[yst] [fic] At the Stars 2/?
did i say "one chapter a week"? i meant one chapter a day.
At the Stars
Part 2
The call was placed on his landline. It was a good thing he was home. He had just come home for a break, after a photoshoot in Timor.
He was separating prints in the basement of his log cabin in Yamanashi when the call came through. The answering machine had picked it up first. He had made sure that the speakerphone would be loud enough to get through to him, so he heard, very clearly:
"Ryo? ...I guess you're out of the country again. As soon as you come back, please get in touch with me. There's something I need your help with and..."
Ryo almost tripped running up the basement stairs.
"Touma!" he screamed into the receiver. "It's been a while! How are you?"
"Ryo...?" The voice hesitated. Ryo did not like that. He had expected a glad friendly yell of "Hey, you're home!" as a response, not this. "I'm all right. I need to speak with you in person."
"Sure, what's up?" Touma even sounded serious. No lame joke, no lame attempt at small talk. It wasn't like him.
"I'll be in Shinjuku this Saturday. Shuu and Shin haven't returned my calls, so I'm not sure they can make it. What about you?"
"I'll be there. And Seiji...?"
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
"11 AM at Miyanokouji Bar. Thanks, Ryo."
The call was dropped before Ryo could say anything more.
For a moment, Ryo stood wondering if he should call back. The familiar number of Touma's apartment in Tokyo was reflected on the caller ID.
But he figured he would get the details on Saturday anyway. He wasn't going to ferret out information that wasn't ready to be given.
Since their armors vanished, and they were free to live their lives the way they wished, it became harder to keep in touch. In a way, Ryo supposed, they had wanted to distance themselves from their past, and not making a serious effort to meet up so they could reopen old wounds, share their war stories was part of that.
They were still good friends, of course. Good friends who sometimes met up, wrote or called - or, in Ryo's case, sent postcards. He was always somewhere, and there was always something beautiful to snap a photograph of, and send to everyone with a rushed scribble at the back: "From the Amazon. Hope you're well. Ryo."
He was never very good with words. He hoped his photographs, at least, would tell his friends he was doing okay for himself.
Seiji, who was good with words, was always somewhere as well. Or, at least, that was what he was told. Touma had told them all during the last reunion, two years ago, that Seiji often traveled for research on his Sengoku-era novels. That was why he had not made their reunions for the last few years.
(Ryo had honestly never known how much legwork was involved in being a world-famous author. Not being a big reader himself, when one said "author" he instantly had a vision of a half-blind eccentric, shoulders hunched with age and lack of social skills, bent over his quill and paper or typewriter or whatever. Someone as good-looking and pleasant and young as Date Seiji definitely did not fit his idea of an "author."
(And yet, Seiji's Sengoku-era fiction was being translated into five major languages, and exported all over the world. Touma assured them that he made a good living off the royalties, and sometimes traveled just for fun.
Ryo was proud of his friend, that was for sure... though he did wish Seiji could take time out to show himself.)
Since their armors went away, it became harder to read each other's feelings. He wouldn't be able to tell if Seiji needed any kind of help, though of course he was concerned.
There was one thing he was sure of, however, with the help of his armor or no: something was bothering Touma. And whatever it was, it had been around for some time.
Ryo wasn't the only one who noticed it. Shin and Shuu had both commented at least once about how Touma always left early during their reunions, and how he would consciously avoid meeting up with any of them unless he absolutely had to. And even then, he would leave early, as if there were things he was carefully trying not to be present to discuss.
It was as if Touma was forcing them into the status of mere acquaintances. It was hard not to worry.
What could be wrong? Was Touma in some sort of trouble? Did he need money? A place to stay? Someone to talk to?
Miyanokouji was quiet. At that time of day, Ryo and Touma were the only patrons - and it seemed Touma preferred it that way. The only other soul, the waiter/bartender, was often distanced, as if used to people using his establishment for shady business it would be better for him not to know about.
That, and/or Touma had bribed him to stay away from their table.
Ryo always felt uncomfortable whenever he knew Touma did that, but he'd learned to stop complaining. Miyanokouji was where they met if they wanted to discuss something private. It was public enough to defy suspicion, but discreet enough to keep their conversations secret.
It was the perfect place to discuss their past as warriors, for example, if no one's apartment was available. But if Touma felt that precautions needed to be taken, Ryo knew he should take his word for it.
He'd hoped Shin and Shuu could make it, but the two were out of town; Shuu on business, and Shin on research. Shin's nature conservation group was going to come out with an anniversary issue that required him to travel, and Shuu had to attend to his family's restaurant's exhibit at a food expo in Chiba. They both promised to get in touch as soon as they could, however.
In the meantime, Ryo welcomed the chance to talk to Touma alone.
This was a different Touma from the one he had hoped to meet. He'd hoped it was all in his head, the weariness that Touma wore around himself like a shroud... but this Touma looked much older, much thinner, with his strangely blue hair grown longer all around, his cheekbones stark and his downturned eyes sunken, sleepless.
In fact, Touma's eyes were the only thing about him that did not radiate exhaustion. But they did not meet Ryo's gaze head-on, like they used to. Like they would if nothing was wrong.
"Ryo," he began slowly, "did you ever feel like the way we look at things has become more complicated since we lost our armor?"
"Complicated?"
"Like..." Touma thought about his words for a bit. "It was much easier to make decisions when we still had our virtues. I'd come to a crossroads, then - just like that, I knew what I had to do. Now..."
A heavy silence lay between them. Ryo hated it. he needed to say something, even something stupid, to make it go away.
"To tell you the truth, man, even when we had our virtues, I never really felt benevolent. I just sort of did stuff and people told me later it was the benevolent thing to do."
That seemed to work. Touma chuckled emptily. "Same here about being wise, I guess..."
There was little room for small talk. Touma made it clear that he would not have contacted any of them if he felt he had other options.
"Basically," Touma said, running one hand through his hair, "I've been blackballed out of the medical industry."
Ryo's eyes widened. Was he hearing this right?
"What?? You?! Why would that happen?"
"Let's just say... I've been less than ethical." And the way he said it made Ryo think that "less than ethical" was actually a mild way of putting it.
His fears were proven right when Touma started to explain: he'd been shirking his duties at the pharmaceutical company he was employed in, deliberately delaying his output so that the officials of the company would give him more time to research.
Of course this meant the pharmaceutical company would investigate. And when they did, they discovered that Touma had been conducting independent lab work at a nearby university after (and sometimes during) office hours, using the data that he had gathered for the research they were paying for. He was not giving them the results they wanted, and he was using his research for personal purposes - the nature of which he would not voluntarily disclose.
Needless to say, said company was not pleased.
"I've become an outcast among my colleagues." Touma relayed all this in a neutral voice. He might as well have been reading out of a diary page he'd rehearsed reading aloud countless times. "I can't say it wasn't my fault. People were already wary of me getting a medical degree all of a sudden, after being this big-shot astrophysicist..." He rolled his eyes as he said "big-shot." Ryo knew well enough how uncomfortable it was for Touma to have been a celebrity whiz kid. "Now that I've been fired, certain people are saying they were right to doubt me all along. If you'll keep your ear on the grapevine, you might catch some pretty shocking lies about me."
"What kind of lies?" Ryo asked quickly.
Touma shrugged. "Things like I stole and sold confidential records. Falsified test results. Slept with all of the CEOs. That kind of lies."
Hearing this left a bad taste at the back of Ryo's throat. But Touma himself seemed unaffected.
Ryo found it strange that all this was happening. Not so much that Touma was bending rules to get what he wanted done - but that he got caught. This was definitely not like him.
"So now I'm in a bit of a bind. My old employer won't press charges, but I still can't get a job in places with decent laboratories. I don't want to trouble my parents... they've been put through enough, with my leaving my old job in Kyoto. My dad..." He let out a small sigh. "Let's just say, he was disappoint."
Ryo grimaced. Touma's sense of humor and its inappropriate entrances...
"Touma..." Ryo leaned forward in his seat, lowered his voice a bit. "You never really answered us when we asked. Why did you have to leave astrophysics for medicine? You know, I don't think I understand everything right now, but..." Ryo's brow furrowed. "Somehow I feel like none of this would've happened if you'd stuck with your old job."
His friend smiled bitterly. The ever-astute Ryo had hit upon a sad fact, and he wasn't about to hide it.
"I'm serious. Can't you just go back to looking through a telescope instead of a microscope? You're better at it, anyway. I'm sure your old employer would -"
Touma shook his head. "It has to be medicine, Ryo."
"Why? What's worth staying for?"
Touma's face suddenly lost all expression. He looked out the nearest window and there was another eerie silence. It made Ryo want to keep talking. He felt these pauses eating away at the few small things he and his old friend had in common.
But before he could open his mouth to speak, Touma said one word: "Seiji."
Ryo looked up to see Touma meeting his gaze again, finally. "Do you remember the last time you saw him?" Touma asked.
Ryo barely remembered, in fact. It must have been five years ago. Since then there had only been phone calls and letters that became less and less frequent.
Then, absolutely nothing.
What Ryo remembered from five years ago was his friend Date Seiji looking as he always did: cool, calm, steady as sunlight on still water. He was 20 and he'd just published his first short story. Also he was in college and busy fending off girls as usual, though he was too polite to say it outright. He was in good health, thank you for asking, and how was Ryo's father? Still off to parts unknown?
He remembered the unyielding strength of Seiji's grip when they clasped hands to say goodbye. The warmth of Seiji's half-smile.
Fast forward to five years later: Ryo was sitting at a bar in the middle of the day, with a haggard old friend who was telling him Seiji was ill. And not simply ill, but ill from a mysterious disease that modern medicine could not even explain, much less have a cure for.
Touma had spent the last five years thinking about it, reading up on it... and he came to believe it was related to the disappearance of the armor. However, Seiji was the only one of the five armor bearers who ended up saddled with the disease.
That, he declared, was because he was the only one prone to it.
There was something in Seiji's genes that made him vulnerable; losing Kourin just made it worse. Because the armor was the only thing that had been keeping him from suffering from it.
Ironically, it was also the thing that had triggered it in the first place.
Fast forward again to twenty minutes later: the two young men had left Miyanokouji Bar and were walking down to the bus stop. Touma was still talking about grave things in that strangely dispassionate voice:
They all knew Seiji was a sickly child. But he was not the only one in his family who was like that. It was a genetic weakness that took the form of a common childhood infirmity. Seiji had older relatives and ancestors who were sickly as children - but they survived it. Touma supposed that they never even had the disease that Seiji was suffering currently.
And why was this? It was because they never bore the armor of Kourin.
"Seiji was tortured," Touma said quietly. "Do you remember?"
"We were all put through hell, Touma," Ryo argued. People passed them by without a second glance.
"No. Not like Seiji. There was that time in New York," he started to say. He paused when a couple walked between them arm in arm, separating him from Ryo for a second. When the coast was clear, he continued, "In New York, he was held underground for days. Hooked up to wires, pain shot through his nerves and directly into his brain. He had to retreat to the back of his mind to escape it..."
Ryo only noticed that Touma's left hand had balled into a fist when it unclenched. Even when it did, Touma's fingers shook from the effort of relaxing.
"Still," Touma went on, his voice level, "that might not have been the cause. You see, the disease I'm talking about can't be easily triggered. It can only be brought about by sustained trauma - being pushed to your physical, mental and emotional limits for an extended period of time. Say, the time when we fought as Troopers. That was just about enough."
The bus came. They boarded. Touma slumped against the backrest with his arms folded across his chest. After a long pause, perhaps to collect himself, Touma continued to speak about the disease - which had no name as of yet but had been given a complicated code number that Ryo couldn't trust himself to remember.
Being the bearer of Kourin had exposed Seiji to more stress than the ordinary human body could handle, Touma said. And the supernatural armor's protection could only go so far. When it vanished, after it determined that there was no longer any need for it, it stopped keeping Seiji safe from the sickness that he'd had since the beginning.
Ultimately, it failed to protect him from the inevitable.
Their armor had kept them all alive at the end of the war with the Netherworld. But Seiji's had left him broken.
"That's not possible," Ryo declared. He couldn't raise his voice inside the bus, and he couldn't wait until they were back out in open air. "Our armor healed us! When we were wounded, it patched us up. When we were in trouble, it saved us. Kourin wasn't any different!"
"Yes," Touma said patiently, "but if Seiji'd had that condition even before Kourin, it's not likely that Kourin would even recognize it as a disease. You must understand, Ryo: our armor knew how to preserve us, not to fix us. And now they're gone."
This was getting a bit too much to hear. Ryo couldn't take it all in without a fight.
"He was fine!" he said in an angry whisper. "The last time I saw him, he was fine. He didn't feel anything bad. Otherwise he would have said...!"
Touma said nothing. He was looking out the window, at old familiar streets.
Ryo waited for Touma to start talking again. But they reached their destination shortly, and after that it seemed there was no time for further explanation. They needed to walk to Touma's apartment building from the stop. They needed to wait for the elevator. Then they needed to make their way to Touma's room... all in absolute silence.
Little did Ryo know that the silence was intended to prepare him.
(tbc)
At the Stars
Part 2
The call was placed on his landline. It was a good thing he was home. He had just come home for a break, after a photoshoot in Timor.
He was separating prints in the basement of his log cabin in Yamanashi when the call came through. The answering machine had picked it up first. He had made sure that the speakerphone would be loud enough to get through to him, so he heard, very clearly:
"Ryo? ...I guess you're out of the country again. As soon as you come back, please get in touch with me. There's something I need your help with and..."
Ryo almost tripped running up the basement stairs.
"Touma!" he screamed into the receiver. "It's been a while! How are you?"
"Ryo...?" The voice hesitated. Ryo did not like that. He had expected a glad friendly yell of "Hey, you're home!" as a response, not this. "I'm all right. I need to speak with you in person."
"Sure, what's up?" Touma even sounded serious. No lame joke, no lame attempt at small talk. It wasn't like him.
"I'll be in Shinjuku this Saturday. Shuu and Shin haven't returned my calls, so I'm not sure they can make it. What about you?"
"I'll be there. And Seiji...?"
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
"11 AM at Miyanokouji Bar. Thanks, Ryo."
The call was dropped before Ryo could say anything more.
For a moment, Ryo stood wondering if he should call back. The familiar number of Touma's apartment in Tokyo was reflected on the caller ID.
But he figured he would get the details on Saturday anyway. He wasn't going to ferret out information that wasn't ready to be given.
Since their armors vanished, and they were free to live their lives the way they wished, it became harder to keep in touch. In a way, Ryo supposed, they had wanted to distance themselves from their past, and not making a serious effort to meet up so they could reopen old wounds, share their war stories was part of that.
They were still good friends, of course. Good friends who sometimes met up, wrote or called - or, in Ryo's case, sent postcards. He was always somewhere, and there was always something beautiful to snap a photograph of, and send to everyone with a rushed scribble at the back: "From the Amazon. Hope you're well. Ryo."
He was never very good with words. He hoped his photographs, at least, would tell his friends he was doing okay for himself.
Seiji, who was good with words, was always somewhere as well. Or, at least, that was what he was told. Touma had told them all during the last reunion, two years ago, that Seiji often traveled for research on his Sengoku-era novels. That was why he had not made their reunions for the last few years.
(Ryo had honestly never known how much legwork was involved in being a world-famous author. Not being a big reader himself, when one said "author" he instantly had a vision of a half-blind eccentric, shoulders hunched with age and lack of social skills, bent over his quill and paper or typewriter or whatever. Someone as good-looking and pleasant and young as Date Seiji definitely did not fit his idea of an "author."
(And yet, Seiji's Sengoku-era fiction was being translated into five major languages, and exported all over the world. Touma assured them that he made a good living off the royalties, and sometimes traveled just for fun.
Ryo was proud of his friend, that was for sure... though he did wish Seiji could take time out to show himself.)
Since their armors went away, it became harder to read each other's feelings. He wouldn't be able to tell if Seiji needed any kind of help, though of course he was concerned.
There was one thing he was sure of, however, with the help of his armor or no: something was bothering Touma. And whatever it was, it had been around for some time.
Ryo wasn't the only one who noticed it. Shin and Shuu had both commented at least once about how Touma always left early during their reunions, and how he would consciously avoid meeting up with any of them unless he absolutely had to. And even then, he would leave early, as if there were things he was carefully trying not to be present to discuss.
It was as if Touma was forcing them into the status of mere acquaintances. It was hard not to worry.
What could be wrong? Was Touma in some sort of trouble? Did he need money? A place to stay? Someone to talk to?
Miyanokouji was quiet. At that time of day, Ryo and Touma were the only patrons - and it seemed Touma preferred it that way. The only other soul, the waiter/bartender, was often distanced, as if used to people using his establishment for shady business it would be better for him not to know about.
That, and/or Touma had bribed him to stay away from their table.
Ryo always felt uncomfortable whenever he knew Touma did that, but he'd learned to stop complaining. Miyanokouji was where they met if they wanted to discuss something private. It was public enough to defy suspicion, but discreet enough to keep their conversations secret.
It was the perfect place to discuss their past as warriors, for example, if no one's apartment was available. But if Touma felt that precautions needed to be taken, Ryo knew he should take his word for it.
He'd hoped Shin and Shuu could make it, but the two were out of town; Shuu on business, and Shin on research. Shin's nature conservation group was going to come out with an anniversary issue that required him to travel, and Shuu had to attend to his family's restaurant's exhibit at a food expo in Chiba. They both promised to get in touch as soon as they could, however.
In the meantime, Ryo welcomed the chance to talk to Touma alone.
This was a different Touma from the one he had hoped to meet. He'd hoped it was all in his head, the weariness that Touma wore around himself like a shroud... but this Touma looked much older, much thinner, with his strangely blue hair grown longer all around, his cheekbones stark and his downturned eyes sunken, sleepless.
In fact, Touma's eyes were the only thing about him that did not radiate exhaustion. But they did not meet Ryo's gaze head-on, like they used to. Like they would if nothing was wrong.
"Ryo," he began slowly, "did you ever feel like the way we look at things has become more complicated since we lost our armor?"
"Complicated?"
"Like..." Touma thought about his words for a bit. "It was much easier to make decisions when we still had our virtues. I'd come to a crossroads, then - just like that, I knew what I had to do. Now..."
A heavy silence lay between them. Ryo hated it. he needed to say something, even something stupid, to make it go away.
"To tell you the truth, man, even when we had our virtues, I never really felt benevolent. I just sort of did stuff and people told me later it was the benevolent thing to do."
That seemed to work. Touma chuckled emptily. "Same here about being wise, I guess..."
There was little room for small talk. Touma made it clear that he would not have contacted any of them if he felt he had other options.
"Basically," Touma said, running one hand through his hair, "I've been blackballed out of the medical industry."
Ryo's eyes widened. Was he hearing this right?
"What?? You?! Why would that happen?"
"Let's just say... I've been less than ethical." And the way he said it made Ryo think that "less than ethical" was actually a mild way of putting it.
His fears were proven right when Touma started to explain: he'd been shirking his duties at the pharmaceutical company he was employed in, deliberately delaying his output so that the officials of the company would give him more time to research.
Of course this meant the pharmaceutical company would investigate. And when they did, they discovered that Touma had been conducting independent lab work at a nearby university after (and sometimes during) office hours, using the data that he had gathered for the research they were paying for. He was not giving them the results they wanted, and he was using his research for personal purposes - the nature of which he would not voluntarily disclose.
Needless to say, said company was not pleased.
"I've become an outcast among my colleagues." Touma relayed all this in a neutral voice. He might as well have been reading out of a diary page he'd rehearsed reading aloud countless times. "I can't say it wasn't my fault. People were already wary of me getting a medical degree all of a sudden, after being this big-shot astrophysicist..." He rolled his eyes as he said "big-shot." Ryo knew well enough how uncomfortable it was for Touma to have been a celebrity whiz kid. "Now that I've been fired, certain people are saying they were right to doubt me all along. If you'll keep your ear on the grapevine, you might catch some pretty shocking lies about me."
"What kind of lies?" Ryo asked quickly.
Touma shrugged. "Things like I stole and sold confidential records. Falsified test results. Slept with all of the CEOs. That kind of lies."
Hearing this left a bad taste at the back of Ryo's throat. But Touma himself seemed unaffected.
Ryo found it strange that all this was happening. Not so much that Touma was bending rules to get what he wanted done - but that he got caught. This was definitely not like him.
"So now I'm in a bit of a bind. My old employer won't press charges, but I still can't get a job in places with decent laboratories. I don't want to trouble my parents... they've been put through enough, with my leaving my old job in Kyoto. My dad..." He let out a small sigh. "Let's just say, he was disappoint."
Ryo grimaced. Touma's sense of humor and its inappropriate entrances...
"Touma..." Ryo leaned forward in his seat, lowered his voice a bit. "You never really answered us when we asked. Why did you have to leave astrophysics for medicine? You know, I don't think I understand everything right now, but..." Ryo's brow furrowed. "Somehow I feel like none of this would've happened if you'd stuck with your old job."
His friend smiled bitterly. The ever-astute Ryo had hit upon a sad fact, and he wasn't about to hide it.
"I'm serious. Can't you just go back to looking through a telescope instead of a microscope? You're better at it, anyway. I'm sure your old employer would -"
Touma shook his head. "It has to be medicine, Ryo."
"Why? What's worth staying for?"
Touma's face suddenly lost all expression. He looked out the nearest window and there was another eerie silence. It made Ryo want to keep talking. He felt these pauses eating away at the few small things he and his old friend had in common.
But before he could open his mouth to speak, Touma said one word: "Seiji."
Ryo looked up to see Touma meeting his gaze again, finally. "Do you remember the last time you saw him?" Touma asked.
Ryo barely remembered, in fact. It must have been five years ago. Since then there had only been phone calls and letters that became less and less frequent.
Then, absolutely nothing.
What Ryo remembered from five years ago was his friend Date Seiji looking as he always did: cool, calm, steady as sunlight on still water. He was 20 and he'd just published his first short story. Also he was in college and busy fending off girls as usual, though he was too polite to say it outright. He was in good health, thank you for asking, and how was Ryo's father? Still off to parts unknown?
He remembered the unyielding strength of Seiji's grip when they clasped hands to say goodbye. The warmth of Seiji's half-smile.
Fast forward to five years later: Ryo was sitting at a bar in the middle of the day, with a haggard old friend who was telling him Seiji was ill. And not simply ill, but ill from a mysterious disease that modern medicine could not even explain, much less have a cure for.
Touma had spent the last five years thinking about it, reading up on it... and he came to believe it was related to the disappearance of the armor. However, Seiji was the only one of the five armor bearers who ended up saddled with the disease.
That, he declared, was because he was the only one prone to it.
There was something in Seiji's genes that made him vulnerable; losing Kourin just made it worse. Because the armor was the only thing that had been keeping him from suffering from it.
Ironically, it was also the thing that had triggered it in the first place.
Fast forward again to twenty minutes later: the two young men had left Miyanokouji Bar and were walking down to the bus stop. Touma was still talking about grave things in that strangely dispassionate voice:
They all knew Seiji was a sickly child. But he was not the only one in his family who was like that. It was a genetic weakness that took the form of a common childhood infirmity. Seiji had older relatives and ancestors who were sickly as children - but they survived it. Touma supposed that they never even had the disease that Seiji was suffering currently.
And why was this? It was because they never bore the armor of Kourin.
"Seiji was tortured," Touma said quietly. "Do you remember?"
"We were all put through hell, Touma," Ryo argued. People passed them by without a second glance.
"No. Not like Seiji. There was that time in New York," he started to say. He paused when a couple walked between them arm in arm, separating him from Ryo for a second. When the coast was clear, he continued, "In New York, he was held underground for days. Hooked up to wires, pain shot through his nerves and directly into his brain. He had to retreat to the back of his mind to escape it..."
Ryo only noticed that Touma's left hand had balled into a fist when it unclenched. Even when it did, Touma's fingers shook from the effort of relaxing.
"Still," Touma went on, his voice level, "that might not have been the cause. You see, the disease I'm talking about can't be easily triggered. It can only be brought about by sustained trauma - being pushed to your physical, mental and emotional limits for an extended period of time. Say, the time when we fought as Troopers. That was just about enough."
The bus came. They boarded. Touma slumped against the backrest with his arms folded across his chest. After a long pause, perhaps to collect himself, Touma continued to speak about the disease - which had no name as of yet but had been given a complicated code number that Ryo couldn't trust himself to remember.
Being the bearer of Kourin had exposed Seiji to more stress than the ordinary human body could handle, Touma said. And the supernatural armor's protection could only go so far. When it vanished, after it determined that there was no longer any need for it, it stopped keeping Seiji safe from the sickness that he'd had since the beginning.
Ultimately, it failed to protect him from the inevitable.
Their armor had kept them all alive at the end of the war with the Netherworld. But Seiji's had left him broken.
"That's not possible," Ryo declared. He couldn't raise his voice inside the bus, and he couldn't wait until they were back out in open air. "Our armor healed us! When we were wounded, it patched us up. When we were in trouble, it saved us. Kourin wasn't any different!"
"Yes," Touma said patiently, "but if Seiji'd had that condition even before Kourin, it's not likely that Kourin would even recognize it as a disease. You must understand, Ryo: our armor knew how to preserve us, not to fix us. And now they're gone."
This was getting a bit too much to hear. Ryo couldn't take it all in without a fight.
"He was fine!" he said in an angry whisper. "The last time I saw him, he was fine. He didn't feel anything bad. Otherwise he would have said...!"
Touma said nothing. He was looking out the window, at old familiar streets.
Ryo waited for Touma to start talking again. But they reached their destination shortly, and after that it seemed there was no time for further explanation. They needed to walk to Touma's apartment building from the stop. They needed to wait for the elevator. Then they needed to make their way to Touma's room... all in absolute silence.
Little did Ryo know that the silence was intended to prepare him.
(tbc)