tp5au: chapter one and a half (1.5)

[shattermelt]

Kippei woke up slowly, sluggishly, with the vague feeling that something was very, very wrong. He was cold, and that was wrong too.

Shinji wasn't warm? Shinji should be here and warm, and he wasn't. He was cold? Was he dead?

Kippei sat bolt upright, forcing oddly leaden arms and legs to move as he reached for Shinji in a flash of irrational panic. But Shinji wasn't there, cold or otherwise. Shinji wasn't here?

"Shinji!" he called out uselessly, already knowing that Shinji wasn't anywhere he could hear. The sense of something being weirdly, badly wrong increased, filling him with dread. Shinji was gone--not just up for some reason or coming back but gone. He didn't know why he was so certain of it, but his brain was still working very slowly, foggy and confused.

What the fuck had happened? He felt drugged... someone had drugged him. And Shinji was missing.

Someone took Shinji.

He stumbled out of bed, swearing, and reached for his clothes, doing a half-arsed job of dressing as he went over to the comm, getting halfway through calling station security before his brain caught up with him and he shut it down, bowing his head as he forced his chemical laced brain to think.

Shinji was missing, but he had no proof that anyone had done anything. It would look to anyone else probably like Shinji had just taken off, but Kippei knew better. Shinji would never just leave like that. Not in the middle of the night, not sneaking out, and he wouldn't have bothered to drug him. He wouldn't have left. Someone took him. Maybe drugged him too.

There was only one possible conclusion: Rikkai. Rikkai had kidnapped him. The only question was whether or not Rikkai had wanted Shinji, or if they had taken him because of his relationship to Kippei. To use as a hostage, maybe? Hell if they'd gotten in here they could have just killed him and been done with it, so it hadn't been about Kippei at all.

Those bastards. They were so convinced Shinji was one of them, they weren't even going to give him a choice in the matter. Kippei was going to kill them, like all of them. Also, like HELL they were keeping his Shinji.

Kippei gritted his teeth and went to the Komputer. Time to find out how they did this, and where they'd taken him. Kippei was going to get him back, end of story. Shinji would know that Kippei would find him, and he didn't mean to take any longer about it than he had to.