Everything hurt.
She came to with a start, with a gasp, with a near-silent cry of pain and an even quieter mental cry-
[Emi.]
Her world spun. The walls, were they white or black or somewhere in between. Was someone there? She felt – or she thought she felt – a warmth, a heartbeat of someone close by, her left side in fact, and what was jammed down her throat? Akira choked on the breathing tube and heard the erratic beeping of the heart monitor as she struggled. The person beside her stirred, and Akira recoiled at the garish white and black smeared into grey and the black pits for eyes, a red slash for a mouth.
Akira screamed.
All of the time spent waiting, hyper-focused on every factor of his friend’s vital statistics, had lulled the detective into a false sense of the passage of time. Even the cases that Hakuba brought with him did little to hold his attention for any particular length of time, most of his presence dedicated to counting between each heartbeat, each revolution of the machinery in the room. It had become a sort of comforting despair.
The scream, of course, disrupted that ever so thoroughly.
Hakuba fell off of the chair that he’d been sitting in, papers scattering to the floor in a flurry of white and manilla, then scrambled to pick himself up. Any residual pain from his injuries was nothing to the pounding of his heart or the panic that flared up like scalding steam.
“A-AH! Akira-kun!” he cried, eyes wide. “Ah- ah, j-just hold on, hold on, let me… let me get the…” The detective threw himself to the call button, hitting it a bit harder than necessary, and turned back to the girl in the bed. “Th-they’re coming! They’re coming! It’ll be all right!"
He didn’t want her to choke, but strictly speaking, he wasn’t really permitted to remove the breathing apparatus on his own. Still, could he stand there and do nothing? Hesitantly, he edged closer to try to put a hand on her shoulder, frantic.
