Disclaimer: Characters do not belong to me, no matter how much I look like Emishi when wearing stupid pink sunglasses. They are used without permission, but with much respect for the creators of Get Backers. (Far more than the respect I have for Emishi, because, you know, he's Emishi.)
Warning: This fic has a heterosexual pairing featured prominently - gasp! But there are also mentions of Kazuki/Jubei and implied Ban/Ginji, because this is Get Backers, after all.
Notes: An Emishi fic that isn't entirely comedy? And multi-chapter? ...Yeah, scary. Hit me one night out of nowhere, too. Amusingly enough, almost entirely written before I saw episode 40. Good ol' "passionate male friendship" - of course Emishi would notice Shido's current state before Ban and Ginji did.
Takes place shortly after the MakubeX story, with spoilers galore, but sometime before the Venus de Milo arc. Mostly using fansub translations for various things like Mugenjou, but keeping some honorifics, despite my distaste for random Japanese words in English fics, just because I like them when Ginji or Emishi use them oddly.
Jokers Wild
"Emi... Emishi!" Shido's casual greeting turned into an exclamation of shock as he opened the door further and fully took in the sight of his friend's form, hunched over before him on the steps leading into Madoka's mansion, illuminated eerily by the light on the porch.
"Shido..." Despite the dark red stain seeping through his shirt beneath his fingers, clutched to his stomach, Emishi looked up and managed a weak grin. "I made it... All this way, and I made it... Th... they found us... The Volts... Volts are..."
He swayed, and almost fell, but Shido grabbed hold of his arms, holding him upright. "What happened, Emishi?" he prompted firmly. "Who did this to you?"
Emishi coughed weakly, and a drop of red trickled from the corner of his mouth. "When I left... MakubeX... he asked me to give you..."
"Emishi!" Shido caught him as he sagged forward, clutching a parcel.
The light, hesitant footfalls behind him were easy to identify, especially with the lighter padding of Mozart alongside them, and for once Shido was grateful that Madoka was blind - she didn't need to witness a sight like this. "Call an ambulance," he urged her quickly, his eyes roaming over Emishi's frame, desperately searching for some sign of what exactly had injured him. "Bring Ginji, tell him-"
"An... ambulance?" Her voice held a note of alarm, but sounded confused. "Shido - what's going on?"
"Emishi - he's bleeding badly, and-"
"...He is?" He glanced over his shoulder at her quiet sound of surprise, and found her looking puzzled. "I don't smell blood..." Mozart's faint whine affirmed Madoka's assessment, to Shido's knowledgeable ears.
Shido's head snapped back around to give a suspicious look to Emishi, limp in his arms. The man's eyes were still closed, but that ghastly, bloodstained grin of his had grown wider. "Of course she doesn't..." Emishi murmured weakly. "Because..."
Suddenly he straightened and laughed, spitting out a small, broken capsule. "Because it's all stage makeup! Oh, Shido-kun - how you could believe anything could happen to the Volts while I was protecting them is beyond me!"
Shido's mouth had fallen open in disbelief, and now he was torn between relief that his friend was all right, and the urge to shake him to death for such a stupid, thoughtless prank. "Emishi..." he growled dangerously. "This is supposed to be a special night!"
"And a special night deserves a special trick," the Joker said cheerfully as he wiped the fake blood from his mouth and looked past Shido to the woman standing behind him, who had a rather bemused expression. "Apologies if I offended, miss, but - oh my..." Pushing his way past Shido, he looked over the young woman, dressed all in red silk, with the finely groomed guide dog by her side. "You must be Madoka-han, because you look every bit as lovely as Shido-kun has told me, and then some. ...May I touch your hair?"
Madoka giggled as Emishi bent down to pet Mozart. "So soft..." he crooned. "I'm jealous, Shido-kun..."
Mozart barked in startled amusement, and Shido growled again. "Emishi... don't insult your hostess."
"I'm not offended, Shido," Madoka told him with a smile. "Your friend seems very funny..."
"Ahh - beautiful, a sense of humor, and not so easily tricked as Shido-kun..." Emishi took Madoka's hand lightly, and dropped to one knee. "Madoka-han, will you marry me? I'm sorry to be so flighty, dear one," he added, lowering his head to address Mozart conspiratorially, "but can you blame me?"
Evidently, Madoka could hear Shido's teeth grinding, because she looked up at him with amusement. "Don't worry, Shido - he's done no harm."
"Oh, Shido is just upset because he couldn't bear the thought of losing me! It may take him all night to recover from the shock of my near-death," Emishi told her brightly, getting to his feet again. "Now, is there a place I can change into more suitable clothes? I brought them along with me - it's a ways from the Infinite Castle to this place, and I didn't want my good clothes to get dirty on the way..."
"Yes, there's a room right down that way," Madoka assured him, nodding towards a hallway. "Shido, will you show him the way? I'll see to our other guests... It's a pleasure to meet you at last, Emishi Haruki - Shido's spoken of you often."
"He has, hmmm...?" Emishi mused in a tone that Shido wasn't at all sure he liked. "At any rate, I'm pleased to finally meet you as well, Madoka-han. Thank you very much for inviting me into your beautiful home."
"Think nothing of it - it's Shido's home now as well," she told him with a smile, "and his friends are my friends, whether they're man or beast. It's my honor to have one of his best dining with us tonight. If you'll excuse me..."
"She means your lion, doesn't she?" Emishi whispered to Shido with a grin, as the two of them headed down the hall Madoka had indicated. When Shido's hard expression didn't change, Emishi's face fell a bit too. "Oh, come on now, Shido - I'm only joking..."
"A dinner party is not quite the setting for your stupid jokes," Shido muttered coldly. "Really, saying the Volts had been wiped out... and I think you got your stage blood on my shirt."
"It's water-based - it'll come right out," Emishi assured him.
"Hmph." Shido frowned. "And... MakubeX didn't ask you to bring me anything...? What's in the package?"
"Only his best regards. The package is my good clothes." After a moment, he grinned again, and slung his arm around Shido's shoulder casually. "And I see you haven't punished me for any of this. Either love has made you go soft, Beastmaster, or you really are just relieved that I'm alive and well."
Shido didn't answer - either option was somewhat degrading. To be honest, he thought to himself that perhaps it was a little of both.
Emishi got to laugh a bit more about his prank over dinner, since at least one of the other guests found it funny. "Really, monkey-trainer," Ban chuckled over the clinking of silver and china and the soft glow of candlelight, "how could you be taken in by stage blood? They've never come up with a way to make it feel or smell right, even if it looks right. Do you have your animals do all the serious fighting for you, that you can't identify a fake?"
"Shido's seen plenty of blood - I can vouch for that," Ginji piped up before Shido could growl a response. Despite the delicious dinner, which ordinarily would have left the former Thunder Emperor in pure bliss, his eyes held a touch of sadness at the reminder of unpleasant days. "I was there too..."
"And me!" Emishi had to speak up in Shido's defense as well. "Shido-kun shed almost as much blood as my whip has for the Volts - though he did it with considerably less humor."
"I'm not so sure of that, since your jokes aren't funny," Shido muttered into his drink.
"Ohh, Shido-kun," Emishi teased him. "Just because you have no sense of humor..."
On the other side of Shido, Madoka smiled, and reached up to touch Shido's shoulder reassuringly. Odd, Emishi supposed, when Shido was the strong one and she only small and frail and blind. Despite her lack of sight, she found and touched him with a certainty that suggested an intimate knowledge of him; without the ability to look, she knew just how tall he was, just how far away he sat, just where his shoulder fell. "Shido has a sense of humor - he's showed it to me often enough,"she stated fondly. "His humor is just more... understated and quiet."
Shido shifted and looked down at his plate, as if self-conscious. Emishi couldn't help but notice, however, the peace that entered his eyes at Madoka's touch.
Behind the sunglasses he wore - even with the semi-formal attire, it was one of his vices, and everyone there except possibly the blind hostess was tolerant of his quirks - his own eyes went hard.
The subject changed, from Emishi's pranking to current events and happenings in the world of fine arts, and Emishi was lost. It was exactly the sort of conversation one might expect at a dinner party hosted by a fine, talented lady like Madoka, and not at all a conversation that one who had lived so long within the self-contained haze of the Infinite Castle could follow. In fact, Ban was the only one who could seemingly keep up, though Ginji made the effort - and usually got smacked by Ban for saying something apparently either ignorant or irreverent, though Emishi wouldn't have known the difference. (If he had, he supposed he'd have added a few more such comments to the discussion just for kicks; serious conversations were just not fun at all.)
Shido as well remained mostly quiet, though now and then he spoke up to offer an opinion, and it seemed to please Madoka. She was training him well, Emishi thought, to be a partner that would be acceptable in her world, just like that guide dog of hers. It left a bad taste in his mouth that the meal could not entirely banish - the problem with a trained dog, of course, was that the human was always considered to be in charge. Though still fondness of a sort, it was not at all the even-handed friendship that Shido would offer an animal - or that Emishi had offered Shido, who was practically an animal of his own.
As the evening wore on, the drinks flowed, and everyone gradually grew more accustomed to each other, the conversation became more casual again - thank goodness - and Emishi began filling the others in on what had happened in the Infinite Castle since they'd last been there. "Volts membership has been growing - booming, really," he told them proudly. "The young people have been coming to MakubeX one after another, day after day, and he tells them what to expect. And you know, despite that, most of them stick around," he added with a grin. "I'd like to say it's MakubeX's charm winning them over, or the hope he gives them - but from listening to some of them talk, I think half the time it's the food he gives them... and with the girls, it's his eyes and his smile that hold their interest."
"His smile..." Ginji had a dreamy, thoughtful smile of his own as he pondered the idea. "I think more than anything else, I like hearing that MakubeX smiles again now. When we saw him, he seemed so unhappy, until the very end... not like when I knew him before. He had this bright smile back then, that showed in his eyes. And they both shone..." His musing was cut off in a sudden yelp of pain. "Ban-chan, what was that for?"
"Are you a teenage girl too?" his partner asked, even as he casually dropped an arm around Ginji's shoulders. "So, Emishi - how's the resistance going? Any big developments?"
Emishi obliged and filled them in - telling them how he and Jubei had found some strange passageways which might lead somewhere promising, and how MakubeX and Sakura had been searching for areas where the illusionary powers of the Infinite Castle were weaker. But behind the chattering, he continued to be distracted by his companions, and how comfortable they seemed beside each other. Even if the conversation was something only one half of each pair could relate to at any given time, as their worlds were so different, the looks in their eyes reflected harmony that had nothing to do with social status, and everything to do with the soul. It was the same sort of harmony that had been so unique in Kazuki and Jubei in the days when the Thunder Emperor ruled the Infinite Castle's lower areas, and there was little peace or comfort to be found. It had vanished from Jubei's eyes when Kazuki had chosen to leave, and without even that small hope remaining, the Infinite Castle had seemed all that much more cold and unwelcoming in the days after Ginji departed.
Although his place at Madoka's long table had been set just beside Shido, in a way Emishi thought he might as well have been placed at one of the far ends.
Later that evening found Emishi, Shido, and Madoka sitting in the lush grass beneath a tree, out on the grounds of Madoka's mansion. The Get Backers duo had left already, Ban having stated that Ginji had drunk too much of Madoka's wine and was starting to get sillier than usual - though anyone paying attention would have noticed that Ban had gotten just a bit louder than usual himself, and Emishi wouldn't have minded a little silliness. Still, it wasn't bad to lie back on the ground in the cool night air, with a cat beneath his hand and a rabbit perched on his chest. The cat remembered him, having been one of Shido's longtime companions, but the rabbit was a new friend, and Emishi rather liked both.
Shido was more sensibly sitting up, with his arm around Madoka, who rested her head on his shoulder. Emishi just stared up at the stars between the rabbit's ears; if he didn't look in Shido's direction and see the woman there, it felt a lot like old times. Except softer, he had to admit. And without the expectation of someone ruining it by attacking at any moment. ...Well, without as much expectation - Emishi did still spend the majority of his time in the Infinite Castle, after all. But here, it seemed far more peaceful than it ever had been when he and Shido would sit together, sometimes with Kazuki and Jubei, up in the rafters of some half-finished skyscraper. Here, the paranoia that came from a life lived through battle and power struggles was just a tiny nagging thought in the back of Emishi's mind, like the stiff bundle of his whip in the small of his back, where he kept it tucked away.
Shido seemed to feel the same when he finally spoke, his voice low and quiet. "I'm glad you could make it, Emishi. It's a long way from the Infinite Castle."
Emishi nodded. "Yeah... but not a bad trip." Shido knew just how far away it was - worlds and worlds away - but Emishi didn't want to talk about that now. Not with Madoka there. As much as he liked to perform, to show off and gather people's attention, there were some thoughts that only deserved sharing with certain others who knew.
"So now that you know the way," Shido inquired, "do you suppose you'll come out more often?"
"Oh, I don't know..." Emishi mumbled casually, plucking a bit of clover and offering it to the rabbit on his chest, who sniffed and accepted. "It's nice to think about, but the Volts need me... all those new kids, you know?" Besides, Emishi thought to himself, the way out of the Infinite Castle was a lot easier to find when there was a reason. There were so many reasons not to leave that he was rather sure he didn't actually know the way at all.
"Yes... I suppose you're right." There was a rustle in the grass as Shido shifted. "...Emishi..."
Emishi knew that tone of voice, and he quickly grinned up at Shido, stroking the cat and the rabbit gently. "Don't worry, Shido-kun - I'll come and visit if you like. After all, I can't leave my friends Kitty-kun and Bunny-sama here."
Shido smiled slightly at the names he used. "They'd like that."
"Come and visit any time you like, Emishi," Madoka offered. "We have the room - and as I said before, all of Shido's friends are welcome here."
"Thank you for the gracious offer, Madoka-han," Emishi replied with a knowing smile, "though I wonder if you know just what you're getting yourself into..."
She laughed quietly, and Shido nodded. "It's a dangerous offer, Madoka, where the Joker of Fresh Blood is involved. More so than lions or bears."
"If all the blood he spills here is water-soluble and comes in small capsules, it's not so dangerous," she reasoned, and Emishi had to smile. The Beastmaster had found quite a mate - if circumstances had been different, Emishi might have liked her a great deal himself.
But as they said their goodbyes, Emishi wished she would go away, just for a little while. There were many things he would have discussed with Shido, had they been alone, but the girl was always there - they had no privacy whatsoever, with her hanging onto his arm as if he was her new favored guide dog. Might as well put a harness on him, Emishi thought as he began the trek back to the Infinite Castle, despite her worries about him travelling alone at night. And how naive was that, to worry about travelling through the countryside at night, when the place he was travelling to was the Infinite Castle?
The thing that really got him, he supposed as he watched the cars go by despite his outstretched thumb, was the way Shido seemed to like the idea of being harnessed, though he'd never have put some such device on any of his animal friends.
Emishi didn't get home until nearly dawn, since no cars stopped to pick him up. Many, to his annoyance, actually sped up as they neared him. It wasn't until the first light started to peek through the skeletal tops of the skyscrapers before him that it occurred to him that maybe he shouldn't have changed back into his regular shirt without washing the fake bloodstains out first.