It always started with a call from the police. It always started with the phone ringing in the morning.
He was home for his day off, deciding to help his parents around in the bakery, at the worst moment his family was going through. It was calm, almost a bit too much so, until the phone rang. His mother got the phone, said "hello?", immediately switched to more anxiety. It had been very tense in this house for the past day. Ever since Iori had gone missing. His mother had cried, his father had screamed at the police, and he had done both at the same time.
Mitsuki and Iori had been together, when the latter had gone missing. He didn't exactly know how it had happened. It was as if his mind had forgotten when it had slipped up, as if the event had been wiped off from his memory. The bitter taste of failure and the sour taste of worry had remained in his mouth ever since he had been realized Iori wasn't with him anymore and since they had realized they couldn't find him.
The call ended shortly after. A wave of chill coursed through his body. His mother, in an unfamiliar calm and sorrowful tone, told him: "They have found Iori". Before he knew it, his entire family was in a car driving to the police station. The sky was grim, it was raining, it was cold, it was windy, almost stormy. As if the weather was trying to express what was going on in his heart. An odd, but appreciated occurrence: getting blinded by the overly happy sun during times of sorrow was beyond frustrating.
The police staff were staring at the three of them with pitiful eyes. And Mitsuki hated pity. He hated the feeling of dread it was filling him with him: once and for all, what had happened? Why did everyone look at them like they had just lived through the end of the world? Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why…?
Why…
Before he knew it, Mitsuki was in a dark room with his parents by his sides, as a saddened forensic turned on the lights on a table with a human-shaped lump hidden under a white sheet. He wanted to vomit, as soon as he realized this had all already ended badly. They were in the middle of the worst possible outcome. The gunned bitch the police had found, that he remembered seeing already splattered in the blood of an innocent I7 fan who had the misfortune to come across her path and be better than her at school, had already done the deed.
He didn't even look at the table when the sheet got taken off the corpse. He didn't look to know his brother was dead before they had stepped a foot in this room. It didn't even smell like blood, because it had all dried before they came in. Before they knew anything about the situation. He cried the biggest tears of his life and fell to his knees, eyes fixated on the bullet holes in the corpse of his own brother, two to the chest, in each lung, and one to the head, right between his empty eyes, before it all turned white.
Mitsuki woke up in a jump, sweating heavily, gasping. It was all a nightmare. It was… unreal. Not real. Nothing of this kind had happened. Iori hadn't died. Iori wasn't dead. It was all in his mind, as disturbing and as gut-wrenching at it was. He still had the taste of nausea in his mouth and the chills of fear on his body. He still had the picture of the bullet right between his brother's dead eyes flashing before his eyes.
He wiped his face with his hands. This sure was terrifying… He had gotten some troubled dreams because of his concern for Iori before this night, but this was an entirely new plane of terror he had live through there. He had seen a severely injured Iori in his sleep before, sometimes coughing his own blood, sometimes feverishly using his body as a shield, but never had he seen him dead like that.
The first thing he did once he was done shaking and panting, was to turn on his phone and send all the messages which flooded through his mind, gates of worry opened and spilling all over his phone screen.
"Are you OK Iori?"
"You're fine right? Tell me you're fine"
"If you need anything call me even if it's in the middle of the night or training"
"You're probably sleeping right now… but please reply to me in the morning"
"Please reply, please, I need to know if you're safe"
Only then did Mitsuki look at what time it was. Two in the morning, huh. With dread and a sudden feeling of exhaustion, he decided to run to the kitchen to serve himself a glass of water, to at least make the taste of vomit disappear from his mouth.
He had finally been authorized to exit his bed and explore the hospital on his own. Hospitals weren't fascinating, such a thing was commonly spread knowledge, but Iori was more than glad to finally be able to see something else than his room without having to ask a nurse or visitors to wheel him around. As soon as his feet hit the ground, his legs lost all of their lethargy.
As soon as he opened the door, the lights of the room turned off. It was weird to have automatic lights in a hospital room, especially as he had been lying without moving for days without this ever happening. It was one more reason not to stay here for much longer. He clutched the IV stand which had to accompany him (apparently, he still lacked some blood to be free of it) and made his way outside, closing the door behind him.
The corridor was sunk in darkness. Was it night time already? This was even weirder… He could have sworn it was the middle of the afternoon in his room. Maybe the artificial lights managed to trick his eyes, after all. It wouldn't be so surprising, in a way, as it had been days since the last time he had seen the natural sunlight.
Perhaps his perception of day and night was disturbed, after all. He would have to fix it up once he would be back home and working as an idol again. There was no way he was letting the bullets ruin his entire schedule after they got healed and patched up.
The corridors weren't only dark: they were also deadly silent. Almost too silent, would he add. Iori was used to calm hospitals (well, as calm as it was when he had to visit his brother or any relative he may or may not have remembered the identity of), sure, and it hadn't been very noisy since the beginning of his hospitalization, but it was eerily silent nonetheless. As if there was nobody else in the halls and rooms. Moreover, there was nobody other than him in the corridors: no nurse, no patient, no visitor… Truly as if everybody had left without telling him about it.
Which was, obviously, a very weird thing for a facility meant to welcome multiple people at a time and take of them like a hospital.
Out of curiosity and a thirst for his newly-found freedom, he still continued walking down the corridor. He had a slow pace, mostly because he was still weary of how odd the situation was, but also because his left leg still felt a bit numb, in a way, although it wasn't pain jolting down and up his nerves anymore. The more he advanced, the darker it was getting around him, until he had to eventually use his cell phone as a flashlight.
He didn't exactly know why he had taken his phone with him: maybe it served as his anchor into the outside world if he was to delve deep down the hospital's maze. Maybe it was his sole link with what was aside from the medical facility he was trapped in.
Now that he thought about it, this hospital was really anxiogenic. After a while, you couldn't not feel trapped in a cage you were forced to stay in twenty-four-seven. Even if the wheelchair was a thing, to Iori, it was no more than the key to the cage dwindling in front of his nose, yet out of reach. There had been no escape from this white prison, and even if he was right that moment walking down a part of the building he had never seen before, it was still only a fluke: he had just gotten out of his cell.
So it didn't feel like he had recovered much of his freedom. It was all a game of pretending to be free again. His spirit was still bound by chains to his injuries and ropes bound his body to his room. He knew he would have to come back there and lie down eventually. His injuries, after all, were still a bit sore.
Looking around, he had to notice something: there really was nobody. Even if he shook his phone's light around, there was nobody. Only closed doors awaited him in this route into what felt like the depths of a hidden, yet undiscovered world. And, well, Iori hated the unknown. There was no word to define how horrible it was not to know where he was going and how dangerous it actually was. Or why the situation was this way: odd, bizarre and intimidating.
He was at a point where going back wasn't such a bad idea after all. It'd mean going back to the only place he actually knew in the building: his room. For once, the hospital room he had cursed internally of white prison would become his actual safe spot. This truly was an odd journey into the depths of something he acutely knew was way over his head and way out of his control.
Upon trying to go back, he was prevented from doing so by something binding his feet to going forward. This was starting to get really odd. In a slight moment of panic, Iori flashed his impromptu flashlight on his ankles, hoping to figure out what was dragging him to the darkness, only to see nothing. There was nothing visible doing that to him? Was it all in his mind? And why?
There was an uneasiness building inside him. That feeling he wasn't in a safe situation he could get out of without hurting at least a bit. It was impossible to shake off as he resumed his walk into the depths of an unknown well, maybe of a staircase leading to some demise-like fate. It really was weird to feel that way in a hospital.
After more dreaded steps, accompanied by the darkness and shadows thickening all around him, he noticed there were some half-opened doors before his eyes. These were more lit than the sheer black surrounding him like a fog, and out of wanting to find one safer spot in this strangest of explorations, he gave one a shot and glanced inside of it.
Right here and there, was the corpse of a woman with a hole right where her heart should had been and black sand spilling on the floor from the hole and her wide opened mouth. As if it was never going to stop flowing and never going to vanish.
Before he knew it, Iori's back was against the wall on the opposite side of the corridor, nausea rushing in, barely keeping his insides where they should be. He wasn't ready to see a dead body vomiting its own blood despite the sinister situation he was currently trapped in. It was… uncanny, at best.
In his brain rushed the idea of going back to his room, more than ever, just find the only place he knew and where he could go to feel a little bit better. It was getting more than dangerous. The smell of blood filled the corridor as the chains on his ankles vanished, letting him go back as quickly as he could with a numbed leg and his abdomen injury starting to hurt again. He had rarely felt that endangered. Even as he was getting shot, he still had his brother next to him, calling for help, and it was infinitely safer to be in the daylight with a high chance to make it in the end.
On the way back to his room, fog continued to rise until he noticed it wasn't as innocent as fog was. The burning in his throat and lungs made him realize the true nature of it: it was black smoke, poisonous, intoxicating, suffocating. It was blinding him, eyes squeezed shut, tearing as if trying to defend themselves against the smog. The smell of burnt and of gas made most of his functions turn off, to the point he was just wimping on the ground, forced to his knees by the sudden pressure around him.
He swore he could hear mocking laughter and intelligible, snarky whispers. He missed the shooting star of Nanase's voice, the warm smiles and hugs of his brothers, the cute embarrassed faces and apologies of his manager, the lassitude and quirks of Yotsuba, his idol group's everything, in fact. Even Kimidori's presence was welcome, desired, needed at this point.
He just wanted not to be alone in this misery.
Tears from sorrow and from his eyes hurting shed on the floor, drying immediately into more smoke, so he tried wimping his eyes with his hands and his arms. This only made everything hurt more, as if his skin was covered in sand. At this point, tears mixed with saliva, a truly humiliating experience to go through, even if he now knew he was the only one left alive, not even standing, in this place closer to a circle of Hell than to anything he had ever been in.
His consciousness was starting to dim from the sorrow and the continuous pain, until he noticed blood was starting to spill out of his wounds in the form of long, flowing crimson strands of sand, giving the only colour he was still able to see inside an entirely monochrome world to anything around him.
When Iori's eyes opened again and for one last time, all he saw was a familiar ceiling blurry because of his tears.
He had figured. It was all a terrible nightmare. Everybody around him spoke of their fever dreams as weird, out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, but his were always vivid hellish landscapes he felt victim too. Coincidentally, he always felt like he'd lost control of himself when he was sick: was it why fever always coincided with these visions in his mind? Was ailment the only thing they needed to reach the surface and haunt his mind over and over again?
His head hurt. It wasn't time to think on such profound and deep things when simply thinking was painful.
For once, Iori could truly say he was happy to be in this hospital room. It was impersonal, cold and boring after a day of daze, but it was safe, it was white, and it felt like it was a place to stay in when he was vulnerable. He could call for help with the simple press of a button, would he get completely delusional and start thinking he actually got teleported in hell by a malevolent creature. Who knew what could happen, with a poison-induced fever.
With some lousy moves, his hand managed to land on the thermometer left by his bedside earlier in the day. He had no idea of what time it was, but his eyes hurt enough for him not to turn on his phone or laptop for the moment. If he was correct, the small screen of the thermometer glowed in the dark enough for him to see it. As usual, it turned how he was: all he could notice, was that it had considerably lowered. He was still sweating heavily from it and from the nightmares, but it was a good thing to see the number going below forty.
Well, he had been at forty and more before, right? His mind felt blurry on this. Probably the shock of the situation, probably the fever, probably the pain from the IV getting torn off his vein.
Eventually, he had to realize something: he didn't feel like sleeping. He was still too nervous, too afraid to go back to sleep. It'd just end up being a new nightmare. But, on the other hand, walking around the corridors of the hospital felt like risking his life and having to struggle with a rusty wheelchair and his wounded shoulder. Yeah, it was no more than a bundle of bad ideas.
As such, he just turned on his phone. Maybe there was something to read on it or on the Internet, bless the hospital's Wi-Fi for providing him with the information he may not had gotten from anyone else around him. Maybe he could just read some fan tweets in an attempt to determine what would please them and what they didn't want to see from the group. After all, that was all he could do to feel any useful.
Wait. It seemed like he had forgotten along the way he was still ill, hadn't he? Ill for less than twenty-four hours from then on, but still feverish and straight out of a nightmare. It wasn't the best time to analyse data.
His phone screen was quickly flooded with messages from his brother. It wasn't coming as a huge surprise to him: Mitsuki had been very stressed and concerned for his little brother since the latter had gotten shot. It was weird to think he wasn't the first one shocked about it: in fact, he was almost insensible to his own fate and condition, except for the fact it seriously hindered with his schedules and both school and idol business.
The messages were drenched in concern, as expected, as predicted. There was still a slight smile drawing itself on Iori's face: for some reason, for once, he appreciated the concern. Maybe it was because he had felt so alone and given upon in his nightmare before this moment that he felt like he needed to make sure people were with him. That he had people supporting him who get him away from terrible situations like getting shot or getting trapped inside an infernal rendition of a hospital.
A sudden wave of dizziness and exhaustion took over him almost as soon as he had finished reading the messages. Yet, before his vision turned black again, he still had the time to type and send one thing to his worried sibling:
"I'm fine, big brother. I'll be fine. Please take care."