Chapter Text
All this anger was once love.
“ELY. PLEASE.”
It was no use. Dry in the mouth, so wet in the face, Tokio squeezed his convulsing eyelids shut. The torrents they spewed rained unceasingly down his mangled cheeks.
Mado, Sora, his dreams or Azuma’s, to hell with this so-called power of foresight. All this time, Ely was The Calamity and–Tokio racked his brain for all the ways he, anyone, someone, could have prevented this. He would tear out every nerve in his brain in search of what to blame.
“Tokio.” The gravelly voice of his worn-down best friend scratched an opening into Tokio’s humid haze. “Do you remember when I asked you to kill me if you needed to?”
Must it always be to kill, or be killed? Kill Ely because she lost control. Kill Azuma if he lost his control. Tokio didn’t want to hear any more. There’s no such thing as being ready to kill your loved ones. How dare Azuma pretend? Had Tokio trained and sacrificed all this time just to be able to kill the people he couldn’t live without?
Azuma stared at the twitching, half-conscious Tokio. His eyes quietly, futilely begged for a response. But Tokio’s jaws could barely hinge together. Nothing, but for the two seconds when he heard a pitiful whimper and a whisper of rage breach Tokio’s crusted lips. Tokio’s vacant, teary stare suggested he was somewhere else still. Perhaps his mind was back at The Tower, before Ely absorbed Sora, before Tokio tried to take the mark, before they both...
Here Azuma was, pathetically trying to decode the irregular spasms of his vegetative best friend like a morse code. Go, he ordered himself. Go do what he can’t. Chin trembling with a half-grimace, Azuma dragged his knee up to the cavity in his chest. Bits of his own guts stuck to his pants. Eventually, he pressed through the earth from his good hand and summoned both legs in front of him. Onto his feet. Standing. Swaying. Tremoring knees about to buckle.
Bloodbathed and at his wit’s end himself, Azuma cut to the chase. Tokio couldn’t, and Azuma would. Raise .
The fiendish pain of having absorbed death shot up his reconfiguring spine. He swore to all heaven and hell: just one more time; this one last splinch of borrowed time.
Revitalized and thrumming with power, Azuma shot up into the sky. Reams of white trailed behind him like blades in the wind. Off to the girl he loved. To kill his love.
The air crackled and shook with consecutive blasts of Ely’s inferno. Fire and smoke blared from her head, her shoulders, her back. In her chaos form, she was a towering stack of soot. This ghastly silhouette vibrated, sizzled and shifted with every step. Beholden to no fixed form. A black hole where her face used to be.
Thousands of locusts continued to spring from her ashen layers as she moved. Where the fires did not touch, what little remained of Yamato Prefecture evaporated at the indiscriminate beck and call of the black holes in the palms of her hands.
You will not take them from me! Nobody can take them from me or else. I will take everything left.
Could Azuma hear her too? Tokio laid limp and crumpled. Despite seesawing with death, what tortured him most were the cries of her soul. Azuma. She’s talking about us. She’s doing all this for us. Is that crazy or are we? He felt he could cry forever, but his tear ducts, arid and spent, had nothing more to show.
It had been different with Palma. During the Minami City case, Tokio heard the soul cries belying Palma’s chaos form, too. He was sure these cries proved she could be saved. He had begged Azuma to understand. It worked. They saved her. Yamato Mori’s most promising choujin trio, Tokio, Azuma and Ely, did the impossible and brought back Palma. So how come…
“Tokio!!!!” A familiar voice like velvet sundered near him. “I’ve been looking every- Why are you- Where is- Oh, shit…”
Palma took a second. She looked down, around, then up for all the answers.
On the ground, blood-soaked dirt was caked up all around him. Her eyes traced the raw nerves, organs and bones mortally exposed in the familiar body she had been so relieved to locate just moments ago.
In the distance, a lone swirling mass of cloth and chains desperately plunged and plunged and plunged again into a smoking giant whose particles simply dispersed at every lash.
“He’s… He’s going to die like that.” She gasped.
No answer from Tokio. Not even a look. He stared blankly at the earth with no indication that he registered her presence.
Palma took in the pitiful puddle of humanity at her feet. He was barely breathing, but worse than that she wasn’t sure he had the will to keep trying.
The fight with Zora had cost Tokio mentally, physically and emotionally. His best friends were currently trading lethal blows on the rubble horizon of a decimated cityscape while he himself laid like this. Tokio’s bottom half went as far as a half thigh. Both his legs were sliced off by Zora’s adamantine scythes. Recovering his legs by raising was, therefore, impossible. Even if he could, he was too mentally unstable to raise anything anyhow. What was left of his chin, arms and back showed more broken bone than skin.
Palma remembered the moments before it all. The huge commotion in the makeshift meeting hall just before the full scale invasion of the tower’s top floor.
Satou and Sandek refused Tokio’s plan. Tokio went anyway. No matter the hundreds of fallen allies in his wake; Tokio, in pristine battle-ready condition, had gone up to Zora’s chambers determined to have a conversation .
Palma’s lips thinned into a bitter sneer. A conversation with the witch of the black tower. The genocidal mad woman whom Palma herself had unwittingly experimented on dozens of victims for.
“To save countless more lives,” Zora’s slippery messenger had vowed. Noh Mask: the mysterious middleman who had nearly killed Palma with his duplicitous aims.
Only a great and powerful fool like Tokio could have ever imagined a conversation with Zora being possible. And it wasn’t. And all those who died…
If Zora was a fallen angel, Tokio was an angel of death— a vulture queerly endowed with a heart after heaven’s own. Never saving more lives than they killed all the same.
Palma’s face softened as she mused at his martyrdom: somehow, unlike the scavenging birds he took after, saving the most decrepitly fallen was Tokio’s soft spot. It was the very reason Palma still lived. That idiocy saved her life.
She dropped to the ground beside him and began drawing her own blood. In any case, they still needed him. Azuma needed him. Ely needed him. She needed him.
“No.”
She froze at the vibrations of his voice. A feeble finger attempted to knock her syringe away as it approached. Palma gritted her teeth.
“Live. Die trying. Don’t you dare…” Palma steeled her voice, “…give up.”
The weak sweep of his hand was hardly enough force to keep Palma from her mission. However, Palma wavered. She didn’t want to dismiss the value of consent, nor was she in full comprehension of the injection’s ramifications.
If Palma’s blood coursed through Tokio’s, he would not only live forever reliant on her blood, he would also be under her control. Notwithstanding any other side effects that hid in waiting.
“I thought it only works on the dead.” He whispered.
“Is this sorry state what you’d call being alive?” She met his octave, an equally low vibration back. Bewildered he could even speak, she huffed. “No time to wait, or waste. Your best friends are out there fighting to either of their deaths. Worth a shot?” She fixed her gaze onto the needle’s point as it quaked in her hands.
“I can’t raise.” His eyes found hers.
“I know.” She bit her lip to keep from crying. “That’s why…”
“No. Don’t do it, Palma. I won’t forgive you.”
“Then get up! Do something, anything else, Tokio! Anything else other than wallowing like this!”
A wretched, warbled scream suddenly tore through the sky. It was Ely.
Azuma had her wrapped in a series of chains bound around meticulously constructed metal sheets. He was compressing Ely’s form through a patchwork of interlocking steel plates in order to contain her nebulous constitution.
Palma held her breath. Azuma’s plated contraption dug inwards into Ely whose fierce resistance indomitably pushed outwards. For a moment, Ely was compressed just enough. Azuma’s chains quickly took advantage. Heavy yards of steel decisively coiled even tighter around his makeshift metal package like a cobran vice. Yet, the corralled beast endured. As Ely struggled against her confines with all her might, the entrapment was looking to burst open anyway.
The voice of Ely’s soul ripped through Azuma’s senses again.
I just want them back. Give them back… Please…I’ll give everything back. Give them back to me.
“But we’ve been right here, trying to catch you, you fool.” His cracked lips murmured words he knew couldn't reach her.
Azuma’s face darkened. Now or never. He swooped in for the finishing move. But Ely was quicker. Or rather, her last cry and his heartbreak made him slower.
It only took a second for Azuma to register the sudden change of pressure under his plates. Too late. All of a sudden, the plates struggling to press against her were being willfully sucked right into her core.
Then, like a tightly wound spring let loose, she unfurled, ramming her explosive density at her cage. The recoil concentrated itself in one single direction, his. It crushed him.
Palma watched Azuma drop from the sky like a fly.