This part contains copious amounts of vomit and a few "bad words," so, take fair warning if those are things you would feel a specific way about seeing.

The day after Jack leaves, Yusei is sick. He wakes up feeling dizzy and feverish, and doesn't actually get out of bed until his roommates start pestering him about being late for something that he doesn't really remember about right now. So instead of answering them, he curls further into his blanket and turns his face towards the wall. They keep talking to him, and he keeps not answering them. Can't they tell he's sick already? He's sure he looks awful, with how bad he feels right now. Never mind that he's almost entirely hidden by blanket, and they obviously can't see him. But surely they've noticed how strange he's acting? He's completely refusing to talk to them, why isn't that enough evidence for them? Fuck. He doesn't have the energy to speak. If he did, he'd probably sound like an anthropomorphic sewage pipe. Fuck.

"Mmff mmwmm," he mutters into his pillow. Mumbling is a good compromise for speaking. Yeah.

"Yusei, you're talking into your pillow," Blitz says. "We can't hear you."

"Will you just get up already?" someone else says. "We got shit to do today."

"Ugh, maybe we should leave him alone today," some third person says. Or maybe it was Blitz again. Did Blitz say anything yet? "I mean, considering what happened yesterday."

"Larry almost drowned yesterday, and he's been up for hours."

"No, I mean…Jack was still his friend and shit, you know?"

"More importantly, he tried to kill a little kid and robbed the guy who stopped him."

"Yusei doesn't get depressed about stupid stuff like that! Jack is an asshole and Yusei should forget about it and wake the hell up!"

"Jack was still my friend, too…"

"Larry, tell Yusei to wake up. He'll listen to you, you're cute."

Sweet, beautiful silence follows for a handful of seconds before it is interrupted by somebody grabbing Yusei's shoulder and jerking it back and forth. "YUSEI! WAKE UP!" someone, who is probably Larry, screams directly in his ear. He knows it's Larry only because he's the only one with such a high-pitched voice who would be here. Because he's still not looking at anyone; he's watching a cockroach crawl in and out of a crack in the wall and trying to stop himself from vomiting onto his sweat-stained, naked, heavily repaired pillow. At this point he knows it would be better to just say something, but it's very hard to make himself do it when he's holding puke in his throat whilst being violently shaken.

"Stop," he says in a weak little voice. No one seems to have heard him, which is no surprise considering Larry is still screaming, but he can't speak any louder or he'll have to part his teeth. His only recourse is to swat Larry's hand away and lean out over his pillow so he can throw up without ruining his bedding.

Vomit splatters across the floor, fluid enough at first that it spreads a few inches in every direction, solid enough that it congeals almost immediately and settles into a quivering pile at the head of his bed. Yusei looks down at what just came out of him, spits one last chunk of partially digested something into the pile, and yawns. When he closes his mouth again he looks up at everyone and sees a line of four faces gaping at him. Larry, once again the most noticeable of the four, has specks of orangey stomach liquid splashed across his cheek.

"Oh…Yusei are you okay?" he yells. He reaches out a hand to grab Yusei by the shoulder, a motion which makes him recoil so far that he hits the back of his head against the wall. The impact for some reason makes his stomach lurch again, and he retches as if to continue vomiting, but nothing comes out. Larry babbles incoherently at him while he chokes on his own throat. "Oh my gosh you're sick, or something, when did you get sick? Oh man, this is my fault…"

"Larry, cut it out. Give him some air," someone who is probably Nerve, based on his voice, says. No, no, he's looking at everyone now, he can see who's talking, and it is Nerve, and he's pulling Larry away from him by the wrist and pointing at the floor, like he's training a puppy to sit. Larry sits, on command, like the puppy Nerve is trying to train. To sit. And probably other things puppies generally learn as well. Uh huh. It's not usually so warm down here, but right now it's sweltering, for some reason. Yusei pulls his shirt off, balls it up, throws it across the room, leans over the pile and pukes again; this time with actual puke instead of just phantom puke, like twenty seconds ago.

"Oh boy, you're really fucked up, huh?" that guy who was just talking only a second ago says. "You didn't get drunk last night, did you?"

Yusei wipes his lips with the back of his hand and shakes his head no. "I woke up like this," he says. His voice is hoarse.

"Yusei, I'm sorry," Larry apologizes, hanging his head in apparent shame. "This is my fault. You're sick now because you were trying to help me, probably."

Yusei coughs a few times before answering. "What?"

"Because, because the water was really cold and you were all wet for a really long time…"

Cough. "Being wet doesn't do this," Yusei says.

"But, you almost drowned-"

"No. You almost drowned."

"Okay, but-"

"Trust me, you have nothing to do with this. I ate something bad, or something."

Larry sighs with his entire upper body. Every part of him sags forward, as though he were deflating from the back of the neck. "But I gave you your food last night, so—"

"Larry, hush," says the guy who is larger than everybody else. Ugh, he's not even recognizing someone he's looking at. Wait, no, that's Taka. Man, he feels like shit.

"Well, I don't know what's the problem, but are you okay to go?" Blitz asks, eyeing the vomit with poorly disguised disgust. Why he feels the need to pretend vomit doesn't disgust him is beyond Yusei's comprehension, but there he is, gaping at the blob of the aforementioned vomit, periodically reaching for his nose and stopping himself the moment before he pinches it closed. "We need you to start work with us as soon as possible."

Yusei unwraps himself from his sheets and raises himself to a full upright sitting position and his vision immediately fuzzes over and he can't see anything but blurry colored splotches for several minutes. He holds his forehead in his hand and waits, and waits, and now he can see again so he puts his feet on the ground and hooks his fingers into a hole in the wall and pulls himself up. His knees shake and his vision blurs again and he sits down and covers his eyes and he doesn't think he can go to work today.

"I can't," he says. He lies down and tries to pull his sheets back up, but for some reason they won't move.

"You're lying on them." Blitz pulls him back up and grabs his sheets out from under his back. "Here."

"Are you sure you can't go?" Nerve implores, disappointment making his voice really, really irritating. "We really need the money."

"No he can't go!" Larry shrieks in his squeaky little kid voice. "He can barely even stand! He needs more sleep!"

"It's true, man. Just let him sleep, he'll get better faster."

"Ugh…"

"Do you need anything, Yusei?" Larry asks. His eyes are wide and his face is in so close Yusei can smell his breath. "Do you want some water? Do you need, like, a bucket or something to throw up into? Are you hungry?"

Yusei licks his lips and buries his face in his pillow. "Amm mmmf mmsm."

"What?"

He turns his head so his mouth is free and repeats himself: "All of those things."

And so Larry gets as many of those things he can find, leaves them at the foot of Yusei's bed, and heads up to the sidewalk with everyone else. Yusei's pile of vomit stays where it is until they get back at the end of the day and remember to clean it up for him.

Go to part two, when it's up, which should be almost immediately after part 1 is up, which it is, or else how would you be reading this sentence.