Chapter Text
“Code Blue, Silver Wing, Room 4A. Code Blue, Silver Wing, Room 4A…”
The calm voice of the hospital operator over the intercom was at total odds with the alarm ringing overhead in the dark call room, bathing the glorified closet in blue light.
“Oh, shit,” Yukio said blearily as he extracted himself from the ancient leather couch, staggering out of the on-call room. He only had to take a few steps before he was completely awake and sprinting— being a light sleeper did have its perks.
Nobody was thrilled when their patient’s heart stopped beating, but some people thrived on the adrenaline, the teamwork, the last-ditch procedures with dire stakes. Not him. Yukio hated every second of it, especially when he was the one expected to run the code. Even two years into residency, it hadn’t gotten easier.
But this was his patient, and if there was one thing he hated more than a Code Blue… it was losing. Especially when he didn’t even know what he was losing against.
Hashimoto Karin’s precipitous decline had been tormenting Yukio since he’d admitted her to the hospital a week ago. What had seemed like a simple case of anemia didn’t respond to iron or blood transfusions. Then her white blood cell count dropped, then the platelets— and though she hadn’t been bleeding when she was admitted, her blood struggled to clot effectively now. Every line of testing and treatment he’d pursued was a dead end. There were no cancers, no poisons or venoms, no hemorrhagic fevers, no known cause of any sort— and yet here she was, dying all the same.
Perhaps the most aggravating part was the sensation of familiarity. Yukio had seen this before, or at least read about it. But where? He’d scoured every medical textbook he could get his hands on and found nothing.
(He didn’t think to check his exorcism texts, gathering dust in a remote corner of his closet.)
Yukio could smell the blood just standing in the doorway of Room 4A. He could feel himself start to slip back to fifteen years old, his father’s blood staining the wooden floor—
The sharp discomfort of his nails digging into his own palm pulled Yukio out before he could succumb. Not here, not now…!
He looked anywhere but at the nurse currently doing chest compressions, his eyes thankfully landing on his intern at the head of the bed. Oh, brother. Who had given Shibata that laryngoscope?
“Dr. Shibata, what happened?” Yukio asked, striding forward to pluck the intubation instrument out of his subordinate’s hand.
Shibata Keiko looked like a kicked puppy. Combined with the diminutive stature and her usual high ponytail, the pouting made her look like a high schooler in borrowed scrubs. “You never let me intubate,” she muttered.
“That’s Dr. Ueno’s ruling, not mine,” he said, snapping on gloves. “If you can’t get an airway during an elective procedure, how are you going to do it in an emergent situation?” The respiratory therapist was already bagging her, tilting the patient’s chin up and filling her lungs with the bag-valve mask, but she needed an endotracheal tube 5 minutes ago. Poor Hashimoto somehow looked more dead than most coding patients— which was remarkable, considering every Code Blue was clinically dead. “Have we given epi yet? What’s her rhythm?”
“Kitamori-kun found her in PEA. We haven’t gotten to the rhythm check yet, giving first dose of epi now,” Nurse Kim said, flushing the patient’s IV and giving the epinephrine with the swift, practiced hand of a veteran. She was a middle-aged, sturdily built Zainichi woman who’d been working at Fukuoka General longer than even Dr. Ueno. “You want bicarb, too?”
“Yes, please.” Kitamori had stepped over to the mobile workstation and started to rattle off recent lab results and assessments in an only slightly tremulous alto voice. Hunched over the computer, Yukio could only see the crown of their closely cropped, chestnut hair.
Yukio readied his supplies and motioned for the respiratory therapist to remove the mask from Karin’s face. He focused on the steps and landmarks as he intubated her, never letting his gaze wander downwards to her wide, unseeing eyes. Her bleached hair was matted with blood, down to the grown-out roots. She was bleeding from every orifice on her face, including her throat; it made intubation difficult, especially as Yukio had to work with the jostling of chest compressions. After several long, tense moments, Yukio finally secured an airway.
“Very nice, Dr. Okumura,” the respiratory therapist said appreciatively. He went right back to ventilating. Yukio stepped away, removing his gloves and shoving his hands in his pockets to hide their trembling.
He always managed to keep his hands steady during the actual procedures, but even propranolol couldn’t stop the shaking afterwards. It seemed to be his body’s natural response when he had adrenaline coursing through his veins and nothing to do with his hands.
Time flowed differently during a resuscitation. Nurse Kitamori kept the time like a conductor; pointing out when compressions were too slow or shallow, coaxing their odd little orchestra to a fermata every 2 minutes to check the grim EKG printouts.
But the hardest part of a code wasn’t running it— it was knowing when nothing more could be done. It was after the sixth unit of blood that Nurse Kim, the most experienced person in the room, locked mournful eyes with Yukio. The aides and nurses who had been switching off for compressions filled the room with a stuffy, sweaty heat and the sound of heaving breaths… but Hashimoto Karin remained utterly, awfully still. Yukio raised a hand.
“Stop compressions,” he said. His voice filled the entire room with its softness.
“Okumura-senpai, please, can’t we try a bit longer?” Keiko was still clutching the latest EKG strip in her hand. Flat in all leads, just like all the others from the past 30 minutes. The ABG printout crumpled in her other hand looked even worse than the rhythm strip.
Yukio shook his head. Shibata was smart, but she was green in the way so many first-year residents were. In the way Yukio hadn’t been since ten years old. She reminded him so painfully of his brother at fifteen, convinced that every person could be saved.
“Time of death is 0931.”
Physicians usually left after announcing the death, leaving the nursing team to do the postmortem care and bring the body down to the morgue. This time, Yukio stayed. Karin had no family to call, no loved ones who needed the news broken to them. Neither Yukio, Keiko, nor any of the nurses could ever recall someone coming to visit her. She deserved to have someone standing in vigil as the body bag gave her one last embrace.
He couldn’t help but look over every inch of her remains in the process, searching for something he had missed. Something he could find, so he didn’t have to endure the agonizing wait for the autopsy report. What mistake had he made? How could he have stopped this? The what-ifs quickly accumulated in his mind. The blood transfusions could have caused a hemolytic reaction nobody had recognized… or maybe the toxicology testing he’d ordered hadn’t been thorough enough. There had to be a test he’d forgotten to order, an exam finding he’d overlooked, the secret way this was his fault—
No, he knew better than to go down that road. Yukio inhaled deeply, exhaling to a count of ten. He felt his blind eye snap back into alignment with his good one, having drifted toward his left ear as he stood deep in thought. The room was empty; they’d taken Hashimoto’s body away, leaving him alone in the wreckage of the failed Code Blue. Gloves, flushes, and plastic packaging for myriad medical instruments littered the floor. The blood that pooled and smeared on the linoleum was already starting to darken. Soon, someone would come in and clear the mess away, leaving the room pristine for a new patient who would never know someone had died in that room mere hours before.
He turned and walked away.
The apartment was dark when he returned home. Daisuke had already left for work; usually their schedules would overlap for a few blissful hours, but Yukio had been late to sign-out this morning. He’d be back in the evening, which gave Yukio plenty of time to have a shower beer, pull the blackout curtains, and get some sleep after an awful call shift.
“Aw, you’re not wearing the white coat!” A voice came from the couch on Yukio’s left, entirely out of his monocular field of vision. His hand automatically went to the holster hidden underneath his scrub top, pulling a pistol on his mystery intruder.
“Hey, hey, don’t shoot! It’s me!” With that urgent plea, Yukio’s sleep-starved brain finally recognized his twin brother. Rin had his hands up, legs still slung over the side of the couch.
“Meow, meow!” A black lump that had previously been blending into Rin’s uniform coat raised its head and yowled, revealing Kuro had joined in on the visit.
“Jesus Christ, Nii-san,” he groaned, reholstering his gun. “Would it kill you to send a text?”
Rin pouted. “What, I can’t stop in for a visit with my favorite brother?”
Yukio’s forefinger and thumb slipped under his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. He hadn’t fired, but the familiar scent of gun oil still lingered. “You’re always welcome to visit. With warning, so I don’t accidentally shoot you!”
“Since when did you care about shooting me?” The question was light and joking, but it still made Yukio’s gut twist.
“That was ten years ago,” he muttered, grimacing.
Rin laughed, forcing Kuro to jump off of his chest before he stood. He pulled Yukio into a bear hug. “I missed you,” he said, his voice as warm as ever. “I thought you were busy during med school, but this residual thing is something else! It’s like you dropped off the face of the Earth.”
Homesickness hit Yukio like a tidal wave. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his twin until Rin’s arms were around him, squeezing his ribcage with that familiar slight ache. Daisuke was family, but Rin was his brother. And yet, he couldn’t truly say either of them knew him better than anyone else in the world; there were things Rin knew that Daisuke didn’t, and vice versa.
For example, Rin still didn’t know Daisuke existed— or that they were live-in boyfriends. And Yukio had yet to get around to telling Daisuke about their… unique family situation.
Yukio had made a complete mess and he only had himself to blame. Typical.
He let himself hug his brother back, then extracted himself from Rin’s arms. “They call it a residency because you practically live at the hospital,” he explained.
Rin grimaced. “Well, at least you’re getting paid the big doctor bucks, right?”
Yukio suddenly found the laminate flooring extremely interesting. “…Not really…”
“…Do you at least like it?”
“Usually.” Even today, he could still truthfully say he enjoyed it more than exorcism. The further he got away from that part of his life, the more it all felt like some horrible nightmare. Ignoring Coal Tar and other random demons was second nature. In his mundane day-to-day, he could almost pretend the monsters of his childhood had been imaginary, that his biological father being the Devil himself was simply metaphorical. Almost— except for the unseeing eye that served as his constant reminder.
And now his brother, as demonic as always, dressed in that damned familiar uniform. “What brings you here, Nii-san? This can’t be just a personal visit.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’re in uniform.”
Rin smiled sheepishly. “Oh yeah, that,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well, some reports came in of some suspicious deaths around here, and I volunteered for the investigation!”
Yukio felt as if someone had dumped ice water directly into his chest cavity. “What sorts of suspicious deaths?”
“Way more disappearing people and pets than usual... and the bodies that have been found are torn up and missing a lot of blood. Officially, the city is looking for a rabid animal.” Rin bared his fangs in a pained grimace.
It sounded like as vague and half-assed a local government cover-up as any. The problem with starting a mission based on the vague reports of mundane government workers was that they didn’t know how to give any clues; the list of differentials on ‘torn up bodies missing blood’ ranged from Chupacabras to Hungry Ghosts. “They really didn’t give you a lot to work with, did they?”
Rin gave the same sort of sheepish, appeasing smile he’d given their father when he came home with a report card full of Fs. “I was hoping… that maybe you’d have some ideas?” As if attempting to help butter him up, Kuro rubbed up against Yukio’s calves, purring.
“I’m retired, Nii-san,” he said with a scowl.
“I know that! And I’d never try to force you back into it,” said Rin. “I just figured, y’know, I’d give you a heads up and maybe bounce a few ideas off you? While also getting in some non-exorcism brother bonding time?” His voice rose with every question until he was in a ridiculous-sounding falsetto.
Yukio raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t get a hotel room here already, did you?”
“Um…”
“Good. I wasn’t about to let you stay in a hotel when I have a spare room.”
Another, more bone-crushing hug. “You’re the best, Yukio! I really did miss you, I hope this mission takes forever—“
“Yeah, yeah, just let me call my boyfriend to let him know you’ll be staying over,” he said, already pulling out his phone. His sheer exhaustion led him to realize what he’d admitted to a moment too late.
Rin’s eyes lit up with surprise and unbridled joy, his grin threatening to split his face in two. He seemed relatively unbothered by only now finding out about Yukio’s relationship status, thankfully. “YOUR BOYFRIEND? YOU HAVE A- mmfhfhffhfh!”
Yukio clamped a hand over Rin’s mouth as he tapped Daisuke’s contact icon with the other. Thankfully, his contact photo wasn’t anything too embarrassing; it was Daisuke sitting on a beach chair, his tawny skin tanned an even deeper brown by the summer sun. He lowered his sunglasses to give the camera a wink with sparkling obsidian eyes. It only took a few rings for him to pick up. “Babe?” Yukio grimaced almost immediately; the pet name had come out without even thinking, but he could hear the muffled sound of Rin repeating it with unbridled delight.
“What’s up, night owl? I thought you’d be sleeping,” said Daisuke, his voice warm as honey.
Rin had somehow wriggled his face out of Yukio’s hand. “He sounds nice,” he stage whispered.
Yukio felt a muscle in his jaw start to twitch. “I, ah, wanted to give you a heads up that my older brother is visiting. He’s in town for work last minute, so I offered him our spare room. Is that alright?”
“Of course. Are you alright?” Yukio must have sounded worse than he thought if Daisuke was breaking out his Therapist Voice.
“Me? Oh, I’m fine.”
There was a pregnant pause. “You sound… tense. And you said you and your brother haven’t always—“
“It was a bad day at work,” Yukio said quickly.
Daisuke’s voice became much more somber. “I’m sorry,” he said. Working in mental health, he understood just how awful ‘bad days’ could get. “Do you want me to bring you anything when I get home?”
“That’s very sweet, but I’ll be okay.”
“Alright. Well, I’m looking forward to meeting your brother! Love you.”
“Love you too.” Yukio hung up to find Rin looking at him as if he’d grown a second head.
“You guys say ‘I love you’ and live together. How long have you been dating?”
“…Almost two years.” Yukio’s stomach did somersaults with guilt.
Rin’s jaw wagged up and down as he struggled to find words. “Wha-When were you gonna tell me about him?”
“I was, I swear, I was just going to… figure out some things first.” Yukio chewed at his bottom lip.
Rin leaned closer to him, his eyes sad. “Yukio, were you worried about telling me ‘cause you’re dating a guy? You know I’m bi, obviously that doesn’t matter to me—“
“No, no, it’s not that at all!” The thought of Rin having any issue with Yukio seeing another man was laughable, considering Rin’s own dating history. “It’s not you I was worried about, Nii-san, it’s… well, it’s kind of you, but not in the way you’re thinking.”
“I’m not following.”
“Daisuke can’t see demons,” Yukio said, starting to pace. “He doesn’t know I used to be an exorcist, or that you’re one right now, and he certainly doesn’t know about Satan.”
Rin placed a hand on his forehead, shaking his head incredulously. His horns poked out from between his fingers and locks of raven hair, larger and more apparent than Yukio had remembered them. “This is insane,” said Rin. He staggered backwards to sit on the couch again, hurt and anger in his eyes. “You’re scared I’ll freak out your boyfriend when you’ve been hiding this from him for two years!”
“It never came up,” said Yukio, hating how weak the argument sounded to even himself. It had never come up because he never let it come up; he told half-truths and lies of omission before swiftly changing the subject. Daisuke never pushed, because he was too good a person for that. (It only drove home how completely Yukio didn’t deserve him.)
“Oh, please!” A small tongue of blue flame appeared on Rin’s shoulder. “He never asked about your family or wanted to see pictures?” Rin’s grimace bordered on a snarl. “Or did you only show him photos of me from before I pulled Kurikara?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Nii-san, of course I didn’t just show him childhood photos,” he said, rolling his eyes. Rin didn’t need to know the pictures Yukio had shown were carefully selected. He hadn’t gone so far as to Photoshop Rin into looking more human… but he had subtly cropped Rin’s tail out of a photo or dozen. He had coped with the guilt by telling himself this was only temporary, until he could explain the situation to Daisuke.
“It’s not easy to explain to someone not involved in that world,” continued Yukio. His partner remembered Gehenna’s intrusion on the world 10 years ago, but like so many non-exorcists, he didn’t pay much thought to ‘Anti-Social Organisms’ after the crisis was said and done. It had been even easier for Daisuke to do, having never seen a demon with his own eyes. “Daisuke-kun is a therapist. If I just start blabbing about how we’re the sons of Satan, he’s going to think I’ve lost my mind.”
“If he won’t believe you, I can tell him,” Rin said. “Hell, I can show him.”
“No!” Yukio blurted, before taking a deep breath. “No, that won’t be necessary,” he said in what he hoped sounded like a much calmer voice. His heart thundered in his chest.
Rin shook his head, giving Yukio a mournful look. “I know you wanted to leave exorcism behind you, but you’re hiding parts of yourself from someone who loves you…”
“My situation is different from yours, Nii-san.” Yukio hadn’t even fully concealed the reality of his past, only made the details more mundane. Daisuke knew they’d been raised by a priest who had died tragically when the twins were teenagers. He knew Yukio had worked throughout high school and college. Yukio had even mustered the courage to tell Daisuke about the times he’d tried to end his life. Did the details surrounding those things really matter?
For the first time Yukio could ever recall, his life had felt normal. And it had been easy, natural. Simply a matter of leaving out a few sentences, letting Daisuke’s assumptions fill in the gaps. It was safer this way for him, anyway.
Yukio hadn’t meant the comment to be a jab, but pain flashed in Rin’s eyes. His gaze dropped to the floor. “Yeah. I guess it is different for you.”
Yukio didn’t know what to say. His brother didn’t quite seem willing to admit he was stung, let alone accept an apology. “I’m not ashamed of you, Nii-san,” he said after a few long moments. “Far from it. But I need to approach this carefully, or else…”
“Or else your partner could get scared off. No, I get it,” said Rin, crossing his arms. His expression was a familiar one to Yukio; he had seen it plenty of times on his own face, those dull eyes with the barely-there smile. It felt viscerally wrong to see on Rin. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep everything under wraps until you’re ready.”
Yukio flashed him a wan smile. “Thank you, Nii-san. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to shower and sleep. I’ve been awake for about 27 hours straight.”
Rin’s jaw dropped. “Holy fuck, Yukio, lead with that next time! No wonder you look half dead.”
At least I was able to keep one person mostly alive, Yukio nearly said, which was definitely a hint that it was time to go to bed.