Sinners & Saints: Redemption

Part 10

The first indication they had that something was going on was the sound of distant shouting from the left, far down the corridor. A strong breeze wafted down the hall, swirling in and out of the cells and teasing at Lukas’ hair and clothes. “What the…” He moved to the front of the cell, trying to peer down to the end of the row. “What’s going on, can you tell?”

“I can’t see anything,” Brad answered him from the next cell. They both listened intently for a few minutes, and heard more shouting. There was a sense of growing pressure in the air, as if all the air in the entire building was being compressed. Wind - it could no longer truly be called a breeze - whistled down the hall at irregular intervals, growing in strength with each gust. "It could be Nagi... winds often manifest as a side effect of his powers. If so, we need to get ready - this will be our one and only chance to escape this place alive."

"Great," Lukas muttered, clutching the bars. "How the hell do we 'get ready'?"

The sounds of shouting turned to screaming before Brad could answer him, and the strongest gust yet blasted through the hall, carrying clouds of dust and even tiny stones with it. Lukas backed away from the bars, coughing, and heard Brad doing the same.

"Can you see anything?" Brad called, and Lukas shook his head.

"No, I..."

The world spun and came crashing down, crushing Lukas beneath the weight of it. The Voices were screaming in his head, louder and stronger - and yet somehow oddly more distant - than they had ever been before. Brad's mind beside him was a bright spear point, digging into his brain, burrowing inside him until he felt sure he would burst. He screamed, and heard Brad echo him as the precognitive was flooded with a wave of visions, shared with the telepath through their mental link.

Between the Voices and the visions, Lukas was rapidly heading towards a Fit. Some distant corner of him was aware that if he passed out now, he would probably never escape this place, and would be Emmanuel's playtoy for the rest of his life. The thought gave him strength, and he gathered every last shred of willpower to wrest a rudimentary shield into place.

The most distant of the Voices were cut out instantly, even by such a thin barrier. As the ability to think returned to him, Lukas realized that meant they were VERY far away, despite how clear they had been. There was a cluster of unfamiliar minds somewhere nearby that were still imposing on him - they were near whatever had collapsed and sent the debris cloud into the cellblock, and they were panicking about something. Next to him Brad was still linked to him, undaunted by the shield, but Lukas had lost the connection to the other psychic's visions.

Summoning more and better shields, Lukas was slowly able to block out the panicking minds, and even to damp out most of Brad's projecting. When he was finally certain that his thoughts were mostly his own, he opened his eyes - when had he closed them? - and looked around. He found that he was lying on the floor of his cell, covered by a thick layer of dust while more drifted down out of the air. He sat up and dusted himself off, straining to hear something with his physical ears.

There was the sound of soft whimpering from somewhere nearby - Brad, he realized after a moment. "Brad," he said, voice hoarse with coughing. "Hey, Brad, come on, snap out of it."

The other psychic was likely trapped by the sudden return of his visions, just as Lukas had been caught in the minds of everyone around him. The telepath reached out cautiously along their link, extending his shields as he went, until they encompassed Brad as well. He had no idea if telepathic shields would have any effect on precognitive visions, but it was worth a shot.

He was struck again by the flow of visions, a swirl of images too rapid and varied to make out. Multiple futures all tried to make themselves known at once, fighting for dominance like unruly children in a playground. Somewhere in that mess was Brad's consciousness, lost in all the myriad possibilities.

*Here,* he called, still following the link. He projected an image of the cell, of the rubble, making it as strong and detailed as he could. *Here, Brad, come to me. This is the present. THIS is now. Follow the threads back to the place where they all meet.*

He felt a touch, a familiar mind brushing against his, and slowly the visions faded. Replacing them came thoughts and memories, and he couldn't help but peek - he'd never been inside Brad's mind before, and he was curious. Especially about the time he was now blocked from remembering.

*No, Lukas,* Brad cautioned him, pushing him gently out of his mind. That formidable iron shield slammed down over the precognitive's mind, barring Lukas from all but the most basic contact once more. *Trust me, my friend... you're better off not knowing. We've been given a new start, let's not ruin it with old arguments you don't even remember.*

Lukas let it go, retreating back into his own mind and drawing his shields tightly around him. He DID trust Brad, and as badly as he wanted to know what he was missing, if Brad told him he was better off not knowing, then it was probably true.

Booted footsteps echoed off the walls, approaching them slowly. Lukas gritted his teeth and stood, fists clenched, waiting to see who came into view. If it was Emmanuel...

But it wasn't. A young man approached from out of the dust clouds, hardly visible until he was almost on top of them. He was young, maybe twenty, and had strongly Asian features despite his blue eyes. He said something in a language Lukas didn't recognize, and his tone of voice was somewhere between relief and resentment.

To Lukas' surprise, Brad answered the boy in the same language. Whatever he said startled the other man, then made him laugh and shake his head. The stranger pulled out a set of lockpicks and knelt in front of Lukas' cell.

"I take it this is our rescue?" Lukas said dryly to Brad. After the pounding his mind had just taken, his telepathy was a little too raw for him to want to casually use it, either to talk to Brad or to read the stranger's mind. "Is this Nagi?"

Brad coughed, almost as if he was covering a laugh. The boy looked up, blinked, and then shrugged and went back to work on the lock. "No, this is a former enemy of ours. Nagi has friends among them, and I suspect he managed to convince them to help rescue us."

The lock clicked open and the boy stood, bowing ironically to gesture Lukas out of the cell. "Thanks," he said as he stepped out. Crossing the invisible border between the cell and the hall immediately made him feel about a hundred times better about the situation.

The boy muttered something that didn't sound entirely complimentary, and went to work on Brad's cell. Lukas leaned against the far wall and waited, squinting down the hall in the direction the boy had come from. "You got any friends out there?" he asked the youth.

The Asian man looked up at him crossly and said something in that same language. From the sounds, Lukas was beginning to think it was Japanese - not that he knew anything about Asian languages. "What's he saying?" he asked Brad curiously.

Brad chuckled. "Mostly he's telling you off. The last thing he said was asking you to speak in Japanese."

"But I don't know Japanese!" Lukas protested. "Can't he speak English?"

The American sighed. "Lukas, a few days ago you DID know Japanese. You spoke it fluently. The fact that you can't even understand it now tells me that Emmanuel did a VERY thorough job of blocking your memories of your time in this country. If it was just a normal case of amnesia, you'd still remember the subconscious skills you had learned."

Lukas felt a chill run along his spine. "How the fuck do you forget a language that you know fluently? This is insane... I'm not sure even I would be able to do a block THAT complete on someone I didn't have a link... to..." His eyes widened and he swore. "Fucking bastard tagged me! All those years ago, he must have tagged me, and I never even knew it!"

"It would explain how he managed to find us," Brad agreed. "I was quite thorough about ensuring our tracks were covered." He asked something of the boy, who shrugged and replied with a few words that sounded like names. "Siberian says most of Weiss doesn't speak English, though Nagi does, thankfully. As soon as we're in a secure position, remind me to transfer at least a basic knowledge of the language to you telepathically. We have a close enough bond that I should be able to do that."

"Yeah, sure," Lukas agreed gratefully. He didn't like being out of the loop, and not being able to understand most of the things said around him definitely counted as 'out of the loop'. The boy said something questioning, and Brad shook his head. Blue eyes slanted a very puzzled look at Lukas, and then the youth gave an exclamation and Brad's cell door swung open.

"Let's go," Brad said, gesturing down the hall for the boy's benefit. The Japanese boy nodded and headed off back the way he'd come, gesturing for them to follow him.

The two psychics trailed along behind him, picking their way through the rubble carefully. The last thing either of them needed now was a sprained or broken ankle to complicate matters. "Lukas," Brad said quietly as they walked. "These people know you. Some of them hate you. Some of them know you... rather well." Lukas raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't comment. Hard as it was to imagine being with anyone other than Brad, he also wasn't naive enough to assume that he'd been celibate all those years if he HADN'T had Brad.

The American sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Right now I don't dare check my visions unless I'm in full trance, or they'll overwhelm me again. It's everything I can do to hold them off. But I don't need to be a precognitive to know that what's coming will be messy." He hesitated, then added, "Just be gentle, Lukas. You have a very great deal of influence over several of the people you're about to meet, and at least one of them will be severely hurt if you reject him in any way."

They had reached a much larger pile of rubble... large enough that it clogged the hallway. The Japanese boy was already climbing towards the top, where Lukas could make out a small gap between the debris and the ceiling. When the youth reached the gap, he started prying more rocks off the top and tossing them down.

Lukas sidestepped quickly to avoid a rock that seemed to have been aimed at him, only to be hit in the shoulder by another one. He glared up at the youth, who just smirked down at him and said something that sounded quite rude before he returned to tossing rocks. Lukas responded in kind, in German, making Brad laugh.

"If you don't want to get hit, climb up and help him," the precognitive suggested, already suiting actions to words. "Otherwise we're going to be stuck here for quite some time before that gap is wide enough to fit through."

Aya pried himself out from between the two rocks that had nearly crushed him, still profoundly shaken by what he'd seen. He'd been present when Nagi had destroyed Masafumi's mansion after Tot's death, but this had been destruction on an entirely different scale of magnitude.

He was battered and bruised, but nothing seemed to be broken, which was a minor miracle in and of itself. Two slabs of concrete had fallen such that they were leaning against each other above him, just inches from his back. They in turn had protected him from any other large chunks; the end result was that he hadn't been hit by anything larger than his fist. He still felt as if he'd been pummeled by a fierce hailstorm, but he would live.

Assuming that he wasn't now trapped in this hallway - given the amount of rubble he'd seen crashing down before he'd hit the deck and covered his head, he wouldn't be surprised if he was blocked in. In fact, he'd be surprised if he WASN'T. Cautiously he got to his feet and started picking his way forward through the debris.

After a moment he realized he could feel a slight movement of air against his face - at least he wasn't completely sealed in. The air current caused the dust that was hanging in the air to swirl around him in dizzying patterns, making it even harder to see. The lights were flickering as well - some of the power lines must have been damaged.

He hadn't been far from the entrance when it all came slamming down, so it didn't take him very long to reach the rock pile that had once been the entrance to the lobby. He was extremely relieved to see that while the pile was high, it didn't fill the hall completely... there was more than enough room for him to get through at the top. He started climbing, wondering grimly if there would be anything left to find on the other side.

The movement of the air was much stronger when he neared the top, and he realized why the moment he crested the peak; the entire ceiling of the lobby had fallen in, exposing the room to the elements. Wind currents were creating dust devils out of the lighter debris, and there was concrete, plaster chunks and steel beams everywhere.

"Aya!" a familiar voice called from across the room. Aya looked up, and saw Youji just emerging from the hall that led to the main entrance. It too had been partially blocked, but the playboy had no trouble getting through. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," Aya replied, sliding down the other side of the pile. "You?"

"I'm going to turn several lovely shades of black and blue, I'm sure, but otherwise I'm okay," Youji replied wryly. He surveyed the damage, and his half-humourous expression melted into a concerned frown. "Gods. Nagi must be somewhere under all this mess. And Omi and Ken bolted into the cellblocks..." he gestured, and Aya turned to see that the other two hallways had been completely blocked, rather than only partially filled. "We need to start digging them out, I guess. Hopefully this took care of the guards for us."

Aya forebore to mention that if it had taken care of the guards, it had likely taken care of Omi and Ken as well. As far as Nagi went... he doubted the telekinetic could have survived this, but then again, he'd have said the same after Nagi had brought down Masafumi's mansion.

"I saw where Nagi was standing just before it all came down," the redhead said, moving towards the centre of the room. "I'll look for him - you start digging Omi and Ken out."

As he'd expected, Youji went straight for the hall Omi had bolted into. Aya was badly worried about his own lover, but at the same time, he didn't think he'd be able to bear digging through all that rubble and finding Ken's dead body. The mere thought made his chest ache so badly he couldn't breathe. So instead, he moved to the approximate area the telekinetic had last been in and started tossing chunks of debris aside, looking for some sign of the boy's body.

He'd only been digging for a minute when he realized there was something odd about the pattern of the collapse... there was a circle where the debris was piled higher than in other places. He scrambled up to the top, nearly sliding back down again several times on the shifting rocks.

Sure enough, within the circle was an area with much less debris in it. The wind was playing havoc with the dust, making it difficult to see, but Aya's sharp eyes spotted Nagi's hand and sleeve lying limp against a rock. He picked his way down to the bottom, sliding the last foot or so, and quickly began digging the boy out from under the pile.

It took him only moments to free Nagi's upper torso from the loose debris. He checked the boy's pulse and breathing, and confirmed what his eyes had already told him... the telekinetic was dead, either because of the falling ceiling or the expenditure of his own powers.

He nearly left it at that. A large part of him was urging him to just walk away... after all, Ken was still trapped, and might be running out of air. And though he had reluctantly admitted to himself that he couldn't blame Nagi for what Schwartz had done to his sister, he still wouldn't shed any tears over the boy's death.

But... he remembered the devastated look on Omi's face when they'd told him the telekinetic had gone missing the day before. And the way Nagi had flinched from him, cowering in the corner when he'd snarled at the boy. Nagi had suffered enough abuse and neglect in his life, and now Aya - supposedly one of the 'good guys' - was just going to walk away from him without even trying to save him?

His hands were moving before his mind had reached the conscious decision, and he realized he'd known what he was going to do all along. There really was no other choice, not if he wanted to be able to live with himself in the future. He pinched the boy's nose shut and leaned over, sealing his mouth to the telekinetic's and forcing air into the boy's lungs. After doing that a few times, he moved to try to restart the youth's heart by pumping on it, hard. Nagi already had a cracked rib, and Aya wouldn't be surprised if he ended up with several more after this, but if it saved his life then it was worth it.

He kept at it, moving back and forth between breathing and heart, going at the task with his usual relentless determination. He wasn't going to give up until someone pulled him away from the body or Nagi breathed on his own.

He wasn't sure how many cycles he'd been through when Nagi suddenly choked against his mouth and thrashed weakly. Aya pulled away, supporting the boy as he gasped painfully for air, breathing in tiny little pants because of the pain in his ribs. "Prodigy, can you hear me?" he asked.

"Y-yes," Nagi finally managed to respond. He was shaking like a leaf and trying to huddle in on himself as if for warmth. His skin was cold and clammy to the touch, and Aya frowned. Pulling his trenchcoat off, he gently draped it around the boy and started to work on freeing his legs as well.

"Balinese, any luck?" he called to his teammate. The playboy paused in his work and pushed his hair back from his face - he'd lost his hairtie at some point, apparently.

"Yeah, he's in there - we can hear each other if we shout," Youji replied, though he sounded grim. Aya blinked - he'd been so focused he hadn't even heard Youji shouting. "He's injured and can't dig, gunshot to the shoulder, and he says there's no air movement in there."

"Right. Give me your trenchcoat, then keep working," Aya ordered. Youji started to ask why, then saw Aya's trench already wrapped around Nagi. He nodded and shed his jacket in a single smooth move, tossing it across the rubble to Aya. The redhead caught it deftly and added it to the one already wrapped around the boy. "Will you be all right if I leave you for a few minutes?" he asked.

"I'll be f-fine," Nagi whispered, clutching the jackets to him. "I'm just exhausted. Go help the others."

Aya didn't need to be told twice. He headed for Youji, but the blonde waved him off. "Check on Siberian," the playboy said. "I've almost reached Bombay, and he says he's probably got enough air for days, so don't worry about it."

"Thanks," Aya acknowledged briefly. Even that much gratitude made Youji give him a surprised look, but he hardly saw it as he turned and made his way to the other side of the room as quickly as he could. He surveyed the blockage of the corridor Ken had vanished into, and though he saw a small gap up near the top. Climbing up, he shouted into the hole. "Siberian! Can you hear me?"

"Abyssinian!" Aya had never been more relieved to hear anything than he was to hear Ken's voice at that moment. "Yeah, I'm in here. I'm okay, and I found Crawford and Schuldig. They're fine too." His lover sounded torn between relief and disappointment, and Aya had to admit he felt much the same way. In many ways, things would have been so much easier if the two older psychics had been dead, or even if Weiss simply hadn't been able to find them. "Are the others okay?"

He started scraping away the top layer of debris, widening the gap from his end as Ken was probably doing on the other side. Hopefully it wasn't too wide, so they would meet in the middle relatively quickly. "Bombay is trapped the same way you are, but Balinese is almost through to him, and they're talking." He hesitated, then added, "Prodigy isn't doing very well, but he's alive, and that's more than I expected."

Someone on the other side made a concerned noise, and then Crawford asked, "What's wrong with him? I assume he's responsible for the collapse?"

"Yes," Aya told them, grunting as he shoved a large chunk of steel out of the way. "He was fighting with the... anti-psychic, or whatever it was. He's shaking badly, curled up, and his skin is cold and clammy. His eyes are dilated too - shock, most likely. He wasn't breathing when I found him, I had to restart his heart."

"Christ," Ken swore. "Same thing that happened yesterday after he totalled those warehouses."

"He collapsed after using his powers yesterday, and then used them again today?" Crawford said, sounding amazed. "He shouldn't have been able to MOVE, let alone bring down a building. Listen, Abyssinian... he's going into reaction shock. Forget about us, we'll dig our way out of here soon enough. You need to keep him warm, as warm as possible, or his system might shut down again. If you have any sort of food or liquid, give it to him right away, force it down his throat if he won't eat it. And don't let him go to sleep!"

Aya hesitated, but Ken spoke up. "Go on, Abyssinian, we're almost through to you anyway. I can see you." Leaning down, Aya saw that his lover was indeed no more than a few feet away. Ken grinned and gave him a thumbs up, then shooed him off. "Go, take care of Prodigy, or I don't think Balinese will be able to keep Bombay from going ballistic on us this time."

Snorting at the likely accuracy of that statement, Aya gave his lover a small smile before sliding back down the pile and heading for Nagi once more. Youji had broken through on his side, and was now just trying to widen the hole enough to get Omi through it. The swordsman clambered down into the hollow where Nagi had been buried, and found the boy curled up on his side, still shivering.

He hesitated, but remembered Crawford's injunction to keep the boy as warm as possible. Sitting so that his back was propped against a larger piece of concrete, he drew the shaking youth into his arms and held him close. Nagi's eyes were closed, and for a horrible moment Aya thought he might have fallen unconscious. "Prodigy? Can you answer me?"

He suffered through a long moment of fear, before Nagi finally opened his eyes and nodded slightly. His eyes were glazed and dilated - he was in shock, as Aya had guessed. The redhead didn't know what 'reaction shock' was, but it apparently manifested in much the same way as regular shock. "Talk to me," he commanded the boy. "Don't fall asleep."

Nagi opened his mouth, clearly struggling to form words. "Wh-what d'you wan' me t'talk abou'?" he finally managed, his words slurred rather badly.

Aya sighed in relief that the telekinetic could talk at all. "Anything you like." He had a flash of inspiration. "Tell me about computers - Bombay is always trying to explain them to us, but it seems like a foreign language to me."

As he'd hoped, Nagi brightened somewhat and launched into a slurred and convoluted 'explanation' that Aya couldn't follow a single word of. But he was talking, and his diction was improving with each passing moment. He wasn't shaking quite as hard now, and had instinctively curled up against Aya's chest with his head on the older man's shoulder.

"Prodigy!" Omi's voice came from above, interrupting the incoherent torrent of words from the boy. Both Aya and Nagi looked up to see Omi sliding down the pile towards them, followed by Youji. "Are you okay?" the youngest Weiss demanded anxiously.

" 'M fine," Nagi asserted, lowering his head back to Aya's shoulder. "Tired. Cold. 'll be okay." He looked up again suddenly, his body tensing in Aya's arms. "Did you find Schuldig?"

"Siberian found them," Aya replied quickly. "They're both fine, they're digging their way out to us now."

"Thank all the gods," Youji said, and Omi nodded agreement. "Bombay, you help Abyssinian keep Prodigy warm... I'll go dig from the other side."

Omi lowered himself carefully to sit beside Aya, and the redhead turned so that Nagi was caught between them, warmed by body heat from both sides. "Keep talking," Aya ordered the boy, who showed signs of drowsing now that he was finally warming up. Nagi took up his narrative once more, prodded occasionally by questions from Omi that didn't mean anything to Aya, but which apparently served to send Nagi off on entirely new tangents.

"We've got them!" Youji shouted after an interminable time. Omi let out a whoop of relief and sat up, helping Nagi to do the same.

"Man, I thought we'd NEVER get out of there," a familiar nasal voice exclaimed in English. Aya only understood about half of the words, but he certainly understood the way both Omi's and Nagi's faces lit up at the sound of them.

"Gebieter!" Nagi's voice was too soft to carry far, but he was already trying to squirm out of their grasp. "Let go!" the boy insisted. "I need to see him, please!"

"Let him go, Abyssinian, he won't relax again until he's seen for himself that Schuldig is all right," Omi ordered in an undertone. Aya nodded and released his hold on the telekinetic. Omi helped his friend over the lip of the rubble, and the moment they crested it a familiar shock of brilliant orange hair came into view.

"Master!" Nagi cried in Japanese, pulling free of Omi's grasp and stumbling forward to throw himself into the German's arms, nearly knocking the startled man off his feet.

"Schu!" Omi was right behind Nagi, glomping them both and hugging them tightly, babbling something to Schuldig that Aya couldn't hear from where he was climbing down the side of the pile.

Something was wrong, though... from all of Omi's and Youji's stories and insistences that Schuldig loved Nagi more than anything else in the world, Aya would have expected the man to look happy at being reunited with his lover. Instead the German looked stunned and dismayed, glancing over at Crawford as if for help. Aya's suspicion was confirmed - though not in the way he'd expected - by the telepath's first words.

"Do I know these kids?"

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