The Rest Is Silence, a yami no matsuei fanfic

Disclaimer: I do not own Yami No Matsuei

The Rest is Silence

I wake up in pain, but that's nothing new, because I've been in pain for so long that I can't remember any time when I was completely without it. There isn't even an escape from it in sleep, because when I sleep, I dream of pain. Dreams are memories, after all, and any good memories I ever had have long since been overwhelmed by painful ones.

I open my eyes slightly, to let them know I'm not comatose. The other beds and equipment are stationary fuzzy blobs, and the nurses and doctors are the moving ones. The world is blurred not because I need glasses, but because I no longer have the spare energy required to focus them.

One of the blobs moves over to my bed. "Awake now, are we?" She says rhetorically. I can feel her detached sympathy, her thought that I am too young. She doesn't expect me to answer. It's been months since I've actually spoken to anyone, since I decided to reserve the strength I had allocated to my vocal cords for screaming, and later moaning. Now, I can no longer do even that. The nurse fusses around my monitors and IV and writes on my chart. She doesn't speak to me any more, for which I'm grateful. Some of them keep up a determined stream of bright chatter behind which I can always feel their insincerity. I know I'm dying, and I don't need their inane platitudes telling me otherwise. They know it too, or they wouldn't have put me in the intensive care ward for terminally ill patients. I feel it whenever one of my fellow bed warmers leaves, and not one has yet left alive.

The doctors have long since given up on me, for which I'm glad, because they don't bother me as much anymore, and I don't get caught up in their emotions. I have enough to deal with just with the people dying around me.

A hospital is a bad place for an empath. This is a microcosm of humanity, where human emotions are concentrated at the extremes: some of it was great joy, most was deep anguish, and it all flowed into me like dirty bathwater down the open drain hole. The constant pain in my body is augmented by their constant pain invading my mind. I wasted a lot of my energy early on here trying to shield myself from others. A futile effort – I didn't really know how, and was already too weak to make it work.

I wish I could go home, back to my cell. The end would certainly come faster there, and it would probably hurt less too, even without the constant supply of morphine into my bloodstream, as I would no longer have to endure the pain of others. The morphine had lost what little effect it had had at the beginning, and they couldn't give me more without killing me. I wish they would make up their minds, and just give me the required dose.

At first, I truly didn't want to die. I wanted to get better, to spite my family, if nothing else. I had once dreamed of going to live somewhere where I would never have to see anyone else, where their hatred could no longer cut away little pieces of my soul. Even now, I would still like to recover and live, but that isn't an option. My only choices are to lie here in this state, not dead but not truly alive either, or complete death, into oblivion or whatever else might come afterwards.

I knew I would die before the doctors did. They passed me around from specialist to specialist, trying to identify my illness. I had been ensconced in a private room, and examined by the most qualified, and everyone was aware of the illustrious Kurosaki name. After a few months of not receiving a single visitor, not even my parents, I had migrated into a curtained ward, and the small buffer against the alien emotions in the hospital that the private room had afforded was gone. I endured just about every test in the medical repertoire, and they found nothing. At one stage, they even thought it might be psychosomatic, and sent me to the psychiatric ward to see the shrinks. That was perhaps my worst time here. The feel of those afflicted minds – the chaos in them, and the hatred of self and the world at large, burned me like acid, and at the same time there was something so chillingly familiar about that insanity.

The shrink didn't help, either. He smiled and spoke gently, but he didn't believe anything I said, and spent most of our time together contemplating his golf handicap.

Eventually, though, they had admitted to their inability to identify the illness, and had tacitly given me their permission to shuffle discreetly off the mortal coil. That had been a year ago. I had clung grimly to life ever since, mainly because it was inconvenient for everyone.

So I don't have the most obliging personality around.

I don't care anymore tough. It hurts too much, and I am almost spent. All the strength I have left is for breathing.