Chapter Text
Kazuichi Soda woke.
There was a ringing in his ears, and somewhere nearby rang the high-pitched, shrieking sobs of a young girl screaming. Shooting pains were racing through his left leg.
“Shut up! I said SHUT UP!” said the blurry shape leaning over him, and smacked him. The screaming warbled a bit when the side of his head struck concrete. Ah. Right. So that was him.
He took a raw, gasping breath, and Fuyuhiko’s voice above him said, “If you start screaming again, I’m going to break your fuckin’ jaw, don’t think I won’t.”
Kazuichi clapped his mouth shut.
“GOD how’d this go so wrong?” Fuyuhiko grumbled. He was scowling, his eye focused on something outside of Kazuichi’s field of vision.
“The bomb was mistimed,” said a flat voice somewhere near that white-hot, stabbing area of the world that was Kazuichi’s leg. He tried to raise his head, and the yakuza pushed it firmly back into the floor, not even bothering to look at him.
“Wow, shit, yes, you think? You think the fuckin’ bomb might have been mistimed? That’s your logical fuckin’ deduction? What the hell would we do without you, Kamukura, and your amazing, brilliant, phenomenal skills of reason, figuring out that the BOMB WAS FUCKING MISTIMED?”
“You asked.” There was a sharp tug on Kazuichi’s leg (oh god, it was broken, it was SO broken, he could FEEL the jagged edges of his broken tibia rasp together) and he whimpered miserably, trying not to scream again, because a broken jaw would not improve this situation.
“Oh shut up, Kazuichi,” Fuyuhiko said again, losing steam. “It’s your own damn fault.”
The world was swimming slowly back into focus. It was dark - not night, but the kind of dusky, gloomy grayness of thick smoke and dust-choked air. Kazuichi was lying sprawled across a tiny island of bare concrete in a sea of rubble. Somewhere far, far above him, the grating creak of steel beams slowly bending echoed through the gaping, hollow cavern of an office building cored by explosives.
“Wha… wha’happen?” was the best Kazuichi could manage, because his head was still ringing and DAMN did his leg hurt.
“APPARENTLY, the bomb was mistimed!” said Fuyuhiko, in a tone of mock surprise. “Who do you think we should blame for THAT?”
“What? What, no! No way!” Kazuichi scrambled to prop himself up on his elbows, and got a brief, swimming glimpse of Izuru Kamukura splinting his leg with a rusted, broken length of metal and the ripped-off, bloodied sleeve of someone’s jacket. (None of theirs, but there was blood seeping through the piled-up rubble to his left and right, so surely there were a lot of jackets in this broken shell of a building that quite suddenly no one would be needing.) The ocean of pain rose up to meet him, and he found himself on the floor again, starbursts dancing in his vision. “AAAAAHHHG w-wait, wait, no, not screaming, not screaming, d-don’t break my jaw!”
“Just hold STILL,” Fuyuhiko commanded tiredly, resting the flat of his hand against Kazuichi’s shoulder and holding him against the chill floor again. Part of the yakuza’s shirt was burned away, Kazuichi realized, and where he could see the skin, there were angry red burn marks all up his arm.
“I…” he tried again, “I didn’t get the bomb wrong, there’s no WAY I got the bomb wrong, I checked and, and double checked and triple checked… this was IMPORTANT, man, you think, you think I’d, I’d get the bomb wrong when I KNEW how important-“
“Well the bomb was WRONG,” Fuyuhiko snapped. “Because if the bomb had been RIGHT, we would have been out of this shithole before it went off, huh? …You’re tearing up. Don’t you fuckin’ cry on me, Kazuichi, don’t you dare fuckin’ cry right now!”
“I’m not crying!! There’s… smoke! My eyes are watering! AGH, stop TUGGING ON IT!”
Fuyuhiko rolled his eye. “You hear that, Izuru? He doesn’t want it splinted. Guess he just wants to lie here and DIE ON THE FUCKING FLOOR.”
“Hm,” said Izuru, ignoring him.
“Seriously though, why are we even stopping to treat his leg? Be funny if it got infected and fell off.”
“It would be inconvenient if it fell off,” said Izuru.
“Oh, take a shot of despair once in a while. Your problem is that you’re incapable of having any goddamn fun.”
“And yours is that you never think of the big picture,” said Izuru, blandly.
“He’d still be useful with half the legs. He just needs to sit in a garage somewhere and build shit, I don’t know why we even bring him with us on these things. Come on, let’s just fuckin’ drag him. By the leg.”
“Never mind, splint the leg, splint the leg!” Kazuichi whined, and Fuyuhiko grinned briefly and gave his shoulder a little shove.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
They sat in silence for a moment while Izuru finished the splint, and then between the two of them Fuyuhiko and Izuru managed to hoist a sobbing and whimpering Kazuichi onto Izuru’s back, piggyback style. Izuru’s long hair was swept over one shoulder, out of the way, but what little of it Kazuichi could see was tangled beyond redemption and matted with grease and dirt and blood.
“D’you ever wash this?” he murmured into the back of Izuru’s neck, lightheaded and loopy with pain. “Or, like, comb it, ever?”
“You’re delirious,” Izuru said shortly.
“Yeah but DO you?”
“No. It’s monotonous to keep it up every day.” Izuru started walking in a random direction, and Kazuichi rested his head heavily on the other boy’s shoulder.
“Hah. Gross. Amiright, Fuyuhiko? It’s gross. Des… despairingly gross.”
Ah yes, there it was, setting in with beautiful dependability: the fantastic, fantastic drug that was Despair. It didn’t make the pain go away, but somehow it pushed it past some white-hot threshold into rapture. His bomb was a disappointing embarrassment, everyone was furious at him, his leg was broken and it was all he could do not to pass out from the pain that shot through him every time Izuru took a step. Kazuichi half sobbed, half laughed weakly, and Fuyuhiko rolled his eye again, falling into step beside Izuru.
“Well, he’s out of it.”
“Hm.”
“Alright, we’ve gotta get out of here. The Fuck-up Foundation is gonna be swooping down on this place any second to take care of cleanup duty, and I don’t wanna be hanging around when they get here.”
________________
Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu picked his way slowly through the rubble.
It had been a simple, unfuckupable plan. They’d meant to sneak out through the underground parking garage, long before their bomb went off a few stories up, but the exits here were long since buried by an avalanche of rubble. The worst of the wreckage was several stories high; a mountain of steel and concrete and glass and blood and bodies and slowly smoking ashes. The building creaked ominously above them.
They weren’t the only ones still alive, of course. As the wreckage slowly settled there were distant groans, curses, quiet sobbing. A woman, her lower body pinned by a slab of concrete, blood slowly leaking through the dust beneath her, reached out desperately at Fuyuhiko’s ankle as he passed. Distracted and still fuming over Kazuichi’s failure, he kicked her hand away. Izuru, walking a little behind him and burdened by Kazuichi’s dead weight, stepped down hard on her head. Her whimpering went abruptly silent.
“Ugh, when they’re that pathetic, just let them die slowly,” Fuyuhiko grumbled. “We aren’t fuckin’ angels of mercy over here.”
Slowly, they made their way up a steep slope of debris. On what had probably been the fourth floor, Fuyuhiko pulled himself up over the crumbling lip of the massive hole in the floor, and saw a thin glimmer of warm yellow light.
“There’s a window up here,” he called down to Izuru, who was standing with Kazuichi atop the pile of rubble just beneath him. There was the grating sound of Fuyuhiko shifting debris around, and suddenly a shaft of sunlight was streaming down through the smoke. Izuru, standing in darkness, stuck his hand into it and watched with a vague blankness as sunlit motes of dust and flakes of ash eddied randomly around his fingers. Fuyuhiko shuffled around above.
“Aw, shit.”
He was peering out without being seen, his back pressed to the wall beside the window. There was enough screaming panic below to send a little shock of pleasure through him, but Future Foundation helicopters were already swooping down like loud, black, inconvenient vultures. Cursing silently, he crept back toward the gaping cave they’d blasted into the building.
“The-“
“Future Foundation is here, yes, I know,” said Izuru, sounding bored. “It’s well within the parameters of their usual response time. And I can hear the helicopters.”
“Yeah, and what the hell are we gonna do about that, huh? Not exactly easy to sneak out of a fourth floor window with them buzzing around.” He sighed and sat down on the edge of what was left of the floor, his legs dangling down into the abyss below. “Damn, I didn’t even bring a gun, I’ve got a…” He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the concealed blade tucked into the back of his belt. “…Got a fuckin’ bowie knife. This was supposed to be covert.”
“I timed the bomb right,” Kazuichi moaned. “Not my fault. Didn’t mess up.”
“And now we’re gonna have to fight our way out dragging THAT around.” Fuyuhiko gestured at Kazuichi, torn between fury and defeat. “Do some mental calculations for me. How much better are our chances if we leave him to die?”
“Y-you’re not leaving me to die! Right? You’re just saying that?”
“Oh, shut UP, Kazuichi.” Fuyuhiko dropped back down onto the rubble next to Izuru. “Okay. Okay, we’re gonna fuckin’ handle this like adults. The plan is-“
“They don’t know we’re here,” said Izuru.
“Don’t you fuckin’ interrupt me! I’m in charge, alright?”
Izuru gave him a cold look.
“What?? Fuckin’ what, Izuru?”
“Inserting ‘fucking’ into every sentence isn’t making you sound less shellshocked and on the verge of panic. It’s an obvious tell that you’re stressed and acting tough to cover for it, and it’s annoying.”
Izuru caught Fuyuhiko by the arm, a spit second before the bowie knife would have shish-kebab’d his face. He wrapped his fingers around Fuyuhiko’s burned wrist with a slow, calculated pressure. Fuyuhiko hissed through gritted teeth.
“F- Fuck!”
“Try some synonyms.”
“FUCK,” he said louder, and Izuru sighed resignedly and let got of his wrist. Fuyuhiko let the knife drop to his side, his anger fizzling out. Might as well be furious at a brick wall, for all the good it did directing his emotions at Izuru Kamukura.
“That’s a second degree burn.”
“I fu- …I know it’s a burn! I was aware that it was there! It was actually pretty hard to miss, when a big slab of burning drywall fell on it! Have you got anything fu- anything useful to contribute here?”
“They don’t know we’re here,” Izuru repeated, instantly losing interest in both the confrontation and the burn. “They’ll assume this went the way it was supposed to, and we’re long gone. They don’t know the building exploded while we were still inside it.”
“Well… yeah. Of course they think that.”
“So,” Izuru prompted, flatly, almost seeming annoyed at having to spell this out, “They’re not looking for us. We can lay low until they leave.”
“Oh! Yeah! Screw fighting our way out, let’s just wait.”
“Like that plan,” Kazuichi muttered weakly. “Like that plan a lot. Good plan.”
“You would, you fu- …you coward.”
“If that’s your plan, then,” said Izuru, with every bit of his usual emotionlessness. “You’re in charge.”
“Wow. WOW. Izuru Kamukura, that was sarcasm.”
________________
Izuru Kamukura calculated.
They were camped out there on the fourth floor, sitting by the window and waiting while their shaft of light slid slowly upward and reddened in the dying light. The helicopters still thrummed outside, and a ways below them was the sound of Future Foundation rescue workers sifting through the detritus of their attack.
Working their way upwards. Ten minutes before this little hiding spot was discovered. Less, if they correctly identified the injuries of the woman whose head he’d crushed, and narrowed their search. The introduction of that variable made the whole thing a little more interesting, a little harder to calculate. But the waiting was dull. Like a radio tuning out, Izuru lost interest.
His eyes shifted slowly to Kazuichi and Fuyuhiko.
Pain, too, was a hard thing to calculate. A pleasant unknown, in a world of flat, predictable order. Fuyuhiko was sitting sullenly against the wall and cradling his rapidly blistering arm. (He’s trying not to be obvious about it. Trying by habit to balance those specific societal expectations that fit neatly together into the persona of a yakuza, and forbid him from showing any weakness. But his teeth are clenched a little too tightly, and his posture is tense and withdrawn. It’s a shame we as a culture have no quantitative measurement for pain.) Kazuichi, propped up next to him, was white faced and barely conscious, murmuring faintly to himself. (Dreaming of a father who used to batter and break him; that much is easy to predict. How boring.)
Again, what had briefly seemed interesting slipped away, and left his head a dull, white void. Izuru stared blankly ahead.
“What are you looking at?” Fuyuhiko grumbled.
“Nothing.” Roughly nine minutes now, based on sounds of the rescue effort below. (He’s going to assume I’m concerned about his burn, and get defensive. “My arm is fine.”)
“My arm’s fine, alright?” Fuyuhiko spat, and shifted his body to hide the blistering skin from Izuru’s line of vision. Izuru averted his eyes, and stared at a spot on the cracked and crumbling drywall instead. (How long before the building itself loses structural integrity and collapses completely? Interesting. Requires Architect, Physicist, Demolitionist, miscellaneous others. Remember blueprints, building codes, era of construction, placement of incendiary devices. Start calculations on that.)
“Ugh, screw Kazuichi, seriously,” said Fuyuhiko, nudging Kazuichi’s broken leg with a knee and getting a pained whimper out of him. “How the hell do you mess up your own talent this much?”
(He’s found the puzzle,) Izuru thought, interest briefly flaring. (The contradiction between what should have happened, and what did. Can he solve it?) “How do you think?” he said aloud.
Fuyuhiko glared at him. “Heh, bet you already know, with that six million dollar brain of yours. You’ve probably already figured out exactly what went wrong.”
“Yes. I know what went wrong.”
“Well good fuckin’ job warning us about it!”
“Hm.”
“S… sabotage,” Kazuichi managed, eyes still closed.
(Bingo.)
“Don’t you shift the blame like that,” Fuyuhiko growled.
(Frustration,) Izuru thought, in between math equations. (Will manifest in mockery. Anger. Will peter out with doubt.)
“Oh, it’s not my fault you guys, I got the bomb right you guys. The HELL you did,” Fuyuhiko mocked, venting to himself more than to Izuru. “He’s gonna sit there and claim he didn’t screw up this whole thing, like the bomb just MAGICALLY went off? I mean, is he just incompetent, or is he actively trying to sabotage us, here?” He sighed; deflated a bit.
(Doubt. “Maybe it really was just an accident.”)
“I dunno… maybe he’s right. Maybe it really was just an accident. Shoddy wires or something. I just… this was supposed to be easy. You know? This was supposed to be a fun one.”
(He’s incorrect,) thinks Izuru. (An easy puzzle, but in the end he couldn’t solve it. Boring. “Peko is going to kill me.”)
“Heh, if I survive this, Peko’s gonna kill me for doing this without her-”
“Can you shut up?” Izuru said blandly, still mentally calculating the odds of the building falling on them. It wasn’t as if he needed the silence, but he knew exactly how Fuyuhiko was going to process this whole situation. He didn’t need to hear it twice.
Fuyuhiko’s eye widened, slowly turning livid. “What, am I distracting you from staring at nothing?”
“You’re just boring me. You don’t need to speak.”
(He’s favoring his burnt side, so he’ll swing the knife with his left arm. The torso would be ideal… no, he’ll go for my face again, and won’t care that he’s being predictable. He wants to maim, not kill. It’s an empty gesture of dominance, a display of discontent. He’s already expecting me to catch it.) Izuru, still sitting calmly against the wall, caught Fuyuhiko’s wrist again as the yakuza lunged across the floor. His good arm, this time. (He’s learning.)
“Hmph.” Fuyuhiko wrenched his arm free and sat back again, sullen.
The last set of calculations finished, and a timer began to tick down inside Izuru’s head. His eyes flickered upwards toward the ceiling - the creaking, groaning strain of metal on metal. Waiting. Expectant. Yes, right about… now would probably be the most entertaining time to drop this little factoid. He looked back calmly to Fuyuhiko, still sulking against the far wall.
“I’m going to share two interesting facts with you,” he said.
“I cannot fuckin’ wait,” the yakuza answered, deadpan.
“The first,” said Izuru, that clock in his head ticking rapidly, “Is that in roughly five seconds, this building is going to lose all structural integrity and collapse on us.”
For a split second, Fuyuhiko’s mouth flapped open in a wordless gape, and before he could stammer up the inevitable, baffled “what the hell” that Izuru could already see forming in his head, Izuru was powering on ahead of him with: “And the second, is that I’m the one who sabotaged our bomb.”
Fuyuhiko’s furious scream was drowned out by the shrieking scrape of something precarious and vital finally folding in on itself and snapping, and as the yakuza leapt forward, knife first, the floor beneath them heaved in time with a sudden, accelerating roar of cascading thunder: several hundred thousand tons of metal, concrete, and glass avalanching down on top of them.
(He’d been right. It really was interesting, right up until very suddenly, it wasn't.)
________________
Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu opened his eye with a groan.
He was outside, the sinking sun a pale red half-dome on the horizon of a sky choked white with pollutants and dust. The helicopters still hummed in the distance, and there were shouts, the sounds of surviving rescue workers and injured innocents scrambling back into some semblance of order. He could see none of it through the reddish haze of dust still hanging thick in the air. It was all very far away, somewhere outside of Fuyuhiko’s aching, stunned little world half buried in rubble.
“…He threw me,” Fuyuhiko mouthed disbelievingly, as memory crawled slowly back. “I jumped at him with the knife and he just grabbed me and threw me out the window.” And, as he sat up slowly, dirt and detritus showering off of him, he had to admit that the timing, the strength, the angle of the throw, had been perfect. His descent had been hidden from the Future Foundation’s eyes by the billowing clouds of dust thrown up as the building fell, and somehow, he’d fallen four stories and landed miraculously unscathed. “Fuckin’ Izuru Kamukura.”
The sounds of pained sobbing, interspersed with bouts of frantic giggles, led Fuyuhiko to Kazuichi, who was curled up in the fetal position a few yards away, eyes wide and swirling with the madness of despair. Fuyuhiko stumbled over to him through the piles of debris. Reached out to shake him by the shoulder, was met only with more gibbering.
“Come on, snap out of it. Kazuichi. Kazuichi Soda, wake the hell up and tell me where Izuru is.”
Kazuichi giggled again, eyes rolling back into his head, and Fuyuhiko threw up his hands in defeat. “Fine. You know what? I’m leaving you here.”
He walked away.
He walked back and, with quite a lot of effort, hooked his good arm under one of Kazuichi’s and started to drag him.
“Taking you to Mikan. Better than you deserve.”
After a moment, in a voice strained with exertion, he amended that with: “Okay. The bomb wasn’t your fault. You did… fuckin’ okay. I guess.”
Another slow moment of dragging the mechanic across the ground, navigating through piles of wreckage, twisted chunks of rebar and concrete bigger than the both of them.
“…Don’t let the compliment go to your head.”
They made it a few more yards when Fuyuhiko spied Izuru Kamukura pulling himself free of yet another massive heap of what used to be office building. “Hold that thought,” he told Kazuichi breathlessly, letting him drop the ground again. “IZURU KAMUKURA YOU BASTARD!!”
Izuru looked up blankly just in time to see Fuyuhiko careen into him in an enraged tackle, wrapping his arms around Izuru’s abdomen and sending them both sprawling to the ground. Another little cloud of dust was kicked up around them. Izuru, lying on his back, blinked at him slowly.
“You… you sabotaged the bomb? You fuckin’ SABOTAGED THE GODDAMN BOMB!! Why? Why the hell?? Because you were bored, because it’d only be interesting if there was a risk of fiery explosive death?” Izuru was still staring at him, silent, and a hysterical laugh crept into Fuyuhiko’s voice, riding the wave of anger and resignation and despair that was rapidly creeping up from the pit of his stomach. Because of course that was why. Of course Izuru would do this; this whole misadventure was essentially just one of Izuru’s goddamn Soaps.
“I don’t even know why I’m surprised! Don’t even know why I’m mad! Of course Izuru Kamu-fucking-asshole-kura got bored and tried to get us killed, why else would you even have come? I was stupid to think you just wanted to have a good time, blow up a few buildings with us, ruin somebody’s day. Izuru Kamukura doesn’t do guys! Night! Out!!”
He pulled back his good arm, a furious, heavily telegraphed punch that was more show and strutting than an actual attempt at vengeance, but Fuyuhiko threw all his weight into the followthrough anyway, because screw Izuru. Izuru’s hand came up to catch his wrist again, just a second too late, and Fuyuhiko’s own hand shot past it and punched Izuru in the jaw, hard enough to make his own knuckles sting and Izuru’s head snap to the side and smack against the ground.
Fuyuhiko, still sort of straddling Izuru, realized he was was breathing hard; they both were. Somewhere nearby, Kazuichi gave a sharp bark of laughter that turned into a sob as he bit it off.
“You hit me,” said Izuru.
“You deserved it, and you let me hit you.”
Izuru slowly propped himself up on one elbow, staring down blankly at the hand he’d started to raise to stop Fuyuhiko. “You hit me?”
“Yeah, I fuckin’- What the hell, Izuru, you didn’t have to take the punch if you didn’t want to. You never do anything you don’t want to, which is one of the many qualities that make you the most infuriating and terrible person on the planet.”
Izuru blinked again, slowly and deliberately, and it seemed suddenly to Fuyuhiko that he looked less blank and more dazed. “You hit me,” Izuru repeated, the words slurring slightly, and the burning, growing rage careening down the highway that was Fuyuhiko’s hindbrain hit an abrupt speedbump and flipped its car.
“You… did let me hit you, right?”
A drop of blood ran down Izuru’s brow, leaving a thin red trail that ended when it got caught up against a long, matted hank of bangs. Izuru touched it and pulled his hand away, staring at the blood on his fingertips. Dazed had become confused. “Something…” he began, faintly, “Something hit me, when the building came down. I’m… disoriented.”
“Shit,” whispered Fuyuhiko.
“I’m going to throw up,” announced Izuru, with significantly less confusion, and “SHIT,” said Fuyuhiko again, scrambling off of him and grabbing a handful of Izuru’s hair, yanking it quickly out of the way as Izuru leaned over and retched up the contents of his stomach. With the hair pulled aside, Fuyuhiko could suddenly see it clearly: the thin, silvery scar running just below Izuru’s hairline, now split open and rapidly welling up with red as another few lines of blood joined the first.
“Oh, that can’t be good.” The anger had petered out entirely, making way for the beginning tendrils of panic. Because saboteur or not, Izuru was far too valuable an- (Ally? Co-worker?) -an asset for this to be happening on Fuyuhiko’s watch. One hand still holding Izuru’s hair back, Fuyuhiko squatted down in front of him. “Hey. Hey, how many fingers am I holding up?”
“All of them.”
“Yeah, well, that hand’s burned, I don’t want to bend them. Hey, no, look at me. Tell me what year it is, or who the Prime Minister is or some crap.”
Izuru dazedly put a hand to his temple again, wiped away the blood that was streaming down his face. “I should have been able to… to keep track of the trajectory of… even if I missed something, my luck… This shouldn’t have been able to happen.”
“Focus, you asshole! What’s your name, give me your name.”
Izuru looked up at him at last, eyes utterly distant and disoriented. “H… Hajime… Hinata?”
“Yeah, shit, wow, that is definitely a bad sign.”
Izuru threw up again.
Panic crawled upward from Fuyuhiko’s gut. Despair as well, writhing and wretched and inviting, but the yakuza pushed it back again, forcefully. He was now officially the least injured person in the group. He could not afford to follow Kazuichi into the glorious high of Junko’s Glorious Low. And he needed to prove a point to Izuru Kamukura about his ability to prioritize the big picture once in a while, there was always that. “Okay, well, I’m still pissed at you and when all this blows over we are going to have WORDS. But at this point I’m pretty satisfied to call this reaping what you sow, so… stay there for a second and enjoy your karma. I’ll be right back, and we’ll… figure out how to get you both to Mikan, I don’t know.”
He stood up, walked a few feet toward Kazuichi, and then looked back over his shoulder anxiously. Izuru had managed to push himself upright, and was sitting with his forehead on his knees, his shoulders rising and falling just a little too rapidly. “Your own damn fault,” he emphasized, without much conviction.
When he turned back around, there were figures emerging from the haze of dust just beyond where Kazuichi was twitching on the ground. Three of them, in snazzy black suits with that stupidly sci-fi silver logo on the lapels, the rest of their bodies hidden by steel toed boots, gas masks, and heavy work gloves.
“Oh,” said Fuyuhiko.
“Shit,” said Fuyuhiko.
His hand strayed to the knife at his back, gripped the handle tensely. They were closer to Kazuichi than he was. One of the rescue workers waved.
“-Told you I heard somebody over here. Hey, don’t panic! We’re with the Future Foundation, we’re here to help,” the one who’d waved called out, completely and utterly failing to recognize three of the Remnants of Despair.
(And why should they? The identities of the Remnants of Despair were not common knowledge. Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu was the name of a missing, presumed dead high school student, not a global terrorist.)
Fuyuhiko swallowed stiffly, wondering if, with his injured arm, he could fatally stab them all fast enough to stop one of them from screaming and bringing the rest of the Future Foundation down on their heads. His tension must have been broadcasting pretty clearly, because the Future Foundation goon who’d spoken quickly raised their hands in a placating gesture, as if he were a frightened animal. “I swear, it’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. We’ve got a shelter set up near here; there’s food and water and medical supplies. You’re gonna be okay now.”
Fuyuhiko’s eye flickered from Kazuichi, curled up and whimpering, to Izuru, blood still rushing down his forehead and staining the knees of his pants as he pressed his face to them. And his own arm was burning, threatening to drag him under with despair, and Mikan Tsumiki…
…was a long ways away.
His hand slowly loosened on the hilt of the bowie knife.
“My…" (Allies? Co-workers?) "My friends are hurt. Bad. The whole place came down and we… We need help.” Fuyuhiko took a shaky breath, wiped sweat and dirt from his face, allowed the panic he’d been fighting to stain his voice. Just another frightened survivor. “Damn but we really need help.”