taught, everything someone with my degree’s supposed to do. That all led to this, somehow.” He doesn’t even know how. He knows the steps he took to secure this job, of course, he remembers his doctoral research and securing letters of recommendation (and scrubbing any traces of his personal history-he really hates that phrase-out of them), but why all that led here…is there a reason for it? Is there ever? Is he asking himself all these rhetorical questions because he hasn’t had enough caffeine?
That’s probably it.
“Do you want tea?” he asks Sumeragi. “I have beef lo mein, too, but I don’t know if you eat that.”
“I abstain from meat while I work, generally,” Sumeragi says. “But thank you for the offer.”
Heat nods, pulls the teapot out of the cabinet and lights the Bunsen burner. “What exactly do you do, again?”
Sumeragi deliberates, or it looks like that’s what he’s doing, runs his thumb over the seam of his glove. “I have several professions,” he says. “But I do not come here to represent their interests.”
“Who are you here for, then?”
“I knew-” Sumeragi hesitates. “I knew someone close to Doctor Angel. I am here for him, and his memory.”
His memory. “He’s dead?” Heat asks.
“Yes.” Sumeragi doesn’t elaborate. Is it a respect thing? Probably. Or maybe he doesn’t know, either.
Explains a lot about Angel, though. He wonders if Sheffield knows, knows who it was. Of course he does, that asshole knows everything about everyone here and that’s how he got his job and that’s how he’s keeping it. Well, fuck it, Heat doesn’t need to play office politics and all those little undercurrents, there’s more important shit than that to deal with. “You still haven’t told me what you do.”
“I am an onmyoji,” Sumeragi says. Heat blinks, and Sumeragi continues. “I do not think there is an equivalent position in your culture. I am called upon to mediate between the living and the dead, and to use my arts to protect my country.”
“Like Doctor Strange.”
Now it’s Sumeragi’s turn to blink. “He’s a comic book hero. He kind of does what you do,” Heat says. “I used to love the Avengers when I was a kid…it’s a stretch, I was just trying to think of something that fit.”
Sumeragi nods, but at least he doesn’t say I see this time. The kettle whistles, and Heat whisks it off the Bunsen burner and pours the water into two of the cleanest mugs. “Earl Grey, green, or chamomile?” he asks.
“Green will do, thank you.”
Heat passes him the mug, wonders how much of the warmth filters through Sumeragi’s gloves, how much of the steam permeates the leather. (Does anything?) While the bag’s stewing, he asks, “Doctor Angel invited you?”
“She did.”
“Why, does she want you to try and chat up God for us, too?” -that came out wrong. He sighs, grinds his teeth together. Why not ask Sumeragi, though? When he thinks about it, it’s not like they’re working with-the problem with Cuvier’s Syndrome is that he can isolate all the C-affected data strains he wants, and that work’s supposed to be what leads to the cure, that accumulation of data and research and method, but it’s bullshit and he guesses he’s known that as far back as Berkeley, or at least suspected. These are the facts: a dozen children, at least a dozen, are dead because their voices couldn’t stretch over millions of miles. From your mouth to God’s ears, he remembers his mother telling him that. People’s skin turns to stone. Not paralysis in the affected limbs marked by mottled grayish skin discoloration, stone. And Heat’s drinking tea and eating mediocre Chinese food with a man who talks to ghosts for a living, and he’s not even sure what to make of that, he’s too tired to. Tired, or tired of.
“That is not what I do,” Sumeragi says, looks into the swirling depths of his cup. “I am a different sort of intermediary than that.”
“You aren’t a priest.”
“No. I am not a priest.”
“So what do you believe in, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking,” he adds.
“I believe in what I have seen,” Sumeragi says, and his voice is still measured, even, but it’s like he has to force that kind of cadence now, it’s not happening on its own. “And I have seen many things.”
Heat looks at Joseph over the rim of his mug, watches his breath condense beneath the oxygen mask. He tries to remember Joseph’s favorite color, his favorite song, what subjects he liked to study with his tutors, whether or not he spent time playing with the other kids in the God Project, anything other than the concentration of oxygen in his blood or his average body temperature. He can’t.
“And you see dead children here,” he says.
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do about it? About them?”
“Nothing, unless I am asked,” Sumeragi says. “I do not think I will be asked.”
“Guess we can’t ask you to clean up our shit,” Heat says, and his mug shakes in his hand and his knuckles turn the shade of Joseph’s hospital gown and he pillows his forehead on the glass and-the glass is there to protect Joseph. He knows that, he’s always known that, but now he realizes it and it’s almost enough to send him hurtling back in his seat.
“You could,” Sumeragi says softly.
“But we won’t.” Heat straightens, rises, pours himself another cup and jams what’s left of the carton of lo mein into the microwave perched on the kitchenette’s counter. “If we did, we’d have to admit we did something wrong.”
“Is that what you believe, O’Brian-san?” Sumeragi asks, and he’s really good at deflecting questions away from himself, Heat just picked up on that now.
“It’s one in the morning, Sumeragi.” He sighs. He’s been doing that a lot lately. “I don’t know why you’re here,” I don’t know why I’mhere, “I’m tired and my patient’s on deathwatch and I’m stuck in a building with a bunch of scientists who think talking to God will stop the world from turning into stone. And I’m one of those scientists,” God help him, “and my job is to understand and I don’t and it pisses me off, and I don’t know what’s left for me to believe in.” His cup clinks against the sink’s basin when he lets it go, lets it tumble in. “How’s that?”
“Enlightening,” Sumeragi says. He looks down-looks older than he did before, somehow, maybe it’s the light playing across his hair and skin differently but the lines seem sharper now, more pronounced. “I used to believe in death.”
The cup’s stopped steaming in his hands. Heat reaches for it-“I’ll take that,” he says-his fingers brush over Sumeragi’s gloves and the leather feels nothing like skin, it’s older, thicker. He should put the cup in the sink now. He doesn’t. His hand’s still overlapping Sumeragi’s, right there on the mug.
“Why did you stop?” Heat asks.
“Everything-” Sumeragi’s voice breaks. “Everything about me stopped.”
Water drips into the sink, splashes into the basin. He left the faucet on, he must have. The fluorescents flicker and hum and Sumeragi’s eyes-eye, it’s just that one eye-it sucks the light in, sucks Heat in with it. Gold like the sun, like Heat’s hair, like molten metal and burnished surfaces and the crucifix his sister used to wear around her neck…Sumeragi’s breath passes through Heat’s lips, they’re close enough for that, close enough for more than that, there’s a tiny scar at the corner of Sumeragi’s mouth and Heat wonders how it got there, what it tastes like-
The microwave dings.
“The noodles,” Heat mutters, and tugs the cup from Sumeragi’s hands. “You sure you don’t want any?”
“Do not trouble yourself on my account,” Sumeragi says.
Too late for that, Heat thinks. Too late for everything.
I love you, honey. May the next year be happier, for both of us. *kiss*