She was pealing around the corner and flinging herself at the entrance, her feet skidding along the strangely slick floor as she gripped Leo's worktable to steady herself. Her breath was finally catching up to her and Jo, heaving herself up was met with the sight of her worst-case scenario. There was blood. A path of it that trailed to the door and to the back of the garage, tools and parts were scattered all over the floor, the scent of gasoline repugnant in the stale ozone as the ground had been doused with it. It was mixing in with the blood, contaminating the red pigment with an oily residue, the strong smell of fuel and the iron tincture from the blood overpowering in the small room. "Meg! Meg!" She shot past the red path, lost her balance when her boot slipped in the bloody grease at her feet and stubbornly stumbled forward, fright and adrenalin ripping through her lungs as she saw more blood, a handprint smearing along the wall and disappearing into the other room. "Meg!" She called out; her hands reached wildly for the bloodied wall as she trailed her fingers over it and followed it into the next room. "Meg!" She gripped the handle on the door to Leo's office and like another shocking gunshot to the heart it wouldn't open. She slumped forward against it, feeling all the energy sap out of her, the fright and the expectations of what she might have to face on the other side of that door ripping the fight out of her. She knocked her shoulder against it disheartened, felt like she actually wanted to cry when her attempts only shook the frame. The old pain in her shoulder was acting up again, the healing effects of time abandoning her and taking her spirit with it. "Meg..." She sobbed on the other side of the door and sunk her foot into the concrete under her feet, using all her body weight to push into the creaking door. She slammed against it, heard the thump of something barricading it and she reared back and drove her bruised shoulder into the door until she heard it splinter and crack. She pulled back and drove her foot into it, saw the green paint of the room on the other side and grabbing onto a piece of the door she flung it to the side. She pushed through the wooden wreckage and the furniture acting as obstacles and fell into the room, heart pounding a mile a minute and her eyes scanning the room wildly for a lock of red hair. "Jo...?" She turned in the direction of that voice, found herself staring at the front of a desk, bloody handprints smeared all over the floor next to it. "Leo!" She heard herself calling out, her voice, like a strangers and she was rushing over in the direction of his voice. She saw him propped up under his desk, his right arm completely useless to him as blood leaked out from a wound in the appendage. It was thrown out to his side; the arm horribly twisted and shattered looking. "Leo, what...?" There was also another large wound on his side and the blood flowing out turned his gray garage jumpsuit black. "Meg..." Leo started but didn't get very far when he began to cough and wheeze. He attempted to lift his hand to pull her closer, but it wouldn't rise when commanded. "Some guys burst in here and I..." he coughed some more, "I reacted too slow." The wound seemed to turn darker as if to demonstrate his fatal flaw. "I told Meg to get the hell outta here, to go find ya...I was pretty good at distracting them..." Leo closed his eyes and then they suddenly flew open, like he was fighting the heaviness that had descended upon them. "I was able to barricade the door...and they knocked against it...I distracted them good...but they got quiet." Jo thinking fast sent out a distress signal to Sei who she knew would get in touch with the right people. They wouldn't be able to call the ambulance without alerting the police and it was a morbid routine for everyone working under Sei who was injured on the job to seek medical attention from blacklist specialist and underground hospitals. "Hold on Leo." She said, tossing her phone to the side as she pulled off her jacket and was helping him to sit straighter against the leg of the desk. She tied the jacket around his side and pulled the sleeves into a knot right on the wound. He winced and started to mumble, "that's good she found you. That's good." Jo had to look away at that moment from the man's dim cast eyes, because she didn't have the heart to tell him that Meg hadn't been the one to get her. Leo continued on half delirious from the blood loss, "She's tougher than she looks." His head lulled to the side, like it was tethered to his body by string and not muscle and bone and skin. "She's so small...but...when you're in a pinch, she..." Leo eyes at that moment seemed to roll into the back of his skull, he was slumping forward, and his breathing weaker than it had been a minute earlier. His face looked swollen, like he'd taken a couple of hard blows to the face and Jo only hoped none of the injuries to his face weren't permanently damaging. She continued to press her hands to his wound to keep pressure on it and to keep her mind focused on something other than the alarming panic coursing through her. Her chest felt tight, her throat sore. She swallowed the grievous lump caught in her windpipes, heard herself gasp to keep the tears away as she closed her eyes and prayed that help would get here soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Leo was going to be okay. They'd gotten there in time and Leo...was going to be okay. Sitting in the waiting room and being given that news by a doctor with a coffee stain on his tie hadn't caused her whole body to breath out a sigh of relief like it wanted too, because she was still thinking about Meg. She had never stopped thinking about Meg. "That's good." Kyouhei breathed out beside her and she was still—weirdly—focusing on the doctor's tie, the one with the coffee stain and now that she looked a little closer...raspberry jam on one side of his shirt lapels. That raspberry jam reminded her of Meg's hair. She thought it was the shock catching up with her and the fact that she couldn't do anything...about anything. She stared harder at the splotch, felt her eyes grow misty and it suddenly felt like somebody was choking her and digging their fingernails into his throat. "Jo." Sei's voice came out from somewhere near her left. And for some reason, her head had turned to the right and toward Amy when she had actually wanted it to look to the left toward Sei. "Jo, we've got nothing to worry about. Meg's tough...we're tough." Amy told her with a slow bob of her head, the pink and white decorations in her hair looking gloom in the too bright lighting overhead. "Jo." Sei was still calling out to her and suddenly the voice was right in front of her. "Kyouhei, can you go get something for Jo to drink." Sei softly ordered, like she didn't want her to hear. "Sure." He got up a little too quickly and was rushing over to the vending machines. She heard the sound of change suddenly hitting and rolling across the hospital's waxed floors. "Jo." Sei, who was in front of her, was lightly squeezing her by the shoulders. "Maybe you should go lie down. They'll contact us when they want ransom. They wouldn't kill her without reason. They must want ransom and you have nothing to worry about. We'll get Meg back. I'll have grandfather wire the money into my account." She didn't know why, but nothing was making any sense in her head. Sei's words were one of them. She remembered the far-off voice that had toyed with her, but she had not remembered any promises of ransom or exchanged materials. And it was like it was happening in slow motion when she had asked Sei her question. "Who will contact us?" Sei got a surprised look on her face and then she covered it with a strained smile, "Everything will work out, so please...try to get some rest." Did Sei know who was going to contact them? She shouldn't know, but Sei was well informed, maybe she had already figured it out. Maybe she had already solved the case and maybe this was all some bad dream and she was supposed to wake up now. "Do you know who'll contact us? It's one person; the voice in my head was one person. It wasn't a ‘they'." She said, and the doctor present was nodding at Sei and moving closer to her. "Miss, I think your friend should go lie down. It's been a long day. It would do her some good to get some rest." And for some reason she couldn't stop talking about the voice, that thing that had harassed and taken away the most precious thing in the world to her. If only she had talked about it before...like this! Then maybe...maybe Meg would have been spared. "It's gone now. But it was there." She pleaded with Sei and the woman had her hand on her shoulder and was helping her up. The doctor came up to her other side, but Sei told him she could handle it. When he was gone, Sei had gripped her shoulder harder than necessary and she flinched because the skin there was still bruised and un-healing, like the wounds in her heart. "I believe you. I believe you, Jo." Sei had said, her voice not wavering at all, but firm, steadfast and Jo hadn't known it was even possible for such a thing to give a person hope. The sound of another person's voice, it had always been secondary to a person's actions to her, but right now, right at this very moment that wasn't the case anymore, because when Sei had spoken again, confident and resilient like steel. "We're getting her back." Jo had believed her wholeheartedly. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A/n: Jo's going through shock, I wanted to portray this because I wanted to show the big difference between Jo pre-relationship with Meg and post. Jo's a human, even though she isn't perceived that way in the anime. I also wanted to show what Sei's fundamental role in the group was. Sure she's the leader and the financial backer, but she also seems like the emotional support for the rest of them.
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