FLCL Fan Fiction ❯ N.O Return Address ❯ ocho ( Chapter 8 )

Where am I?

 

I wake up stiff absolutely everywhere and blinking into the fluorescent light radiating down from the ceiling. I smell blood, sweat, semen and floor cleaner.

 

Oh. Fuck.

 

I take a while to get my bearings together. I have to stand up and stretch and blink and remember, none of which is done without at least a little pain. Apparently I slept in the handcuffs and also in a fetal position. The whole atmosphere makes me shut my eyes. I can't stand the sight of the white walls of the room. I hate breathing the stale air and tasting disinfectant on my breath. I hate the scrub of my jumpsuit against my sensitized skin.

 

And damnit you don't put a runner in a box.

 

When I look at the ceiling I think of how I don't know what time it is. When I look at the walls I wonder what the star means. When I look at the floor I realize I really, really have absolutely no chance of escaping, try as hard as I might.

 

When I look at the door someone knocks on it.

 

Before I have a chance to respond someone opens it and is bustling inside with an angry look on her face. It's the redhead - Atsuko? - from the day before and she's twirling on her finger the ring with the key to my handcuffs on it. My eyes gravitate toward it immediately and follow it against my will. She laughs and it's without smiling.

 

"Lucky kid, Taro-kun," she declares. "Looks like they've found somethin' for you already."

 

I'm frog-marched out of the room in the clothes I slept in, down a hallway I barely even register and into a room filled with beeps and clicks and harsh metal machines. One entire wall is glass or superplastic or something and through it I can see something extraordinarily strange. It's…a…horse? It's sitting propped up on four fingers with its middle finger jutting forward like a head with the horn of a unicorn and it's prancing around the room and occasionally throwing itself against one of the walls in a pretty masochistic manner.

 

It looks like it's been trapped in a box for a while because it's behaving in ways that had crossed my mind last night.

 

Atsuko throws me into a chair. "Sit." Because I'm so not sitting already.

 

"What the hell is going on?" I mutter but there really isn't any benefit in struggling or fighting back or asking questions that won't get answered, is there?

 

"Good morning, Taro," answers Eyebrow over a PA system that whines with microphone malfunction. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but we captured the perfect specimen to perform this procedure with last night, around one this morning actually. It's approaching critical condition so we had to do it right away. Keep in mind this is strictly for observation purposes so we won't be performing any tests. I hope you'll understand."

 

I'm in handcuffs, you asshole, what else can I do?

 

Atsuko is snarling but it's almost with glee that she straps the square blue helmet to my head and fidgets with the knobs at my temples until it's exactly straddling the line of "irritating" and "downright painful." "This'll only hurt a little," she lies before she backs up against the wall furthest from the chair.

 

With a touch of a button the superplastic wall slides away and the handicorn launches itself at me and a ping shoots straight through both of my ears and it vanishes in a vortex of fucking pain.

 

I have images. A large and hideous raisin-colored triangle has a mother-feeling stapled to it. Things grow out of the ground upright in the shape of fallen-over trees. The sun is purple and I sometimes see the world in negative. I eat chain-link fence.

 

When my eyes open again it is to see Atsuko with blue-green hair and then slide them shut again as I pass out from the pain.

 

~-~-~-~

 

This time when I wake up I know exactly where I am.

 

The good thing is that my handcuffs are off so my wrists and my head are both feeling fine. The bad news is that my stomach is growing mutinous and I can't really see much of anything out of my left eye.

 

"I think he's recovering quite well," says a muddled voice.

 

You call this well?

 

"It's probably because his unit is sealing," says another, "or else he'd adapt to it more readily."

 

"Take what you can get, I guess."

 

I flop to the left and vomit straight onto the floor and a pair of dark brown boots.

 

"That's disgusting," comments Kitsurubami.

 

"Tell me," I say with a sour mouth, "what the fuck you're doing to me."

 

"Taro, Taro, Taro," says Amarao. "We've already told you that. We're shipping these N.O-spawned monstrosities back to where they belong."

 

And suddenly I am aware of something. It had never occurred to me, so it must not have occurred to them, but with Reiko's voice and the sudden return of my eyesight I yell, "But you're sending them back to the wrong place!"

 

"What's that?"

 

"What's that?"

 

I stand up out of the chair and take the helmet off and in a fit of uncharacteristic rage I kick it through the thin filth and across the room. "You think we're so high and mighty as humans to just kick these things back out of our world! Did you ever stop to think that we're sending them back to other worlds where they're equally unwanted? You claim to be protectors of interdimensional safety and yet you're fucking up the entire cosmic biosystem! That thing you shoved into my brain just went to a place where it'll be even less happy than it was here, and it'll cause even more destruction on an unsuspecting, more defenseless plane of existence! You can't fucking play god! You can't you can't you can't!!!"

 

The words just pour out of me. I keep screaming and I have no idea where everything I suddenly know comes from. I just know in my soul - no, in my brain that I'm right. I don't pay attention to the recognition that's creeping over the faces of the officers in front of me because I'm screaming and screaming and professing the truth until my lungs collapse too hard for me to even care. I'm right. I'm right.

 

When I can't say anything else Amarao opens his mouth to say something instead and out of it comes a claxon roar.

 

Atsuko, the blue-haired girl and a third girl with a long black braid burst through the door begging orders. "What's the alarm?" In the hallway I can see red lights swirling all over the place and reflecting off the walls and Atsuko's keys.

 

"Intruder!" Amarao yells and he almost stampedes out the door but returns to grab me around the wrist and drag me with him as an afterthought.

 

Kitsurubami gets out after us but manages to wriggle out in front as we race down the hallway. I can barely hear her over the blaring alarm sound. "Code Red!" she yells into every door we pass. "Red, red, red, red, candy apple red!" At a four-way intersection we all shoot different ways but I manage to shove Amarao into a wall and run away.

 

I'm good at that.

 

He chases after me screaming like a siren and I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. My sneakers squeak on the too-clean floor and I stumble more than once but I know where the door is because I know everything. I make all the right turns except for one.

 

If I had taken the right turn, I wouldn't have found Tasuku.

 

He flips around to face me as soon as he senses my presence, brandishing his signature baseball bat left-handed to ward me off. I can't make eye contact because he's wearing dark blue sunglasses that obscure his eyes but I can read the recognition on the rest of his face as he immediately lowers the bat and rushes to me to guide me out of the complex. I can't find the words to say to tell him that I know how to get out myself because I know everything.

 

It's narrated to me in my head in his voice even though I've never heard it before.

 

The seven-pointed star is a symbol for the S.I.E.T.E. - the Society Intrepid of Extra-Terrestrial Exploration - a North American organization that performs humane N.O research and seeks to find an alternative to the Medical Mechanicca way of negating the threat of N.O related creatures. Amarao's Japanese branch of the S.I.E.T.E. is generally considered to be a renegade operation, possibly garbled by his past relations with one Haruha Raharu, a woman who used to be an extradimensional correspondent for the S.I.E.T.E. before surrendering her heart to the Pirate King Atomsk and his power. Nandaba Tasuku was sent to America under the cover of pursuing his baseball career in order to obtain elite training and specific instructions pertaining to the reformation - or, should that fare poorly, elimination - of Amarao's defective S.I.E.T.E. base. Complications arose when he returned to find that his family and sometime fling had both had direct relations with both Raharu and Amarao, but ultimately it was decided to execute the plan as it was issued.

 

"Thanks for busting me out," I say to him breathlessly when we reach the door.

 

"It wasn't out of my way or anything," he whispers to me in a low suave voice that I really have to learn how to use sometime. "Good luck." He tosses his bat from hand to hand and turns to go back into the fray while I barrel out of the compound on my own two feet and through the streets of Mabase, across a bridge with a cat under it and across train tracks with broken bottles sitting on them and straight to the train station and into the huddled group that is my friends to grab Mika around the waist, wrench her head back by her pretty-girl hair and shove my tongue into her mouth like breaking the tape at the finish line.

 

We break off breathless to Chisune and Reiko's applause. "If you don't fuck me later," she tells me, "I think I might kill you."

 

"That's not much of a threat."

 

"Where's Suzume?" Reiko asks me.

 

Reluctantly I tear my eyes from Mika and turn to her. "She's with Raharu."