For Love of Reliability

A/N: Hi everyone! I’m very sorry about the long wait. Remember when I was writing Something Missing and I said my internet was going to be shut off? Well, it happened. I had to wait for my next paycheck to get it turned back on—today. The next chapter is almost completely done and I hope to have it up soon to make up for this long wait.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed: Dark Alchemist (dude, thanks for looking this up), BlueVixen2071, AnimeBabesGoneWildWithMe, CANDY PeRvErSioN, Chrono, SassieLassie988, SkittleSama, and HeAvEnLy BLiSS. You guys are the greatest.

Also: Yes, in Cambodia, fried tarantulas are considered a delicacy, and yes, they fry them live. Sorry, I know it's gross.


Chapter Two: Red Eyes and Hiccups

He wanted to kill her. Well, not truly . . . he wanted to fuck her. Badly. But his emotions were building up to such an unstable level, the two fierce actions were beginning to look a lot alike.

Who would bring a lingerie stash to a relief effort? Apparently Mimi. Who slept in it? He knew Mimi didn’t back home—or at least she hadn’t when they were sleeping together. Of course, he reflected wryly, she hadn’t really worn anything when they had slept together, except his shirts occasionally. Not that she was above raiding his wardrobe now. Last night, he’d come home from his shift to find her wearing nothing but a v-string, his spare glasses, and his yellow tie. He had opened the door, seen her, and then slammed it shut again. To be fair, he had done it more out of shock and nervous reflex than conscious resistance. In fact, the sight of his favorite tie nestled between those cherry-topped mounds broke him. He had even put his hand back on the door handle to head back in when Zinan had come by, telling him there was a card game downstairs. Jyou had pulled back, regained control, and gone to play—just barely.

This was a pattern. Jyou didn’t know how or why, but he managed to be pulled back from his temptation threshold at the last moment every time, the last two weeks full of bullets he’d only just dodged. This made him leery. Serendipity had never been kind and suddenly it was buddying-up to him. Which made him wonder if there wasn’t some cosmic conspiracy in the works to make him look like an ass. In fact, he had grown convinced of it, his neurotic brain twitching with circumstantial evidence it held up as proof that Fate (who had long held some sort of sadistic grudge against him) was just picking her moment.

“Jyou?” Midori intruded into his reverie. “Are you even here?”

“Sure,” he responded lamely.

“Then what do you think?”

He swallowed. “I think I’m in trouble.”

“About the patient, Jyou.”

His eyes jerked sharply to the little girl he was examining. Her name was Bopha and she had been sitting there rather patiently, more fascinated than scared by the medical procedures and instruments—which was a good thing considering she had been sitting there for a half hour.

“Well,” said Jyou, “she’s not exhibiting any outward symptoms besides the irritated eyes. We should wait for the blood-work to get back from the lab, but I’d say she looks pretty good.”

Midori smiled at Bopha, her smiles having a tendency to glow in her eyes so the little girl knew even with the paper mask covering her mouth. “Bopha, can you sit for a few more minutes until your test comes back? You’ve been such a good girl.”

Bopha nodded.

Jyou and Midori walked to the side room to change their sterile gowns, gloves, paper caps, and masks. She went for blood. “Snap out of it before I have to kick you.”

“What?” Jyou asked.

“You can’t think about her while you do this. It’s dangerous, and as your partner, I’d rather not die because you glazed out and fucked up. I mean, come on, the sex can’t be that great.”

Jyou looked up from scrubbing his hands. “What are you talking about?”

Midori smiled. “It’s okay, just that I’d prefer you got it out of your system before you came in. I don’t know, bone her an extra time before you leave in the morning or something.”

The water was running over his hands which had stopped moving as she spoke. He gaped at her. That was certainly a crude way to put things. “We-we’re not . . . we’re . . . you know, not . . . .”

She stared for a minute, taking in this information. “Well,” she said, “that might be the problem.”

Jyou blushed and resumed washing his hands.

“So who’s holding out?”

He looked at his partner. When did she get so damn nosy? “I am.”

Midori didn’t seem surprised. For a moment he thought she was going to meddle further, offer advice or ask what had happened between them, but instead she said, “So, how does that work? When you sleep, I mean.”

“I sleep on the floor.”

She laughed.

“What?” he asked, pulling a fresh paper gown from its package.

Giggles distorting the beginning of her response, she said, “You got promoted just before she came.”

“So?”

“So, you’re the only person who isn’t a doctor in this division who doesn’t have to share a room and has a normal sized bed. And you sleep on the fucking floor.”

He glared at her. “And you think that’s funny?”

“Are you kidding? I think it’s hilarious.”


------------


Mimi wanted to cry. In fact, she was planning on it. She didn’t have time to do it properly now, but her shift was over in fifteen minutes and then she could go up to Jyou’s room and let it all out before he got home.

Her supervisor, a young woman only a few years older than herself named Akako, didn’t like her and seemed to relish in giving her all the worst jobs. She had spent hours the night before scrubbing pans and cleaning an oven, getting back to the room less than an hour before Jyou. Her hands were still raw and peeling from the steel wool and harsh chemicals. Her nails looked awful and she couldn’t seem to keep them clean. And now, she was carrying shipments to the storage house outside, her back straining and aching in protest.

At least she had Yusuke with her. “What the hell is in these?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Mimi answered panting. “It seems like the weight keeps shifting, though. Isn’t that weird? And why are there tiny holes in the tops of the barrels?”

Yusuke lifted his eyebrows in a way that seemed to say he didn’t know either.

The food storage facility was down the road a bit from the makeshift hospital, the path leading to it cut through thick undergrowth. The hospital was an old school that had been converted for the time being, and the food storage, an equipment shed. It was a walk of about a quarter of a mile—not really too far, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot further loaded down with a fifty-pound barrel. Still, Mimi supposed she was lucky. She had heard stories of some of the small villages further south, where the dysentery was still bad. Most of the volunteers there were sleeping in tents and cooking over fires.

Mimi had never realized before just how much she appreciated the urbanization of Japan. She had always known that she was not naturally outdoorsy, the Digital World having proved that more than a few times, but the Digital World wasn’t overrun with mosquitoes and tapeworms. There was now no doubt—she was a city girl through and through, and when she got back she was never going to fucking leave again.

Still, however out of place she was, however much pain or discomfort she went through, she refused to go to Jyou to fix it. It had only been two weeks, but in that time Mimi had learned both what a short-sighted planner and packer she was, and just what she was willing to part with to subsist. She had brought a lot of shoes—expensive trendy shoes, and she was glad she had. They served her as currency for everything she had lacked the foresight to bring. A pair of stilettos for a pair of sturdy rain-boots, pair of go-go boots for a half liter of mosquito repellant, a pair of designer sandals for a water canteen (a transaction that haunted her still). It amazed her; she’d had the presence of mind to grab enough pink dye to take care of her roots for the next months, but not enough to think of bringing a hat (an error in judgment which cost her a pair of beaded ballet flats).

It had rained all night and most of the day and her feet were sliding through mud as she trudged along in her thick rubber boots. The pants she wore were a little too big and certainly a bit baggy, but they protected her legs from the sun and the insects. Her hair was pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck to keep it out of the way, but wisps were falling out, loosened by the work of the day and the hairnet she had pulled off as soon as she was finished in the kitchens. She knew that her face was smudged with dirt from when she had wiped sweat from her face, forgetting that her gloves were covered in mud. She had to hurry, take care of this last barrel so that she could get back to Jyou’s room, have a shower, and plan her next strategy.

Her heart slumped in her chest at the thought. Everything about this place bit the hairy big one, but she could deal. The situation with Jyou, however . . . . That was the one thing she couldn’t handle—the thought that Jyou didn’t want her anymore. It had been two weeks and she had barely scratched his composure. Two weeks and he hadn’t laid a goddamned hand on her. Her supply of kinky seductions was running dry, not to mention her enthusiasm. It was difficult to be inspired when Jyou could look at her naked body and just turn away. But it was even worse than that; he wouldn’t talk to her—wouldn’t stay in the same room with her. She was beginning to think he hated her.

She was ashamed to admit it, but on a haughty plane of her personality, one she tried to forget existed, she had always thought herself above Jyou. She had seen him as awkwardly mannered, poorly dressed, and heartbreakingly un-cool. She had fought dating him for so long because she was embarrassed to be seen with him. It was a hideous thing to admit about herself, but she knew that it was true. Here though, in this festering, hellish land of vomit and blood, Mimi was seeing another angle entirely.

She found herself surrounded by med students and people living in poverty. These people looked at her clothes and saw materialism; they looked at her hair and saw frivolity; they looked at her reason for coming and saw a girl who had been over-indulged, spoiled. It didn’t matter that they were half-right, what mattered was she was beginning to see herself the way Jyou might. In dating him, she’d felt that she had lowered herself; it had never occurred to her that Jyou might feel the same way about going out with her.

The other members of his team were kind to her, but treated her like she was a little girl in the way they spoke to her, someone who wouldn’t understand big words or deep subjects. They assumed that she was shallow, that she was silly—they didn’t even know her. They thought Jyou was out of her league. Back home, she’d worried what her friends outside the Digidestined would think of her dating Jyou; she knew he was wonderful, that he was more than he seemed, but her friends would have seen him and jumped to conclusions the same way Jyou’s friends had with her. It was unfair, and it hurt, but she tried to remind herself that it didn’t matter. What mattered was what Jyou thought, and the possibility that he was embarrassed of her loomed very real and very crushing before her.

She had abused him, taken him for granted, humiliated him, and had been conceited enough to believe that he would still want her after all of it. She couldn’t give up, though. This was shaping up to be one of the worst experiences of her life; she would not walk away from it with her objective unachieved. She may not deserve Jyou after what she had done to him, but she didn’t deserve Akako as a supervisor, either—or to be hauling barrels half her weight through mud. If bad things she hadn’t earned could happen to her, she rationalized, couldn’t good things happen, too? As she’d always been told, life wasn’t fair. It was reasonable to believe that could be turned in her favor. She wanted him, damn it, and by God, she would have him.

“What the hell are you two doing?”

Mimi groaned; beside her, Yusuke dropped his barrel to the mud with a splat.

Akako was glaring at them and Mimi’s nerves were just frayed enough not to care if she had actually done something to warrant her supervisor's wrath. “We’re putting the food shipments in storage, just like you asked us to,” she said through clenched teeth.

“You can’t put those in storage,” Akako spat as though she were speaking to unusually stupid children. “They’ll die.”

“What do you mean?” Mimi retorted, her stance and tone not giving an inch, though her brain told her she probably should.

Akako rolled her eyes. “Those barrels,” she spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable with extreme care, “are full of tarantulas for the feast tomorrow.”

Mimi’s entire demeanor changed. “Tarantulas?” she squeaked.

Yusuke, who had sat to rest a moment on the top of his barrel, jumped up as though he had been bitten in the ass, even moving his hands to cover his butt-cheeks. He looked from the barrel to his supervisor. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” Akako answered. “They’re a treat for the patients, but traditionally, they’re fried live.”

Mimi was speechless.

“You’re kidding, right?” Yusuke croaked, blood draining from his face.

“No,” Akako snapped. “Now, take these back to the kitchen. There’s a storage pen with food for them. Dump them in, and for the love of God, fasten the lid properly.”

“W-we already took two barrels to storage,” Mimi’s voice was still high-pitched and unstable.

“Then get them, too.”

Mimi gave an involuntary whimper as Akako turned to go.

“Oh, get over yourself, Mimi. You’re going to have to touch them when you fry them tomorrow.” She glared at Yusuke as well, “You too.” Then she spun around and left the two of them looking at their barrels.

“No,” Mimi whispered.

“You want to run for it?” Yusuke asked, deadly serious. “It’s a long way to the border, and we’ll probably starve and get sick, possibly die, but that’s better than this, don’t you think?”

Mimi wasn’t listening to him. She was shaking her head, utterly shell shocked. “This is wrong,” she whispered. “This is wrong in every way something can be wrong.”

They both stared at the barrels before them for a long moment.

“I’m going to hurl,” Yusuke said.

“Save it for tomorrow.”

“I can do it tomorrow, too,” he returned. “You think I can’t?”

She sighed and lifted her barrel. At least they hadn’t gotten too far from the hospital. “Come on," she said.

The pen for the tarantulas was horribly clear plastic and full of crickets. Pouring the spiders into it required more courage than she thought she had, though there had been quite a few screams from both her and Yusuke when she’d set down the barrel and saw that many of them had held on and remained in the barrel. An elderly woman in a hairnet and apron had come up with a pair of tongs and taken care of the problem quite wordlessly, leaving Mimi feeling silly. Yusuke, however, had no shame and had asked the woman to linger till he had dumped his.

The old woman, seeing the trauma in their faces, broke into what was clearly a stash, and gave them each a can of soda, for which they thanked her profusely. Mimi, not realizing just how thirsty she was, downed hers in a few gulps.

“Shit, Mimi,” Yusuke said, smiling.

The last drops sliding down her throat, she let out a loud and unladylike burp, which made Yusuke laugh and her blush.

Tossing the can into the trash, Mimi nudged her friend. “Come on,” she said, “we have to get the other barr—els.” Her sentence was fractured by a harsh hiccup. “Damn it,” she sighed.

Yusuke just giggled harder, but he did follow her out of the building. Outside, the medical teams were having their last break of the day, eating a snack the kitchen staff had prepared earlier. Mimi froze as Jyou looked up; this wasn’t how she wanted to look when he saw her.

“Um,” said Yusuke, seeing Jyou approach, “I’m going to go get my barrel.”

“Are you alright?” Jyou asked, concerned. “You look awful.”

Mimi knew that he was just worrying about her, that he wanted to make sure she was alright. If she had been thinking about the big picture of her plan, which happened to be seducing him, she might have reacted differently. But she was hot and she was tired and she was cranky—how the hell was she supposed to look after working all day? “I’m fine, get out of my way.”

Surprised, Jyou stepped aside. After Mimi had passed him, however, she sensed him following her.

“Not now, Jy—ou. I’m not in the mood.”

He grabbed her arm spinning her around. “Did you just hiccup?”

She glared. “Yes, why?”

“Rai,” he called, “bring me my kit and a stool.”

Mimi twitched as he examined her eyes holding them open with his fingers. “Jyou,” she slapped his hand away, “what are you do—ing?”

He pushed her back, onto a stool Rai had brought, and opened his kit.

“What’s up?” Rai asked.

“She has red eyes and hiccups,” Jyou and answered.

“Fever?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s going on?” Mimi demanded.

Jyou remained silent, digging through his kit, so Rai answered. “Red eyes and hiccups are two of the earliest symptoms of Ebola,” his voice was gentle.

Mimi blinked. What? “I have red eyes from wait—ing up for Jyou all night. He tells me not to do that, but I can—’t help it. I have hiccups because I just chug—ged a can of soda.” She saw Jyou pull a sterilized needle from his kit and panicked. “What the hell is tha—t for?”

Jyou looked up at her from where he was crouching before her. “I’m going to need a blood sample, Mimi.”

“No!” Mimi tried to get up, but Jyou grabbed her. She was terrified of needles.

“I’ll be gentle, Mimi, but I need it.”

“I’m not sick, Jyou,” she said desperately. “I’m not.”

“Mimi,” Jyou said, his voice straining to remain calm, “if you tense up, you’ll make it worse.”

“What’s going on?” Midori demanded from behind Jyou.

“She may be sick,” Rai answered.

“Dude,” Zinan said, “you’re not wearing gloves.”

“I don’t care about that right now. Mimi, do your muscles ache?” Jyou inquired, applying a cold alcohol-saturated cotton ball to the inside of her arm, just above the elbow.

“Yes, but I’ve been hauling stu—ff all day.”

“Jyou, you heard what Kinjo-sensei said about—”

“Piss off, Zinan.”

“But Jyou—”

“You heard him,” Rai took obvious pleasure in telling his partner off. “He said ‘piss off.’”

Zinan didn’t budge, but he did shut up.

“Do you have a headache?”

She glared, “Now I do.”

“Mimi, I’m serious.”

“No, I don’t ha—ve a headache.”

“Sore throat?” He listened to her heart, sliding the cool stethoscope under her shirt. It was the closest his hands had come to her breasts in weeks, but there was nothing sexual in the touch.

“No.”

“Stomach pains? Vomiting?”

“No and no.”

“Bloody diarrhea?”

“Jyou!”

“This is important, Mimi.”

“No, okay. I do not have any da—mn bloody diarrhea.”

Jyou nodded, “And you don’t seem to have a skin rash either.” All this seemed to comfort him a little.

“See,” she said, “you don’t need a blo—od sample.” Even as she said it, she felt a stab of pain in her arm. “Damn it Jyou, I said . . .” she looked down to see the needle had been pulled out of her arm, not stabbed into it. The blood sample was already in Jyou’s hand, and she hadn’t even felt it. “How . . .” she trailed off, watching as he put a sterile cotton ball over the dot of blood on her arm and held it in place with a strip of medical tape.

Midori smiled at her puzzlement. “Jyou’s the best with needles. All the kids love him.”

“Mimi,” he said, “I want you to sit here while I take this to the lab.”

He rose to go.

“Wait!” Mimi made a grab for him, but came away with his stethoscope.

He glanced at her and his tool in her hands, but turned to go anyway. “I’ll be right back, Mimi.”

Her eyes narrowed. She threw the stethoscope down into a muddy puddle and followed him into the hospital, leaving his team behind.

He was far enough ahead that she lost sight of him, and not having a clear knowledge of where the labs were located, she didn’t come upon him till he was standing at the counter.

“Kiyoshi,” he was saying, “I need you to run both an lgM and lgG ELISA on this as well as a PCR.”

Kiyoshi was nodding as he reached for the sample.

Jyou grabbed the hand and said, “I need this right away.”

Kiyoshi nodded and went into the lab.

Jyou turned and saw her. “Mimi, I told you to stay out there.”

She didn’t know what to say. She was exhausted, angry, frightened, and felt decidedly mistreated. Tears came to her eyes and a sob broke from her throat.

Jyou’s brows furrowed and a look of concern washed over his face. “What’s the matter?”

She gave a mini-shriek of frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to be sick. Maybe it scares the shit out of me. Maybe I just wanted you to hold me.”

Jyou gaped at her, clearly shocked by her words. She couldn’t imagine why—it wasn’t as though her feelings were entirely unreasonable considering the circumstances. Nothing in the world seemed more inviting, more safe, at this moment than his arms, but it appeared he was going to withhold those as well.

She turned. “I have a barrel I have to g—o get,” she whispered.

Walking away, she heard him calling after her, but she didn’t stop.