With regard to “reducing” dislocated joints:
Normally, when somebody dislocates a joint, it’s best not to attempt to force it back into place, a practice commonly known in the medical community and among its constituents as “reducing.” With a wrist, this is doubly true, as the wrist is an extremely delicate joint, meaning that even if a reduction is attempted, it may only make it worse.
However, in cases where it’s obvious circulation has been cut off to the hand, and no medical attention is available, it may be prudent to, very delicately, at least attempt to unpinch the vein that’s been blocked.
(End medical spiel)
I am your spoken truth / I am the light in you / I’m here to make you shine / in everything you do / I am your lighted way / and I’m your darkest day / I’m here to help you see / you can rely on me
Death will come when I’m good and ready
I am / My Letter #4
The man with the raspy voice felt no guilt about Minoru Alder. Perhaps if he’d known the truth about the death of his partner, he would have, but it would not have changed Minoru’s fate. Period. His word was his word. It was not befitting for a commander to make exceptions for his subordinates, for any reason. Especially not for a subordinate who had now killed one of his other subordinates.
Yes, he had killed…what was his name again?
The man mused for a moment, came up with nothing.
He had killed his subordinate and then fled. That made him both a coward and an enemy. Charges of cowardice alone were enough to earn him a death sentence.
His desertion, however, did not faze the man in the slightest. Nothing did. He had many more subordinates than merely Minoru, his partner, and the other one. And he had money in any case; oh, how he had money.
He supposed considering the shattered state of his organization, he should hold onto money more tenaciously, not spend it on more subordinates. But this took precedence, he thought, over paying some old men’s pensions. If they didn’t understand...well, then, perhaps they were cowards, as well.
But the man with the raspy voice was not a coward. Not in any way. He would do it himself if he had to, such was the strength of his conviction.
Not that he would have to, of course. That was what the money was for.
Not that this had done him any good. He would have thought that the dumbfuck cornpoke cops not two blocks away would have been alert enough to hear him, or notice the van blazing away at what couldn’t have been anywhere near the speed limit. Or at least, that was what he was speculating; it was surprisingly difficult to be a good judge of speed when your view consisted of a dusty linen floor and a lump of black cloth.
What a dignified way for an old-guard sniper such as Minoru Alder to travel. You deserve it, though; you managed to get yourself caught by a bunch of fucking kids, Minoru, he thought. Nice job. He had even shut up completely as soon as they had thrown the cloth over him. Rolling over.
He had a hard time feeling really bad about this.
Rolling over keeps you alive. Give it time; you’ll get out of this. He thought this with a confidence born of years of Getting Out of This by simply giving it time.
This would be no different. No different.
No different.
He was just getting settled into biding his time when time decided it was done biding him. The van went over what was quite possibly the largest bump he had ever felt while laying, completely incapacitated, underneath a cloth blanket in the trunk of a van. Nobody said anything, in spite of the fact that they had taken it so fast and so hard that there was no way that the van could be wholly intact, but as he landed, he landed on his wrist. Hard. Pain flared and he heard something pop, and he screamed just as the van settled into a stop.
There was a general murmur—really, it was an overarching gasp from all but four of the van’s occupants, but the sudden, flaring pain in his wrist had a parallel effect of stuffing cotton balls into his ears—from in front of him, and he dug his teeth into his lower lip as he rolled off of the wrist, his other hand flying up to clutch it protectively.
His other hand…
Not that Minoru particularly cared, but the sudden motion had broken that massive cramp, like a button to restart a machine. Only this button was his wrist and it was really fucking—
Light as the van of the trunk opened, the blanket was practically thrown off of him, and he found himself staring straight into the face of the girl who had lecherously taken a piss in the middle of the night while he observed the sexy snoring party. Orange-red hair, serious face, big, expressive blue eyes which were presently staring at him with a bizarre absence of fear.
In fact, there was an abundance of melancholy at that moment in those eyes. Oh, look. There is a man hiding under a blanket in the back of our van. How wonderful, this is the perfect addition to this wonderful beach trip. Complete lack of emotion.
She stared at him for a moment, and others began to gather—a boy with faux-blonde hair in a fairly dorky spike-cut; a short girl in braids, a pretty girl with dark hair in a veryurban chic cut, who had her arm unscrupulously and causally draped about a simple-looking sort of girl with long, brown hair.
Standing well behind them, trying to look more nonchalant than a criminal caught walking off with a bag of loot but failing miserably, were his captors.
“Who are you?” the pretty orange-haired girl’s tone was as melancholy as her face, and suddenly, Minoru thought, you poor bastard, a feeling of deep sympathy that he hadn’t felt in years rushing to his head and his heart in an instant. In the next instant, he shoved it back down, helped out by another surge of pain from his wrist.
“My wrist is…I think it’s dislocated.” His voice was very hoarse considering that he hadn’t used it in at least twenty minutes. “I think. I think I need…”
The urban-chic girl peered at him through trendy-ish glasses. “Oh-ho,” she said, her voice positively ripe with a sudden gleeful interest that did not at all hold with the other girl’s mood. “Do we have a pervert stowaway here?”
“Nngh,” Minoru replied, the pain starting to intensify again as his momentary interest in a close-up encounter with the people he’d been looking at through a scope only a night before vanished.
The braided girl, previously looking almost as morose as the orange-haired one, said with a sudden dose of fascination, “I think he’s starting to turn purple.”
Behind them, Natsuki was starting to look a little bit sheepish, trying to casually wander off. Midori grabbed her by the shoulder, a shit-eating grin on her face, shaking her head. Silently, she said, This was your idea. You stick around. A moment later, she turned her head, and said the same thing to somebody that Minoru couldn’t see.
Meanwhile, Minoru was dying of agony and being stared at by a group of teenagers that looked like they wanted to poke him with a stick to see if he’d move.
And they seemed to be taking a fair measure of glee in it, at that. The boy showed a measure of concern on his face, but it wasn’t a big one. They all thought he was a fucking pervert. A peeping tom.
“Tell us, mister pervert,” Glasses said, “Just which one of us were you staring at, exactly?”“Mrgh,” Minoru said, marveling at his internal lucidity, especially when faced with his outward incoherency and the NUMBING PAIN IN MY WRIST. He noticed that the very edges of his vision were starting to turn white, and he tried again. “My wrist,” he said, his mouth working slowly, awkwardly, like it had cotton balls in it (it actually came out something like my rischt), “is dislocated, and I feel very much as though I am about to die.” Minoru was not precisely used to pain—snipers didn’t tend to be. As a rule, if you fell under enemy fire, you died or they did. The last time Minoru had heard of a sniper heroically limping home wit a damaged leg was when one of his coworkers in the Sino-Russian conflict had fallen out of a tree. He had weighed about two hundred pounds, and Minoru had thought he’d deserved it.
Glasses only smiled, a bit sadistically. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to stow away in the back of our van, mister pervert.”
Minoru was about to shoot a clever retort back at her, something to the effect of braggh nngh wagh, but before he could, Midori put her hand on urban-chic’s shoulder.
“Chie,” Midori said calmly, her voice a bastion of forced gentility—the kind that was obviously fake—“It’s okay. He’s not a pervert.”
Chie raised an eyebrow at Midori, not used to her leadership. Being fair, Midori wasn’t fully used to Midori’s leadership either, nor would she ever be. That, however, was not something she frequently thought on.
“If that’s true,” Chie said, being careful but quick, “why was he stowing out in the back of our van?” It was obvious that she was more curious about questioning him for details than she was about preserving her own dignity as she said this.
Midori had the grace to look a little bit sheepish in front of Minoru as her brain went into complete and utter lock-up. “Ah…about that, you see…it’s…”
a complicated, heart-wrenching story, with reasons greater and deeper than the Mariana trench
“A complicated…”
that’s what you used to be
cant think can you
cant do shit
anything
“and he-heart wrenching story. With…ah…reasons…”
Chie was staring at her like she was trying to wave bye-bye with a third breast. Midori was going red, but not from embarrassment; she felt like she was giving a lecture with a horrible stutter. She just couldn’t. get. the. words. out.
THINK
cant think thinking means thinking about
THINK
that
Reito was behind her, and his hand was warm on her shoulder. She didn’t move this time, if only for fear of appearing weak in front of the enemy.
“There’s a story behind it, but it’s too complicated to explain, as our …ah,” he frowned, having spoken himself into a corner when he was forced to address Minoru as something. He was silent for a moment.
That moment would have, at this point, taken Midori an hour; when it passed, and the word he was looking for came to him, he continued, “guest appears to be passing out. I think it would be prudent to take him inside now, and perhaps give him something for the pain.”
From his dignified position whimpering and clutching his wrist, Minoru suggested, humbly, “and if any of you know how to fix a dislocated wrist, I’d be most appreciative.”
Midori managed a small grin, and directed it at Minoru. “I think I know somebody who can help you out,” she said. Her voice was strained and quiet, as though pressing against a wall that prevented her from passing a certain volume.
Mai and Chie both frowned, and Chie said, “You do?”
Midori shrugged. “I know people who know people.”
“Who just happen to be in Goza?” Mai said with a little frown.
My best friend’s a doctor, okay? I learn a thing or two. Step off, Midori thought, and then wondered why she refused to simply come out and talk about herself to some of her closest friends.
Once again, it was Reito who stepped in to save her. “We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it.” His voice was confident, cool, his grin wide and trustworthy.
Nobody bought it. “I think what really concerns me,” Chie said, her tone a little hostile, “is why it is that there’s a person in the trunk of this van and you didn’t tell us about it.” It was clear that she was taking this a little personally. There was a fire in her eyes that Mai, at least, had never seen before. Aoi put an arm on Chie’s shoulder, and Chie relaxed a little, but not much. This would have been better for Reito and Midori if Aoi didn’t have the same disbelief in her eyes that the rest of them did.
Where the hell did Shizuru and Natsuki go? Midori glanced around quickly, found that they’d vanished from sight, cursed. They’re probably off somewhere fucking, the goddamn…
She stopped, unable to fathom the depths to which this train of thought drove her bitterness.
What was worse, it wasn’t because they’d ditched out on them at a crucial moment.
It wasn’t even that they had ditched out, she presumed, to go fuck somewhere in a bush.
It was that both of them had found somebody to fuck in a bush. Somebody that wasn’t going to have a heart attack in the middle of the desert. Somebody that
“Um,” Minoru said, breaking the stand-off between Chie and Reito, “I’m glad you guys listened to mommy and daddy when they told you not to talk to strangers or let them ride in your trunk, really I am. I’m sure they’d be proud. But, ah, I don’t know your name,” with his eyes, he indicated either Midori, Reito, or a tree trunk about ten yards back, “but if you do have a friend who knows a friend or whatever, I’d be glad to get some on-site medical attention.”
I wonder how pissed Yohko would be at being called all the way out here, Midori wondered briefly, before Minoru continued, “But unless your friend is a professional orthopediatrician, they won’t be able to do much.”
At this point, Midori noticed that his hand was starting to turn a little blue.
He’s losing circulation to that hand really quickly; he’s going to lose the hand if he’s not careful.
He might be a bastard, but he might not be, too.
But he’s still a god damned person.
She tried to go towards him, to try and get him out of the van and take him somewhere where she could splint his wrist, but her feet locked up. You can’t do it.
The little voice told her, just let Reito do it. He can do it better than you can anyway.
Every self-doubt binge has its limit. That limit usually comes when the little voice in the back of your head, the one that tells you, you can’t do it, you can’t do it, you can’t do it, says something that violates some tenet that you hold so dear to yourself that it becomes utterly impossible to believe the voice anymore. For Midori Sugiura, that tenet that she valued above all about herself was violated here, now. She was who she was, and nobody…nobody…would take away her passion. If she wanted to do something, nobody would do it for her simply because they could and she could not.
Bam.
For a full five seconds, Midori couldn’t see a thing. Her vision dropped out, and the world dropped out from underneath her. But the world wasn’t what was falling; she was. This crutch that she’d been leaning on since the Professor’s death.
It was the crutch of ambivalence. If nothing matters to me at all, if I let anything that wants in attack my body and my mind, then his death doesn’t matter either.
She had let things attack both her body and mind. Men had wanted in, and she had let them in for a night, as they, convinced that she was drunk on what was actually nothing but orange juice, took her in whatever way they, actually drunk, had wanted. Self-doubt knocked on her door, and instead of sneering in its face, she opened the door and took its coat.
Fuck you.
Her feet still moved slowly. Her brain was still sluggish.
But she had changed the current. She was Midori Sugiura, and she had done it all by her fucking self.
Not by yourself. You needed
his
help.
He stands only a bit taller than I do. His hair is
black
graying, and he has a kind of constantly
confident
analytical expression on his face. And he helps me.
I don’t like Reito like I did the Professor. At this point, she had no idea whether that was a lie or the truth. It was simply what she thought, and she could trust it for the moment. She also knew that people didn’t get over things this fast, and that she wasn’t anywhere near out of the woods yet.
That’s all right.
“My friend is a school nurse,” Midori said, digging in the pocket of her vest for her cell phone. “She’s probably treated more dislocated wrists than a professional orthowhatever. Give me two seconds.” Her voice was still a little strained, but her words were flowing again.
“Midori,” Reito murmured, “Are you sure about this?”
“Shut up, Reito,” Midori said lightly, and punched in Yohko’s number, held the phone to her ear, praying that her friend was somewhere near her phone.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Third ring. Always. To make sure they mean business.
“Hey,” Yohko answered, her voice airy and familiar, even with the slightly metallic tone the phone forced onto it. “Thought you were in Goza.”
“I am in Goza,” Midori said. “Listen, are you at all sober right now?”
Minoru got an ugly look on his face; it was the look of a man who had the undeniable feeling that he was hopelessly, irrevocably fucked.
“Almost totally,” Yohko said without a hint of defensiveness. “It’s the break, so I’m sure I’m buzzed from somewhere. Why?”
“I need to know how to reduce a dislocated wrist.”
“Who dislocated their wrist?”
“Nobody you know.”
“And why, exactly, are you talking to me instead of an emergency dispatcher?”
Midori didn’t answer. There was a moment of silence between them. Then, “Are you in trouble, Midori?” Her voice was very serious.
“I’m not sure yet, Yohko. I’m really not. But his hand is starting to turn blue, and I think he’s going to lose it if we don’t do something.”
“And you’re not going to call an ambulance.”
“I would if I could.”
“But you can’t.”
“But I can’t.”
Yohko sighed. “I thought you were going to take it easy for a while.”
“Me too. Are you going to help me out or not?”“The wrist is really delicate, Midori,” Yohko said firmly. “You’re just as likely to fuck it up even further trying to fix it.”
“If we don’t do something soon, he’s going to lose it. It’s pretty bad; I think he pinched a vein.”
“You’re sure?” Yohko said.
“No,” Midori said it as confidently as somebody could be when admitting they didn’t know something.Another sigh. “Fine. First, have somebody go find a stick and something to make a splint with. Medical tape is best, but anything gentle will work.”
Then Midori started dishing out orders, and for a while, anyway, she felt better.
She was still going to fucking kill Natsuki and Shizuru, though.
Shizuru hadn’t stopped holding her hand since they’d gotten out of the van. Nobody had noticed, probably because they were all preoccupied with a strange man in their trunk, but the look in Shizuru’s eyes said that their inattention most certainly was not the reason she was taking the kind of liberties that she was taking.
The look in Shizuru’s eyes said that she was hungry. Natsuki had seen it once before…
in a dream
kimono is loose as she leans in
but she couldn’t put her finger on it; like she’d blocked it out.
“Are you sure you’re okay leaving them like this?” Natsuki asked a little tentatively, testing the figurative mud that she felt she was about to step in, to decide if moving further would drown her or only get her pants a little messy.
Shizuru said nothing; simply led Natsuki on, moving quietly through underbrush and sand towards the cabin.
“Shizuru?”
In reality, Natsuki didn’t think that Shizuru would feel at all bad about abandoning the group up there. What she wanted was for Shizuru to speak. About something; anything. Her silence was more frightening than…
Than when she talks to you about what she wants.
They made it around the cabin, out of sight of the van, and Shizuru stopped moving, her head pointed down, her hair obscuring most of her face. Natsuki stopped as well, trying her best to study Shizuru’s face. Natsuki felt her body tense up and for a moment, there was utter silence; not even the ocean seemed to want to make noise for her. The stillness only made Natsuki want to shiver. To fill the void.
Then, “Natsuki.”
“E…eh?”
“Why did you do that?”
Shizuru looked up, and her face both scared Natsuki and melted her; it was hungry and sad all at once: Hungry by the way her eyes flickered up and down, taking in every inch of her; sad by the way her lip twitched as she did it.
“Shizuru,” Natsuki said quietly, and reached out for her with one hand. Her face was sympathetic, kind, and Shizuru let her hunger take her, fueled by the gentleness in Natsuki’s face, like a lion was fueled by the gentle aura of its prey.
She took the hand and used it to pull Natsuki to her, and in the next moment, Natsuki felt, for the second time that day, Shizuru’s lips on hers. They were warm, moist, and they felt both wonderful and terrible, all at once.
Natsuki kissed her back, even while she considered whether she wanted to or not. It was supposed to be ‘just this once,’ she thought, a little bemused as she felt Shizuru’s tongue press itself onto hers.
Natsuki had no idea what to do with that tongue. She had never really kissed anybody like this before; even their earlier lip-lock had been nothing like this.
She wasn’t sure she was comfortable with it.
It feels wonderful
But it feels terrible, too
She wasn’t comfortable with it.
But if you reject her now, she thought, with somebody specifically targeting her as they are, can you really keep your eye on her? Can you really…
Shizuru broke the kiss, and looked Natsuki straight in the eye, and whispered, “I love you.”
Shizuru did get overzealous on very rare occasions. Ironically, or perhaps not so much so, all of these occasions seemed to involve Natsuki in some way. Shizuru
leans in as I lay there, practically unconscious from the fever ravaging my body.
kissed her again. It was
the first time I’ve been sick in years. But I’m still awake enough to remember the feeling of
sweet; it felt good, mostly somewhere low in her body. The passion warmed her someplace she hadn’t felt warm in for a long time. And yet, something about it, something about
her painted lips on mine. It feels…
wrong
sick.
Natsuki felt a wave of revulsion take her, emanating from her lips and coursing down to her stomach. She felt her gorge rise a little.
If you lead her on and then reject her, she might never
forgive you
let you go, even if you want her to.
But you can’t do this yet.
But she may hate you for it.
But you can’t.
She knew this was true.
But she also knew that she couldn’t say no. So she did something she had never done before: She broke the kiss and copped out. “Shizuru,” she whispered, “not here.”
For a moment, an ugly, dangerous look came over Shizuru’s face, and for that same moment Natsuki was suddenly certain that Shizuru was going to strike her.
Then it passed and Shizuru nodded. “You’re probably right,” she said tautly. “We wouldn’t want to be discovered.”
Natsuki nodded nervously, feeling—no, knowing—full well that she had just dug herself into a hole that she may not be able to escape, and said, “We should get back to the others.” She felt her stomach sink with dread at the prospect of being buried alive in the half-truth she had just told, simply by omission; but something, some small little voice inside of her, told her that there was not a thing she could do about it.
Shizuru nodded, accepting—at a level somewhere near the surface, anyway—Natsuki’s need to be subtle about the two of them for the moment.
She still insisted on holding Natsuki’s hand on the way back up.
A moment later, Reito stood up straight, giving Minoru essentially a piggyback ride. Minoru supported himself with his one good hand, and rested his bad one on Reito’s shoulder. There was a fairly well-fashioned splint already lining the back of his hand, made from a very straight stick and some medical tape that somebody had found in the glove compartment of the van. In spite of this, Minoru’s face was an ugly mask of pain, for which nobody could blame him.
Chie was still looking skeptical and angry, but Aoi was speaking to her in low tones, and with each word, Chie seemed to calm significantly.
Midori cast a glance at Natsuki and Shizuru as they arrived, less angry than she would have expected. They were, indeed, holding hands, but something about the way the whole thing had turned out without their help seemed to calm her. She would have to tie the two of them up and give them a stern talking-to about running off in the middle of a crisis to have sex later, but as it was…
Reito grinned at her as best he could as he carried Minoru down the small flight of steps to the cabin. He had been the one to unpinch Minoru’s vein, in the end; his being the steadiest fingers of all of theirs.
As it was, Midori was sober and satisfied with the way things were, for possibly the first time since they had arrived on that beach.
She could deal with the rest later.
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