InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Purity 10: Anomaly ❯ Drastic Measures ( Chapter 28 )

“Here’s the contract, along with a list of addendums that Ransbad has asked for at the last moment.  To be honest, I haven’t had the time to go through all of them yet, so if you don’t mind, could you make sure they didn’t throw any weird clauses in there about first-born children or blood sacrifices . . .”

‘I . . . I totally wasn’t . . . wasn’t jealous . . .’

‘Are you serious?  You were—absolutely were—and she knew it, too, ba-a-a-a-aka.’

Toga’s eyebrows rose for a second, only to draw together in a thoughtful frown as he gazed across the room at Mikio, who hadn’t heard a thing he’d just said.  “Mikio?”  That didn’t work.  “Mikio?” he repeated, raising his voice just a little.

Mikio blinked and shot Toga an almost surprised look.  To be honest, he’d actually forgotten that he was even there, at least, momentarily.  “Uh, sorry . . . You were saying?”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Toga slowly shook his head.  “You’ve barely said more than a couple sentences to me since I got here,” he said.  “Want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

Mikio could feel his cheeks warming despite his resolve not to do blush.  “I-It’s nothing,” he muttered, reaching for the contract that Toga had brought over, frowning thoughtfully at the note attached to the cover.  “Guarantee that the current employees will be retained . . . No facility closures for a minimum of two years once contract is finalized . . . et cetera, et cetera . . .” He dropped the contract onto the table again and shrugged offhandedly.  “These aren’t bad, as far as addendums,” he remarked.  “Do you have an issue with any of them?”

“Not really,” Toga said, sitting in the chair to the right of the sofa.  “There are a lot of them, but to my knowledge, there’s nothing that could be considered over-the-top.”

“Okay.  I’ll draw up a new one, then.  It shouldn’t take long.”

Toga nodded.  “Good . . . Now, tell me, how’s Gavin’s case going?”

Mikio sighed.  “I’m making progress on it,” he said, “but it’s still slow-going.  I might need to pay another visit to their lawyers, see if I can’t get a little more cooperation out of them.  Right now, I’m still compiling a list, as far as who had access to which servers, but I’m concentrating on the ones that Gavin uses.  There are four, it seems, but I only have access IDs, so I’m not entirely sure which one is used when he files his reports.”

“Sounds like a lot of trouble,” he remarked.  “I take it that the corporate attorney still isn’t doing a whole hell of a lot to help you out?”

Mikio snorted indelicately, hauling himself to his feet to grab a bottle of water.  “Considering I had to have Cain ask a judge for a subpoena for the information I do have?  No, he’s not.”  He grabbed two bottles and bumped the door closed before heading back to the living room once more and handing Toga one of the bottles.  “I did talk to him, though, and he seemed . . . Well, he grudgingly listened what I had to say.”

Toga thought about it for a long minute.  Then, he smiled.  “You’ll get to the bottom of it.  You always do.  You’ve got a kind of tunnel vision about things like this.  It’s why you’re a damn fine lawyer.”

“Thanks,” Mikio said with a marked grimace, considering he didn’t feel like a damn fine lawyer, given how long it was taking to prove what should have been easy enough.

“Since we’ve gotten all the business out of the way . . . Suppose you tell me why you’re so distracted?  Because in the length of time I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you this out of sorts.”

Mikio shot his cousin, who actually seemed more like an uncle, given the distinct age gap between the two, a guilty sort of look.  Toga intercepted it and arched his eyebrows once more.  “It’s, uh, nothing.  I’ve just . . . just been helping Madison out a little . . .” He flicked a hand, as though to dismiss it, maybe trying to downplay it, hoping that Toga might let it drop.

“Madison?  Oh, right . . . Evan’s friend—the hunter’s daughter . . . Beautiful girl,” Toga slowly nodded, as though he were putting all of his knowledge of Madison Cartham together in his head.  “Helping her out?  Is she in trouble, too?”

Mikio made a face and quickly shook his head.  “Not like that . . . She . . . She had some trouble with her apartment’s security—there’s been a rash of robberies in the area lately—and then, one of her friends killed herself . . .”

The worry on Toga’s face was immediate and intense.  “Really?  Damn . . . Is she all right?”

This time, Mikio let out a long, drawn-out sigh, burying his face in his palms as he sat back down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.  “She seems to be,” he replied, voice muffled slightly by his hands.  “But with Madison . . .” Hands dropping away, only to dangle limply between his spread knees, he slowly shook his head.  “She doesn’t like to seem weak, so, even if she isn’t okay, she’s not necessarily going to tell anyone, either.”

“Mmm,” he intoned.  “Sounds like a woman I know really well.”  He chuckled suddenly, but he didn’t sound entirely amused, either.  No, there was an underlying hint of . . . sadness? Resignation? under it all. “Actually, it sounds like . . . all of the women in the family, truth be told.”

Toga’s statement didn’t really do a thing to reassure Mikio, and it figured.  They came from a collective family of strong women, after all.  Even so . . . “I just . . . I want to know that she’s all right,” he muttered.

He could feel Toga’s gaze, but he didn’t look to verify it.  In fact, he was rather resolved to ignore it since he had a good idea, just what he was thinking, and Mikio . . . Well, he wasn’t willing to delve into his own feelings that deeply.

“Mikio . . . Is, uh . . . Is she . . . the one . . .?”

Somehow, hearing the question out loud was enough to rattle Mikio to his very core.  “Wha—? O-O-Oh, n-n-no . . . She . . . We . . . We’re just . . . just friends,” he stammered.

Toga chuckled again.  “Would that be so bad?” he pressed.  “I mean, she is a beautiful girl . . . Smart, amusing, strong . . .” He made a face, but his amusement didn’t wane.  “Then again, she has allowed Evan to drag her into some fairly questionable things over the years, but he’s married now, so maybe he’ll be too preoccupied to instigate as many shenanigans as he used to . . .”

“That doesn’t really sound like a vote of confidence,” Mikio said, snapping the cap on his bottle of water and draining over half of it before coming up for air.

Toga chuckled.  “I’m only saying that some of us—like me—prefer the nice girls.  Others of us—maybe you, for example—like a woman who keeps you on your toes . . . It’s all a matter of preference . . . Have you talked to Sebastian or Mamoruzen about it?  Maybe not Morio . . . He doesn’t tend to give the best advice about . . . Well, about anything . . .”

“Gunnar never gives good advice about women,” Mikio said, then he grimaced since the Mamoruzen in question was Toga’s own son.  “Apologies, but he doesn’t.”

Toga chuckled.  “Yeah, you don’t have to apologize for that.  He is rather . . . opinionated, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s one way to put it,” he grumbled under his breath.

Toga raised his eyebrows, having come to his own conclusions, based on Mikio’s reaction.  “So, you did talk to him about it.”

“Not by choice,” Mikio replied darkly.  “A-Anyway, it’s really not a big deal.  I’m just worried about her; that’s all.”

A thoughtful silence fell for a few moments, filling the room with a companionable kind of quiet.

It made no sense, did it?  In the last few days since they’d met for dinner, he hadn’t seen her, but he had received a number of texts, and they’d spoken a few times on the phone.

It wasn’t the same, and that’s what was bothering him the most.  Somehow, it almost felt as though there was a certain distance between them, even if he tried to tell himself that it was all in his head.  How many times had he sat there, wondering, just what she was doing, who she was seeing?  More than once, he’d actually considered, marching over and checking in on her, but he’d managed to talk himself out of it.  Nope, instead, he’d sat here, spending hours upon hours, dreaming up the weirdest scenarios that nearly always ended up with him, running into her while she was on a date or something, and that . . .

He grimaced inwardly.  That was enough to make him want to tear something or someone, limb from limb . . .

“Well, that’s an Izayoi expression, if I ever saw one,” Toga remarked, breaking the quiet with a rueful chuckle.  “So, who are you shredding into pieces in your head?”

He blinked, shot Toga an almost guilty sort of glance, and cleared his throat.  “Uh, no one; not really . . .” He sighed, rubbing his face once more in a weary kind of way.  “Just . . . Just trying to figure out when life got so complicated . . .”

Toga chuckled.  “I don’t know, Mikio, but I can tell you that mine did right around the time that I met Sierra.”

Mikio made a face.  “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

The Japanese tai-youkai’s chuckle escalated into an all-out laugh.  “If it matters to you . . .”

“What’s that?”

Toga shrugged.  “It’s all totally worth it in the end.”

Mikio didn’t respond to that.  That was kind of what he wondered—and what he feared, too . . .

“M adison?”

“Hmm?”

Valerie let out an exasperated sigh, tossing the magazine onto the coffee table that she’d been leafing through.  She had decided not to go with Evan to the studio today, despite the fact that, according to her, he whined and bitched and moaned about it, but she’d had a visit with her doctor today—everything was looking great—and needed to stay home to wait for the delivery of a crib she’d ordered for the nursery.  After that had arrived, she’d come over to spend the rest of the day with Madison.  “Are you going to tell me what’s eating on you or are you going to pout all day?”

Madison wrinkled her nose.  “I don’t pout, V.”

Valerie nodded slowly.  “Except that you are.  So, out with it.”

Catching the length of her hair, Madison quickly twisted it up and reached for an ink pen off the table to jam through it, holding it in place.  “I really love this apartment,” she said, causing Valerie to arch an eyebrow since that wasn’t exactly the answer she was expecting.  “I mean, I really do . . . Fell in love with it the first time I saw it, walked through it . . . Of course, it was empty, and the walls were a drab, flat white, but it was just everything I was looking for . . .”

“It’s a very nice apartment,” Valerie allowed in a neutral tone of voice.  She still had that lawyer expression on her face, though, which meant that she was waiting patiently for Madison to get around to it.

Flopping back in the overstuffed chair, Madison uttered a petulant little ‘hrumph’.  “So, as much as I love this place, tell me, why do I hate being here?”

Valerie didn’t seem particularly surprised by Madison’s statement.  “Sweetie . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . Didn’t you choose to come back home?  I mean, you said that he seemed surprised when you decided to go, didn’t you?”

“I . . . am . . . stupid,” Madison snarled, balling up her fist, thumping it against the arm of the chair to emphasize her point.  “Besides . . . He only felt sorry for me because of Jazz . . .”

“Are you sure about that?”

Madison snorted.  “He found me, crying,” she pointed out in a mumble.  “Not just crying, either—ugly-crying.  Of course, he felt sorry for me.  I was . . .” Trailing off with a decided grimace, she huffed out another very deep breath.  “I was entirely pathetic.”

“Somehow, I doubt he thought that . . .” Rolling her eyes, Valerie sat up, but she had to struggle just a little since her baby-bump had grown a bit larger—enough to actually notice when she wore a snug pullover like she was today.  Perched on the edge of the sofa, she stared at Madison and shook her head.  “All right, then we find a reason that you need to go stay with him again?”

“Easier said than done,” Madison fumed stubbornly.  “I mean, I can’t screw up the lock again—that would be dumb, even for me, not to mention entirely anti-climactic—and there’s really nothing else that I could do to make it so that I needed to go there again without being ridiculously obvious, don’t you think?”

Valerie stared at her for a long moment.  “I thought you said that he only let you stay the last time because he felt sorry for you—not that I actually believe that—but it is what you said.”

“That’s what I’d thought at the time,” she said.  “But the other night at dinner . . .” Trailing off, she quickly shook her head.  “It doesn’t matter.  I might have been wrong; that’s all.”

Valerie laughed.  “This is so weird, coming from you.  You’re one of the most confident women I know—and you aren’t the type to play games, either.”

“I know,” Madison stated.  “That’s why this is so hard . . . If he were like every other guy I’d met, then it wouldn’t even be an issue, but . . . But he’s not . . .”

Nodding slowly, as though she understood exactly what Madison was trying to say, Valerie frowned thoughtfully.  “And you . . . You love that he’s not.”

Madison grimaced.  “Yeah, I . . . I do . . .”

The buzz of the door monitor interrupted the conversation, and Madison got up to shuffle over to it, only to blink in surprise when she saw who was there.  “Gunnar?” she said, holding down the intercom button.

The future Japanese tai-youkai stood on the stoop, hands casually in the pockets of his tailored slacks, the wind outside, molding the dark grey cotton dress shirt to his lanky frame.  “Buzz me in?”

She did, peering over her shoulder at Valerie, who was staring back at her, eyebrows raised in silent question.  “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said with a shrug, letting go of the panel and stepping away, but not venturing far since she’d have to answer the door as soon as Gunnar reached her floor anyway.

“Does he stop by often?” Valerie asked, looking, in Madison’s estimation, a little more amused than she ought to.

“Actually, no,” Madison replied.  For some reason, the sudden thought that something had happened to Mikio flashed through her head and wouldn’t let go.  By the time Gunnar tapped on the door a couple minutes later, Madison yanked it open before he finished knocking, and he blinked.  “Hi,” she said, stepping back to allow him inside, tamping down her misplaced sense of impending doom.  “What brings you by?”

“Afternoon, Maddy . . . Oh, hello, Valerie.  I didn’t know you were here . . . Everything all right with that baka you married?”

“He’s just fine,” Valerie said, breaking into a very amused little smile.  “It’s nice to see you again.”

“Likewise,” he replied before finally shifting his attention back to Madison once more.  “I won’t stay long.  I was in the area, checking on a few things, but I heard on the news that there was another break-in not far from here . . . Bas said that your security was better now, but I just wanted to make sure you’re secured.”

“Another one?” she said, shaking her head since she hadn’t heard anything about another one in the last couple days.  “Where?”

Gunnar strode over, took his time as he carefully inspected the window, making sure that it was securely latched and that it wasn’t broken, she supposed.  “A couple buildings over,” he said, his tone, a little distracted.  “Not that I think you can’t take care of yourself well enough, but . . .”

“No, that’s fine,” Madison replied, rubbing her arms as an uncomfortable tremor raced up and down her spine, as goosebumps broke out on her skin.  “Thank you.”

“A couple buildings away?” Valerie repeated, turning on the television and flipping through the channels for the local news.  “I don’t know, Maddy . . . I don’t like the idea of you going out alone—or coming home alone, for that matter.  What if they break in here, and you walk in on them?”

She didn’t get a chance to answer as Gunnar turned away from the window.  “As long as your apartment is safe, then you ought to be all right,” he assured her.  “Let me check the rest of your windows and stuff.”

She nodded her consent as he headed for the kitchen.  Valerie looked thoughtful for a long moment before she leaned to the side to see past Madison.  “Hey, Gunnar . . .”

“Hmm?”

“If you wanted to stay with someone, but didn’t necessarily want to tell them that you wanted to, what would you do so that you . . . didn’t have a place to stay for a while?”

“What?” he replied, crossing his arms over his chest and forgetting about the window he was going to check—at least, momentarily.  “Leaving Evan already?”

Valerie laughed and rolled her eyes.  “Not me!”

Madison made a face when Valerie nodded in her direction.  “V—”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Valerie insisted, waving off Madison’s warning with a flick of her hand.  “Gunnar’s a lot more discrete than Evan, you know.  Besides, you said yourself, you’re out of ideas.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but snapped it closed again almost immediately since Valerie had a point that was just a little too viable for her comfort.  Even so, the more people who knew, the dumber Madison felt, so, it really came down to her own pride, she supposed.  Bite the bullet and ask Gunnar for help?  Or nip it at the bud and sit here alone for another long, sleepless night . . .?

Gunnar shook his head.  “Okay, if it’s not you,” he said, pointing at Valerie, “then it has to be about you,” he went on, shifting his finger toward Madison instead, “and if it’s about you, then am I safe in assuming that this has something to do with Mikio, too?”

It kind of frightened her, just how quick on the uptake Gunnar actually could be.  “Oh, umm, I . . .”

He rolled his eyes, but the smile that surfaced on his lips wasn’t unkind.  “Relax, Maddy.  No one else knows anything.  It just so happens that Mikio stopped the office by a couple weeks ago, so, Bas and I already knew you were staying with him.  That’s all.”

Somehow, she had a feeling that there was a little more to it that he hadn’t said, but she didn’t feel quite up to probing for more information at the moment, either.  Instead, she sighed, rubbed her forehead as she leaned forward to snag her glass of wine off the table.  “All right, then I don’t have to explain anything.  Any ideas?”

Her question wiped the amusement off of his face, and he scowled.  “Given that you’ve already screwed up the keypad, doing so again would be a little redundant,” he mused thoughtfully.  To her mild amusement, he actually started pacing the kitchen floor, arms crossed over his chest, elbow resting on one while he idly tapped his lips with the tip of a tapered claw.  Suddenly, though, he snorted indelicately and leveled a no-nonsense look at her.  “This is beneath you, you realize.  Playing games, Madison?  Since when?  Why don’t you just march back over there and just tell him that you’re moving in and he can deal with it?”

Madison made a face, narrowing her eyes at her friend.  “You’ve met Mikio, right?”

The look he shot her bespoke his belief that she was being a little—or a lot—simplistic.  “Of course, I have.”

She rolled a hand, as though trying to get his brain to work faster.  “Then you know that if I did that, he’d run, screaming, in the opposite direction because that’s just not how he is.”

Gunnar’s mouth dropped open, and she could see the retort forming on his tongue, but just as quickly, he snapped his mouth closed and sighed instead.  “Yeah, okay.  You’re right.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Valerie interrupted, standing up, grabbing Madison’s empty wine glass out of her hand as she stepped away to retrieve another bottle of water for herself.  “Ideas, Gunnar—ideas.”

Gunnar’s gaze narrowed as he stared at Madison, as though he were trying to figure something out.  “Madison, at the risk of offending you because I’m not trying to, can I ask you something?"

“All right,” she replied, ignoring the clanging warning bells, tolling in her head.

He nodded slowly, and when he spoke again, she could tell that he was trying to pick his words very carefully.  “This . . . This isn’t some sort of weird game, right?  You’re not just going after him because he’s hard to get to?”

“I thought you said you weren’t trying to be offensive,” Valerie snapped, kicking the refrigerator closed, setting her bottle of water on the counter with a heavy, ‘thud’.

“I’m not,” Gunnar insisted in a tone that said that she ought to have realized as much.

Madison sighed.  “It’s all right,” she said, cutting off Valerie before she could truly light into Gunnar for the perceived slight.  To be honest, she wasn’t too keen on that question—that kind of assumption—but a part of her understood it, too.  Given her history, she supposed . . . Even so . . . “Is that what you really think?” she parried, quirking an eyebrow at Gunnar.

He let out a deep breath.  “No, I don’t,” he allowed.  “But you know, like you said . . . Mikio’s a lot different from . . . Well, from pretty much anyone.  There are things about him . . . He’s always been . . . It’s not a bad thing.  It’s just . . .”

It surprised her that he was having such difficulty in stating whatever it was that was going through his head.  In a way, though, she understood.  As much of a jerk as he normally could be, Gunnar really didn’t want to put Mikio down in any way, either, and that . . . It spoke volumes.  “Just because he’s not like you or Bas or anyone else doesn’t mean that he’s not worth the effort,” she said.  “He is.  He absolutely is.”

Gunnar stared at her for another long moment, but finally, he smiled, just a little.  “Good . . . but . . .”

“But?”

He made a face, rubbed a hand over his chin.  “I don’t know, Madison . . . I mean, short of the coming of the second Great Flood, I don’t really know of anything that could really help you . . .”

Madison’s eyes widened, and she sat up, taking the glass of wine from Valerie, who sat back down on the sofa with her water once more.  “The Great Flood . . .?” she repeated.

He shrugged.  “Yeah, it’s a Bible story . . . Mother told it to me when I was small . . . God told Noah to build an ark that was big enough to—"

“I know the story,” she said, cutting him off almost impatiently.  Then, she stared at him.  “Gunnar?”

“Hmm?”

“So . . . how good are you with plumbing?”

“Plumbing?” he echoed, shaking his head.

Madison slowly smiled, and, as she did, Gunnar eyed her.

And sighed.