He couldn't figure out why Kirishima would be calling him. Wasn't she supposed to be resting in her hospital room right now?
What could she possibly want?
Maybe she'd been behaving herself and wanted a few days of outdoor leave. Or maybe she wanted to check out for good.
Still wondering, Sasaki left the bedroom and picked up the phone in the living room.
"Hello? This is Sasaki."
"Y... yeah, it's me. Kirishima."
Hearing the voice, the lazy, unbothered look on his face disappeared right away. His eyes went wide.
"Your voice? What's going on? Did you change back?"
Kirishima, on the other end, had no idea why he sounded so shocked.
The drug had come from him in the first place, so changing back should've been completely normal.
Why was he acting like this was some big surprise?
She hesitated, then answered slowly. "Uh, yeah, yeah, I'm back to normal, but... but..."
She sounded like she couldn't get the words out.
Whatever it was, she clearly didn't want to say it.
Sasaki was losing patience.
"Spit it out already. You changed back and forgot how to talk while you were at it?"
Kirishima gave up trying to explain over the phone and just went straight to begging. "Sasaki, can you come to the hospital? Please?"
Sasaki instinctively glanced at the clock.
5:43 pm.
He had been busy dealing with Yukari since 1:30. Aside from short breaks, all of his mind and body was focused on one task; taming the yandere.
So, four hours plus...
Now, this girl wanted him to visit.
However, it was still early.
A trip to the hospital wasn't a big deal, and honestly, whatever Kirishima wanted or didn't want, it gave him a good excuse to check on the rest of the group he'd sent there.
Now that he thought about it, he'd never actually taken the time to look at any of them properly after turning them from men into women.
Every visit was the same, grab one, use her, toss her aside, like pulling tissues out of a box.
Even a real scumbag had better manners than that.
However, Sasaki didn't care much. They were scums anyway; potential rapists, criminals and all...there was no need to treat them like human beings.
He walked into the bathroom, set the phone down on the edge of the tub, and started running the water.
"Got it. I'll head over soon. If that's everything, I'm hanging up."
At the hospital, the doctors and nurses had been ignoring every complaint Kirishima made.
She'd had no choice but to drop Sasaki's name just to borrow a phone and call him.
Some things just couldn't be explained properly over the phone anyway.
When she heard he was actually coming, she nearly cried with relief. "Really? Thank you so much! I'll be waiting, okay? You have to come!"
"..."
He was the one who'd put her in that place, and here she was thanking him like he'd sent her on vacation.
It was such a strange situation that Sasaki felt a little embarrassed just being part of it.
"Alright, alright. I'm hanging up."
Sensing he had no interest in chatting, Kirishima didn't push it and hung up quietly.
Filling the tub would take twenty or thirty minutes, so Sasaki had some time to kill.
He went back to the bedroom.
He'd rushed out earlier to take the call, so he hadn't cleaned up Yukari yet.
She was still lying face down on the mattress, looking basically like a puddle of melted ice cream.
He grabbed some tissues and carefully wiped her down, top to bottom, working gently so he wouldn't wake her.
Once she was clean, he opened the windows to air the room out, did the laundry, got something cooking, and when the time was right, he scooped her up and carried her into the bathroom.
After washing them both off, he laid her back down on the bed, now with fresh sheets, and said quietly,
"There's food in the pot in the kitchen. Eat when you wake up. And don't forget to take the sheets out of the washing machine later."
All he got back was a sleepy mumble.
Sasaki wasn't sure if any of that had actually registered, so he poked her cheek.
Lifting a pair of heavy, fatigued eyelids and realizing Fuyumi was the one poking her, Yukari closed her eyes once more, reached out, and pulled him straight into her arms.
Uh.
To be honest, being held against the chest of someone with such a voluptuous, full-figured frame felt so utterly comfortable that it made a person want to linger forever.
He let himself enjoy it for a bit before finally pulling free once she'd drifted off into a deep sleep.
Then tucked the blanket around her and quietly left the room.
Outside, the sunset was staining everything dark red, and the apartment walls glowed gold in the light.
He walked to the nearest bus stop, waited five or six minutes, and caught a bus straight to the hospital.
Navigating the familiar path toward the hospital's inpatient ward,
Sasaki headed directly for the specialized wing that had been cordoned off exclusively for Fujitsubaki Mi.
The hallway there had no windows, just harsh white fluorescent lights overhead that made everything look cold and a little unsettling.
It was bright enough, sure, but in a way that felt more uncomfortable than helpful. Add in the thick smell of disinfectant and the whole place felt like somewhere you didn't want to spend a second longer than you had to.
He genuinely couldn't fathom what kind of twisted tastes Fujitsubaki had to actually enjoy working in such a depressing atmosphere.
Grumbling to himself, he finally reached the hospital room with Kirishima's name on the door.
Through the glass panel, he could see she wasn't alone.
Sitting beside her bed was a blonde woman in a crisp white lab coat.
He wasn't surprised to see Fujitsubaki there.
After all, she'd told him herself that the odds of Kirishima changing back were basically zero. And yet somehow he had beaten those odds.
It would've been weirder if she wasn't in there running tests on her.
He opened the door and stepped in, tossing out a casual greeting.
"Waiting for me, you two?"
Fujitsubaki, sitting with her legs crossed, pushed her glasses up with a completely flat expression and gave him a small nod.
Kirishima had been sitting curled up against the headboard like a scared little animal, but the second she saw Sasaki, she practically lunged forward.
The desperation on her face made her look like a drowning person who'd just spotted something to grab onto.
It caught Sasaki off guard.
He sat down casually at the foot of the bed and glanced sideways at Fujitsubaki Mi. "Did you fry her brain with one of your weird concoctions?"
The latter shifted her flat stare toward Kirishima, who immediately went quiet, then shook her head.
Her voice, as usual, had all the flavor of plain water. "The drug doesn't cause brain damage. She's just excited to see you. Probably thinks you're the only one who can help her."
"Help her?"
Never mind why she'd think he was the one to help.
The real question was, what did she even need help with while stuck in here? Breaking out?
That wasn't up to him.
Fujitsubaki answered the confusion plainly. "She wants out. And she wants to change back."
Every single piece of trash he'd dumped in this place wanted out and wanted to change back.
That was nothing new.
Except, wait, wasn't Kirishima already back to normal?
That thought lingered for a second before Sasaki remembered the perfume he'd given her.
That perfume was designed to boost the wearer's affection toward whoever gave it to them.
Considering how much time Kirishima and Takagi had spent together, it wasn't exactly shocking that some kind of feelings had developed.
His original plan had just been to keep Kirishima obedient and make sure she followed Fujitsubaki's orders properly.
If she genuinely ended up developing feelings for Takagi, it didn't really matter to him either...
But looking at the current situation... Kirishima wanted to change back because of Takagi?
If she was still running around as a blonde gyaru, none of this would seem so strange.
But she was back to being a guy right now.
It seemed like, with Takagi's constant help, Kirishima had fully settled into being a gyaru, right up to the point where she stopped even thinking about it.
And by the time she finally snapped to her senses and recognized her own feelings, she had already permanently reverted...
That was probably why she'd panicked enough to call him.
Sasaki had been there for the whole thing, so it wasn't hard to connect the dots once he thought it through.
But knowing the cause didn't mean there was anything he could actually do about it.
He had no say over how the hospital ran things.
And besides, did she really think flipping back and forth between genders was as easy as flipping a coin?
Since he wasn't about to speak up for her, Sasaki kept his face neutral.
"She's your subject. What you do with her is your call. All I did was bring her and the others to your door."
"You don't need to hold back just because she used my name to get me down here."
Since he was the one who'd rounded them up in the first place, nobody understood better than Sasaki what kind of lowlifes these people were.
Granted, the offense Kirishima had committed was relatively minor.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't a crime worthy of this kind of sentence... but that wasn't something Sasaki needed to lose sleep over.
She had messed up, and Sasaki had dropped her in here for a bit of "re-education."
That was entirely fair.
He had given Kirishima a task, and afterwards, he had fulfilled his end of the bargain.
So Sasaki owed her neither obligations nor favors.
And Kirishima knew that full well... which was precisely why she was swallowing her pride like this.
"Sasaki... please. I'm begging you. I did everything you asked, properly..."
However, the latter raised a hand to cut her off. "And I did what I said
I would too."
To be honest, Sasaki hadn't actually planned on holding up his end at first.
It had just been a random promise thrown out there, since the odds of her changing back were basically nothing.
But she had changed back, hadn't she?
Watching Kirishima sit there in speechless, soul-crushed despair, Sasaki couldn't help thinking the whole situation was wildly bizarre and absurd.
Yet this bizarre mess was something he had engineered entirely with his own hands.
Which somehow made it feel even more ridiculous.
He had no intention of getting her out of there, but since he was also the reason her whole world had been turned upside down, just leaving her stranded felt a little harsh.
He let out a small sigh and turned to Fujitsubaki. "So what's the plan for her?"
"My research is about immortality, not gender swapping. The body change thing is just a side effect. Reversing it isn't something I can just do on a whim."
That answer didn't surprise him at all.
Before he could speak, Fujitsubaki continued. "It's just that it isn't quite as easy right now. Even though it's a side effect, the successful data on Kirishima's transformation has already been fully gathered."
"With her successful case as a reference, repeating the process and changing her back will only take me a little more time."
"So after a while, you can actually change her back?" Sasaki asked, eyes widening.
"Yeah. If it were genuinely impossible, I wouldn't have let her contact you in the first place. That would just be a waste of my time."
She already had the data she needed, so what Kirishima looked like now didn't matter to her at all.
She could reverse it whenever she wanted.
She just hadn't offered right away, choosing instead to leave the decision up to Sasaki.
"I see."
Watching how casually Fujitsubaki treated the whole thing, Sasaki realized she really didn't care one way or another about Kirishima's current state.
Granting the request probably wouldn't cause her any trouble either.
And yet Kirishima had gone and begged him instead.
It felt like Fujitsubaki was going out of her way to show him how much his opinion mattered to her.
To be honest, Sasaki didn't think he was that important to her.
This kind of street level scouting for test subjects felt like something almost anyone could do.
If Fujitsubaki could hear what he was thinking, she'd shake her head at how wrong he was.
When she first met him, she'd told him plainly that her research project had been shut down and she had no staff left.
She was running every experiment by herself, with nothing but a couple of overworked nurses helping out.
Where was she supposed to find someone willing to help her with something this risky?
Just grabbing random people off the street was out of the question.
Even in this world where the police were useless, most people still had enough sense of fear not to go around assaulting or kidnapping strangers.
If she tried to explain what she needed to some random person, they'd think she was insane.
Sasaki had mostly stumbled into this role by accident, going after lowlifes who had no wife, no kids, no parents, nobody who'd come looking for them.
If Fujitsubaki started targeting regular people with families, she'd be dealing with way more trouble than she could handle, even with her connections.
That was exactly why she leaned on him so heavily.
Aside from a rare exception, nobody had ever come after her because of what he brought in.
If she really wanted to, she could go work for some big company or serve some wealthy family and have as many people supplying subjects as she wanted.
But that would mean answering to someone else, being turned into a tool for making money or serving somebody's agenda, and she hated that idea.
She liked her current setup just fine. She brought the hospital results and prestige, the hospital gave her space and support, and that arrangement suited her.
As for the subjects themselves, that part was entirely on Sasaki.
She didn't need to please the hospital administration.
Outside her research, he was the person she valued most.
Without subjects, her whole immortality research was just theory, ink on paper, numbers in a computer.
He was the one piece she couldn't do without.
Of course she valued him.
He just had no idea how much.
Realizing that Kirishima's happiness pretty much rested on one word from him, Sasaki turned to her and said, "Have you really thought this through? If you do this, I'm not helping you again. I don't have time to keep playing dress up with you."
Sensing that he might actually be willing to help her, Kirishima, who'd been sitting there in shock dreading how Takagi might react to rejecting her, jerked her head up. "You... Sasaki, are you really going to help me?"
If he hadn't been the one who dragged her into this whole mess, and if she hadn't been behaving decently lately, he wouldn't have bothered at all.
What a headache.
Sasaki pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Answer my question first."
Meanwhile, Kirishima, who was moved by how persistently Takagi had cared for her, feeling wanted and loved in a way she'd never experienced before, nodded with grim resolve. "I've thought it through. Please, Sasaki, change me back."
"..."
Uh!
Not wanting to watch a grown man make the kind of teary, pleading face usually reserved for teenage girls, Sasaki turned to Fujitsubaki instead. "If it's not too much trouble, go ahead and change her back."
"Fine." The latter nodded.
The whole transformation thing had only ever been a side effect of her immortality research.
Now that Kirishima had reverted successfully, that particular side effect could be considered handled.
It didn't solve the core problem, but shifting someone's physical state back and forth was no longer a major technical hurdle for her.
.
.
.