Sanctuary

Chapter Twenty One - Kagerou

Call disconnected.

The words flashed across the screen of the HMD and Kagerou cursed and punched the nearest wall. She immediately regretted the motion, hissing and shaking her left hand as the pain started.

"How's the kid?" Michio asked, managing to sound entirely devoid of any actual concern.

"Infected." she sagged back onto the bed, near the nightstand this time, and fiddled with the HMD in a desperate attempt to call back.

No signal.

"Health!" Kagerou cursed, but she struggled with the buttons of the HMD anyway. "Don't give me that you ridiculous pair of glasses, there's only no signal when Sera doesn't want there to be signal!"

Her eyes focused on something distant and Michio looked away, as if that counted as giving her privacy. She buried her face into her hands, though her eyes were still stubbornly dry in the wake of her shock. "Go on," she muttered to Michio through her palms, "say it."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Why not? Isn't that what you do? Wait for me to fuck something up and then rub it in my face?"

Michio was silent. Kagerou wasn't.

"Go on! Tell me how I could have saved her! Tell me again how I let her go, how it's my fault she's dead! Tell me I never cared for her! How could I have?! Go on!" She was standing again, the tears finally coming in a hot blurry mess. The sorrow, the loss, and the fury made her voice tremble, but she continued to shout.

"Tell me I'm heartless! Make it true!" The last sentence echoed off the empty walls of the small room, as did the slamming sound of her palms hitting flat against the nightstand. Her emotions filled the space like liquid, but Michio didn't even flinch at the sound. His face softened when her tears finally came. She sobbed in a trembling breath, watching him, waiting for him to say something—anything.

"I'm sorry," was his quiet response. There was a glimmer of sincerity in his voice that caught Kagerou off guard. It seemed to calm her and she sagged in over herself, the life draining out of her. She looked away and wrapped her arms around her chest. Her lip trembled as she forced herself to go numb again. She let the loss spread through her, draining the warmth from her body. There was a pins and needles feeling in her very being.

"I got information, though. Not a lot of good without proof, but it's a start. I can work to prove it. It's a start." Her voice was purposely flat. She couldn't let herself feel anything.

"Kagerou. . . you don't have to do this now. How about you go back to bed. Get some rest. Take some time. You don't have to prove anything tonight." Michio's voice was oddly comforting. He was being understanding. She wasn't used to it.

"They want war?" she continued, ignoring him. "I'll give them war." She lunged for her bag, but Michio grabbed her arm. She pulled away with a jerky motion, still furious at him for a reason she couldn't seem to place.

"Later." He slid her bag out of her reach with his foot, casually, as if she couldn't see him do it. "But right now you're hurting. You need to process everything. You need sleep. You need to take care of yourself, maybe have one of the nurses down here at least clean your wounds and wrap them properly." He gestured to the makeshift wrap on her arm, the dirt stained remnants of her shirt tied around the wound the best haphazard knot she could manage with one hand.

"I thought you said you were in!" she snapped at him, not entirely sure when her numbness had rolled straight back to anger. "Why are you hesitating!? They took everything from me! They took everything from you!"

"Not everything." Michio nodded his head to the door of his room. "I have this place now. I have this entire community of people to protect. I want to help you, I do. But I won't put their lives at risk. We need a plan. We need the level headed calculating Kagerou, not the Kagerou that's grieving and wounded and sleep deprived. We'll talk about this later."

"Nami," Kagerou blurted, turning from Michio to stare at the wall.

"What?"

"We need to talk to Nami. Senna's mother. She needs to know. About Senna, about Zed..."

"Senna's mother. The woman who lives in the Presidential Tower? Look, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're not making any sense and you're not going to, the state your in."

"Nami knows me. It'll be fine."

"Zed knows you. It's suicide," Michio countered and Kagerou glared at him.

"We can break in."

"To the Presidential Tower?"

"Yes." Kagerou stood and Michio stood with her, keeping himself between her and the bag. "I bet I can pull Senna's fingerprints off of the interior panel of the HMD. We can use those to get in." She was muttering it mostly to herself, letting the plan form as she spoke. There wasn't enough room to pace, not with Michio acting like she needed to be restrained.

"We'll talk about it tomorrow. It'll be a few hours yet before the nurses start their shift. Get some sleep, let them look at you tomorrow, and we'll talk about the whole thing over breakfast."

"The fingerprints... what else is there for security? Cameras, people, all of those things are probably standard. But what else? Is there anything else? Health it's been so long since I've been there I'm not sure anymore. But I remember the fingerprint scanner in the elevator." She chewed her lip.

"And you're what? Going to storm in guns a blazing, assassinate the President, and then have brunch with his widow and tell her oh yeah her kid's dead, too? You've experienced a loss, I get it. I'm sorry I yelled at you about not caring, but you're not thinking straight."

Kagerou sank back onto the bed, though she wasn't listening to him anymore. She was trying to recall the layout of the tower. She hadn't been there many times and all of her visits had been more than a decade ago. A few parties, some unpleasant meetings with the council...

Michio was still talking, his voice low, but she didn't care. She was so lost in her own thoughts that she wasn't entirely sure when she laid down. She was even less sure of when she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.