Of course, "spending an hour or even more in a room with someone else sleeping" wasn't in Kaede's main hobbies, at all. However, the calmness of the situation was soothing her after so many things happened to both of them, but especially to him. He was aggressive when he went into delirium, but she couldn't possibly hold a grudge against him for that.
Noticing his breathing was starting get really troubled, borderline wheezing, her eyes searched across the room in the hope something in her surrounding could help with the growing issue. She then noticed the mask connected to the noisy machinery (that she had forgotten about until this moment) and, softly, put it back on his mouth and nose.
Despite the fact this pneumonia was devouring him from the inside, Shuichi seemed rather calm and even at peace when he was fast asleep, lightly snoring, perfectly still in bed except for his chest. This sight was more than pleasing to the pianist: he was finally finding some rest after all this pain and exhaustion and self-hatred.
She surprised herself to hold his hand, and barely noticed so when it got squeezed. Damn, he had more physical strength than she originally thought!
She wondered why he was suddenly squeezing her hand that strongly, but that was before she saw his face distorted by what seemed to be some kind of anguish, at least, it was pain he was showing. She hated that, but drops of sweat rolling on his temples confirmed her fears to be true.
He was having a nightmare.
She got her hand out of his grip and rushed to the bathroom, taking with her a bucket she had filled with cold water and a towel. She found both of these things in the bathroom, and was ever so thankful to have found them.
She wiped his face regularly while he was rapidly moving, as if he tried to undo the bed sheets around him. Her worries were ever-so-growing, and maybe his fever hadn't went down as much as she hoped it would.
After a good twenty minutes of witnessing such a thing, he had calmed down and drifted into peaceful sleep.
That was, until a knock at the door happened and a nurse entered the room.
"Miss Akamatsu?"
"Hmm?"
"Could you do us a favour?"
"What is it?"
"If you don't mind, we would like you to get some of Mr. Saihara's personal belongings for his hospital stay."
"I'll do it! But where are his keys? Where does he live?"
"His keys are inside the nightstand's drawer. Let me write his address out for you, Miss. Thank you very much."
Kaede arrived in front of an apartment lot, around six or seven floors high. She was a bit intimidated, but she had survived getting out of the hospital's giant yard, so she thought she would be perfectly fine finding his flat. It was on the third floor, in the quietest part of the town she had known until then.
She unlocked the door and entered.
The flat was a mess, and she knew it as soon as she stepped a foot in there: she almost fell on an empty water bottle on the ground.
The apartment itself wasn't the biggest thing ever, lucky for her. It had a main room, a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. Nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary. By "lucky", she was internally referring to how dark the flat was: all curtains were drawn, and she hadn't find the switch yet. This was going to be far harder than what she had originally expected.
Once she had found and turned on the switch, the full view of the mess that was this flat unveiled itself.
The floor was covered in bottles, used boxes of medicine, and various other pieces of garbage, but what caught her attention the most were the incredible amount of uses tissues who had missed the bin. It was as if he had tried to throw them from afar, probably from his bed judging by the position of the tissue balls.
Actually, everything in this room pointed to him living in and from his bed at one point.
This was... Disturbing to say the least. The idea that he had been sick for longer than she thought, and that the only reason he came out of his home during their winter break was to hear her play the piano. It was painfully touching.
His phone was on his nightstand, but when she tried to turn it on, she realized the battery had run dry a while back. The power adaptation was still plugged on the wall, but the phone wasn't. She did so herself and got up to the closet.
The closet was less messy than the rest of the flat, but the pile of dirty laundry on the ground explained pretty well why it seemed rather empty. Kaede grabbed a pyjama (there was only one remaining, picking wasn't that hard), a sweater (he had one of those? Who would have thought), a few sshirts here and there and a pair of trousers.
She didn't expect him to wear most of them, but she still gently put them in a luggage case she had found somewhere else in the flat. She also grabbed the remaining water bottles next to the bed, before her eyes fixated on something else next to his nightstand.
Kaede took one of the empty boxes of medicine, curious as to what they originally contained. It was a generic headache illness, and another box was cough syrup, and another was a generic throat-soothing pills box... He was trying to patch himself up as much as possible, but it didn't prevent his condition to worsen and worsen. That explained the sticky brown spots on the nightstand and floor: he was pouring himself syrup that fell from the spoon.
Kaede stopped by the kitchen, only to notice it was pristine compared to the rest of flat... If not for the thick layer of dust on everything that was the fridge. Fridge that was empty. Poor guy really was too weak to get out of the house until her concert. That forsaken vacation prevented him from getting better... And it was already about to end. Life was horrible.
His phone finally had enough battery to turn on again. She unplugged and took the adapter with her, leaving the flat and locking the door behind her again. On the way back to the hospital, she was reading his messages.
She had guessed his password was "akamatsu"...
His inbox was filled with messages from Momota, asking him about the math homework, to why he wasn't responding, to how he was doing, to if he hadn't been robbed in a dark alley, to why he wasn't responding again... She could feel fear and anxiety and a kind of paranoia building up as the messages went on.
He also had one message from Harukawa, asking him to reply to Momota's messages.
And Ouma had sent in a "oh shit waddup" meme.
Kaede saw the messages she sent right after the concert had ended and that he had been taken away.
"Saihara, are you okay?"
"Did you go home? Are you still in the hospital?"
"Please reply to me, I'm worried you know!"
"You have someone home for you, right?"
She was feeling a bit awkward to read her own messages on his phone, especially since she couldn't help but get reminded of her breaking down in front of her parents.
The road was lonely but it didn't feel that long when she exploring what he had missed for a good three days. How much time had he spent surviving in his bed exactly? She couldn't forget the brown sticky spots on the floor... Some were really brown, some less... Was that blood? That weird thing he had spat out the evening before? Please no!
She was... Deeply disturbed. Her classmate, her friend... No, her crush, her mutual crush was... Dying? He was in such a horrible, horrible shape...
No matter how many times she shook her head in an attempt to forget the feeling crawling under her skin, she couldn't brush off this horrible thought.
The scent of death and the horrid sound of a broken requiem.
When she was in front of the door of his room, she felt her strength vanish. She let go of the luggage. She was... Feeling kind of defeated really.
Was that despair?
Was it the end?
No... She was the first one to know he was stronger than he thought, than everybody thought. He would pull through this.
Hospitals are here to save people. He would be saved. He would heal and live like before.
What nurse was she if she lost hope for her patient?
This time, Kaede clenched her fist in positivity, in determination.
"I'll help you!" She whispered to herself before knocking at the door.