Chapter Text
As soon as Kogami moved, he regretted it. The transponder had woken him out of what had felt like a dead sleep, but when he opened his eyes, he couldn’t seem to shake the fog from his mind. According to Ginoza, he’d been asleep for nine hours, but he would have guessed that it had been more like nine minutes.
That was a bad sign. Even half asleep and heavy with pain, Kogami remembered the signs of an infection. Pain, tightness, and heat around the wound, check. Exhaustion and heavy limbs, check. Feeling cold…Kogami supposed that could just be the harsh EENA air, but he felt like he’d never be warm again. That meant that he probably had a fever. Given that he’d only been injured maybe twelve hours ago, that was a pretty bad sign.
Kogami held a hand up, and it was shaking. Hard to tell if that was the chill, or exhaustion, or dehydration, but whatever the reason, that also wasn’t good. His body had already started deteriorating around him. Which was going to make getting out of EENA that much harder.
Kogami didn’t really want to take painkillers until he knew what his plan for the day was - painkillers would probably make moving around easier, but they would make thinking much harder. But his wound was throbbing. Aching pain was radiating through his middle. He doubted he’d be able to eat anything either way, but he didn’t even think he’d be able to drink water until and unless he took painkillers. Losing his clarity of thought would be bad, but combining that with dehydration was even worse.
“Kogami?” Ginoza said. “Are you…still there?”
Kogami blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “Just…taking inventory. Gonna take some more of the painkillers now, and try to drink some water.”
“That sounds sensible,” Ginoza said. “How much water do you have left?”
The answer was not enough. But Kogami thought that unless the painkillers helped a real lot over the next few hours, rationing water was going to be the least of his worries. A bigger concern would probably be keeping it down.
But the infection wasn’t something he really had control over, so he put it out of his mind - as much as he could, at least.
“I think I’ll be okay for a couple days,” he told Ginoza. Then he took his pills with a few sips of water. He thought about eating, but thought that would be pushing it. He’d just been stabbed. He probably wasn’t ready for solid food.
“How does your wound seem?” Ginoza asked. “Are you going to…wash it out again, or anything?”
Kogami didn’t want to start the bleeding again, and he had absolutely no intention of taking the dressing off until or unless he had to. “Nah,” he said. “I’m gonna smoke a cigarette.”
“What?”
Despite having watched Kogami try to quit smoking on two separate occasions, not to mention been with him the many times Kogami had to stop smoking temporarily due to an illness or an injury, Ginoza still had a poor sense of addiction and withdrawal. He sort of seemed that smoking was something Kogami did mostly because he liked the feeling. Which…may have been true at some point, but certainly wasn’t true now.
“Just one a day,” Kogami said. “I need the nicotine.”
“Are you sure you should be smoking?” Ginoza said, managing to inject so much disapproval into his voice that Kogami could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “In your condition?”
Kogami chuckled quietly, feeling his wound shoot pain out in every direction. “Gino, if I don’t smoke, my condition is about to get a lot worse pretty damn fast.”
Ginoza was silent for a few seconds, maybe thinking back to the times he’d seen Kogami go without cigarettes long enough for the withdrawal to start. “Tch. It’s not good for you, you know.”
“I know,” Kogami said, smothering a sigh. Expanding his chest that far would hurt too much. Smoking would probably hurt, too, but withdrawal would hurt worse.
Kogami pulled his battered, mostly empty pack of cigarettes out of the side pocket of his pants, along with the lighter Ginoza had (reluctantly) given him for his birthday a few years before. Unsurprisingly, cigarettes weren’t among the supplies that the SIBYL System had deemed necessary for Kogami’s survival, so the only pack he had was what he’d had on him when he’d been picked up. He’d had to ration them almost immediately, limiting himself to one a day.
The cravings usually started after a couple hours, but he’d managed to fight his way through them. Being active had helped, and now, the pain was helping too. It was hard to want much of anything when his stomach felt like it was on fire.
Kogami lit a cigarette and took a drag, letting his head fall to one side as he closed his eyes. Breathing that much did hurt, and Kogami struggled to stop his chest from spasming as he coughed sharply.
“Kogami!!! Stop SMOKING!”
Kogami swallowed the last few coughs and managed another drag, hating how good it felt to have the nicotine hit his system. “Gino-”
“When you get home, you’re quitting.”
Kogami managed to stop himself from laughing, this time, but he did smile. “Okay, Gino. Sure.” If he really did get to see Ginoza again, he would at least give it his best effort.
“I’m serious, you know. I consider that a promise, and I don’t take promises lightly. I won’t let you forget it.”
Kogami closed his eyes and let Ginoza’s slightly strident lecture wash over him, just like he really was home. It carried him through the rest of his cigarette, and the beginning of the painkiller high.
And then, just as he was starting to relax, and beginning to wonder if he should make a plan, he heard a sharp intake of breath from Ginoza.
“sh*t,” Ginoza said. “There’s someone at the door.”
Kogami briefly forgot that they were in two different locations, and jolted upright, heart hammering. But he couldn’t hear anything, and he almost immediately realized that he was being silly. No one was banging at his cellar door. Ginoza had meant that there was someone at Ginoza’s door.
Not that that was really much better, now that Kogami was thinking about it.
“What?” Kogami said quietly.
“They’re knocking,” Ginoza hissed. “Don’t worry, I was expecting this. Someone asked after some of the hostages last night, and I had to tell them they were all working on a time-sensitive project for me.”
Kogami felt his heart sink. Ginoza had very many skills, but it was instantly clear that hostage negotiation was not going to be one of them.
“I knew that excuse was only going to last so long. Eventually, more people were going to come knocking, and I doubt anyone else will buy that explanation. sh*t. I had just hoped that I would have a little more time….”
“Do you know who’s there?” Kogami asked.
“No. But…I think I need to deal with this. Don’t go anywhere, alright? I have some questions for you, and then from there, I’m going to help you figure out a plan to get home. Just don’t…move until you’ve spoken to me again, alright?”
Kogami doubted he had the physical ability to go much of anywhere at this point, and he certainly had no intention of wandering around EENA without a plan. “I won’t move,” he said.
“Hopefully this will be brief,” Ginoza said.
Kogami expected Ginoza to hang up on him while he dealt with the situation outside his door, but strangely enough, he didn’t. Kogami suspected it was because he wanted to feel that he had some backup, although he genuinely had no idea if the instinct was conscious or not. Either way, he was glad to be able to hear the faint sound of Ginoza breathing and the small click as he activated the intercom.
“Hello?” Ginoza said. “This is Nobuchika Ginoza.”
The second voice was a little bit distorted - filtered through two layers of sound equipment - but Kogami could still make it out. “May we come in?”
“I’m actually working on something rather important, and I’m afraid I can’t afford any distractions right now,” Ginoza said. “Could you please come back at a later time?”
“This is the Department of Domestic Hostility,” the voice said. “And this is urgent. Open up the door.”
There was the barely audible sound of Ginoza taking a deep breath. “No,” he said simply.
“Open up the door,” the voice repeated, more insistently this time. “We don’t want this situation to get out of control.”
Kogami closed his eyes, wishing desperately that he was there with Ginoza. Talking to people, especially in a hostile environment, had never exactly been Ginoza’s strong suit.
“This situation is already beyond your control,” Ginoza said. And then, he followed it up with the phrase Kogami had been hoping he’d avoid at all costs. “I have hostages, you know.”
Silence on the other side of the door, as Kogami felt a wave of anxiety even through the drugs. Hostage taking was obviously a crime under the SIBYL System (pretty much everything was), but Kogami had worked the MWPSB for years and knew that the fastest way for a latent criminal to end up on the receiving end of a dominator was to involve a formerly innocent civilian. Hostage situations were pretty much SIBYL’s worst nightmare, since they could result in a mass area stress increase, and multiple hostages crossing the threshold with their crime coefficients. Enforcers and inspectors alike were taught to prioritize the hues of everyone around a criminal, even if that meant authorizing the use of lethal force.
Kogami spent a sick few seconds absolutely certain that he was about to hear the splinters as the door was broken down, and the sound of a dominator activating. Was Ginoza’s crime coefficient above three hundred? He didn’t think so, not even now, but he wasn’t sure.
“Let the analysts go,” the voice finally responded. He sounded a lot more polite, this time. “They aren’t a part of this.”
Ginoza scoffed slightly. “You don’t have any idea what I’m doing, and they very much are a part of this, at least until I’m finished. I suggest you stay out of my way.”
“What are you doing, then?” The man on the other side of the door sounded kind now, almost trustworthy.
Kogami, who had participated in a lot of hostage negotiations on both sides of the situation, recognized the textbook. Act like an ally, rather than an adversary. Get the target to trust you, and you’d have that many more openings. He hoped Ginoza recognized that, too.
“It’s above your pay grade,” Ginoza said loftily. “I don’t believe you have the clearance.”
Kogami’s imagination filled in the sound of grinding teeth from the other side of the door. “If I don’t, I can run it up the chain to my supervisors,” the agent finally said. “How’s that? I can’t have a conversation with you until I understand the situation.”
“I am in the process of trying to bring a very important asset back to Japan,” Ginoza said.
“Ah.”
It was hard to tell just from listening through the grainy transponder whether or not the negotiator knew that the asset in question was Kogami. Kogami honestly suspected they did, though. Kogami knew the clearance on his situation was very high, but also, he thought it would be pretty obvious to anyone who’d managed to get very high in the PSB that whatever Ginoza was doing would have something to do with Kogami. It wasn’t much of a secret that they were together, after all. Kogami thought it likely that whoever had been sent in to talk to Ginoza would have been briefed on the situation ahead of time - sending someone who didn’t know about Kogami’s deal would just be a waste of a resource at this point.
“If I am able to stay here without distraction until I can get my asset back, I’ll return him to the custody of Japan,” Ginoza said. To anybody who didn’t know him well, he sounded calm. “I’ll release the hostages in exchange for my own safety. Everybody wins.”
The negotiator didn’t say anything. There was silence on the other end of the call. This seemed to somewhat unnerve Ginoza, and he continued in a wavering voice.
“If I’m not able to continue my work on retrieving the asset unbothered…well, that’s why I have hostages. So I would highly recommend that you let me remain in here.”
Kogami was proud of Ginoza. He thought that Ginoza sounded pretty tough. But, while pretty tough was good, it probably wasn’t quite enough. Ginoza didn’t sound believably like the sort of person who would allow harm to come to any of his hostages. If Kogami had been there, he would have at least made Ginoza put a bullet in the wall or something, just to get everyone to believe that he really did mean business. But as it was, Kogami couldn’t say anything. If he spoke loud enough for Ginoza to hear it, the negotiator would have been able to hear it as well.
Obviously, the PSB would have been able to muster up enough people to subdue Ginoza without giving him a chance to hurt any of the hostages, even assuming they thought that him actually going after the hostages was likely. Ginoza was field-trained and an excellent fighter, but he wasn’t superhuman and didn’t really know how to fire Kogami’s gun. He wouldn’t be able to hold his own against more than a few operatives. At this point, even if he didn’t know it, Ginoza’s plan hinged largely on how important the government actually thought that it was to reacquire Kogami, and how likely they thought it was that he could do it.
Kogami didn’t like those odds, especially since he didn’t know how important the government thought he was. It was getting hard to think through the painkillers, but he didn’t really need to think to know what he would do, if he were the agent on the other side of the door. He would promise Ginoza amnesty in exchange for his eventual release of the hostages, and if he got the asset back, so much the better. And then, as soon as the last hostage was safe, he would go back on the deal and arrest Ginoza.
If the agent was thinking like him, that was better. Ginoza could help Kogami get home, and then Kogami would help him get out of the mess he’d gotten into.
But if the agent at any point decided that the hostages’ crime coefficients were more endangered by Ginoza, rather than by witnessing the bloody murder of Ginoza, he’d probably send in operatives to take him down. He could even be making that decision right now, and Kogami might be about to hear his husband die from a thousand miles away.
Kogami closed his eyes, almost dizzy with sudden anxiety that the pain pills did absolutely nothing to dampen. Everything seemed to hinge on the next moment, and Kogami couldn’t do anything to change it.
“I don’t have the clearance to make that kind of deal.”
Kogami covered his face with his arm and felt himself start shaking as the tension left his body. For now, the agent was going to negotiate.
Ginoza must have realized what was at stake too, at least partially, and Kogami heard him exhale suddenly. “Well, go and speak to someone who does.”
“I-”
“You know where to find me.”
Kogami swallowed back a surprised laugh, unable to stop himself from imagining his husband’s slight smile at his own audacity. The situation was grim, but Kogami still wished that he was there to see Ginoza commit his first ever criminal act. It was definitely the painkillers talking, but now that Kogami was sure Ginoza wasn’t about to die in a hail of bullets, he was back to being kind of impressed.
“I’ll see what I can do,” the agent said.
Kogami waited, biting his lip in the silence, until the hiss of the transponder was replaced by Ginoza’s voice.
“I believe he’s gone. Are you still there, Shinya?”
“Yeah,” Kogami said, so quietly that he wasn’t sure Ginoza could even hear him. He cleared his throat and tried again, alarmed by how hoarse he sounded after such a short time. “I’m here.”
“Alright, good,” Ginoza said. “After that brief…after that…now that that’s been dealt with, I have a few questions I want to ask you.”
Ginoza was stressed. He’d known he was in danger, obviously, but to send in the Department of Domestic Hostility? For Ginoza? The idea was absurd. Ginoza may have spent years as a latent criminal, but prior to yesterday, his worst crime had been occasional blatant disregard of the Employee Handbook. And that…simply wasn’t on the same scale.
He had really thought he might die for a second there, and that Kogami might have to hear it. But he seemed to have bought himself a little bit more time, at least until someone with higher authority came knocking again, and he very much intended to use it.
Before Ginoza had been rudely interrupted, he’d been starting to piece together that Kogami was sick. Ginoza wasn’t sure how sick he was, but whatever the truth was, Ginoza needed to know. He’d come with a few variations on the same basic plan last night, and he needed to hear from Kogami exactly what he would and wouldn’t be able to carry out.
Unfortunately, Kogami wasn’t known for always being perfectly truthful about his own physical and mental state. Ginoza hoped that he would be honest with him now, since the stakes were so high and if Kogami overstated what he could do, there was almost no chance that he would be able to get him back to Japan. In light of this, Ginoza fully intended to pry.
“How sick are you?” Ginoza asked.
Silence on the other end. Then, in a quiet voice, “How did you know I was sick?”
“You’re slurring,” Ginoza said.
“I’m on painkillers.”
“Quiet, Shinya,” Ginoza snapped. “I’ve been up…I don’t even want to think about how long I’ve been up doing research, trying to figure out some way that I can get you home. I need to know what you’re capable of. I need to know how far you can travel, how many days you could hide, if you can talk to someone without attracting attention. I need to know what sorts of supplies you have. So I’m going to ask you again: how sick are you?”
Kogami sounded slightly cowed. “I…I think I might be pretty sick.”
He’d sounded pretty sick that morning, and he’d slept for way too long. Ginoza had suspected as much. But still, it wasn’t exactly great to hear Kogami admit it.
Ginoza tried not to react, although what he really wanted to do was swear at the transponder. Kogami had been honest with him, and he didn’t want to make him feel bad for being sick. “Do you have a fever?”
“Mhmm.”
Kogami sounded like he had a fever, so once again, Ginoza wasn’t surprised. But he probably couldn’t rely on Kogami to improvise too much, or be able to adapt as quickly as he normally could. It was a bad sign.
“Do you…think it’s an infection?” Ginoza really, really hoped it wasn’t. If it was a fever brought on by some combination of exertion, stress, and sleeping in a basem*nt, then it might go away by the next day. Kogami could rest there while the city calmed down around him, and then Ginoza could get him out more easily. As long as there was nothing wrong with the wound he’d received.
“It’s infected,” Kogami said quietly.
“Damn,” Ginoza whispered. “How badly?”
“Don’t want to look at it just yet,” Kogami mumbled. “Only one change of bandages.”
That made sense, even if Ginoza didn’t want to hear it. “Okay. Leave it for now.” He hesitated, then decided to trust Kogami’s field medicine experience over his desire to put Ginoza at ease. “How badly do you think?”
“Not great. Getting worse.”
Ginoza rubbed his face with his hand and tried not to scream. His best plan involved leaving Kogami in the basem*nt until some of the police cordons were lifted - according to the news, riots were dying down, but it wouldn’t be safe for Kogami to leave just yet. After that, Ginoza had planned a route that would get Kogami to the small local airport, where there were still international flights departing for Tokyo. He could see from Kogami’s file that he’d been given falsified documentation for his entry into EENA, and he could use that same identity to board the plane back home.
“Can you wait?” Ginoza hated asking that of Kogami, but he didn’t see a different option. It would be dangerous for Kogami to stay where he was, risking getting sicker, but Ginoza had the news playing on the second monitor of the analyst’s workstation. It would probably be even more dangerous for him to leave.
More silence, longer this time as Kogami considered Ginoza’s question. Ginoza waited, heart in his mouth, but at least the waiting was good for something. If Kogami was taking this long to answer, then he was actually considering the question, rather than just saying what he thought Ginoza needed to hear.
“I can wait,” Kogami finally said. “We can patch me up when I’m back.”
Ginoza breathed a long sigh of relief, thinking that this was probably the first good news he’d had since he’d contacted Kogami in the first place. “It shouldn’t be more than a day. It’s just too dangerous for you to move right now.”
“I understand,” Kogami said softly.
“You’re safe where you are, right?” Ginoza was trying very hard to keep his voice steady, but he could feel that his anxiety levels were starting to spike beyond what he could manage. He wanted to ask Kogami a thousand questions. No, a million. No, he knew what he really wanted to do was swoop in and rescue Kogami somehow and deposit him back to Japan, and his anxiety wasn’t really going to ease until he knew that Kogami was safe. As much as he knew there was no point in bombarding Kogami with questions, they were difficult to swallow back. “Still no rioting near you?”
“I’m safe,” Kogami said. “Haven't heard anything. Once you go, I’ll sweep the perimeter, just to double check, okay?”
Sweep the perimeter. That sounded like such a militant, technical thing to need to do - Ginoza honestly wasn’t even entirely sure what it would entail. What would Kogami be sweeping it for? But there was something almost tender about the action - it was clear Kogami didn’t think it was necessary to sweep the perimeter to ensure his safety. He was doing it so Ginoza would know, even when he was like this, that Kogami was trying his hardest to make sure that he got home safe.
“Alright,” Ginoza said. “That sounds…reasonable to me. I’ll start checking the news coverage of the riots, and I’ll start letting you know if they move closer to your area. I won’t be exact, because I don’t know precisely where you’re located, but I do believe I’ve managed to find your approximate neighborhood. I can alert you if I think you’ll need to move.”
“Thanks, Gino,” Kogami said. There was silence for a minute. “How is your…your…you’ll be okay where you are for a couple days too, right?”
Ginoza felt something tighten in his chest. He tried to take a deep breath, and it didn’t seem to help at all. Ginoza had no idea if he would be alright here for a couple days. He didn’t want to think about it, but there was a legitimate chance he was about to lose contact with Kogami. They could decide that the aid he could provide Kogami in getting back to Japan wasn’t worth the threat to the hostages, and they could forcefully remove him. His own safety aside, would Kogami be able to get back home without the calls from Ginoza? Ginoza privately doubted it. He didn’t know where the airport was, and he didn’t have access to the flight schedule. He didn’t even speak the language.
Which meant that Ginoza didn’t really have a choice. He would need to do what it took to stay in contact with Kogami. Even if….
No. Ginoza wouldn’t think about that. He had spent his whole life being loyal to SYBIL, an upstanding citizen, a model employee. Just this once, he was asking for a little help. He…he had to get it.
“I’ll be fine here,” he said.
“Okay.” Kogami sounded shaky. It could be that he didn’t believe Ginoza, or perhaps more likely, he just sounded shaky. “Stay…stay safe.”
It wasn’t that easy, and they both knew it. Not for either of them.
“You too, Shinya,” Ginoza said instead. “Sweep the perimeter.”
He resisted the urge to tack on “if that’s what you call that sort of thing.” Kogami would laugh, usually. Ginoza was afraid that in this state, he wouldn’t. And Ginoza didn’t want to find out.
“Right,” Kogami said, almost dreamily. “Will do. Gino….”
“I know,” Ginoza finished for him. “You have to go. Transponder batteries.”
“Uh-huh.”
Ginoza could picture the small, quiet nod that was accompanying Kogami’s words. He wished he could be there to see it. “Goodbye, Shinya.”
“Bye, Gino.”
