After I finished In the Morning, I struggled writing anything NicoMaki related. I've left nearly a dozen fics unfinished, and for a time, I thought I'd simply said anything I could ever say about this couple. A scary thought indeed. However, after months of hard work, I was able to write this.

The entire story is finished and, other than this first week, will be posted twice a week until it's over. There are a few Sunshine! characters who will show up, but as they aren't the major focus of the story, I didn't find it necessary to make this a crossover.

Enjoy~

"A meaningful relationship thrives on reasserting yourself against the other; that is what it is to relate rather than to be alone."

Dear Thief: A novel - Samantha Harvey

That morning was far from the first that Dr. Maki Nishikino was glad her hospital had such a peaceful and quiet garden. Surrounded by four all-glass walls from the interior sections of Tokyo General Hospital, the garden in the center of the building was created nearly a decade before as a donation by her very own family. Vibrant green grasses and forest-colored ferns and multi-hued petals dotted with the innumerable rainbow of colors from native and tropical flowers made up the majority of the grounds. They radiated eye-catching vibrancy in bright red anemone and sunset daylilies and baby blue hydrangea among other flowers living the chromatic scale. The stone path around the garden had a number of tasteful wooden benches placed neatly where patients, families, and doctors sat alike and equal in the quiet serenity of a pocket of nature in the heart of a modern metropolis. Not a single visitor spoke above a low, respectful tone as if to preserve the fragile atmosphere of the beautiful space. Deep in a platform of raised stones in the center of the garden lay a Koi pond full of the eponymous fish in mottled gold and white and orange scales. The fish swam in their graceful animal mindlessness awaiting a scrap or a crumb from the large creatures who delivered them.

Dr. Nishikino was the one delivering the food that morning. She stood alone, still in her starch-white lab coat, and threw pieces of floppy cafeteria wheat bread into the pond between sips of black coffee just burnt enough to kill her taste buds and her appetite for the remaining hours of her shift. Though the air was still chilly on that overcast May morning, there was the suggestion, the pronouncement, of a warm spring storm in the clammy moisture beading on Maki's forehead, on the back of her neck and behind her knees. It rained the night before. Weighty droplets of water ran down some of the higher, glassy leaves of the trees and plopped in heavy plinking tones onto the stones beneath. Caught in this unpleasant mixture of chilly balminess, of mild moisture, the doctor didn't get the relief she hoped for when she stepped outside for the first and only break she'd taken on this impossibly long shift. She hoped to forget, for a moment, the colorful tendrils of cancer on imaging results, the ruined sculptures of broken bones, the death-echo of emphysemic cough and all other matters of illness and disease for a time. But the oppressive, clammy moisture only made these realities press on her mind like the sweat on her skin. Her father had told her, from his own decades of experience, that to do her job correctly she had to disconnect herself from the patients. That she had to compartmentalize, to lock away her feelings and sever her heartstrings all in order to avoid feeling every Pyrrhic victory or eventual failure the occupation was full of. But even after her residency and the first near year of her career, her execution of this advice was not perfect. The locked vault in the back of her heart might suddenly swing open in the middle of successful and failed cases alike.

She was halfway through the saggy slice of bread when a small hand reached out to pull at her white coat. The hand tugged twice without much strength, as if the owner was just a bundle of nervous energy. That or, as Maki found out after turning around, a child. Wide-eyed and expectant in that innocently selfish way children are, the kid stared up at Maki. He was somewhere in around six or eight and had shoulder-length black hair that fell over curiously red eyes, staring at her full of questions. The boy smiled when Maki finally looked at him, but the young doctor could hardly contain her own awkwardness in dealing with children. She quickly swept her eyes around the garden for a parent, but found none. There wasn't anyone out there besides her and the boy.

"Miss doctor?" the child asked.

"Uh, yes?"

"Can you help my big sister?" the child looked even more expectant than before. "She hasn't seen her doctor yet, and she's getting cranky."

Maki opened her mouth to answer, but closed it tight without a word; she wasn't actually sure what to say to that. This child's older sister likely had an assigned doctor with her on their list of rounds, but the hospital was currently somewhat understaffed. There were simply cases - the less serious ones, the less dangerous ones - that the doctors made necessary decisions to put off despite the best of intentions. Maki glanced at her watch. She only had fifteen minutes left of her break and she wasn't actually dong anything important. Sighing a bit, she ripped the remainder of the bread into pieces before tossing them en masse into the awaiting circle of gaping fish mouths. The splashes sounded much like the rain the night before.

The young boy lead Maki into the building and then into the elevators, never pausing while he issued glowing praise about his big sister. Whoever this girl happened to be was at once a domestic homebody able to cook a meal for five while sweeping and doing laundry all at once. On top of this - supposedly - the girl was also a world famous idol. In the child's own words, the "Number one idol in the universe". Maki held her unspoken reservations and simply followed the child, who didn't appear to care that she hadn't spoken to him in minutes. Maki grew red and looked away bashfully when a couple of her colleagues' heads turned to view the normally no-nonsense doctor tailing a kid around busy hospital hallways.

Their destination was the fourth floor. Coincidentally, this was the floor where the majority of Maki's rounds were. She paused at the nurses' station to ask whether any new patients had been added to her list, but the boy tugged at her coat once more and she used the last bit of her patience to take a deep breath and follow him. It took quite a bit of willpower for Maki to hold in a frustrated groan as she was once again pulled along. Nozomi, the head nurse on call, shook her head with barely hidden amusement fighting its way to her face. The near end of Maki's nerves coincided with the end of the trip. When they reached a room at the end of the farthest hallway of the left-most wing, the boy abandoned Maki to run giggling into the room. A quick glance at the name tag by the door revealed the patient's last name to be "Yazawa".

Maki kept her back straight as she readied herself to enter the room. Being a one-person room positioned discreetly in the hospital, the patient grew even more mysterious. The young boy was already crawling up onto the bed when Maki walked in uncertainly, but she hid any anxiety behind a professional mask. She couldn't explain why she was so nervous, only that a certain pressure had built up in the strangeness of this single patient. Maki's eyes met the woman's the moment she walked over the threshold. The patient was scowling on the hospital bed as if even being in the room was a problem. She was a petite woman, small and thin, with the same shade of midnight hair and curious red eyes as her brother. Her face was youthfully pretty - fresh and round and expressive down to the smallest quirks of her lips - but the attractiveness was marred by an angry grimace and narrowed gaze. She gave the impression of a surly teenager, and was crossing her arms as such.

"Took you long enough." came the patient's high pitched voice, which was colored with cynical impatience. Maki was taken aback for a moment. How rude could someone be within seconds? But professionalism was ingrained in the doctor. Patients were often a bit discourteous because of pain. That was a common enough occurrence. It was hard to blame them, but bad attitudes never put anyone in Maki's good graces.

Maki didn't answer when she reached the patient in the bed before her. Instead she grabbed the medical chart chained to the foot-board of the bed and flipped through it. According to the chart, the patient - scowling deeper now, even as she absentmindedly patted her brother on the head - suffered from acute exhaustion, potentially a minor concussion, a menu of pulled muscles and an overwhelming, whole body fatigue. Glancing up from the chart for a visual assessment, Maki wondered how the girl could sound so strong and confident in her rudeness when her body clearly suffered from everything Maki had just read: she had pallid skin, eyes ringed by dark half-moons, and a general aura of weakness and of weariness flowing off her body. From the same chart she learned that she was the doctor assigned to Nico Yazawa. More surprisingly, it turned out the woman was older than Maki had expected: 27, and not, as she thought, closer to 17. Strangest of all, Maki found a note stapled behind the rest of the pages signed by an idol production agency, with explicit instructions to keep their "star idol under professional care for seven days, to make certain that all was well". Following that was a clear order to prevent any and all media intervention. The note ended with a request not to mention said note to Nico at all. All of this only deepened the mystery of this Nico Yazawa. Maki could hardly prevent a look of annoyed confusion from showing on her face.

"Your brother cares for you a lot, Ms. Yazawa." Maki was all professionalism now, falling quickly from the uncertainty she walked in with to the habits of the job she was born to do. Once she knew the patient's issues Maki tended to feel much more confident regardless of how good or bad the prognosis was. Knowledge, after all, was power. Even if she didn't understand what was going on with this idol business, she could still do her job.

"Yes he does. Cotaro is a good boy, isn't he?" Nico looked down at her brother affectionately with all traces of her previous attitude gone. At least until it returned in the next sentence. The mood whiplash was like the strike of a cobra, who'd reared back before striking in an instant. "Aren't you a little young to be a doctor?"

Maki recoiled. She thought her serious and adult demeanor - not to mention the carefully selected designer clothing she wore beneath her lab coat - gave her the impression of maturity. Of authority. In an uncharacteristic outburst she snapped back, "Aren't you a little small to be an adult?". The words slipped through her teeth like air, weightless and forceful all at once.

Silence fell over the room for a moment, until a crooked smile cut through Nico's scowl. "Not bad. I guess you have a spine." She flashed an even wider smile, a practiced one, and then sat up straighter in bed. She held a small hand out to Maki. "Nico Yazawa, professional idol and current star of Sunrise Idol Agency."

So her brother wasn't lying; the girl really was an idol. Now that Maki knew this for a fact. flashes of news reports and magazine covers she'd mostly ignored filled her head. Nico-nii, who she know knew was actually Nico Yazawa, had been an idol for close to 10 years. From the time she was 17 Nico's somewhat unlikely success story took her from a struggling household to national stardom, where she remained for far longer than nearly any other idol in an industry where even five years made someone a veteran. Nico-nii was known for her wide, infectious smile and unlimited energy, the latter of which seemed sapped away in the swaddling of the hospital bedding and the former Maki seemed immune to.

"I'm Dr. Maki Nishikino. How are you feeling this morning?"

"Ready to get out of here." She was completely serious as she said this. Maki nearly scoffed.

"Ms. Yazawa - "

"Nico's fine, or Nico-nii. Your call."

"Ms. Yazawa, you only just arrived an hour ago, according to your chart. Judging by all of this," Maki shook the chart in her hands. "You're not getting out of here for at least a week. There are compound issues here and you don't want to exacerbate any of them."

"A week?! You can't actually be serious. Look, I have a busy schedule - "

"I still have to check over your injuries, make sure you're getting proper nutrition and rest, help develop a physical therapy plan..." Maki listed off her fingers.

"Doc, I have a tour to practice for - "

"And I'm not clearing you until your healthy enough to get back out there."

Nico glared at the doctor and the doctor glared back; little Cotaro seemed not to notice the sparking animosity in the air when he practiced his sister's trademark hand-sign. "Nico Nico-nii!" he called out. But Nico was not nico-ing at all. There wasn't even the hint of a smile on her face.

She took her leave before that burning stare-down could start a fire. The way Nico looked at her was as though she'd been given a death sentence, her bed a grave, the name on her door the stone. There were two or three more hours of her shift from when Maki left Nico, but through the haze of the troubled cloud that she'd fallen under since she zoned out in the garden, the only other patient that cleared that fog was a young girl by the name of Ruby Kurosawa. To Maki, the girl seemed almost doll-like; big, innocent eyes, a set of cherr-red twintails decked out with cute white clips, and a petite body made smaller through sickness - the girl was full of cotton candy sweetness and a near-equal amount of sticky, apprehensive nervousness. When Maki made her rounds and arrived at the girl's room, Ruby was halfway through crying at whatever played on the small tv hanging in the corner. Her sister, angry and intense, regal and commanding, sat beside her with her nose in some schoolwork.

"Hello, Miss Kurosawa." Maki greeted at the girl's bedside. "I understand that you were admitted for -"

" - Cardiomyopathy." The sister, Dia, finished. She pulled a list out of her purse with handwriting more neat and orderly than Maki thought humanly possible. "These are her current medications, allergies, symptoms, and whatever related information I saw fit to inform you of." Dia handed Maki the list; the doctor bit back her own sound of surprise. Her patients were hardly ever this prepared, no matter how much she would have liked that.

"Thank you, Ms. Kurosawa." she nodded, and then turned to the girl on the bed. "Ruby, would you mind sitting up for me?"

Maki was not a people person, but she attempted to make small talk as she placed the freezing stethoscope on various spots of Ruby's chest and back. Each touch of the cold metal elicited a slight cringe in the patient and an even more murderous stare in the severe eyes of her sister. Like a drunk drummer, Ruby's heartbeat sounded irregular and, worse still, weak to Maki's ears. There was a distinct effort Ruby was making to stay still as well, her chest shuddered with every breath.

"How do you feel?"

"Tired," Ruby answered timidly. "And weak. A little s-short of breath."

Another press of the stethoscope was followed by another cringe. "Anything interesting on tv?" Maki tried distracting the girl.

"I j-just heard a rumor that my favorite idol might," she sniffled loudly, "might get dropped from her contract. Apparently she got hurt in a practice session. I-it would be so sad if that happened!"

"Oh? And who might that be?" Maki asked, ignorant of anything idol-related. She was thankful for the distraction the tv granted Ruby. Her own job was easier if she could get a patient to relax, even if it was only in a small way.

"Nico-nii!"

"Ah." Maki paused. Her brow furrowed and she stood up without saying anything for a few moments. "Well, I'll schedule some tests and we'll see where we can go from there."

And so, with a sense of responsibility sprouting up from somewhere Maki couldn't control, the last patient she headed to on that day was none other than Nico Yazawa. The walk to the girl's room was strangely free of other people, and the halls clear of the unceasing clamor of a hospital. Maki looked in on Nico, who had just hung up her phone, before entering the room. Nico's hands were clenched into knuckle-white fists, her normal twin tails replaced with straight hair, and her eyes - her eyes struck Maki like a fire, like a blazing inferno. There was a distinct lack of sadness or self-pity in their depth. Only anger gave the already ruby-red eyes an even more intense gleam, a knife-like luster. The missing sorrow somehow became Maki's own. Her heart ached for Nico, though she could hardly say she knew or respected the girl's work. It just seemed so upsetting to the doctor that the patient wasn't even allowing herself to cry. Nico's eyes were desert dry, Maki's only slightly less so. The doctor walked in clearing her throat. She feigned ignorance of the rumor she'd just heard.

"Thought I'd check in on our VIP," Maki said with sarcasm. "It's been a few hours - have you been hydrating? Resting?" she hoped her attempt to be lighthearted might distract the woman. She didn't want to deal with the mood she was sure Nico was in, though a part of her appreciated seeing beneath the idol persona and haughty confidence, between the candy-coated exterior and the bitter layer beneath.

Nico didn't answer. In the corner were two or three more sets of personal belongings than she expected Nico to have: bags and coats and the like. When she'd left early on there were just a few things Cotaro had brought up with him when Nico was first admitted, though at the moment he wasn't anywhere to be found. Awkward moments of uncomfortable silence took over the cold room before Maki picked up Nico's chart again. Acute exhaustion, fatigue, pulled and strained muscles, a possible concussion - what Nico was suffering from was really the final toll of years of non-stop dancing and performing. She suffered from the remains of the practiced twists, jumps, and movements an idol on near-constant tour went through. It was only natural. Nico should have known all of that work would catch up one day. But it still felt unfair, and Maki understood, at least a little, why Nico was angry more than anything else.

"We'll develop a recovery plan tomorrow, Ms. Yazawa."

"Whatever gets me back out there." Nico finally answered. She didn't look at Maki. Her eyes were still trained on her phone as if she could burn through it, through the wireless phone signal, and right into the agency members who must have given her the news that very afternoon.

"Whatever gets you the healthiest." Maki corrected. "As your doctor, that's my job whether you like it or not."

Nico looked up finally, smirking. "I won't back down. I'll be the number one idol and the number one patient"

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow."

Maki left work feeling a little self-satisfied. Even if it was a smirk, she was glad to have gotten that rude idol to smile for a moment.

Thanks for reading!

Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!