Takashi wakes up early in the morning. Waking up in a strange room on a boat is wierd. Remembering how he got there is even wierder. Trying to walk across the room, staggering instead, and feeling like you still got hit by a truck is also strange. It's probably not long until Ami finds him again. Which is good, because he gives up getting out of the door and sits on the bed.
"I should be better by now." he mumbles to nobody but himself. He turns to look at his hand, and sees the wound from last night still visible and fresh. Barrier lab gloves. He needed barrier lab gloves.
Then he lets out a massive, massive sigh.
Unfortuantely for Takashi, Ami is exhausted. Emotionally, physically, mentally, the poor girl doesn't get enough sleep on a good day. Yesterday was not a good day. And the couch is doing no favors to her. Curled up on it with a spare blanket, Ami is still draped in the same dress she wore last night, though there's now a run in her hose, and the dress is all wrinkled.
But the door is open, so at least he at least could call to her, if it's really urgent. Otherwise, she's liable to sleep for another hour or two. Maybe even three!
It's a little bit before he moves from that bed. She said he could call him if he needed her, but Takashi isn't going to admit that he /needs/ anyone for anything. He does wonder where she /is/ though. After a few moments of wondering, he starts wandering, instead. Remembering what she said, he keeps to the upper area.
The sun hits him pretty hard through a window. "Go away." he says jokingly at it. The he passes by the room with the couch and tilts his head. Explains where she is.
He leans back against the wall after sneaking in. Looking at her. Trying to place her. She was obviously magical. He remembered the subspace jump. And she brought him here. And he presumes that thick fog was her doing as well. It grates at him, not knowing. He hadn't noticed a device. He could only assume if he'd seen her somewhere else, it was the same way people who'd seen Riventon couldn't connect the dots. Or how Madoka didn't recognize Frost Knight.
It was wierd, trying to figure out where he was. Not on this ship, but in the world. With Ami asleep, he looks at his hand. And for just a moment, there's some wisps of blackness there. But they're not as strong as they used to be.
They hadn't been that strong since the magical artist girl had blasted him. But it hadn't stopped him from making an impact near that Jewel Seed. He takes out his phone and considers telling people where he is but... they'd worry. Ayana especially. He doesn't want her to worry about his injuries. She always did. So he puts the phone back in his pocket.
And now, he regards Ami - the girl, without the magic. She'd gone through a lot, and she didn't know him at all, really. She didn't know what a threat he was. Was he a threat to her? After she saved him? He wasn't sure of that,either.
And then his legs gave out and he fell over. Loudly.
Ami sleeps peacefully as she can on a couch on a ship in Tokyo Harbor. The dark energy he channels as he considers his own hand doesn't even faze her; either she cannot sense it (which likely means there's no magical device to warn her), or she isn't bothered by it (which would have altogether more disturbing connotations).
Ami drifts alone, standing bare poised above a perfectly still ocean. Ami stares out at an infinite expanse of nothing, with beautiful pink and white clouds overhead. "Mercury," calls a voice over her shoulder.
"Who's there?" asks Ami in her dream. She turns towards the voice, and spots herself, standing in the Mercury fuku, hovering just an inch over the water. "Sailor Mercury?" she asks confused, of herself.
"Mercury," says the fuku-wearing form of herself, "You're not alone. You are never, ever alone. Your friends love you, and even when you fight, it is because they care very much about you."
"But there's so much," Ami counters, as her uncertainty and her doubts begin to overwhelm her.
"And there will be so much more," Mercury's soldier replies. "And that's why you cannot allow yourself to seccumb to feelings of loneliness or fear. Sailor Venus, Sailor Moon, Sailor Mars and Sailor Jupiter love you. And they believe in you, Sailor Mercury. You are not alone."
Ami reaches out for the phantom of herself, as if desperate for some physical contact from the wra--
WHUMP
Ami awakens with a start and looks around the room. "Takashi-kun!" she says, shaking off the exhaustion and the dream as she rushes to his side. "What are you doing up? You should still be in bed, if you cannot walk." She hastily checks him for new injuries, as if worried he might have broken something in his fall. "You should have woken me up if you needed something," she scolds.
"I thought I was fine." he says, looking up at her. There's a change in terminology, there. It's past-tense. So maybe for the first time (including when he went flying through the window) he's admitted to that much. "I was walking... leaning... okay I was stumbling..." he admits "until you know. I wasn't." he says, his hand doing a sweep of his body as if saying 'behold, I am now on the floor'.
"I didn't want to wake you up, either. I've been a burden on you enough." he adds. Takashi /hates/ saying that, admitting it, and he screws up his face. Some of it's not bravado or pride so much as feeling like he's a failure keenly now. When Ayana takes care of him, she's part of him - that means in a roundabout way it's still sort of self sufficent. But this girl isn't part of him. Isn't part of UMBRA.
And he's relying on her right now.
Then there's a small voice that might not even be immediately recognizable as Takashi's. "You put yourself in danger to save me. If he'd seen through the fog cloud, or if you'd taken too long..." he says quietly.
Ami growls a little and reaches up like she's going to slap Takashi. But then she stops, and puts her hand gently to his cheek. "Goodness gracious, you're burning up," she says, then hastily puts his arm over her neck and shoulders, and lifts him back to his feet.
"Back to bed," Ami says in a no-nonsense tone of voice. She helps him there, then drops him onto the sheets and reaches up to rub at her face. "Coat off. Shirt off. Pants off after you are under the covers. I'm going to find some tylenol while you get situated again."
Then she turns to flounce away. But the workers are here, and she can hear them, which means sneaking through the halls in her stocking feet requires much more stealth and care than normal. It will be a few minutes before she returns.
Oh. A fever. That makes a degree of sense. He can chalk some of these strange thoughts up to his head being on fire. That's really helpful. So he follows her instructions, and is laying under the covers waiting for hert to come back.
He talks the moment she returns. "It's strange, being here, sick, lying in a bed, knowing people are going about their business just below us..." he says after a pause. "Except for the sick and less-dressed parts, it's not that unusual, I guess. I spend a lot of time in a world people will never know, even though they're essentially right here."
"...but you never answered my question." Technically, Takashi did not /ask/ it as a question, but details. "Why did you put yourself at risk to save me?"
Ami returns to Takashi's side minutes later, but keeps an ear towards the door. Technically there's not much she can do if they get caught. Teleporting them out will leave way too much evidence behind. But still she'd very much like to have some forewarning if they're about to get caught.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Ami hands Takashi a glass of water and a pair of medicine tablets. "Because I'm theoretically a hero," Ami reminds Takashi with a sigh. "But also because I knew what I was doing. I didn't put myself at risk. I know Endymion's strengths and his weaknesses. When Sailor Mercury raised that fog, I knew it would buy me time to portal you out. He cannot chase my teleports unless he has something to find me by. I think that's why he gave me his glasses: just in case I tried to run. So I gave those back to him, and then I opened the portal. I suspect Sailor Mercury fought him off from there, but in all honesty I just wanted to get you out to safety so I didn't watch. I'm not ... exactly the most capable in a fight. I analyze the problem, devise a strategy based on the strengths of my allies, and then I pray they can implement it effectively. Not exactly Sailor Scout or Pretty Cure material."
The lies come so easily. Why do they come so easily? And why, still, does she feel it necessary to hide from him? Perhaps it's because of Daisuke; even if things worked out okay, she still feels like she let her friends down.
Maybe that's why Venus doesn't trust her.
Ami starts a little at the realization, putting a hand to her mouth. But she shakes the thought away a moment and looks back to Takashi. "I will always put myself at risk to save people whom I care for," Ami notes. "That includes my chess partner, even if he's being an idiot."
"Theoretically?" he asks. "Theoretically a hero?" he says a second time, musing over it, rolling the words around in his mind after saying them out loud. "Most people would consider themselves a hero, and the few that don't, know where they stand." He factors himself as the latter. "I don't think I've ever heard someone claim to be theoretically a hero before."
He puts the pills in his mouth and takes them with the water. "Sailor Mercury fought him off? I didn't see any Sailor Anythings. I know what they look like." he says cryptically.
Then he shrugs. "Of course, I was busy flying through a window so for all I know Izanami and Izanagi could've showed up, I guess." He looks over to the window. "It all doesn't seem right though..." he sighs. "I hope... something can be done. About all of this. It's too much, it's too dangerous. I'm a fighter but I can't..." he stops. Fever or no fever he's not going to out his /real/ identity.
So he just sighs. "I didn't look like much of one yesterday, I guess. Not with Kyoko, either. People tapping into Dark Energy like that have a hell of an advantage."
"Yes," Ami says to Takashi flatly, "because you were so busy paying attention to everything that was going on around you during that fight. I'm sure you definitely would have noticed the Senshi of Wisdom--who fights with misdirection in a heavy fog--in a heartbeat."
Ami smiles amusedly at him, because of course he's come to the same conclusion. "But yes, I said theoretically. Just because I want to be a hero doesn't mean I have the power to be a hero. I don't kid myself into believing I am something that I am not." Do I?
"Yes, dark energy is an unfair advantage," Ami replies with a faint nod, "which is why I'm really impressed you know so much about it. I'm also very grateful that you gave me your analysis. I have distributed them to Virtue, and I have every confidnence that they will be able to avert a crisis. There are too many pamphlets to prevent it entirely, but they can at least contain and deal with the problem in a safe and controlled manner."
Ami lets out a faint sigh, then reaches up to rub at her nose. "Are you hungry? Or is the fever affecting your stomach too much? I can try and find you something to eat. Another coke, maybe. Clear fluids are better, but your choices there are apple juice and water, and I know how I'd feel about that. But you need calories if you're going to heal--doubly so if your magic is healing you. Despite what everyone would like us to think, magic does not avoid the laws of thermodynamics." Not entirely, anyways. "It just bends them in unexpected ways. You will need energy."
Takashi smirks a bit. "I know how magic works." It's self-assured, prideful - the way he was acting when sniping back and forth with her in chess matches. It's far more /that/ Takashi than the wounded person in the bed, and for a moment, the two almost seem like different people.
He does need energy, and he could take her energy, couldn't he? But he doesn't. Obviously, he's too exhausted to do that. It'd blow his cover, too.
"Dark Energy works wholy differently, you know, that your energy or mine." Now it's Takashi's turn to lie. "It bends different rules. It operates according to it's own rules, but they're... radically different than the rest. Powered by different emotions, too." He's probably not saying anything she doesn't know... but he might be confirming what he does know. "More destructive, at its core. Hostile to life. Get enough of it together and it'll acheive its own malevolent sentience - youma."
"I'm not supposed to be this weak." he states after a long pause, clenching his fist. The word weak upsets him, when applied to himself. "Chiba shouldn't be that strong. Not in that way. It's wrong for him. It oozed wrongness." But it's not wrong for Takashi, is it? That power is right for him, he was born with it, after all.
"Maybe I'm kidding myself too, though." he adds, quietly. That's his greatest fear - that he's not as strong as he was told, as he should be, that he won't leave his mark.
"...a soda would be nice. I'll pass on the apple juice and water. More calories for the magic to burn anyways."
Ami reaches up to touch Takashi's forehead, then nods and stands to step away. She'd prepared for this, though, when she went to fetch the tylenol. She's gone for only two minutes before she returns with a small smorgasboard of vendor food. A coke, a steaming cup of noodles in chicken broth, and napkins. These are set on the bedside table before Ami sits down on the side of the bed again.
"He isn't that powerful, normally," Ami confirms gently. "I know his signature well. I've studied it many times. There was a time we thought he might be a villain, back before they took hold of him. It would be terrifically amusing if it weren't so tragic to see him as an actual villain, now. But I don't think we should talk about Mamoru Chiba, Takashi-kun. It makes you angry, and you don't need to be angry. You need to rest, and recover."
Takashi smiles when she treturns with the food. He opens the coke as he looks at her. "You're probably right, he does make me angry." he says, taking a drink. "but don't give me any of that rest in silence crap." he adds. "I appreciate that you might even be right, but the worst thing in the world is being bored. None of my equipment's here, I can't test any of my theories, and there's no books." he says, gesturing to the room.
"I know I'm asking a lot... and it's not that I don't appreciate what you've already done but..." he takes a drink. Then he sits it down and takes a drink of the can of noodles. "...would you stay here with me? I'm sorry for upsetting you last night. I didn't mean to upset you."
Ami arches her brow at the request, then shrugs just faintly. "I'd already planned on it," she admits. "I'm not needed to deal with the zombies. I can't project that waveform you showed me, and they already know what to do. I would probably get in the way." Actually she could probably do a lot, but she already told Usagi she had something to deal with.
"I might leave for a few minutes, though," Ami notes with a faint smile. "A chess set would be nice, and I know where to get one relatively quickly."
Takashi smiles upon hearing that she'd planned on it - and then he comments. "Yeah, I guess Sailor Mercury and the others will be out there dealing with them." It's just the name on his mind from the earlier talk - otherwise he could've used the names of any number of heroes who he's encountered on one side or another.
"You know that's not fair. You can't just get your win back while I've got a fever and I'm laid up in bed. I don't think you were /that/ distracted.... but I wouldn't be averse to a game or two I guess. I might learn something while you destroy my exhausted self."
Amu smiles amusedly, then reaches up to check his temperature again. Satisfied that the tylenol is doing it's job, she taps the ramen and says, "Eat. I'll be back in twenty minutes."
It's a promise she intends to keep. Rising, Amu straightens out her pretty dress, then says, "You look terrible, Takashi-kun. But that doesn't mean I have to." At this, she jerks her chin up amusedly, then starts towards the next room so that she can collect her strappy heels and the mercury computer. "Anything else you want me to grab?" she calls over her shoulder. "Books? Laptop? Anything?"
Takashi smiles. "I don't think you look terrible, you know." he adds with a grin. But he doesn't know where to send her to get anything he'd like - certainly not by what passes for his house, not a laptop to connect. But he should ask for /something/ shouldn't he? "If you have a laptop you can let me tinker around with?" he asks, politely. "It's fine if you don't. Secret information and all, I understand." he says.
Then, Ami's gone out the door - It's a long 20 minutes. A /really long/ 20 minutes. Takashi spends the time thinking about... a lot of things. The impending problem tonight - he gets out his phone and sends orders to some of the robo-goons to keep UMBRA on lockdown. He hopes Fate, Ayana, and Euphy will be okay - but all of them have power and should be fine. Then he thinks of Madoka. He... doesn't want her to worry anymore than Ayana, but Madoka doesn't have any powers of her own. After a lot of hemming and hawing, he does something he never imagined he'd do.
The text he sends Madoka reads: "Dangerous stuff tonight. Find Akemi-san and stay close to her." He sticks out his tounge at his phone as he hits send, which is just as the 20 minute mark passes.
Ami returns very much changed, and smelling faintly of lavender. Her hair is still a little wet from the shower she obviously took. The makeup is gone, and so too is the pretty dress. In its place is a white sweaterdress and a pair of black tights. She's traded those strappy heels for a pair of vintage white and black sneakers.
Ami places her bookbag on the end of Takashi's bed, then clucks her tongue and glares at him. "I was going to give you this laptop," she notes irritatedly, "but you didn't even touch the soup I brought you. So you have two choices: I can invert you and feed it to you upside down so you have the choice between swallowing or choking, or you can eat it yourself. I will give you ten seconds to make a decision."
Hmmm. "You still look as pretty as you did when you left, you know." he says, teasingly. And then she's turned and glared at him. He looks at the soup. He forgot about the soup. But there's something horridly... funny? interesting? Intreiguing? about the girl that threatens to choke him with soup.
He leans over and drinks it dutifully, and there's a smirk on his face. "There you are, Doctor Mizuno." he adds. "No need to force feed your patient. That's probably bad for his health." There's a LOT about this exchange he finds funny. Probably more than 'doctor Mizuno' does. "You better hope you never end up injured with ME taking care of YOU."
Ami is too busy blushing furiously to enact her threat. Luckily, he's eating it anyways, so all she has to do is scratch away the itchy uncertainty of her nervousness. "Doctor Mizuno is my mother," Ami notes unhappily as she sinks down to kneel, legs splayed to either side, on the ground beside the bed. "You're such a jerk," she mumbles, then starts digging into the backpack.
She hands Takashi an old laptop with virtually nothing on it, then puts her cell phone down on the table. It's already set up to act as a hotspot, and the laptop set to connect. "I swear to god, I'm never going to let you take care of me." Promises promises.