The healer barely tilted his head to the side, his brows creased with utter confusion. "Your face doesn't seem so familiar. If you're a regular patient of the Fourth, however, I don't see why not." Aranami Minato probed the assassin from head to toe with an eyebrow raised, searching his mind for any sort of distinction in which he could identify this man with. Ebony hair, scarred body, strong physique... about half of Seireitei shared that feature.
"If you're not a frequent visitor, I wouldn't have known how else you would've known me. Sorry, I have other things to attend to. Do you mind?" He spoke, waving the clipboard in front of the assassin before gesturing towards the hallway. "I'm afraid healers don't have much time for actual chitchat. Now if you'd excuse me..."
With a slight bow on the head and a face carved into his memory, the healer turned on his heel and started to walk away.
The plan’s first frays showed stark and clear from where the towering assassin waited, leaning tensely against the nearest wall. He felt it the second Yamamura and Aranami kicked up conversation. Either something went wrong or he was a tuba virtuoso. Can’t put my finger on what, though, he realized, eyes narrowing on the dark-haired pair of senior shinigami. Reports and personnel files had formed a certain image in his head about this Aranami character but... the actual guy fell short. Pictures failed to capture just how phenomenally nondescript the medic seemed to be. He could have blended in wearing a chicken suit.
Still, something felt wrong. The feeling proved accurate when the conversation broke off—not just quickly, not just dismissively, but pointedly dismissive.
“Shit,” Mikhael muttered.
He plucked the cigarette from his lips, crushed the butt, and tossed it into the street, still smoldering. He made a snap decision, palmed the soul phone, and strode straight past Eiji, right into Aranami’s way.
”Hold on!” he yelled as he grabbed Minato’s shoulder. He pulled a little and the healer was staring at him once again. Eiji grabbed his wrist and pulled up his shihakushou sleeve almost to his elbow.
“This,” he pointed at the mark around his wrist, left there from the cuffs. “You were in the Seventh.”
As he let go of the healer’s hand, he felt Mikhael nearing the two of them with haste. Not now... Don’t mess this up dammit!
“There are a few things I want to run with you, about your time in the penitentiary. Will you walk with me?”
Mikhael caught the last few words and hesitated for half a step. He thought fast, started cursing quietly under his breath, and turned sharply to stomp out the cigarette seething on the ground. Fake as his concern for fire hazards was, his cursing was real. There’s no way to communicate with Yamamura.
He looked up from the ground-up pulp of tobacco and paper, a dark scowl on his face, and glanced at Eiji and Minato out of the corner of his eye.
“Not here,” he told the healer. Mikhael had stopped in his tracks thankfully, and Eiji had managed to keep conversation going with his target. He stopped in his tracks and waited for the healer to stop as well.
“Like I said, there are a few things I need to run by you. Is there any place you know of that is safe, preferably somewhere that we can be alone and nobody knows we are there. An office is probably out of the question.”
He gestured towards the entrance of the division, where he and his peer had entered and hoped that Minato would follow.
"Honestly, do you mind if I finish this one first? I don't know why you're in such a rush, but perhaps you can consider that someone else has tasks to accomplish." Without so much as a further ado, he went towards his original path. Only a momentary pause stopped him.
"And, I don't know why you seem to be hounding me for that question. You can just look for it in my file... or something. If you're so eager to have your hands on it, at least." Without so much as a goodbye, the healer went off at a quickened pace.
This is not the way it was supposed to go. I can’t let him go; Mikhael might not be done yet.
“Wait a minute,” Eiji yelled out as he flash stepped towards the healer and landed next to him. “This is more than your paperwork or anything you can really make up to have me leave. There is an issue I need to bring up with you.”
Eiji paused for a second as they both halted.
“During your time in the Seventh division, did you see something odd, or perhaps notice something that might be thought of as strange?” He made another pause and took a breath. “I have been gathering intel since I left my cell and there are a few things that don’t seem to be in order.
“My source tells me that there is a co-op going on between the Second and the Seventh. We can’t really be seen together so we can’t keep talking here. Do you mind if we take this elsewhere now?”
He barely stared, blinking at the assassin's words. Co-op? Seventh? Second? He was in neither, wasn't he? Minato mentally scoffed at this idea, almost suspicious as to why this man was determined to squander his time. At the point of the assassin's persistence, Minato would have thought of him as someone desperately trying to recruit him into their little co-op. Otherwise, he knew nothing of the assassin's intents.
"You know, I don't understand why you seem to be hounding me for no particular reason. I am done with the Seventh, and I am definitely not in the Second. For all I know, I'm here, running errands for people who were unfortunate enough to get their asses kicked until they bleed. I'm a healer, not a spy. Now if I were you, I'd go to a more reliable source. I didn't notice anything, and things from the past are long gone. I found it strange that we're cuffed inside cells, if that's of any help."
Once more, he continued off, walking nearer to the receptionist to make some notes. In midst of what seemed to be a slightly animated conversation with the said person, Minato whispered an urgent message to the receptionist, a slight distress signal about the scarred man following him. With a slight nod, the receptionist glanced briefly at the assassin before handing Minato a small note-- a task left for him, apparently.
The situation deteriorated too quickly for Mikhael to do anything. He crossed his arms, frowned, and took a moment to consider that they were in over their heads. Confronting a combat medic in the middle of a hospital operated by his own division, surrounded by wounded soldiers in various stages of healing and the caretakers who would almost certainly not take the side of interlopers from probably the least-respected division in the Thirteen, spelled disaster.
Letting it go, playing it safe, and observing quietly from out of sight—the secure option, probably, but not the one that offered definite results. The longer it took to find something, the greater the chance one or both of them would be made. “Made” in this instance meaning: made to watch some rogue shinigami feed their fingers to a housecat.
The blue-eyed shinigami rubbed the scar over one eyebrow, grinding his teeth loudly enough that a passing medic glanced confusedly at him.
Damn it. Fine.
Mikhael strode forward, one hand settling on Eiji’s shoulder, his expression as serious as a heart attack and half as pleasant. When he spoke, his voice was low, quiet enough that only Eiji would be able to hear him.
He said, “I think he knows something, and I find out what, my way. Maybe you should go.”
”And how do you figure we go about this now?” he asked, knowing that it was almost impossible for them to finish their task. “The target has left us with no room to act. He has entered the hospital and from what I can see, there are a ton of officers in there. We can’t just go in and knock him out. We need something that’s safe and can actually be accomplished.”
Eiji could think of but one thing. The only way he knew they would be able to get their hands on Minato’s phone and exchange it would be to swap it when he doesn’t notice them. And that would be either by being sneaky or by creating a distraction. Because of what had happened earlier, the scarred reaper knew that he would not be able to create the distraction. He had not stopped the healer previously and he could not do it this time either.
“What if you fake a heart attack?” He posed the question as something serious, before actually thinking if it was possible or not. “Yes... That would be the only way. You’ll have to get some medical attention from him while I try to snatch his denreishiki and swap it out with yours. I’ll be able to escape without being noticed. Any questions?”
And whatever Mikhael needed to do, he needed to decide what it is-- and fast. As each second passed, their target blended more and more into the flurry of healers around the Fourth, garnering more distance between him and the two assassins.
Mikhael rubbed the sleep from his eyes, rested his hand over his mouth, and sighed. Decision-making tended to be his forte, but he felt at a loss here. No one prepared him for a mission quite like this one. He glanced over his shoulder and immediately dropped the hand. He turned back to Eiji and muttered, “I think we’re losing him.”
He turned abruptly, suddenly certain, and stepped straight into someone’s outstretched hand.
“Hold on,” the someone said, quiet. He was short, dark-haired, bespectacled, and looked like he could have been a doctor.
“Excuse me,” Mikhael replied, trying to step around.
The newcomer shook his head and added, “Sorry, no, I mean stop. You’re on an unsanctioned mission. The Second Division sent a request just a minute ago.”
“What, cease and desist?”
“No, debriefing. I’m Umara, by the way,” the newcomer said.
Mikhael nodded, scratching his forehead. “I remember you. Debriefing? By who?”
“Whom, actually. I don’t know. Someone in the Second sent a request. Some kind of paperwork mix-up, I don’t know exactly, but you’re wanted immediately and I was the closest assassin.”
The blue-eyed shinigami frowned and pointed at Eiji. “Him?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d appreciate it if you came,” Mikhael said, turning back at the senior assassin. “I’m nt sure I like where this is going.”
The reaper, somewhat surprised, stood there and watched as their comrade interrupted their mission. He managed to get a sigh out of his mouth before he was interrupted by the assassin. Mikhael had a point, asking questions, even though they might have been unauthorized. There was an unwritten law to speak up against higher seated officers but then again, Eiji had no idea who Umara was.
“I suppose we don’t have a choice. We can’t do anything other than write this off as a failure.” He thought there was something strange about the mission itself but it did not really bother him. He just went along with it to help a new comrade.
Eiji followed a few meters behind them as they left the scene. There was still something odd about Umara, something that bothered him. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.
