Hellew :3 So I still didn't hear back from my beta (hopefully because she's enjoying her summer not because anything bad happened!) so, I'm posting this unedited, I will repost the edited version as soon as I get it from her, but for now I want to get further with this story, so here you go! let me know if there are any mistakes please!

Enjoy!

Previously…

Once near the hospital, she went to the underground parking and changed into the scrubs, she tied her hair in a bun similar to her mothers and secured the surgical mask over her ears.

"Meet Mogami Saena!" She said, spreading out her arms in a dramatic pose for Ren.

"You do look quite similar, the only way to recognize you would be through your nose and you already have that covered. Pun very much intended!" He winked.

She chuckled and walked towards the elevator. "Let's go, I have a chemistry test in a couple of hours, the quicker we get this over with, the better!"

Ch10: well…

"Alright!" Ren followed her, making sure his 'physical state' was switched off, wouldn't want to knock something over by accident now, would he?

Kyoko walked in the hospital lobby, she nodded to the receptionists, making sure her Id was visible to them. One of them asked why she had a mask on and she smoothly pointed to her mouth, one of the receptionist concluded she had a 'root canal' surgery and she left it at that

"It wasn't a lie." She told Ren. "I just didn't correct her."

He didn't bother answering and just shrugged and gestured for her to keep going.

Having safely passed through the front of the hospital, Kyoko made her way towards what she called the 'archive room'.

"When I was young, my mother would take me there with a coloring book and ask me to stay out of the way until she finished working." She explained when Ren asked her how she knew her way around.

Opening the door, she slipped inside after making sure there was no one around and silently closed it after her. "Alright! We're in!" She had said.

"There's one thing I'm curious about, though…" Ren said as she sat behind the computer. "What if I'm not in this particular hospital?"

"No worries. A couple of years ago, there was a law that instructed hospitals to merge their electronic databases*. It was said that the decision was made to make things more 'organized' but my mom told me that it's because it made things easier for the police to locate criminals and assault victims." She said, while typing in her mother's Id code to access the record software. "So, even if you're not in here, we'll have your record AND the name of the hospital you're in!"

Ren looked at her for a moment. "Ever been told you're smart in a creepy way?"

"Very often, actually!" She smiled when Ren's record was displayed on the screen. She skimmed it trying to locate the time of death or something that would indicate he was, in fact dead. And then her breath caught.

It took her a moment before she blinked and regained her senses. She brushed a hand over her bangs and said "Well, it's official, you are very much alive!" (A/N: Hurray! the moment we all waited for and all knew it would eventually happen XD come on, let's stop pretending we're surprised)

She took a few screenshots and emailed them to herself while Ren numbly watched the door. He didn't know what to make of what she had just told him. He knew that him still being alive was a probable option, but he had hoped that maybe, just maybe, there was a mistake somewhere and he held on to that hope the entire time, as foolish as it was.

"Done!" She exclaimed after logging out and clearing the history. Ren just followed her, still half dazed as she got out of the room and made her way through the hospital, they got out from the ambulance entry to avoid raising suspicions with the receptionists and went back down to the parking to fetch her backpack.

Once she changed back into her normal clothes, Kyoko tapped on her phone to see the screenshots she had taken earlier. Ren stayed silent as she read what was written on them. "It says here that you've been in a coma for the last sixteen days. There are a few notes I don't understand, so we'll have to confirm that with Kanae." She frowned. "The medication administration seems normal, some ant-inflammatory, muscle relaxers and pain killers." Kyoko sighed. "You have a couple of broken ribs, a broken leg and you seem to have suffered from internal bleeding, they fixed that in the surgery and stitched up your head…"

"So, what exactly do all of this tell us?" Ren asked, frustrated at all the technical speech.

"Nothing, oddly enough." Kyoko started walking. "I e-mailed the pictures to Kanae, she might get more from it since it's her field."

"So, what do we do now?" Ren asked, hoping he didn't sound as lost as he was feeling.

"Now, I have a chemistry test to pass and you have to go home!" Kyoko said. "We'll talk more when I come back this evening."

"Alright, I'll see you then."

Each of them went on his way, Kyoko caught a bus to her school and Ren walked home, looking very depressed. He was grateful that Kyoko managed to keep her cool at least and didn't overreact or do anything to stress him further.

"YOU DID WHAT?!"

"Moko-san, you tore my eardrum!" Kyoko whined.

Kanae had seen her e-mail and called her to discuss things, when she asked how she got those pictures Kyoko told her what she and Ren did this morning and let's just say she wasn't reacting too well at the story.

"Mo! Kyoko what were you thinking?! Forget the fact that you could've gotten in trouble, did you even think what this might do to aunt Saena?" Kanae yelled. "Mo! She could have her license taken!"

"I made sure not to get caught, you forget I had a ghost with me!" Her friend retorted.

"Ughh! You're impossible!" Kanae huffed, still not believing her best friend would act in such a way.

Ren watched Kyoko talk on the phone, feeling guilty. It was his fault that she was being scolded and her friend was right about the trouble she could've got into because of him.

"Anyway," Kanae spoke again after taking a calming breath. "From what I gathered, Ren had received the standard first aid in the ambulance, they cleared his airways and stabilized him. His heart stopped beating while he was being taken to the hospital, they performed cardiac massage and gave him an adrenalin shot. Once in the hospital, I believe he was immediately taken to surgery since there're no records of any treatment in the ER. They relieved the pressure from the brain hemorrhage and the internal bleeding in his rib cage. Stitched up his head, and put his leg in a cast. So far, so good. He was stable and normally he would wake up a few hours after the surgery."

Kyoko listened intently to the briefing. "But he didn't." She bit her nails. "Why?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell, Kyoko. Maybe If I see his chart? There are a few additional notes there that might help me say what happened." Kanae answered in a tired voice.

"I see." Kyoko sighed. "Well, thank you Moko-san, I owe you one."

"Kyoko, are you okay?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you found out that your ghost isn't in fact a ghost. Now that you know Ren's alive, it got much more complicated than trying to help him cross over."

Kyoko paused for a moment, she didn't have the time to process all of this. At first it was about making sure he wasn't dead, but now that they all know that he's alive, what should they do?

Ren was taking it much better than she'd expected. Either that, or he was still numb from the shock. He spent the evening silently sitting on the pink armchair. He didn't make any sarcastic remarks, bad puns or silly jokes. Hell, he didn't even ask what their next step is.

"It'll be alright." Kyoko finally said.

"I'm not asking about 'it' I'm asking about you! How are you taking this?" Kanae snapped.

"I'm not." Kyoko chuckled feebly. "Not yet." She didn't know how to take it, this wasn't exactly an everyday occurrence.

Kanae let out a deep sigh. She didn't say anything for a moment before she softly spoke. "I'm here for you, you know? You can call me whenever you want to talk."

Kyoko smiled, she knew how awkward Kanae must've felt saying that. "I know Moko-san. I'll call you. Good night."

Kyoko sat on her bed. Her expression at the moment matched Ren's. They both seemed quite lost and they, in fact, were. Everything seemed so unreal this morning, but after Kanae's words, it sunk in. Tsuruga Ren is still alive. And at the same time he wasn't. His soul was out of his body which was in a comatose state and they had no idea how that happened or how to undo it. It wasn't about completing a bucket list or finding a 'light' anymore. It wasn't about helping him cross over to the realm of the dead. It was about … what in earth was it about, now?

Well, trying to get his soul back in his body for one. But how exactly did it leave it in the first place? That's what she just couldn't-

"Oh…"

"What?" Ren spoke for the first time that evening, intrigued by her appearant realization.

"Well, I was thinking how your … soul, managed to escape your body." She said. "Kanae said that, according to your medical record, you had a cardiac arrest when you were in the ambulance. The paramedics managed to fix that, but what if that's how you ended up like this?"

"You forget one thing!" He said. "I was out of my body way before the ambulance arrived, if my heart had stopped then, then I'm sure I would have been declared dead on the spot instead of being taken to the hospital."

"I realize that, what I'm saying is, that perhaps you were supposed to get back inside your body once you were stabilized and out of the OR, you see? Like once your body was well enough to take you back in, but what if your heart failure, caused you to stay stuck outside. Your body thought it was dead and closed the 'portal', the way your soul would take to get back in." She said, making Ren look at her like she was a lunatic.

She huffed, feeling a bit like an idiot. "Look, I realize how this sounds, but how else would you explain it?"

Ren looked at her, contemplating her question before letting out a sigh of his own. "I don't know. I'm not sure about anything anymore."

"And more importantly, why didn't you wake up from your coma?" She asked.

"Didn't you just say it's because my body thinks I'm dead?"

"No, I said that was the reason your soul got stuck outside. Medically speaking, you should have been up shortly after you got out of the OR. You were stable, which means your body would have had no reason to keep your soul trapped out, it would've known that you weren't 'dead' anymore and allowed it to get back in and once that happened, you should have woken up a few hours later." She explained.

Ren laughed weakly, after listening to her theory. "This is … one hell of a mess!" He said, putting his head on his hands. "And frankly, I don't know what to do."

"I do." Kyoko said, making him snap his head up to look at her. "We're gonna pay your parents a visit!" She declared with a wide smile.

"We're-WHAT?!"

"You heard me!" She said. "We'll visit your parents."

"Wh-How exactly is that going to make any difference?" Ren questioned, panicking slightly.

"Well, who would the doctors keep up-to-date of your condition? Your parents!" She reasoned. "We need to know why you didn't wake up after the surgery, so we're gonna go ask your parents!"

"Wasn't that mentioned in the records?"

"Not everything is mentioned in the official record. Some things are left out, such as notes and speculations. If a doctor guesses something without confirming it, he doesn't have the right it put it in the medical record. However, stuff like that can be found in paper charts. Or better yet, he could have told something to your parents."

"Well, if that's the case why don't we just sneak in my hospital room and take a look at that chart!"

"Do you think I can sneak into every hospital in the country? For starters I don't have an Id I can borrow for the hospital you're in, and I'm sure I won't be allowed to visit you, since there's no way of confirming I'm in any way related to you, and even if I were, the doctor would probably not tell me anything due to doctor-patient confidentiality."

Ren sighed and closed his eyes with a pained expression.

"What's wrong?" Kyoko asked, getting closer to him.

"My parents… let's just say that we haven't been in good terms lately." He said. "In fact, I haven't seen them in two years."

"Wh-Why?" Kyoko frowned, her eyebrows wrinkled in confusion.

"Dad and I had a disagreement when I was in my last year in law school." Ren took a shaky breath before resuming. "He wanted me to work in his firm, I wanted to build my own career, independently. We had a fight and I moved out. They tried to contact me after that, but I was too stubborn and refused to talk to them thinking they were trying to convince me to go back."

"Ren." Kyoko spoke with a gentle tone. "You've been in an accident and currently are in a coma. I'm sure the last thing on your parents' mind right now is a silly argument from two years ago."

"Yeah, well I'm not so sure about that. In fact I wouldn't blame them if they didn't even visit me."

"Well, then you have nothing to lose do you?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'll be the one visiting them, it's not like they can see you, right? What's the worst that can happen? You find out you're right and earn the right to tell me 'I told you so' or you prove me right and see how much they're worried about you."

Ren looked at her, thinking about her words and trying to find a counter argument, but when he couldn't find any and when she fixed him with her determined look he caved in. "Fine, do what you want."

That night, Mogami Kyoko didn't sleep. She stayed up, thinking of how things had turned out. They had agreed to go visit his parents in the morning, since it was going to be Saturday and her boss had phoned her earlier in the day to say he was taking care of the pharmacy himself, something about a control check or whatever. She kept thinking how she would approach Ren's parents. How does one usually address the parents of a person who had been in a car accident and was still in a coma? No matter what Ren said, they must be devastated. Adoptive parents or not, he said they tried to contact him after their disagreement, that means they still cared about him, right? So it would only be natural that his current states would break their hearts.

She thrashed in her bed and turned to see what time it was on her phone, only to find Ren staring at her.

"Can't sleep?" He asked, his face was illuminated by the light of what seemed to be an electronic device.

"Yeah," She sat up, pulling the comforter closer to her. "Now that I think about it, you said you never sleep. What do you usually do at night?" she asked him.

"I usually stare at your sleeping face until sun rise." He said, idly.

Kyoko's eyes widened. "That's not creepy at all." she said, her voice laced with sarcasm which made Ren chuckle.

"Just kidding! I usually play on your phone since turning the T.V on might wake you up and the light from your laptop would make your mom suspicious." He said, waving the electronic device -which she now recognized to be her phone- in her face.

"Hey! So that why the battery's always dead in the morning!" She narrowed her eyes at him, before smiling slightly. "I was starting to think I need to replace it."

"So why can't you sleep?"

"I was thinking about your parents." She said. "What are they like?"

Ren hesitated before putting down the phone and turning to face her. "My mother is a drama queen." He said, earning a snort from Kyoko. "And so is my father." He added, making the snort turn into a chuckle.

"My mom's really beautiful, she never seems to be aging. She's a wedding planner, ironically enough since she married my father, the divorce lawyer." This made Kyoko smile widely. "She's very stubborn and capricious, always gets her way." He smirked. "Kinda like you!" looking at the ground, he kept going. "My father is one of the strongest men I've ever known, but he never won against her. She's probably his only weakness."

"Tell me about your dad." Kyoko smiled, sinking lower in her bed.

"Oh, he's this vicious attorney in court, super intimidating and very serious. But once he's home, he turns into this huge goof ball." Ren suppressed a laugh. "He's a doting dad. The worst thing you could do, is ask him about me, he'd spend hours going on and on describing this unrealistic creature with features that don't even come close to what I'm like. And he's so fun to be with, he'd turn a tedious day into an adventure, no sweat."

Kyoko smiled wider, thinking how much Ren must love his parents. In his mind, they were perfect, you could tell from the way he smiled as he talked about them.

He kept telling her about them, and threw in a couple of stories from his childhood making her laugh at times and coo at others. They kept going until sunrise, neither of them feeling the time pass.

"Wow…your house is…big." Kyoko swallowed at the sight of the huge mansion, Ren had said that his father owned a law firm so she'd expected them to be rich, but this was way beyond what she had imagined.

"You should see the inside, it's a freaking maze I got lost a few times when I was a kid…" He said, standing beside her as they faced the entry gate.

"How does one get lost in their own house?"

"I was eight and we had just moved in, my parents didn't own this place since the beginning." He said, smiling proudly. "They had to start from the bottom!"

Kyoko smiled. "This actually gives me hope for my and Kanae's clinic dream." She said, making Ren encouragingly pat her on the shoulder.

"Alright, so let's revise our plan one last time."

Last night, they had agreed to tell Ren's parents that she was his friend. He told her a few facts that she can use as proof. This way his parents would trust her and share the information they need.

"I've told a lifetime's worth of lies ever since I've met you!" She had said.

"It's for the greater good." He retorted, quoting her words from before.

Without much delay, Kyoko pressed the interphone button on the wall and waited.

"Who is it?" A female voice inquired.

"Hello, my name is Mogami Kyoko, I'm a friend of Ren's, I was hoping to speak with his parents?" Kyoko said, nervously.

"Hold on." The woman seemed to inform someone of Kyoko's presence before she buzzed her in.

At the front door, Kyoko and Ren were met by a beautiful blond lady -who didn't seem older than someone in their mid-thirties- and a blond man, who seemed to be aging just as gracefully.

The woman hugged Kyoko and said "Welcome, sweetheart." That took Kyoko by surprise, and as the woman pulled away she noticed how pale she seemed, she had dark circles under her red rimmed eyes, probably from crying and the lack of sleep. The man seemed to be more composed if not just as tired as he nodded with a kind smile.

Kyoko bowed and greeted them. "Good morning, Hizuri-sama."

"Hush now, any friend of Ren's is not allowed to be formal around us, just call me Julie and he's Kuu." Ren's mother scolded.

Ren looked longingly at his parents, his eyes tearing up. He hadn't expected to see them this way. Any doubts he had from last night now vanished as he saw how they treated Kyoko. His parents ushered her to the living room and asked one of the staff to bring them tea.

Kyoko nervously clenched her hands in her lap. She looked up at them and smiled. "I should

Introduce myself properly. My name is Mogami Kyoko, I've been Ren's friend for less than a year now." Technically, it wasn't a lie. She was indeed Ren's friend and they had met well under a year. "I heard about his accident and I went to the hospital to visit him, but I wasn't allowed in. They said only relatives were allowed to visit him." Kyoko took a deep breath. She wasn't even acting, talking with Ren's parents wasn't easy, especially since she felt like she was deceiving them. "I was hoping that maybe you'd tell me more about his condition?"

"First, Kyoko-chan, you would understand that we would want some sort of confirmation of your relationship with our son." Kuu said, trying to sound as polite as he could.

"Kuu!" His wife scolded.

"I'm just being careful, honey. She understands, right?" He looked at Kyoko expectedly.

"Of course!" Kyoko smiled. "Ren had confided in me about how things currently were," She started, she realized speaking of such matters might seem rude, but it was the only thing she could think of to make her and Ren seem close. "He told me that you haven't spoken with each other for a while because of the argument you had about his career, he said that he regretted his stubbornness and that he missed you." She smiled gently at both of them.

"I did not!" Ren yelled.

"He did, he really seemed like he missed you a lot." She added, making him blush in embarrassment.

"He did?" Kuu said, with a shaking voice.

Julie started crying quietly. It really broke Kyoko's heart seeing them like that but she knew that it was necessary.

"Yes."

"What do you want to know sweetheart?" It was Kuu who said this, to Kyoko's surprise, hugging Julie with one arm.

A/N:Well, well, well look who made an appearance XD Did you guys like this chapter? Do you have any theories regarding what's to come? I don't wanna make what I write about reviews, but they do motivate me to write and what you guys say sometimes inspires me even, so talk to me guys!

*Okay people, I just made that up xD if there is indeed such a law in Japan I don't know about it (and tbh I'm too lazy to research it XD)

Kris: XDDDDDDDDDD lmao you guys are so adorable, like almost everyone's waiting for Ren to wake up so that he would woo Kyoko and get together with her XD Now, I'm not sure what you guys want for the progression of the story but I'm planning something that would make 'em wait a bit longer so buckle up kids, we're a couple of chapters away from the next arc! (yes, there will be another arc XD) Thanks a lot for the review, Kris!