Guilt’s Cost XV

Return

Once the helicopter was safely in the air, Angel examined the two men. Tseng was semi conscious by now, making Vincent the more obviously critical of the two. He was on his back on the chopper’s floor, and she pushed away the remaining shreds of his shirt. As she did so, she gasped as she saw the reptilian skin that covered part of his torso. Angel knew she couldn’t let this distract her, and carried on with her exam. His two gunshot wounds were easily found. She knew that the one in his shoulder wasn’t life threatening, so turned her attention to the one that was.

On the left side of his chest was a sizable entry wound. Blood still ran from it, but she could tell by his labored breathing that there was more bleeding on the inside, preventing his lungs from properly filling with air.

"Crap," she looked over at Reno, "I’m going to need your help."

He frowned. "Can’t someone else? I ain’t touching lizard boy, no way."

She snapped at him, not in the mood for his petty bickering. "Get over here, Reno."

Sensing the anger growing in her voice, he grudgingly obeyed, and knelt down on the opposite side of Vincent from her.

Angel opened up her medic bag and ripped open a package of surgical gloves. She then began pulling out various other items she would need for the procedure. "Okay, I need to get into his chest now or he’s going to die."

Reno watched her, feeling a little faint as she snapped a blade onto a scalpel handle. "What the fuck do you want me to do?"

She wiped a spot just above the wound with some betadine scrub. "This is going to hurt him, a lot. He will probably wake up, so I need you to hold him down."

After the display of Vincent’s strength that he had witnessed the night before, he knew there was no way he would be able to hold him down alone. He motioned for Ericson and Morris to help him.

Once the other two men had descended on Vincent, Angel took a deep breath and cut into him. She put the scalpel down and slid her fingers in between his ribs. Vincent at once bucked back to life. Even in his weakened state, the three men holding him down barely managed to restrain him.

Vincent screamed through his clenched teeth, not truly aware of what was happening. The pain coupled with the restraint and confusion caused him to momentarily lapse into a flashback of his days in Hojo’s lab. "Let me go! Oh God, please let me go!"

Angel’s heart pounded in her ears, but she couldn’t let her pity for her father interfere in what she had to do. "Vincent, hold still!"

He looked up at her with pain maddened eyes. "Stop! You’re killing me!"

Blood began to pour out from where her fingers where thrust into his chest. She fed a plastic tube in between them. "I’ve got to do this, or you won’t be able to breathe."

Unable to fight anymore, Vincent submitted to the procedure. The pain started to abate as he relaxed. His mind finally gained clarity, and he realized that he was on the helicopter, not in the lab. As the tube drained the excess fluid from his chest, he was able to breathe normally again.

She quickly secured the tube with a few stitches. "Are you all right?"

He stared back at her with exhausted eyes. "Yeah."

"Good," She pulled her gloves off. "Please don’t move. I need to go check on Tseng now, okay?"

Vincent closed his eyes as she walked out of his sight. He tried to remember anything after the explosion, but could not. He had no idea why he was alive, and soon he passed into sleep.

Angel made her way over to Tseng, who was sitting against the wall; his hands still clenched to his chest. There was little color in his face, and a cold sweat was broken out on his skin.

He gave her a weak smile. "How’s Vincent?"

"He’s all right for now." She replied, as she reached out and took one of Tseng’s wrists into her hand. After monitoring his pulse for a few moments, she picked up on the arrhythmia his heart was producing. "How does your right arm feel?"

He glanced down briefly, not remembering any injury there. "I must have pulled something, at least it hurts like I did."

She nodded knowingly, and pulled a small vial of pills from her bag. Angel handed one small white tablet to Tseng. "Put that under your tongue. You had a heart attack, and that is a vasodilator that will help you feel a little better."

He did as instructed, and felt the tablet melt away. Tseng closed his eyes as the pain in his chest eased some more. "Thanks."

"The doctors told you that this kind of thing was too much for you anymore." She said flatly as she drew up a dose of lidocaine.

He closed his eyes. "My men rely on me going with them."

She pushed back one of his sleeves and snapped a tourniquet around his arm. "Your men rely on you being around to lead them. They don’t need you to handle every mission personally."

Tseng felt the coldness of alcohol on his exposed skin. "I can’t imagine not being with them on raids."

She drove the needle of the syringe into his vein. After seeing a flash of blood in the syringe, she flicked off his tourniquet and administered the drug. "That may be, but I can’t imagine losing you to something as stupid as a heart attack; none of us could."

The lidocaine stung as it made it’s way up his vein, but after a moment, his heart’s rhythm again returned to a more regular beat. "Angel, I’ll be fine."

Seeing the color come back into his cheeks, and his expression become less pained relieved Angel, and she took Tseng into her arms. "No thanks to my father. If he hadn’t gotten you up to us, you would either be in custody or dead."

"I know." Tseng sighed as she let him go. "But it wasn’t exactly Vincent who saved me."

Angel looked immediately confused. "But we all saw him bring you up."

Tseng smiled at his niece. "Remember that I said that Vincent is possessed by a demon?"

She frowned. "Yes, a hard as that is to believe."

"It was that demon that picked me up from the street and flew me to the bank building."

"Flew you?" Angel was beginning to think that her uncle was starting to have hallucinations from his attack.

"Yes, flew me." Tseng could sense her doubt. "I don’t know why Chaos would save me, but he did. If Vincent has wings, that demon is in control."

She smirked. "There weren’t any wings on him when he got you to the roof."

"That’s because he no longer needed them to climb the stairs, Angel." Tseng was growing extremely tired, and it was starting to show.

Angel stood up. "We’ll discuss this later, you need to rest now."

She again returned to Vincent’s side to watch him for the remainder of the flight home. He remained asleep, a steady trickle of fluid continuing to drip from his chest tube. Her eyes couldn’t help but be drawn back to the glossy snakeskin that graced his chest. This was the visible evidence of the demon that Tseng had often told her of. Why Hojo would have done this to her father she couldn’t imagine. A glint caught her attention, and she brought her gaze to the waist of his pants. The brassy shine of the metal that had replaced his lower body just peeked out from beneath his clothing. Confounded, she reached out and slid her hand down under the fabric along his hip. All she felt was more metal, and her heart grew sick to think what had been done to him.

She was startled out of her thoughts when Reno shouted out at her from his seat a short ways away. "What the hell you doing? Quit touching your dad like that, it’s fucking weird!"

Angel frowned up at Reno as she retracted her hand away from Vincent. "Shut up, I’m not doing anything ‘weird’, I was just checking something."

"Whatever." Reno narrowed his eyes as he looked at Vincent’s unconscious form. "Even if you weren’t his kid it would be weird."

Her expression grew extremely viscous. "I swear to God, Reno. Why can’t you just shut the Hell up every once in a while?"

He returned her angry look. "Just pointing out you’re a pervert, that’s all."

Angel’s demeanor broke and she laughed up at her cocky companion. "You win, bastard."

Reno grinned back down at her. She was the only one that understood that he never really meant anything by the things he said, and he had come to lover her for it. "Yippee fuckin’ doo. I feel so accomplished; you gave in too quick that time, bitch."

She attempted to muster something equally sarcastic to retort with, but her train of thought was shattered as the helicopter set down hard back at the airfield.

Ericson had taken it upon himself to radio ahead for medics to be standing by when they landed, and the door to the chopper was thrown open as they prepared to get the fallen men into the infirmary.