Chapter Text
With Enies Lobby's remains crumbling down around his head, Jabra's first thought upon regaining consciousness is: Did Gatherine make it off the island?
Okay-- well, his first actual thought is ow, and his second thought is fucking ow! and his third, fourth and fifth thoughts are mainly variations of his first two, but once he's taken a few deep, painful breaths his Cipher Pol training kicks in enough to let him take stock of his condition and come to the conclusion that it's, as the doctors would say, 'not so good.' There's the obvious pain in his neck, his ribs and his face from how many burning kicks he'd taken to the snout, and some downright concerning numbness in his chest. He's no stranger to broken bones, and a few second-degree burns on top of that, all noted with the cool efficiency of habit that had been beaten into his body since he was a child.
Then he wonders if Gatherine had made it onto that evacuation ship that began loading civilians stationed at Enies Lobby as soon as Spandam started the Buster Call.
He hopes so. They hadn't been on bad terms when she broke things off, though it had stung that she'd done so at the news that Rob Lucci was returning to Enies Lobby, as if that stinking cat would ever give a cute girl like her the time of day. Jabra also spares a thought to the rooster that lived in his quarters, a goofy little thing that, as a chick, Lucci had snidely called 'emergency rations' before he and his cohort departed to Water 7. Maybe the bird would make its way down the sea train tracks to some other town where no one will turn it into dinner.
His quarters must be a complete mess now too, Jabra considers ruefully as another whistle-crash of a cannonball shakes the Tower. That garden had taken years to cultivate.
At least the mess won't be his problem for long considering his lack of ability to walk, much less escape the bombardment. Jabra's never been the fatalistic type, but there's no point in denying his situation: A dereliction of duty to such an extent that he lost to some pirates invading a stronghold of the World Government does tend to warrant death in this line of work, and he doubts that any Marines who haven't evacuated are going to be all that concerned about retrieving CP9 operatives in their rush to leave.
He closes his eyes, willing his zoan's accelerated healing to kick in sooner rather than later, and almost doesn't register the pneumatic hiss of an air door opening above him.
"There you are," says Blueno, sounding relieved. "Let's get out of here."
Good old Blueno. Jabra cracks one eye open, meeting the other man's look with a shit-eating grin. "You're still alive?" he says, and wheezes out a few coughs in lieu of a laugh.
Blueno leans down through the circle of his door, and scoops Jabra into that odd little pocket dimension of his. Jabra's met with the sight of Kumadori and Fukurou both laid out on the floor, and Kalifa wrapped up in a pile of curtains sitting beside them. "Where's Kaku?" asks Blueno, shutting his air door as another volley of cannon fire smashes through the Tower of Justice.
"My room," Jabra grunts, working himself up to one elbow. "He was fighting Roronoa."
"And Lucci?"
"Bridge."
The pickup is relatively quick. Blueno retrieves Kaku, who's severely injured but conscious enough to be worried about Lucci, then Lucci, who's barely breathing and also bleeding sluggishly from most of his face holes. Blueno actually asks Jabra to help him move Lucci through the door for fear of aggravating what appears to be every kind of blunt force trauma at once, and the prospect of surviving the Buster Call gives Jabra just enough strength to do so. Lucci is dead weight when Jabra gets his arms under his armpits and Blueno picks him up by the legs, and there's an unfortunate crunching sound from somewhere inside his body as they lift him through and set him down.
Kaku looks over with wide, guileless eyes from his position on the floor. He's a trained and deadly government assassin, but he's the youngest of their team and, having spent so many years deep undercover, isn't nearly as accustomed as the rest of them to losing fellow agents. "Is he..."
"Well," Blueno says, voice a deep rumble, "he's alive for now. But he won't last long without medical attention."
The crash of a collapsing building thunders through his door, which Jabra hurriedly closes behind them.
"Shit," Jabra says, voicing their collective thoughts as he gingerly lowers himself to sit next to Kalifa. She's got her curtain loose around her, not concerned with modesty in the privacy of Blueno's door dimension, or the company of her fellow agents. "Didn't think that Straw Hat kid would take down Lucci."
"He's stronger than he looks," Blueno comments, being the other operative who had taken a blow from that lanky rubber bastard. With a pointed look at the rest of the team, he adds, "They all are."
Jabra grumbles a few more choice curses, but shuffles forward to pick up Lucci's arm and press three fingers to the pulse point in his wrist, then his neck. The beat is so weak and unsteady that he's honestly shocked Lucci isn't already dead, and the look he exchanges with Blueno is grim. He does the basic checks, pulling back Lucci's lips to see his gums (anemic, from internal bleeding), his eyes open to measure the dilation of his pupils (concussed), and a careful patdown for broken bones (many).
"He's in shock," Kalifa supplies helpfully, standing up to untangle one of the curtains from her stockpile and offer it to Jabra, who folds it once and covers Lucci's torso with it. The basic zoan resilience should prevent his condition from worsening, but the extent of the damage isn't something that can be napped off. Still, even he knows that you do what you can to keep a guy warm when he's going into shock.
"Once heard a vet say," Jabra quips, "that as long as you've got all the parts of a cat in the same room, it'll make a full recovery."
Kaku heaves a frustrated sigh, turning his head to watch Lucci lie completely still for a few more seconds. "You reckon we can take some supplies from the hospital wing?" he asks.
"That's the side closest to the battleships," answers Blueno, shaking his head. "There probably isn't a hospital wing left."
"But Lucci--"
"If he bites it," Jabra barks, "that's too damn bad. But there's nothing we can do for him until the Buster Call is over."
Blueno settles on Jabra's other side, cross-legged and leaning forward onto his elbows. "I can't reach it anyway. Out of range."
Jabra sniffs the air, cocking one thin brow in Kaku's direction. "What about you, you stupid herbivore?"
"Don't underestimate giraffes," Kaku says indignantly. "A fully grown giraffe can decapitate a lion with a single kick."
Jabra stalks over to Kaku next, unzipping his tattered jacket while the younger man is too weak to resist and peeling it back to inspect the deep gashes across his chest. He had been smelling a borderline obscene amount of blood on Kaku, most of it soaked into his dark jacket and beginning to crust up. The bleeding has more or less stopped, partially plugged by the debris that had fallen on him as the tower collapsed, and the flesh around the wounds is violently inflamed as it tries to seal around the intrusive particles. Kaku takes the treatment in stoic silence, looking away from Jabra's pointed stare.
"What about those two?" he asks stiffly, his nose waving slightly in the direction of Kumadori and Fukurou.
Jabra looks dismissively over them. "That's not even the worse they've taken from me," he answers decisively. "Think they just got knocked around the head a bit."
"Spandam?" Blueno asks, brows furrowed.
"Who?" says Jabra.
"That's sexual harassment," says Kalifa.
"Saying his name?!"
That exchange seems to momentarily allow Kaku a moment of reprieve from his concern for Lucci, because he lets out a quiet chuckle, then squeezes his eyes closed when the movement pulls at the edges of his wounds. "What about Hattori?"
"Pigeon's the only one I'm not worried about," says Blueno. Some days, he considers making the argument that Hattori is far and away the smartest member of CP9 for how it disappears the moment things go sideways and reappears as soon as the team has everything under control. Endearing itself to Lucci of all people is simply icing on the cake.
"Seriously," Jabra grumbles, eyes still lingering on Kaku's chest, "it's Lucci's bird. It knows how to get out of the way." Kaku lets out an indignant hey when Jabra flicks the bill of his cap and adds, "Unlike this one."
There's none of the usual sharpness in his voice, and Jabra's tongue stays uncharacteristically in his mouth as he considers the situation in front of him. Always the most perceptive among them, Blueno is the one who asks, "What's wrong?"
"The camel's gonna die of sepsis before we get help at this rate."
"Camel?" Kaku doesn't have time to lodge a proper complaint before Jabra's face begins to warp, his teeth protruding out of his lips before his snout elongates to cover them. He shifts into his full-wolf form, on all fours, his head lowered to Kaku's body and breath puffing against his skin as he sniffs.
Kaku jolts at the first sweep of wet, slippery heat across his clavicle. Shock melts into mortification when he realizes that Jabra is licking him, each pass of his tongue wicking away blood and dirt. Mortification escalates while Jabra works his way down, cleaning up the skin around gashes on his chest, including the one that was a near-miss with his left nipple, but of course he drags his tongue across that, too. The one under the line of his pectorals. The one across his abs. That other one under his navel. Kaku nearly passes out from the speed at which blood leaves his head when Jabra shoves his cold wet nose under the waistband of his pants to lave his tongue across the cut at the seam of his hip and thigh.
Kaku silently thanks Roronoa for the extreme blood loss he'd experienced relatively recently, which is probably the only thing preventing the situation from becoming even more embarrassing than it already is.
"This," Jabra tells him after he's done cleaning up the broad swathes of dried blood between lacerations, "is going to hurt like a bitch."
Kaku doesn't have time to ask what he means before Jabra dips his head down again and pushes his tongue into the wound on his leg. It pulls along what feels like sand and small pebbles, dragging them across the open edges of the cut before pulling away. Kaku's entire body seizes up from the pain, but Jabra presses one big paw to his knee and that's enough grounding for Kaku to grit his teeth and relax again under the pressure.
"Jabra," Kaku says weakly, practically a whimper, and the wolf raises his head to nose at his chin and give him a calming lick under his jaw. At least, it was supposed to be calming.
Kaku's neck is, he's dismayed to discover, extraordinarily sensitive, and his poor thoroughly-licked 23-year-old body finally gives up any semblance of dignity. Jabra definitely notices, with that sensitive wolf's nose of his and also the possession of working eyes and ears, but he diplomatically ignores Kaku's (completely understandable! relatively mild!) physical reactions to resume cleaning out the rest of his wounds, far away from his thankfully uninjured neck. He also diplomatically ignores all of Kaku's bitten-back noises, and the panting, the embarrassment radiating off of him in thick waves, and also the snickering from the rest of their conscious teammates.
Kaku would never have applied the word 'diplomatic' to Jabra, but he considers now that he might have been too judgmental on this point, though it's also possible that he'd just used up his entire lifetime's quota of diplomacy from the man. Part of him considers asking Jabra to just let him die of gangrene.
"Well?" Kalifa asks when he's finally done, amusement dripping from her voice as Jabra shifts back to his full human form and spits out a mouthful of sand. "How does he taste?"
"Like shit," Jabra shoots back, taking the strips of drapery Kalifa passes him to tightly wrap Kaku's torso, if only to keep the edges of his wounds from pulling apart even further as the bleeding starts again. It's a relief when Jabra zips his jacket back up and tells him to take a nap and Kaku, exhausted from the overload of sensations he'd just been put through, takes the suggestion gladly.
The Buster Call abates after about two hours, during which Fukurou and Kumadori regain consciousness and start to make noise. They grate on Jabra's nerves on the best of days, but he's glad to see them awake and annoying even if he's also tempted to drown them sometimes. The team manages a few fitful naps in turns until Blueno opens a mail slot-sized door to the outside and they hear only silence.
They file out into the ruins of Enies Lobby, where the sky is finally blue again instead of that unnerving, swirling green. Blueno unslings Lucci from his shoulder and sets him down gently against a crumbling wall. Kaku flops back down to the ground after just shuffling out of Blueno's door takes its toll on him.
The moderately secluded area of the island is great for finding walls still more or less standing, but not for finding medical professionals. Jabra's well enough to move without excruciating pain after all that time lounging around, so he and Blueno head toward the center of the ruins to see who they might find, and how much they might be able to salvage.
Jabra hears voices before Blueno does, and ducks behind a wall to listen. The other agent follows suit without needing to be told, signalling that he's ready to open a door if the need arises. Jabra pointedly doesn't give himself any time to be annoyed about how Lucci's team always seems on the ball while his team will actively share their plans to their target, and shifts to his hybrid form to hear better.
The eavesdropped conversation isn't encouraging. Sure, failing an assignment at this scale probably means an agent is stripped of their rank and dismissed (it's been a long time since an assignment has been failed at this scale), and if you fuck up badly enough to actively help the enemy, that could even mean imprisonment. Jabra hears some goon say, 'Director Spandam says that the CP9 were helping the Straw Hats, otherwise there's no way they could have won,' and is much less surprised than he probably should've been.
'They've disappeared, so it must be true.'
'We have to find them!'
Jabra gives Blueno a look, and motions for them to return to the team.
One of the World Government's big mistakes, if he were in a position to be giving criticism, is allowing information to spread so easily within its ranks. Who's-Who had obediently returned to headquarters after he lost a devil fruit to Red-Haired Shanks, which wouldn't usually have warranted any outsized punishment except for the manner by which he'd lost it-- not just by force, but by stupidity.
Even then, Jabra wouldn't have sentenced him to prison for committing a dumbass mistake. If Spandam was reporting that the CP9 had been insubordinate at best or treasonous at worst, their best bet would be to not return at all.
"You hear that?" he asks Blueno as they make their way back.
"Some of it." The big guy furrows his brows. "What do we do?"
"Easy." Being older than the others has its perks, Jabra supposes. He has a couple more years of learning how the organization works, more experience with things going belly-up in the worst possible way, and lots of peers who are no longer around who had set clear examples of what not to do. Lucci's strong, but that bloodthirsty cat is only cunning about the enemy. "We get the hell out of here," he says.
Kalifa struggles with the curtain around her while everyone prepares to move out, the team falling in line under Jabra now that Lucci's out cold. He shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over her shoulders while Blueno briefs the rest of the team on what they'd overheard. It's big on her, which is a good thing because at the very least it covers her ass and won't have her flashing everyone unless she really starts doing some gymnastics. Jabra's tempted to say that her usual outfit, with the fishnets and plunging neckline and garters, is way more suggestive than being straight up naked (which he supposes is the point) but he personally can't afford blunt force trauma to the groin at the moment so he holds his tongue.
Besides, she gives him a grateful little smile for it, and he doesn't want that to go away too soon. He gives her a quick pat on the shoulder, then drops to his haunches in front of Kaku.
Despite how quickly Kaku had learned to control his devil fruit power, he only benefits from a small part of his accelerated healing. That ramps up as the user draws closer to awakening, which none of them have quite figured out yet. Jabra suspects that it's not something the government necessarily wants their agents to have access to, whether because the power isn't well understood or because, as Jabra has heard, awakening a zoan means the user will lose their minds to the animal within.
That seems less likely to Jabra, who's always found his wolf impulses pretty reasonable. Maybe not when they involve licking his much younger critically injured coworker, but hey, he's a pack animal. He can't help it. "Guess you're not gonna be on your feet anytime soon," he observes.
"'Fraid not," Kaku answers ruefully.
"Alright. Let's go."
"Are you sure?" Kaku bites back a groan as Jabra hauls him onto his back. The stick he fits under him is long enough for Jabra to grab on both ends to support his weight. "You're still injured, aren't you?"
"Better off than you," Jabra snarls back. "But if you'd rather stay here, I can drop your ass now."
"I just--"
"Hey," Jabra says, cutting him off, "if you're gonna talk, at least tell me something useful. Which island's closest on the tracks?"
The rest of CP9 usually ships out directly on Marine vessels from Enies Lobby, but the Galley-La foremen had to do regular maintenance on the Puffing Tom's tracks so Kaku's decently familiar with the distance between destinations. "St. Poplar," he answers.
"They got a hospital there?"
"A small one," Kalifa offers, "but it's fully equipped. They should be able to help Lucci."
"Then we've got ourselves a destination." Jabra catches Kumadori's eye and uses his chin to gesture toward Lucci, prompting the larger man to pick him up. "CP9, move out."