[fic] MEGA-crossover - Jinchi High School 11B/?
+++++++++
It was warm. His whole body was enveloped in heat, like thick sunshine, and his limbs felt tired and heavy. Despite the temperature, his insides felt contrastingly cold, and he shivered sporadically. He groaned, one such bout of shivering causing his head to ache. His mouth and throat felt dry and sticky, like he’d eaten a stick of chalk.
“Can you hear me, Tetsuya-san?”
An unfamiliar voice spoke his name, the sound distant and echoing before coming suddenly into focus. There was beeping too, a steady mechanical sound to the left of wherever he was lying.
He frowned, hearing the voice say his name again and struggling to lift his eyelids. Each seemed to weigh a ton and the bright light he was met with nearly blinded him.
Dark, human-y, shapes appeared above him, saving him from the brightness overhead. He couldn’t make out any details though. His eyes were blurry and no amount of blinking seemed capable of clearing them.
“Tetsuya-san, can you hear me?” One of the shapes repeated before turning to another shape beside him. “Core temperature?”
A woman’s voice responded a moment later. “34.9o.”
“Good. Tetsuya-san? You look like you’re coming around.”
Tetsu licked his lips, managing a small grunt and a nod that made his head spin. “Wh-“ He stopped, trying to clear his throat. “What-?”
“You’ve suffered a mild case of hypothermia. It’s not too serious, your body temperature is almost back to where it should be.”
Tetsu blinked again, confused, and then felt hands near his face and the cool of plastic grazing his cheeks as his glasses were slipped one and a doctor’s face swam into his finally cleared vision.
“Do you remember what happened to you that caused this? You were thoroughly soaked when they brought you here.”
“I-…” Tetsu frowned, the last thing he recalled was saying something to his English teacher about Jane Eyre, and then…
‘…A trashcan? … Oh shit! A trashcan!’
He quickly covered the shocked look on his face as his memories of the afternoon came rushing back, causing a shiver to run up his spine. “Uh… no, I don’t… I think I was outside though, for some reason.” Tetsu’s eyes shifted awkwardly.
“That’s normal in people with hypothermia. It might come back to you eventually.”
“Oh, good…”
The doctor smiled, tucking a clipboard under his arm. “Your friends are outside. Should I tell them to come in?”
“Uh, yeah.” Tetsu smiled shakily, checking to be sure that the heated blankets covered his mostly nude self and feeling rather embarrassed by the whole situation. This was what he got for being naïve enough to trust people like Kozi. “Sure.”
The doctor left the room, only closing the door over behind him, so that Tetsu could hear the faint murmur of a conversation before the door swung open again a minute later. The doctor was in the lead and speaking to Ken, who was hurrying in jumpily, peering around the doctor’s form in an effort to see the boy that was confined to the bed. Yuki filed in behind them, looking uncomfortable and perhaps even more drawn in on himself than usual.
Tetsu let his focus return to the words the doctor was speaking.
“…needs to get his rest. We’ll keep him over night but he should be discharged sometime tomorrow.”
“You’re sure he’ll be okay?” Ken asked anxiously, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
The doctor smiled. “Of course. He’s awake now, and his body temperature is quite nearly back to where it should be. He’s tired, a little cold, and probably a little dehydrated, but we’ve got him hooked to an IV, and he’s coming around nicely.”
Ken looked relieved, rushing to the bed the instant the doctor politely excused himself.
“Tetsu? Oh, you are awake! I’m so glad!”
“Uh-hm-“ Tetsu cleared his throat. “Yeah, sorry about all this...”
“Sorry? Don’t be! Everyone was worried about you.” He spun around. “Right, Yuki?”
Yuki looked confused, as though he hadn’t been listening, and he glanced nervously between Ken and Tetsu in the bed. “Uh, yeah. Definitely.”
Ken turned back. “Suzuki-san drove us here right away, now he’s gone making a phone call but he’ll be back soon. And Hyde went for a walk while we were all waiting for you to- Oh! Right! Haido-kun wanted me to call him.” He pulled out his phone.
“Don’t call. Text. You’re not supposed to make cell calls in here.” Yuki corrected him, and Ken paused for a second before clicking ‘new message’ and tapping out a quick note to the boy currently wandering the halls.
“Good idea. This is faster anyway.” He was done shortly, and dropped himself into the chair by the bed while Yuki leaned against the wall.
Ken chattered a bit more about how worried they’d all been and the trip to the hospital, following the ambulance. Then there was a polite knock on the door before it cracked open.
“Excuse me for a moment, I’m just looking for- Oh, you boys are in here…” Suzuki-san pushed the door open fully and stepped inside. “Did the doctor say you could visit?”
Yuki nodded and Ken beamed. “Yep!” The dark-haired boy affirmed verbally. “He’s awake.”
Suzuki-san’s eyes widened and he hurried over to get a better view around the mound of blankets. “Oh! So you are, Tetsuya-sama!” he stopped on the side of the bed opposite Ken. He helped Tetsu sit up a bit, using the inclination controls next to the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Um… just tired, I guess. And stiff.” He paused. “I’m warming up though, that’s good.”
“Yeah, you’re lucky Ken found you.” Everyone turned to face the fourth boy, who’d just appeared in the doorway.
Tetsu looked surprised. “…Ken…?” The hospitalized boy’s eyes shifted to those of the seated dark-haired boy.
Hyde nodded, coming further into the room. “He was the one who saved you from the schoolyard… You don’t remember?”
Tetsu shook his head slowly. He’d been wondering about what had happened since he passed out, but all anyone had told him was about the paramedics showing up to load him into the ambulance, so he’d assumed it was them who’d found him.
“He was unconscious.” Ken clarified. “He was already out-cold when I got to him.”
“You were the one who found me?” Tetsu said slowly.
Ken nodded. “Saw you through the window of my physics class, so I came down right away, of course.” He frowned, staring down at his hands in his lap. “You scared the shit out of me, you know? You didn’t even look alive…”
There was a short, solemn, silence in the room.
“I’m sorry I made you guys worry…” Tetsu responded, his voice sounding a little spacey in his daze.
“What happened to you, anyway?” Hyde frowned. “How’d you end up outside?”
“Oh, uh… I don’t remember actually.” He lied. “The doctor said that’s common in people with hypothermia, though, so it’s fine.”
“Will you ever get it back?” Yuki asked quietly.
Tetsu attempted to shrug. “It’s possible.” He’d have to come up with a good excuse later, but for now-… Wait, why was he covering for Kozi?
He didn’t know…
Hyde had a curious expression on his face. “Do you think… Do you think maybe someone did this to you intentionally?” Hyde’s thoughts had brought him back to something Chacha had told him on his first day… something about Mana’s gang’s victims getting locked out in the cold on more than one occasion.
Ken’s expression twisted into something dark at a combination of Hyde’s words and Tetsu’s lack of an immediate response. “Who would do that?! That’s- That’s hateful!” He leapt to his feet and turned away. “That’s- I can’t even- Urghh!!” Ken ran a hand angrily through his hair and spun back to face Tetsu, slamming his hands down on the unoccupied edge of the bed and startling Tetsu enough to cause a spike in the otherwise steady beeping of the heart monitor. “Tell me Hyde’s wrong. Tell me because, I swear, if someone’s picking on you, I’ll- They’ll-!”
“Ken… Calm down. I never said that-“
“Just tell me it’s not true!”
Tetsu, along with everyone else in the room was shocked by the usually laid back boy’s sudden fury.
“I… I told you already. I don’t remember.”
Ken clenched his teeth, seething with frustration. “Well, the second you do, you’d better let me know.” He straightened up, clearly trying to calm himself, before mumbling a quick “I’m gonna go walk around” and stalking towards the door. He bumped Hyde on the way past, who was too stunned to move, and everybody watched silently as he disappeared from the room, letting the door smack shut behind him.
“What the-?!” Hyde interrupted the ensuing silence incredulously.
Suzuki-san looked shocked and concerned, but he pet Tetsu’s bed covers reassuringly. “He’s just worried about you, Tetsuya-sama. I think he’s been rather shaken by this whole ordeal.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” Hyde chimed in, coming further into the room and leaning against the back of the chair Ken had just vacated. “He was so out of it during the whole ambulance thing, I thought he was going to pass out.”
Yukihiro nodded in agreement, turning to stare at the empty doorway.
Tetsu looked down, his eyelids drooping and a lump forming unexpectedly in his throat. “I… I-…” He sighed, closing his eyes against the sting of tears. “I’m sorry about all this…”
Suzuki-san frowned, easing himself onto his knees beside the bed. “You’re not to blame in this, young master. Don’t be hard on yourself, you don’t need to apologize for what’s happened to you.”
Tetsu sniffed, nodding slowly and keeping his eyes shut. Sleep kept sinking in on him, his hearing fading in and out as he drifted deeper. He could hear Suzuki-san quieting the others, could hear someone shifting and sighing in the chair beside him, and occasionally what was probably the soft clunk of Yukihiro’s boots as he crossed or uncrossed his legs in his position leaning against the wall.
Eventually, every sound faded off to nothing, and Tetsu was lost in a deep, dreamless sleep.
+++++++++
“Miyavi-kun?”
The colorful-haired boy looked up at the sound of his name. He was shivering, standing under the awning at the back entrance to the school and staring out at the puddled soccer field with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his windbreaker.
“Oh, hi coach...” Miyavi replied slowly, looking uncomfortable.
The coach frowned. “Have you been out here for the past thirty minutes? Practice was cancelled…”
“Oh, was it?” Miyavi feigned surprise, but he looked somewhat disappointed.
“Yes, the field’s flooded again. And it’s bloody freezing.” The coach added with a chuckle. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.”
“Oh, that’s all right, sir. I can walk.”
“Don’t be silly, in weather like this? Come on,” He repeated, ushering the lanky boy towards the teacher’s parking lot. “You don’t want to be the second kid out with hypothermia today.”
Grudgingly, Miyavi let himself be seated in the passenger side of the coach’s car -the back was full of soccer balls. He gave his address, silently cursing the weather all the while.
Even if it wasn’t what he normally aimed to achieve, at least he’d managed to waste a bit of time standing around in the cold.
+++++++++
Tetsu woke up to a warm pressure on his hand. Not that the pressure of all the blankets he was bundled in wasn’t warm, but this was different. For one thing, he was pretty sure his hand wasn’t even under the blankets…
Groggy and disoriented, he processed all this in a sleep-fogged daze as he struggled to open his eyes and come properly to his senses. As he did, he turned his gaze curiously to the side and blinked. And blinked again. There was a vaguely person-shaped blob in the chair beside him.
What-?… oh…
Someone had taken his glasses off while he was sleeping. That explained things.
Tetsu’s thoughts stopped mid-track, hearing a noise from the person beside him. It was a sort of whimper, mixed with a whispered, wordless, plea. Tetsu blinked again. That voice was…
“…Ken?”
There was a rustling sound from the person, and the weight on his hand shifted very slightly.
“Don’t… It’s not…”
Tetsu strained his ears to hear the mumbled words.
“… didn’t… didn’t mean to-…” There was a quiet, choked, sound, like a frustrated sob, and Tetsu immediately began fumbling around with his free hand.
His fingers struck the end table and he winced before feeling around on top of it. A moment later his hand closed over the cool plastic frames of his eyeglasses and he hurried to set them over his eyes. Tetsu blinked once at the sudden shift in vision from blurry to focused, and turned his gaze quickly towards the right side of the bed.
Ken was hunched forward in the chair, lost in a fitful sleep. His arms were folded on the side of the bed, one of his hands clasped tightly around Tetsu’s and his cheek resting upon it, explaining the pressure. If Tetsu wasn’t surprised enough by this, his eyes widened further to see a wetness around Ken’s clenched-shut lashes.
“Ken…?” Tetsu ventured softly, watching Ken turn his face closer to the bed sheets and tighten his hold on the hospitalized boy’s hand. He whimpered softly, his voice muffled enough to conceal his words, and Tetsu sighed.
Suzuki-san and the other two boys were nowhere to be seen. A second inspection of the room revealed a handwritten note left on the bedcovers beside Ken’s sleeping form. It was from the butler, explaining to the sleeping dark-haired boy that they’d left to go back and eat something. Suzuki-san said he’d left something they’d bought from a convenience store down the block for Ken to eat, and that he’d be back later that evening to pick him up.
Tetsu put the note on the end table, noting the plastic bag set upon it, and then let his free hand push some of the wavy black hair away from Ken’s closed eyes. Ken sighed as the other boy’s hand brushed his cheek and his tensed shoulders relaxed slightly. Tetsu hesitated, but he felt guilty enough for being the source of the worry plaguing the other boy, and so he continued to run his hand soothingly through Ken’s dark locks.
The repetitive action had him spacing out, staring at the hands on the clock upon the far wall, and watching the minutes tick by as he listened to Ken’s evened breathing.
+++++++++
“I’m home!...” Miyavi paused in the doorway, but sighed upon receiving no response and shut the door softly in the frame. He toed his shoes off silently, setting them neatly against the wall, and padded softly down the hall of the well-furnished apartment. “Mom?” He peered into a couple rooms, stopping when he found her standing at the stove in the kitchen, putting diced vegetables into a boiling pot on a burner. “Mom, I’m home…”
She glanced over her shoulder at him, turning away to reach for a wooden spoon to stir the food with. “Why? You’re never home this early.”
“Soccer practice was cancelled because of the rain.” He waited uncomfortably for another response. His mother just continued to stir. “Um… where’s Dad?”
Miyavi’s mother stopped stirring, she was tense, staring down at the pot but neither turning to face her son or making any sort of verbal answer.
Miyavi bit his lip, looking down. “… I’m gonna go to my room then.” Again, there was no response, but she did go back to stirring, and so the tall boy sighed and left the kitchen, wandering down the hall to his bedroom.
He shut the door tightly behind himself before changing out of his uniform and into a baggy sweater and loose jeans. He pulled his homework from his bag and tossed it on his bed before climbing in with it, taking a flashlight from his end table in with him. He pulled the covers over his head, shutting out the bare white walls of his bedroom and wishing he could block out the silence as well.
He hated the silence.
+++++++++
11C IS HERE!!!