Okay, so I've been writing this forever, and I really just wanted to post it today, so I'm really sorry if there are mistakes in it. I hate typos, and I didn't proofread as well as I normally do. Anyway, enjoy! I don't own Ouran!
Difficult Patients
A group of nurses rolled her out of post-op to her room. At least, she thought so, that part was still blurry from the anesthesia. She remembered swallowing small spoonfuls of ice chips, feeling a sting as an IV came out, and being frustratingly nearsighted even when someone replaced her glasses. The next moment she was propped up on pillows, her father fluttering around her as though he hadn't seen her in days.
"Are you feeling okay, sweetie? Do you need anything?" Another nurse was beside her, too, checking her pulse for the thousandth time since she'd arrived.
"'M a little thirsty, I guess." Her vision had cleared substantially, but she still couldn't quite make out the clock on the other end of the room.
"That's completely normal," the nurse on her right chimed in. "They drained you out for the surgery. We have you on an IV to help. Do you feel nauseous at all?" Haruhi shook her head. "Good, good. We have all sorts of juices and teas and sodas; what would you like?"
"Just water would be great, thank you," Haruhi answered, her voice feeling dryer and a little weaker than normal.
The woman returned with a Styrofoam cup and promised to come back soon to check on her. The surgeon stopped by: everything went well; she'd have to stay overnight as they'd thought, but she should be able to leave in the morning or the afternoon at the latest; here were the prescriptions for pain medicine; here were the times she should take them. Haruhi took a sip of her water and adjusted her position to ease the ache in her chest but avoided mentioning it – she'd only just regained consciousness; she wasn't keen on being knocked back out with painkillers. She closed her eyes and sighed.
And then her visitors arrived.
"Haruhi, darling, how are you feeling?" Tamaki flew to her bedside and dumped a pile of stuffed animals into her lap. "I couldn't pick just one," he explained, "so I just got you all five! Aren't they adorable?"
"The gift shop workers must've loved you guys" Haruhi murmured, rearranging the mountain of stuffed creatures on her stomach. "I feel fine, sempai," she added.
The rest of the host club filed in, and she realized her vision had cleared enough to allow her sight to extend across the room. The twins straightened her hair with their fingers and complained about her glasses, and Tamaki yelled at them, and Ranka yelled at Tamaki. It was just like an ordinary day. To her left, Kyoya snatched up the chart attached to her bed. She opened her mouth to greet him, but he was already leafing through the forms, showing no intention of acknowledging her presence. Her jaw clenched slightly in annoyance; there were laws about that sort of thing after all, but Hunny rushed to her side with a big, gift-wrapped box, and she was distracted.
"Open it, Haru-chan, open it!" the small boy exclaimed, practically bouncing up and down with excitement. She obliged. Predictably, she found herself in the possession of a sizable box of cakes.
"Um, thank you, Hunny-sempai, they look delicious, but I'm not sure they want me to eat anything yet."
"You should wait until the anesthesia has completely worn off," Kyoya confirmed coolly, not looking up from her chart. She blinked. "Some people become nauseated on the drugs, and it won't help fresh incisions for you to vomit up a host of exotic desserts." Hunny pouted until Mori stepped forward.
"We got you a balloon," he added, quietly tying a brightly colored, floating foil cupcake to her bed.
"Thank you guys, I-"
"Your fluids are out," Kyoya commented, and she furrowed her brow at the interruption and glanced up behind her. He was right; the plastic bag beside her bed was no longer dripping clear liquid into the tube attached to her hand.
"Oh, yeah, I guess so," she answered quietly, fighting her scratchy throat. In the pause before his reply, she realized that everyone else had gone silent.
"They should have replaced them." He sounded annoyed.
She knew the feeling.
"Sempai, it probably just ran out. The nurse before mentioned that-" Kyoya's fingers tapped rapidly at his phone, texting. Irritation bubbled in her chest; he wasn't even listening to her. His hands paused for a moment, and he turned sharply and walked out of her room. She furrowed her brow again.
"Why did you guys even bother to drag Kyoya-sempai along? He's in a worse mood than usual." Tamaki was the first to tear his eyes from the door and answer.
"Mommy just had a rough afternoon," he assured her, but the joke wasn't as light as it should have been, like the Shadow King's behavior was bothering him, too. Still, he brought the conversation back to the casual, and they were all distracted for the few minutes until Kyoya returned.
"Hello there, sweetie," a nurse smiled past the tall, dark-haired boy who she'd followed in to the girl in the hospital bed, and Haruhi smiled back slightly. "What's your name?"
"Haruhi Fujioka." The woman double-checked the name on Haruhi's hospital bracelet and then glanced at the same chart Kyoya had been flipping through earlier.
"You sit tight. I'll be right back with fresh fluids, okay?" The nurse smiled again and turned to go. Kyoya went back to texting, glasses angled to reflect the sun. Haruhi decided it was best to ignore him and returned to telling the twins for the fifteenth time thank you, but she didn't them to get the straightening iron they had in their car.
"Okay, here we go," the nurse exclaimed brightly as she returned carrying a new plastic bag full of who knew what chemicals. "Ready?" Haruhi gave a slight smile to acknowledge the woman's enthusiasm.
"She was ready fifteen minutes ago when her fluids ran out," Kyoya cut in irritably, and Haruhi felt her eyes widen in horror. Kyoya was ill-tempered at the best of times, but he always kept it contained. Lashing out like that was the sort of thing Hikaru would do, not the third son of the Ootori family. She attempted to catch his eyes, to send him a warning look, but when he glanced up, it was at the nurses hands and the movement of the IV equipment, not at her.
"All right, sweetie, I'm just going to connect the new-"
"You talk to all your patients like they're five year olds?" he asked under his breath, and Haruhi felt herself stiffen, heat building in her chest.
He frowned whatever the nurses hands were doing and then made a contemptuous noise in the back of his throat as his eyes returned to his smart phone's touch screen.
"Kyoya-sempai!" Haruhi finally snapped, voice practically shaking with the rage surrounding her lungs.
"Yes, Haruhi?" he answered without looking up from whatever he was punching into his phone, only just raising a single eyebrow as a sign of his acknowledgement. Angrily, ignoring the pain in her chest, she forced herself up onto her elbow ("Sweetie, you shouldn't strain yourself too-" the nurse tried to stop her.) and yanked the blackberry out of his hands. Finally his eyes shot up to meet hers darkly, but she was too infuriated to be intimidated.
"Would you cut it out? She's just trying to do her job. She doesn't need you acting like a complete jer- ah!" Sudden, sharp pain shot up from Haruhi's IV, and she gasped in surprise, sending an equally powerful wave of pain through her chest. Tears rushed involuntarily to her eyes, blurring her vision again, and she fell back onto the mattress, unable to keep her balance.
"And she's doing such a wonderful job, too," Kyoya muttered sarcastically. "You could warn a person before you do that," he spoke scathingly to the nurse, who was still quietly adjusting the tubing to Haruhi's hand.
"I'm sorry, sweetie, I needed to clear the IV so that the medicine could get in."
"I-It's fine," Haruhi assured her, voice still shaking slightly from the shock of pain. A tear escaped the corner of her eye as the mist in her eyes condensed. Kyoya gave a derisive snort, and something snapped. "It is! It's fine! Damn it, would you just get out, Kyoya-sempai? Leave her alone!" she glared at his dark eyes and would have been yelling had her sore throat allowed it. "I don't want you here, okay? Just go home and do your damn work from there like you want to!" There was a half a second pause, and then he adjusted his glasses calmly.
"My phone?" he asked, holding out his hand. She threw it at him, but he caught it before it could connect with his shoulder as she'd intended. "Thank you," he murmured curtly. "Be sure to take your time to recover before you return to hosting; your debt will be waiting whenever you come back."
Haruhi glared after him, for the first time frustrated by her confinement to the hospital bed.
"Y-You guys should get dinner," she broke the silence finally. "I'll take my meds and have a nap, okay?"
She woke in the darkness. Here was a sound by her ear, like someone was rustling through her chart again. Her eyes were still heavy from pain medication, but she forced them open anyway and tried to focus on the dark shape next to her head. Tall, male, with dark hair she thought, but then everything was dark now. The figure turned slightly, and the moon caught on his glasses.
"Kyoya-sempai," Haruhi managed weakly in surprise, coughing slightly as her what seemed to be perpetually dry throat caught on the words and wincing a bit when sharp pain shot through her chest. She needed to take another dose of the ibuprofen. He stiffened at her voice, fingers pausing on the stack of medical forms in his hands. Quietly, he cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses, letting the folder drop out of his hands and back to its place on her bedpost.
"Haruhi," he answered calmly, like he had planned her waking up, but his thumb rubbed almost nervously along the edge of his index finger a few inches from her face.
"What are you doing here sempai? It must be two in the morning."
"Three," he corrected, voice low, eyes frowning slightly. "I had just finished my work, and I thought-"
"You never finish your work, sempai."
"I had come to a stopping point," he amended, a bit of irritation sounding in his tone, "and I thought I'd make sure these nurses hadn't killed you yet." She blinked.
"Haruhi, listen," Kaoru had begun slowly, settling into the chair beside her bed after the others had left. "Kyoya-sempai isn't used to being worried about someone else. He doesn't know how to show it." She had rolled her eyes slightly at the red-headed boy beside her.
"You're kidding, Kaoru." His expression didn't change. "I know you like to read deep, dark secrets out of everyone's actions, but…"
"I have Hikaru; Mori and Hunny have each other; the boss has his family and anyone else he can get his hands on. We're self-centered, all right, but we're not entirely isolated. Kyoya-sempai has never needed to worry about anyone else's well-being unless his family's business had some sort of stake in it, and then he would have planned everything out in advance – had complete control of every variable. A sick commoner girl is the exact opposite of that." She had shaken her head.
"Tamaki-sempai said you hadn't left when they went to dinner."
"I was waiting for my car. I wasn't exactly in the mood for a meal with them."
"So you drove all the way back?" He hesitated as though considering her from behind his glasses' reflective lenses.
"I stopped at my family's cottage."
"I'm not even sick, Kaoru. I'm fine now. That was the whole point."
"No offense, Haruhi, but it doesn't really feel that way watching you barely able to sit up or drink a glass of water. I mean, no one wanted to say anything, but you look like crap, and it isn't just like we've never seen you with your glasses on or without your hair straightened before. It's like someone hit you with a truck or something." The sincerity of the concern in Kaoru's voice had stopped her for a second, but then she had remembered Kyoya's dark eyes distractedly reading through text messages on his phone and irritably shooting the nurse disgusted glances as she did her work.
"He wasn't even looking at me, Kaoru. He was just being a selfish, aristocratic bastard: fussing about IV's and blankets, texting the whole time, still bringing up my stupid Host Club debt for the hundredth time. He wants to have me back at school in time for the holiday rush, and that's all."
"My dad said he saw you in the cafeteria line." Kyoya let the reflection drop from his glasses as he rolled his dark eyes and then met her gaze full on.
"Haruhi, do you really think I would tolerate the food in a hospital cafeteria?" His voice came cold and condescending. She cocked her head slightly, studying his face in the dim light.
"No, normally I wouldn't, but…"
"But what?" he muttered impatiently.
"Just something Kaoru said."
"He was texting doctors, Haruhi, and reading articles about this kind of surgery online. He has been all afternoon. You should have seen him in the waiting room: pacing the whole time and wearing out the keyboard on his cell phone. It was terrible, drove everyone else up the wall worried, too; I've never seen him that upset about anything. He wanted you to have the surgery at one of the Ootori hospitals, remember?"
Haruhi had remembered, but as more of a sales pitch: "You know, Haruhi, my family's local hospital has an excellent Surgery Center; I could even get you a discount on your room, if you'd like." She had turned him down, though; her regular doctor worked where she was, not at the Ootori group.
"He just wanted-"
"To know some of the employees or be able to manipulate their work schedules so that the nurses he liked would be in tonight," Kaoru had explained patiently, like it was obvious. "Now he's terrified that someone'll mix up your dosages or tear up your arm trying to give you another IV."
"Well, I'll be going then," he sighed as though she was talking nonsense. "I do hope you're well soon; The Host Club has a Christmas Party coming up at the end of the month." He took a step away from her, but she grabbed his right hand, the almost-nervous one, and held it firmly in hers. The Shadow King stopped but didn't turn. A barely discernible tremor echoed out of his long, surprisingly warm fingers.
"There's nothing to be worried about, Kyoya-sempai," she whispered. "I'm okay. I'm not sick anymore; they fixed everything. I'll be out of the hospital by tomorrow night, and I'll be back in school in two weeks. You don't need to take anything out on the nurses; I'm fine."
"That's stupid, sempai. Kyoya knows better than to-"
"Yeah, it's pretty stupid," he had smiled slightly in agreement, "but it's also kind of sweet to watch the Shadow King lose his cool over someone."
She hadn't known what to say.
"You're cold," Kyoya murmured a second after his hand tightened on hers, like he needed to formulate an explanation. "I should see if I can get you another blanket."
"I'm okay, sempai."
"You should try to eat some more, too, in the next couple of days, if you can." Something very close to anxiety made his words rush together. But of course, the Shadow King was never anxious. "You'll have lost weight being sick and from the surgery prep, and you boarder that line as it is."
"Okay."
"Make sure you're using that spirometer they gave you; pneumonia can set in if you don't keep your lungs clear." His fingertips moved over her palm, searching out the gaps between her fingers and then slipping quietly into them.
"Y-Yeah." Her IV ached when his grip tightened again, but she didn't say anything until after he let go, a full minute later. "Thank you, sempai."
He hesitated halfway across the room, and she could see his fingers shaking. He shoved his hands in his pocket.
"Well, I can't have some stupid virus ruining the club's investment, can I?"
Haruhi woke too early the next morning; the drugs were doing strange things to her sleeping patterns. They had worn off significantly in the night, too: her chest ached terribly when she breathed, and there was a strange weight on her left wrist. Her wrist. She furrowed her brow and forced open her eyes.
A mop of jet black hair rested on the edge of her hospital bed, the adjoining body at an awkward angle leaned over in a chair. The weight was his arm, crumpled between his chest and her wrist, his warm fingers still brushing hers, though no longer twined together. A familiar soft blue jacket lay across her shoulders, an addition to the two blankets she remembered him piling onto her the night before, leaving him with only a crumpled white dress shirt he'd rolled up to his elbows sometime in the night. There was a bowl of soup on the table beside him, probably cold this long after he'd brought it to her.
Kyoya shifted slightly in his sleep, so that his face was just visible amidst the dark, messy hair. She used her free hand to coax a pair of crooked eyeglasses from his face and frowned at the soft purple rings under the boy's eyes.
"Damn rich bastard."
I hope the formatting turned out okay; the editor was being really spastic. There might be some horizontal lines missing. Thank you so much for reading!