Blankly, Hikari reached out. Her fingers trembled so violently she nearly dropped the pill. The nurse steadied her hand—a touch so brief and professional it didn't trigger panic. Hikari dry-swallowed the pill, then cradled the hot cocoa. The heat seeped into her icy fingers. She took a sip. Too sweet. Cloying. But warmth spread through her chest, a small anchor in the storm.
The nurse lingered for a moment, observing Hikari's shallow breaths. "He's strong," she offered quietly, nodding toward the operating room door. "Stubborn. This isn't the first time I've seen him like this, and he still refuses to give in."
Hikari's throat tightened.
Stubborn.
Like holding a pipe from crushing his throat. Like whispering about stars while drowning in blood.
〖Why come back?〗
She screamed inside, staring at the red light.
〖Why come back for this?〗
Hikari took another sip. The sweetness cloyed, thick and artificial, turning to ash on her tongue. The wool blanket scratched her neck like a reminder of rough hands. Overhead, the red light burned—an unblinking, judgmental eye. And beneath it all, beneath the muffled voices and the hum of fluorescents, pulsed the relentless, mocking rhythm: beep-beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep.
Each beat hammered against the memory of that flat, endless tone—the silence of forty-three seconds.
〖He stopped. His heart stopped.〗
The image flooded back: Kuro on the alley floor, face upturned to a rain-slicked sky she couldn't see, expression terrifyingly serene.
〖Peace. He found peace. And they dragged him back.〗
〖Why?〗
The question was a knife twist in her gut, sharper than the phantom hands clutching at her skin.
〖Why fight? Why claw back into this mess of blood and pain?〗
She stared at the steel door as if she could see through it—to the scalpels, the clamps, the frantic hands trying to stitch together what the pipe and the fists had shattered. Trying to reignite the stubborn spark in a man who'd seemed, for forty-three blessed seconds, to have finally let go.
"Stubborn," the nurse had called him. The word tasted bitter now. Was it stubbornness? Or was it something heavier? A debt? A promise spoken in blood and desperation in a rain-drenched alley?
〖He talked death out of me. And Death took him instead. For forty-three seconds.〗
Now, behind that door, Kuro was fighting death again. Talking it out of himself? Or just proving the old nurse right? Proving he was too damned stubborn to lie down and accept the peace he'd seemingly craved?
Was it even peace?
The hot cocoa trembled violently in her hands. She set it down on the floor beside the chair, the sweet steam suddenly nauseating. She pulled the scratchy blanket tighter, burrowing into its meager warmth, her eyes fixed on the red light.
〖Come back if.. if I may ask,〗 she willed silently, the thought raw and surprising even to her.
〖Be stubborn. Just.. Just this once, be selfish and stubborn and come back. Because if you don't…〗
She didn't finish the thought. The alternative was the quiet. The stars. The endless peace he'd whispered about.
〖Peace.〗
And the terrifying possibility that forty-three seconds might have been enough to show him how much easier it was to stay gone. The beep-beep-beep continued, a fragile lifeline tethering him to this side of the steel door. To her.
The scratchy blanket became an anchor as Hikari drifted, unaware she'd pulled it over her head like a hood. The world narrowed to darkness and the relentless beep-beep-beep echoing from behind the steel door. Jin paced like a caged predator—boots pounding the linoleum—his fury a palpable heat in the sterile chill. She watched him through heavy eyelids, a blur of tension and coiled violence, until exhaustion dragged her under.
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