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It wasn’t everyday that an assassination attempt was held against you, and it was an even rarer occasion for it to fail. Furthermore, having someone sacrifice themselves for was the rarest of all experiences. It necessitated several things: you being someone worth sacrificing for, a person being willing to sacrifice for you, and a situation in which a sacrifice was necessary.
Emma did not think that this experience would ever apply to her. Not because she didn’t think she wasn’t worthy enough to be cared after, but knowing that she was in danger great enough within the presence of someone so giving… she just didn’t think it was in her cards. On the twenty second of February, some time in the early morning, on a sidestreet by a quaint cemetery, Emma realized that she should have died.
Instead of her body cooling on the pavement as blood spilled from her crown, Takemitchy was kneeling. A motorbike that she hadn’t even registered was driving away—the two boys dressed in Tenjiku uniforms howling something or other. They wobbled, as if they were fighting, but the bike stayed upright and they did not turn around. Takemitchy was still on his knees, but his eyes were trained on the receding bike, his expression blank.
That in and of itself was supremely worrying. Takemitchy was a boy who wore emotions like clothing—always visible, and changing at a moment’s notice. When tears rained he switched into galoshes, or when the sun was too intense he opened an umbrella. He adjusted to how he felt in this beautiful strange way that seemed to captivate people. Mikey had been charmed by him, and while he and Emma had somewhat of a dented past, they were still friends. She wanted nothing bad to happen to him, especially if it was due to her, so she fought against the bile rising in her gut.
With careful steps forward, Emma walked towards the boy’s back.
“Takemichi?” she said slowly. “Are—are you alright?”
The blonde continued staring in the direction of the bike, not quite ignoring her, but not responding expediently. By the time he was meeting her eyes, Emma could tell that something was wrong, but instead of acknowledging it like anyone without a death wish would, Takemitchy simply offered her a crooked smile.
“I… have been better,” he groaned.
She should have had the right mind to punch him, but that was her brothers’ thing, and so she walked around his hunched figure to get a better look at him. And while he wasn’t bleeding out like Draken had once complained about, his arm was hanging at a distinctly crooked angle as his chest shuddered with exhaustion. Emma couldn’t refrain from sucking in a pained breath, to which Takemitchy’s smile turned a bit sheepish.
“I don’t wanna look at it. Is it bad?”
Instead of reaching out and helping him, calling for someone, or flipping open her phone, Emma stared for a single self-indulgent moment. “Does it hurt?”
Takemitchy’s laugh sounded wet, and caused the boy to descend into a fit of coughing—but he was chuckling. “I’ve had worse, I think.”
She didn’t know if that was supposed to be the truth, or at the very least, comforting, but it had none of those qualities. Emma just shook her head, her phone already trilling with a connection noise.
Looking up from her phone and towards Takemitchy after he coughed may have been the second most traumatizing experience of her life. There was blood leaking from his lips and rolling down his chin and neck as his pallor went from lifelike to ashen. He didn’t change his expression though—clothing stained in blood, yet he wore it with pride: that pitiful grin still sat on the blonde’s lips, even as it was saturated with blood.
Emma’s hands shook as she spoke to the dispatcher on the phone, carefully describing the way actually bubbled out of his nose and dripped from his open mouth. It felt wrong to sit there and stare—not even to bother trying to help him—but Emma was frozen in place by her foolish heart and frightened feet. The lady on the dispatch said that she was doing so well, and that the ambulance will be there in two minutes, but Emma had been counting the seconds and three minutes had already gone by.
In the short moments it had taken for one of the ambulances to be sent out, Takemitchy’s breathing worsened significantly. It was shallow with pain at the start, but it slowly weakened from gulps of air to hacking wheezes that sounded more like fluid than air. The blonde had stopped speaking, refusing to waste his precious oxygen on answering stupid questions from the dispatcher. Emma was more than capable, she had explained, so she could speak for the both of them.
Mikey and Chifuyu came jogging out of the cemetery when the sound of sirens grew closer. The younger boy was immediately incensed, his words fell from his lips in a torrent of anxiety and if Emma didn’t know better, she would’ve thought the boy was crying. Takemitchy still didn’t respond vocally to any of his questions, but he did swing his head in Emma’s direction.
The sirens were so loud she thought they ought to have seen lights by now.
“What happened?”
And well, wasn’t that just the question? Emma still hadn’t processed the reverberation of the baseball bat that rattled through Takemitchy’s torso. It hit the boy so hard Emma had felt it, especially with how he’d wrapped himself around her. The back of her skull tingled at the memory—her teeth feeling wrong in her mouth. She couldn’t answer that question! Her voice wasn’t going to work anymore, and for some reason she got the distinct impression that she’d dropped her phone a while ago.
Emma wheezed alongside Takemitchy—air not seeming to come to her fast enough. Maybe Takemitchy was stealing it all, the way he was hungrily swallowing it down as if someone were going to take it from him. The thought was absurd! Just like answering Mikey’s question.
Ma’am, are you still there? The dispatcher asked.
Emma was crying hot tears that left trails of freezing skin in their wake.
Mikey was holding her steady as she tried to focus on breathing and crying at the same time.
The world was painted in blue and red as people ran past them towards Takemitchy and Chifuyu, all the while Mikey’s lips were moving. It was far, far too loud to understand what he was trying to say, but Emma watched him anyway. Maybe watching Mikey talk and talk and talk made her feel normal—like Baji was going to kick in their front door with Kazutora on his heels, and Pah-chin grumbling all the while.
It took longer than Emma would’ve liked to admit, and also no time at all, for the girl to finally gather herself enough to spare the emotional and cognitive energy necessary to string two things together and into a thought.
“Where is he?” she whispered. “What happened to all the people?”
Mikey pulled her into a tight hug, those unshakable hands of his trembling where they pressed against her spine.
Instead of breaking down like he should have, he hid everything behind a mask of spiderweb cracks. Emma hated it.
“They took him to the hospital,” Mikey explained. “Chifuyu went with him, and we’re gonna go catch up. Draken, Mitsuya, and his pals are on their way over now. Are you… are you good to go?”
Emma held him just as tightly, so grateful for her doting older brother.
She nodded her head and with a voice thick with tears said, “Let’s go.”
Her word was law, as it always tended to be, so they hopped on her eldest brother’s bike and started making their way to the temporary residence of her newest brother—because that’s what Takemitchy was. He could never share their blood, but as a member of Toman—and someone close to Mikey—she had come to see him as such.
It turned out that Takemitchy had been hit directly by Kisaki’s bat—the whole length of the thing visible on his body in the shape of a perfectly straight line. She imagine it started somewhere on his arm, though she couldn’t see through the splint they’d put on him only a few minutes ago. Furthermore, she could only spot the bruising because his hospital gown was practically see through. Kisaki had broken four of Takemitchy’s ribs, along with his arm, two of the former having punctured and collapsed his lung.
The frothy blood that had been leaking from his nose was due to that, she learned. He was in major shock when he was wheeled in, but as he was now he was calm. Always so fidgety and nosey, it was strange to see the boy so laid back. (Though, she supposed, a shit ton of designer drugs tended to mellow people out.)
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
A dazed smile was her only response.
Later that evening Toman would walk into the conflict with Tenjiku—shot would be fired, though no one would end up dying. Emma would have snuck onto the grounds and watched with bated breath. She found the boy that Takemitchy had described—Kisaki Tetta— and prepared herself for anything she thought she may have had to do. Standing by one of the exits, she could only watch in horror as the boy started sprinting in her direction. Draken was on his tail, closing in the distance with every step, though Tetta did have quite the lead.
When the boy was just about through the wall that surrounded the wharf, Emma swung the baseball bat she’d nicked from her school. Were she Smiley she would’ve jumped with glee, and perhaps shouted home run!— but she was just Emma and so she stared at the passed out body of a kid she may have wanted to kill.
Good riddance.
Takemitchy ended up being completely fine—not a single scar to show for the ordeal. He had to take it easy for a really, really long time after. He was barred from meetings, and his friends stayed at his place nearly every hour of every day. It made getting a moment alone to speak with him tough, but Emma wasn’t the type to give up on something if she wanted it and so she kept trying.
It warmed her heart to know Takemitchy was appreciated, and that his friends cared for him that deeply. When she knocked on the door, a kid with slicked back black hair and an extremely tall stature answered the door. He didn’t exactly recognize Emma—which she didn’t blame him for—but he knew who she was there for. As respectfully and covertly as possible, he showed her to where Takemitchy was resting and let himself outside to smoke a cigarette she knew he didn’t have.
When she sat in the chair opposite to where Takemitchy was lounging, she was taken off guard by him speaking first.
“Does it hurt?”
Her eyebrows knitted together. “What are you talking about?”
“The guilt,” he answered. “Does it still hurt, even though I’ve forgiven you?”
In lieu of anything cool or intelligent, tears sprung to her eyes unabbiden.
It’s not so bad, Emma thought. So long as something like this never happens again.