Threshold
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Something that Otori Kyōya had learned early on, was that his friend had a very low pain threshold.
He'd get dizzy if he sat up immediately after falling to the ground.
He'd get lightheaded and anemic if he started to bleed.
No matter the injury sustained, Suou Tamaki would quickly feel drained and lethargic. (This, by the way, did not necessarily apply to his ego, pride, or self-proclaimed 'princely' image … although sometimes it did.) The more severe the injury, the more exhausted he would be. The longer he tried to brook it, the harder it became for others to get and keep his attention. And of course he would try to hide it while in front of other people; he was supposed to be a man! Or... something.
The only exceptions to these rules had ever been once in the middle of their eighth grade, when the local middle-school bully had childishly tossed Tamaki's book bag deep into a particularly thorny patch of roses – while it was still attached to Tamaki's arm, I might add. Two lost buttons, at least two dozen tears in his uniform, and no less than twice that many scratches later – along with the type of ear-piecing howl that would put a nursery full of fussy tots to shame – a flush-faced and nearly teary-eyed Tamaki was successfully dug out by the thorn-ridden hands of his best friend and both were making their way up to the nurse's office.
And then there was that more critical instance a few months before the two of them enrolled into Ouran High School Academy, where on a rare day when they decided to walk home from school instead of hitching a ride in a fancy black limo, out of the blue the blonde had insisted that they go and play at a commoner's outdoor play park; all on a whim, naturally. And as the sun was beginning to set over the park, he had been eagerly fooling around on all of the various equipment while Kyōya stood stoically by, doing absolutely nothing and being so very boring... when Tamaki slid down a large slide, fell over the edge and landed on the ground on his rear. The reaction was delayed, but it wasn't long before the boy started... laughing? Hysterically, in fact. Which confused the other teen tremendously, until he at last concernedly asked if Tamaki was all right, to which the still-laughing boy, sitting so disgracefully in the dirt, shook his head in negation. He had broken his tailbone.
Even with assistance, transport to the hospital had been considerably strenuous.
And it would surely be unnecessary to say that the next six weeks had been incredibly trying as well. For if one thought that it was bad enough for Tamaki to – on a daily basis – be bouncing off the walls and continually flirting with anyone who so much as didn't avert their eyes from his deep sky blues in a grand total of four seconds, than it might be wise to warn that one that a bedridden Tamaki, where he could do none of these things, where his charm was at an ultimate low due to the setting, the pain, and the regular doses of pain-killers, where the only thing he could get a clearheaded kick out of was to intentionally babble on nonsense to both his guests and caretakers until their ears bled... and for one certain regular visitor to come to a sad point where he realized that he could no longer differentiate the lucid nonsense from the senseless nonsense... well. That, was so much worse.
Another thing Kyōya learned was that Tamaki could not fall asleep where there was activity around him. Unless he'd had a recent bout of insomnia, he generally didn't take naps in the middle of the day (didn't matter what the study subject in school was). And no matter the late hour, he absolutely could not fall asleep in a moving vehicle.
...Which led to a bit of fun with the Hitachiin twins, wherein Tamaki inadvertently discovered that he could, in fact, elicit the two of them into talking in their sleep. Yes. Both of them.
Tamaki was an energetic person by nature – an energetic person who could not simply start running on empty and struggle to get through the next hour, let alone the rest of the day.
Could not, of course, unless he was injured or sick.
Although the differences between sickness and injury had become somewhat easy to distinguish in Tamaki. Because when it came to sickness, the teen tended to lean a bit more on the quietly irritable, less sociable side (as hard as that may be to believe) as opposed to the spaced out, I-can't-focus-more-than-usual side.
Hence, the first indication that something was wrong, was always the silence.