Alice

Relief wasn't enough to describe how I felt after we left the hospital. Shun was awake, for the moment at least, and that was enough for me. Seeing him in that hospital bed, made the whole thing all that more real. Shun was hurt, almost dead, but he seemed to be pulling through.

Was it luck? A good flip of the coin? It didn't matter to me. I couldn't stand the thought of losing one of my close friends, and also couldn't stand to think about how Dan would react if Shun did die. The two were almost like brothers, in a sense.

It was just an impossible thing to think of; somebody you knew dying, that is. I hadn't really been around death all that much in my life, so it was a foreign territory to me. Kato stopped the limo in front of Murucho's; I hadn't even realized that we were back already.

Earlier, it felt like an eternity when we drove to the hospital. Now, it felt like time had returned to its normal pace. The five of us walked inside, and were immediately greeted by Murucho's parents. They wore worried looks on their faces, and his mother asked us, "Is Shun alright?"

Murucho scratched the back of his neck and said with uncertainty, "Not sure. He was awake when we went up there, but it's probably too early to make any guesses about whether he'll make it or not." That was true. Just because Shun was awake now, meant nothing.

It would depend on the days to come that determined whether Shun would fully recover. And even then, he might not be the same person. I had heard stories about how near-death experiences had dramatically changed people. It could alter their entire personalities, turning them into people that nobody recognized.

Would that happen to Shun? Would he become somebody else entirely? It was difficult to imagine Shun as anyone else other than himself. Mr. Marakura cleared his throat and told us, "You've all had a long day. Why don't you go upstairs and turn in early for the night?"

His suggestion sounded as good as any to me. The day had been a long one, filled with too much stress for any normal person to handle. Dan, Julie, Runo, and Murucho went ahead and took Mr. Marakura's advice, and went on to bed. I remained awake and found the kitchen, where I poured myself a glass of ice water.

I let out a tired sigh and started to make my way up towards my room, my glass of water in my hands and freezing my fingertips. This was just so much to take in at one time. It all seemed to happen so quickly, and that scared me. It scared me now that I saw how easily and fast life could be taken away.

Now, I felt like I had to be more careful. Something could happen to me just as easily it had happened to Shun, or the other people that were involved in that horrible crash. I began to wonder how their families and other loved ones were holding up.

Did they possibly envy Shun because he had surived so far, while the other victims had perished? Surely they couldn't hold this against Shun; none of it was his fault, and he had no way to control any of this. But these people were grieving, and they could be irrational now, not thinking about how their logic didn't make any sense.

I rounded another hallway, and walked into the sitting room that we had been in earlier that day. I was surprised to find Dan in there. He was sitting on the couch, watching the TV. The channel was still on the news and was reporting on the current information regarding the car crash.

"Dan? Is everything alright?" I asked softly so I might not wake any of the others that were sleeping in rooms nearby. He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from the screen. There was sadness behind them, reflecting how he, and everyone else, was feeling at the moment.

I set my glass of water down on the coffee table next to the remote, then took a seat next to Dan. "Hey, Shun's going to be okay, Dan. Don't worry," I told him gently. But I felt guilty for making a hollow promise. There was no way that any of us knew for sure if Shun was going to be alright.

There were still a lot of days ahead of us, and each one would tell us if Shun was getting better or worse. I reached for the remote and turned the TV off, but Dan continued to watch the screen, as if the report was still carrying on.

Patting his shoulder, I told him, "Go to bed, Dan. Get some sleep. It'll do you some good and get your mind off some things." He glanced at me, then sighed. "Alright," he said and stood up from the couch. Dan then vanished into the hallway, and I heard his room door close shortly after he left the sitting room.

I sighed, then looked back at my glass of water. The ice had melted, leaving a ring of water at the bottom of the glass. Before a stain formed on the wooden table, I found a napkin and wiped the water away. After that, I went on to my room and turned in the for the night.

Shun

The sound of tired shrieking and metal clashing against metal, jolted me awake. I shot up in the hospital bed, looking around frantically for the source of the horrible noise.

My eyes then shot up towards the TV in my room. It was turned on, an action movie was playing and was on the scene of a car crash, along with the fact that the volume was turned up rather loudly. I began to search for the remote, and eventually found it underneath my leg.

I must have hit the remote and turned the TV on in my sleep, I thought to myself before turning the TV off. The silence immediately flooding into the room now that the infernal contraption was off. It was only shortly after that I noticed that my hands were trembling. Had the sounds of the crash in that movie really scared me that badly?

Perhaps I had some kind of post-traumatic stress now after the wreck I was in. I laid back down in my hosptial bed, taking in deep breaths to try and calm myself down. Sometime last night, while I had been asleep, the nurses moved me out of the ICU and into a regular room.

They also removed most of the wires and tubes out of my arms, which I was grateful for. Sunlight filtered through the metal blinds in the room, marking the start of another day. And that's just what it felt like; another day. I thought that since what had recently happened to me, I would have felt different.

But things still felt like the same. The heavy wooden door opened, and a doctor stepped in. He was starting to bald, but not enough that it was immediately noticeable. A tag on his coat read C. Rosenburg. I then began to wonder how the doctors and nurses in the hospital would react to how quickly I had healed.

They would most certainly be curious. "Morning," Rosenburg said to me without adverting his gaze from his chart. "Morning," I said back to him, but he didn't seem to notice. He was still much too busy going over his chart.

"I'm going to have a nurse come in here soon and look over your injuries. She'll probably rebandage some of them as well. Just letting you know," he told me then left the room, his face still buried in the clipboard. I knew when that nurse saw how my wounds had healed almost overnight, she would become suspicious.

What do I do? The nurse then walked into the room, her brown hair tied up into a messy bun that let me know that she probably just woken up. "I'm just going to look at your wounds," she told me flatly. Really? I had no idea. She examined the cuts that ran along my arm, or at least, where they had been.

Now, they were gone, leaving on the stitches behind. The nurse raised an eyebrow, looking stumped. She then shook her head and told me, "Let me look at your eye." Carefully, she removed the bandages from the right side of my face, revealing the gift that the car crash had left for me.

"It's healed," she said to herself, sounding completely dumbstuck. I wished that she had rearranged her words some. My eye was nowhere near healed. All that had repaired itself, had been the side of my face, which had left a scar behind. But my eye was completely ruined, unable to see a single thing other than blackness.

The nurse straightened up and cleared her throat to seem professional rather than confused. "I'm going to go retrieve your doctor and let him add in his opinion." She then hurried out of the room, and I heard her calling Rosenburg's name. A deep chuckling then came from beside me.

A chill shot down my spin as I turned and saw Death sitting in the windowsill. I could still not see his face, despite the bright, florescent lighting in the room. All I could see, was the part of his face just beneath his nose. And just like his hands, his face was also human. Or, at least that part of it.

Death allowed a grin to appear on his mouth when he said, "Humans are so oblivious to everything around them." I stared at him then snapped back into focus. "What are you doing here?" I asked him calmly. Even though Death had given my life back to me, I still felt apprehensive around him. It was Death, after all.

He was the very thing that people all around the world tried to fight against in order to continue and carry out their lives that they loved so dearly. But in the end, Death would always win. His smile vanished, turning the portion of his face serious.

"I'm here to make sure that you don't end up in a lab experiement somewhere, because people don't just survive a horrific car accident and get up the next day," he told me with his arms crossed. I noticed his scythe was leaning against the wall beside him.

The blade sparkled under the lights, turning something deadly into a thing of beauty. Dr. Rosenburg and his nurse walked into the room, but they did not seem to notice Death looming over me. Rosenburg examined my injuries, finishing with my face last.

"Well, I'll be. You were right, Emily. His injuries are healed," the doctor said with a hint of surprise. Death then slid from the windowsill, and walked behind the doctor and nurse. He raised his human-like hands above their heads and said quietly, "His injuries are healed because they were minor. All he suffered from was a minor concussion."

The doctor and nurse then repeated what Death said, making them seem robotic. "You will tell everyone this," Death added. "Well will tell everyone this," Rosenburg and Emily repeated. I stared at the performance in front of me. He was controlling their minds, making them do and say what he wanted them do.

Death's final command to them was, "He will be released from this place today." His two puppets repeated his words just as they had everything else. Death snapped his fingers, and the doctor and nurse walked out of the room. "You…..You controlled them," I said in shock.

He rubbed his hands together and told me, "That was nothing. Even an inexperienced Reaper can control people. They are lesser beings than Gods of Death, making it an easier task." If humans were lesser beings than Reapers, then that would have made me one before my untimely death.

Had I possibly been controlled without knowing it? The thought that somebody else commanded me, didn't set right. I preferred to be in control of my own body.

Death walked back across the room and grabbed his scythe. "My work is done here for now. I'll contact you later today," he told me. Death grabbed the end of his cloak, and raised it up. A curtain of black shrouded him, but never revealed his body. When the curtain lowered, he was gone.

Dan

"What do you mean that you're discharging Shun from the hospital?" I asked, utterly shocked that the hospital had even consented to this. Shun looked like he was about to die yesterday, and now they were just sending him home? His doctor nodded and told us, "His injuries from the crash were minor. The only thing that was wrong with him, was a minor concussion. There is no reason for him to stay at this hospital."

I still couldn't believe what this guy was telling me. My friend was still hurt, and this guy could have cared less. I should sue him for malpractice, I thought to myself. The nurse that had been standing silently behind the doctor, spoke up.

She said, "If you don't believe Mr. Rosenburg, go look at your friend for yourselves. He's fine." The nurse also gave us the room and floor number that they had moved Shun to after we left. I didn't hesitate to run up to the room. In fact, I didn't even wait on the elevator, and ran up the three or four flights of stairs.

I found the room number, and swung open the heavy wooden door. Shun was sitting in his hospital bed, reading a book. I stared in disbelief. This couldn't have been the same person from yesterday. Shun had looked like a ghost and was on the edge of death, and now, he looked fine.

The others ran up behind me, panting and trying to catch their breath. Runo snapped at me, "You couldn't have waited for us, Dan?" Shun heard Runo's voice, and looked up from the book he was reading. "Oh, hey, guys," he said, looking surprised to see us standing in the doorway.

I noticed that he had his hair combed over to where it covered his right eye, but I didn't pay it that much attention. I then ran into the room, and lifted up his arm, examining every inch. "What are you doing, Dan?" Shun asked me and snatched his arm away from me.

"These doctors here, they're crazy. They're saying that you're fine and are going home today," I told him and tried to examine his arm again, but he wouldn't let me. "I'm fine, Dan. It was just a small concussion," he told me with the annoyance that was always in his voice.

The others had joined my side, and looked just as surprised as I was when they saw that Shun was looking better than he had yesterday. Alice did one of her trademark smiles and told him, "You had us all so worried, Shun." He smiled at her and said, "Sorry for that. I promise, it won't happen. Ever again."

How could he promise that he'd never get hurt again? Did he think he was immortal now that he had survived a close brush with Death? I pushed those thoughts out of my mind. It didn't matter anymore. Shun was okay, and not dead.

I smiled and asked jokingly, "What's up with the new hairstyle, buddy?" I reached over and moved the hair out from in front of his eye, and saw what was underneath. A scar ran down along his face, and his eye was a grayish-white. Shun hit my hand away from his face and said coldly, "Don't touch me."

The others must have seen his eyes as well, because they appeared to be surprised. Or maybe they were taken aback by Shun's sudden hostility. "Your eye," I said quietly. I recalled the right side of his face being bandaged up yesterday, but I didn't think they injuries were severe enough to where they took his sight from him.

Shun fixed his hair back over the right side of his face, covering the scar and his damaged eye. "Yeah? What about it?" he asked me. I had completely forgotten that I had mentioned something about it.

"Uh, nothing. I just didn't expect that your eye was damaged," I told him, trying to find a way to explain my reasoning to him. Shun made sure that his hair was back where it had been, then told me, "It's alright." At that moment, I couldn't help but feel that there was something different about him.

i dont know if i'll get to Southern Hymn today or not. it kind of depends on how i feel. :/ but i thought of the funniest thing yesterday. i was watching Black Butler and thought, "What if Kato was like Sebastian?" i couldnt help but laugh at that image. maybe that's just me though. check out my poll if you havent and read, review, and other things. ~Copperpelt~