BbF&ML: Miss a Day [censored version] (rough draft)
A Kingdom Hearts fanfic by Raberba girl
Summary: Xion gets sick, and neither Lea nor Isa can stay home to take care of her...
A/N: Ftr, here's the layout of the house: most of it is taken up by the kitchen and living area, which are like two halves of the main space. Off to the side is a vague t shape with the bathroom in the middle. The bedroom is on one side of it, which Lea and Isa share (Lea claimed the top bunk); on the other side is a tiny room which was meant to be a study or something, but the kids use it as their room to keep their stuff in. Only Xion sleeps there, though; Roxas sleeps in a loft over the living room.
Also, AkuSaiRokuShi don't have a car. I made a mistake in "Vacation Notice." *sweatdrop*
Btw, Americans, I used Celsius instead of Fahrenheit because not only does everyone else use the metric system and I consider the KH characters to be half-Japanese, but metric also makes more sense. XD 40°C is about 104°F.
o.o.o
"Xion," Lea called, knocking on her door for the fifth time and starting to sound impatient, "I'm about to barge in and drag you out of bed. You're gonna be late for school."
She didn't deign to respond this time.
"Xion-"
"Hey..."
Lea turned to find Roxas standing behind him, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist and still damp from a shower. His hair looked hilarious.
"I need my clothes."
"Don't say I didn't warn you!" Lea yelled at the door, then presented it to Roxas like an usher.
Roxas edged the door ajar, then pushed it all the way open when he wasn't yelled at. "Xion?" It was dark, and he snapped the light on. "Xion?"
She moaned in response and sluggishly rolled over in bed, turning away from the light.
"I need my clothes."
"Mmnh..."
Shrugging, Roxas went to dig his school uniform out of the closet, taking it back to the bathroom to get dressed. After a while, Xion made a feeble gesture, and the light bulb went dark again.
A little later, Isa marched in, flicking the light switch as he did so. When nothing happened, he frowned at the light bulb, then shook his head and took hold of Xion's shoulders, briskly trying to rouse her. "Get up. I don't care how late you went to bed, you are not missing school for some capricious-" He abruptly went silent, feeling at her face and forehead. "Lea."
Lea was in the doorway almost instantly. "What?" he asked in alarm.
"Get the thermometer."
"Is she sick?!"
"I will use the thermometer to decisively determine this."
"Xion!" Lea darted to feel her forehead and fuss over her. Isa rolled his eyes and went to get the thermometer himself.
Roxas, after being called over and restoring the light bulb's functionality, leaned on the doorframe and watched the proceedings with mild interest as he finished eating the last sausage.
"She has a fever," Isa confirmed. "It would be best if she remained home from school."
"Xioooon!" Lea cuddled her in distress. She lay completely limp and unresponsive in his arms.
"Will you stay home to care for her?"
Lea stilled, staring at Isa. "Uh...me?"
"Of course you," Isa snapped. "I can't possibly miss class, I've got two exams today and a group project to work on."
"But...I can't miss work, either." Lea hugged her tighter. "Rent's due at the end of the month, I don't know if we'll be able to cover it even if I don't lose any hours..."
Roxas made a mental note to pay for the next grocery shopping trip, and tried to think of how to do so without Lea or Isa finding out. They were starting to catch on that Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Tsukino weren't regularly 'sending over extra food.'
"I don't feel good," Xion whimpered against Lea's chest.
He stroked her hair and said to Isa, "Okay, here's the plan: you and me'll starve for the next two weeks, and Rox and Xi can eat at Mom's house. That way, I can miss work and still have enough munny for rent."
"You're so dramatic," Isa grumbled. He looked at Roxas.
Lea shot a pleading glance at Isa, noticed where his attention was, then looked at Roxas, too. Roxas fiddled with the grease-stained napkin in his hands and looked back at them, wondering why they were staring.
"Hey, Roxas," Lea said.
"Yeah?"
"This will surely end well," Isa muttered sarcastically under his breath.
"You're a big boy, you can take care of a sick person, right?"
"Huh?"
"It's easy. You just wait on her hand and foot all day."
"I'm supposed to wait for her foot?" Roxas said dubiously.
Isa straightened and said sternly, "You're a young adult who should have developed a healthy sense of responsibility by now, after helping to save the multiverse from a megalomaniac."
"Mega-what?"
"Therefore, I expect you to be diligent and attentive. This is not a vacation day."
"Could either of you kind of let me in the loop here?"
"You can stay home from school and take care of Xion, right?" Lea said eagerly.
Roxas considered this. "Yeah, I guess so." He went to change back out of his uniform into something more comfortable.
o.o.o.o.o
Lea and Isa were annoying - he wished they'd just shut up and leave.
"Check on her at least once every hour, okay?"
"Make sure she gets plenty of fluids, and get a fresh container periodically; she shouldn't be drinking out of the same bottle all day. There's juice in the refrigerator, and canned soup in the pantry."
"Make sure she's got plenty of blankets and a cold cloth for her forehead, okay?"
"Read the medicine labels carefully, and take note of the time whenever you give her a dose. Do not overdose her and do not give her anything you are unsure of."
"Call me or Sai if- I mean, Isa, whatever his name is-"
"Really, Lea...?"
"-call us if anything bad happens, okay? Call us."
"Only if it's an emergency, such as if her temperature rises above forty degrees or she stops breathing, or-"
"Don't tell him to wait to call us 'til she's dying, are you crazy?!"
"She's not dying, and we're busy, he's perfectly capable of handling-"
"Maybe I should stay home after all!"
"Just go AWAY!" Roxas yelled, shoving them both out the door. "I won't let Xion die. Okay? Go to work and school."
"Call us if-" Isa started.
"You sure you've got-?" Lea added.
"I didn't let you guys die," Roxas reminded them.
There was a pause. Then, to his surprise, Lea hugged him. "We promised we'd always be together."
"Yeah," Roxas said, hugging him back.
"...Flaming pants, you've gotten tall."
"Oh." Roxas looked up and found that Isa was gazing straight into his eyes.
"We trust you," Isa said quietly.
"Yeah. We all trust each other, right?" Just when Roxas was starting to wonder if he was supposed to hug Isa, too, Isa nodded and Lea clapped his shoulder and they both turned away.
"We are so late," Lea remarked as they walked off together.
"At least it's Tuesday. I would have missed a quiz if Xion had decided to fall ill a day earlier..."
"Good thing she was nice enough to get sick at a more convenient time for Your Royal Saixness."
Roxas rolled his eyes at their retreating figures and shut the door.
He watched TV for a while, then figured he'd better check on Xion. She was sleeping. He watched some more TV, but then he got bored. He sighed and turned the TV off, and listened to how quiet the house now was. "I'm hungry..."
Eating alone, he wistfully thought that he wished she was eating with him. He finally went into her room, and she looked kind of dead. "Xion?" He turned on the light. She lay perfectly still with her eyes closed, her face nearly chalk white, sweat beaded on her forehead and her hair tangled in damp strands against the pillow. The room kind of smelled a little. "You don't look too good..."
He started to put a hand on her forehead, and gasped at how hot her skin was. "Flaming pants-" Now he was struggling to remember all that stuff Lea and Isa had been telling him. "Blankets...?" She needed something cold for her forehead. Or, medicine...a thermometer...?
After realizing that he'd been standing here not actually doing anything for too long, Roxas dug for his phone.
Don't call us unless it's an emergency.
Was this an emergency?
Call us if she's not breathing.
"Sacred-" Roxas patted helplessly at her. Finally, his face practically touching hers, he figured out that she was breathing. "Okay...breathing..." He looked around. "What do I do first?" She looked uncomfortable, so he finally started wiping the sweat off her forehead, and fluffing her hair so it wasn't all stuck to her skin. She whimpered a little. "Xion, are you okay?"
The word slipped out of her mouth like a sigh. "'Lixir..."
"Uh...we don't...have any...anymore...remember...?" It didn't look like she heard him. "Oh, man." He looked around desperately and saw a bottle of medicine on the bedside table. "Ah!" He dove for it.
...The words were tiny, and there were a whole bunch of them.
Read all the directions carefully.
"Whatever, Saïx." He shook two pills out into his hand, because that was how many Lea had given her that morning. "Okay, you have to eat these, Xion." She didn't move or even open her eyes, so he finally slipped them into her mouth. She didn't chew. Then, just as he was wondering if he was supposed to move her teeth up and down, she made a strangled sound, spit out the pills, then threw up on him.
Roxas stared down at the vomit, feeling like he was gonna throw up, too. "...Help."
o.o.o.o.o
Lea's phone buzzed in his pocket, and he instantly dove into hiding as soon as he saw that the call was from Roxas. "What happened?"
"Xion threw up on me."
Lea tried not to laugh. "She must be feeling pretty bad."
"She wouldn't eat the pills."
"Eat the-? Roxas, those kind of pills, you have to swallow them whole. You can't chew them."
"...Oh."
"You'll have to get her to sit up and drink some water - if the pills are in her mouth at the same time as the water, she'll swallow them both together."
"Oh."
"It's probably easier if you do one pill at a time."
"Okay. She threw up on me."
"Poor Roxy." After talking him through most of the cleanup, Lea was discovered and had to hang up. "I hope they're doing okay..."
o.o.o.o.o
Pushing and pulling Xion around was kind of like playing with a huge, hot doll. Worried, Roxas worked hard until everything was clean and she'd eaten- swallowed some pills and she was sitting up more and covered with blankets and had a cloth on her forehead to try to make her not so hot, and now he was trying to get her to eat. "Come on, Xion. I was hungry, so you should be hungry, too. Eat the sandwich, it's good."
She turned her head away from the smell of peanut butter and whimpered.
"..."
Plenty of fluids.
"Um...I'll get you some juice, then, okay?"
He finally didn't know what to do anymore. He lay down beside her and looked at her for a while, feeling her misery in his heart. Then he got bored and wanted to play video games. But he was afraid to leave her alone now, so he carried her into the living room and settled her on the couch, and gave her some more pills because she looked dead again. Then he sat down on the floor and turned on the TV.
After a while, he heard her say in a gravelly voice, "Roxas?"
He paused the game and turned around and propped his arms on the couch. "Are you feeling better?"
Her eyes were open, and she'd kicked off the blankets. "I'm so hungry...do we have any crackers?"
"Crackers? I guess so." He went to look, and saw a cluster of soup cans on the shelf above them. "Oh yeah! Isa said there's soup." He put it in a pot on the stove to warm up.
When it was ready, he poured some into a bowl and brought it to Xion, who smiled wanly. "Thanks..." She only ate a few bites, though. "I'm tired," she murmured. Shivering, she put the bowl down and pulled all the blankets around her again, huddling under them as if she was freezing.
"You didn't eat very much..."
"I'm tired."
"...But you're still hungry?" She didn't answer. He found that she'd eat it if he put the spoonfuls into her mouth for her, so he fed her bit by bit until she whimpered and wouldn't open her mouth. "It's almost finished, anyway." He took the bowl back to the sink, fed her more pills, and went back to his game.
o.o.o.o.o
Most professors either ignored it when cell phones went off in their classes, or just made a brief, annoyed remark and kept going. Professor Higgins, however, notoriously strict, did not put up with it at all. His syllabus made it clear that anyone who missed more than two days of class would be dropped from the roster, and that texting during class, or leaving to answer a phone call, or being caught on unrelated Web sites during lectures, counted as 'absences.' He was known to follow through. This was why Isa had been very careful, since he could not afford to take risks. Being dropped from a class after the late registration deadline was simply not an option.
"My, my, my, Mr. Tsukino."
Isa closed his eyes in dismay and tightened his grip on the phone. He usually silenced it during class, but had left it on vibrate mode today, because of Xion's condition. Of course Roxas would choose this time to text him about something trivial.
"You are now absent today, Tsukino."
"Sir, my younger sister is ill and her teenage brother is the only one watching her, I needed-"
"Excuses, Tsukino?"
"...No, sir," Isa said stiffly, flashbacking unpleasantly to all the times he'd had to grovel to Xemnas. "I apologize."
"Very well. Then, since you were paying so close attention, perhaps you could summarize for us the significance of Lamar's 1912 discovery, which I just finished expounding."
'...If you knew what I have done in the past and what I'm still capable of, you would not be lording it over me so carelessly.' No. He cut off that line of thinking immediately, as always. He knew it could never lead him anywhere good. "Well, sir, from what I understand..."
Halfway through the period, it happened. Bzzt, bzzt, bzzt. Not a text message this time. To his horror, Isa accidentally knocked the phone into his bag when he reached for it. He frantically dug through books, folders, and everything else in there hindering his search; when he finally pulled out the phone, it was too late. Now at his side, Higgins snatched the phone out of his hand, accepted the call, set the phone to speaker mode, and said loudly, "Hello?"
'I hate you,' Isa thought. 'I don't deserve this.'
"...Isa?" Roxas's voice crackled uncertainly.
"This is Professor Ronald Higgins at Radiant Garden University," Higgins boomed. "You are currently interrupting my class."
"I have to talk to Isa."
"By all means, be my guest," Higgins said sarcastically, raising an eyebrow at Isa but continuing to hold the phone out of reach.
Isa sighed. "What is it, Roxas."
"I...I don't know if it's an emergency or not, but-"
"It doesn't matter now. Why are you calling?"
"I...I just...Xion threw up again, and she doesn't look good but I don't know what to do..."
Three precious, hard-earned course credits in jeopardy, and all for this nonsense. "Roxas-"
"My heart really hurts."
...Now, that was cause for concern. Roxas and Xion were still connected enough that each of them could feel the other's strong emotion. "You haven't been neglecting her, have you?"
"No! I put her in here with me and fed her and I cleaned up the last time she threw up and I've been giving her medicine and trying to keep her warm, or cold, or whatever she wants, but-"
"Which medicine?"
"The one on the table."
"Which table, Roxas?" Isa said in exasperation, too distracted to register that Higgins had put the phone back into his hand. "There was a pain reliever / fever reducer in her room, and Lea must have dumped half the medicine cabinet out in the kitchen-"
"The one in her room."
"All right, when was the last time you gave her a dose?"
"Right before I called. But she looks worse, not better."
Isa got a bad feeling. "What about the previous dose?"
"I dunno."
"What do you mean you don't know?" Isa stormed, rising to his feet. "Didn't I tell you to check the time?"
"Uh..."
"Number XIII, tell me exactly how much medicine you've given that girl since the time we left."
"...Are you mad at me?"
"I ASKED YOU A QUESTION."
"Fine, geez! I dunno, five times, maybe?"
"What?!"
"Or...four or...three...yeah, three. ...Or four."
On top of his folder which contained the course syllabus, and the words, "A third instance will be considered confirmation that the student wishes to drop the class," Isa pressed his hand so that it would stop trembling. He looked up to meet his professor's eyes and said to Roxas, clearly and quietly, "I'm coming home."
Higgins, who had been watching him inscrutably, showed no change of expression.
"What? But I thought you said you couldn't- Uh, I think Xion wants to talk to you."
"Xion?"
Her voice finally came through, hoarse and weak. "I want to..."
"Xion," Isa murmured, unaware of how much his voice had softened.
"Are you...at school...Saa-chan...?"
Isa closed his eyes in mortification at the intimate nickname being broadcast for the entire class to hear. Although successful in not collapsing into a puddle of shame, he dropped his head so that his hair swung forward around his face. "Yes, but I'm leaving."
"Class is...over...?"
"No, but it doesn't matter."
"You can't...miss class..."
"Forget what I said this morning. Your health is more important."
"No...I'm okay...just come home as soon as school's over...okay?"
"...All right," Isa pretended to agree, laying the phone down so he could start packing his things.
"Saa-chan...?"
"What."
"When you come...will you...watch ponies with me...just once...?"
Isa did collapse this time, sinking down into his chair because he was too horrified for his legs to hold him. "Xion," he said in a completely dead voice, "I will do whatever you ask, because apparently I was born to submit to your feminine humiliations."
"Oh..."
"I'll see you soon."
"Okay...love you, Saa-chan..."
Well, at least he was never going to set foot in this class again. "I appreciate your sentiment."
"When does your last class end?" Roxas asked.
"4:50."
"Okay..."
"She had better still be alive by the time I get there."
"O-Okay."
Isa hung up, swung his bag over his shoulder, thanked Higgins brusquely for the opportunity to learn from him this semester, and started to march out the door.
"Tsukino."
Isa halted on the threshold and looked back resentfully. 'Haven't you done enough?'
For some reason, most of the female students were staring at Isa with lit up faces, but he didn't spare much attention for them. Higgins was back at the board, about to resume the lecture, watching Isa. "I will see you in class on Thursday. I assume you weren't too busy texting to notice when I announced the assignment change."
"I - heard that, but-" 'Why does it matter? Haven't I been expelled from this class?'
"Very well. Have a good afternoon, Mr. Tsukino." Professor Higgins began scrawling more notes on the board. "Now, it's true that the discovery throws a wrench into the widely accepted Simulacrum Theory, but some leading authorities have argued that..."
Somewhat at a loss upon being offered such unexpected mercy, Isa bowed deeply without interrupting the lecture and then left. 'I can't...believe it... I still have a chance of finishing that course after all...' He smiled. Briefly. Then remembered that all fifty or so of his classmates, plus the professor, had heard Xion's end of that horrific phone conversation. "Sacred moon, do I want to?" Of course not, but he didn't exactly have a choice about the matter. "Why is it that you people seem to make a hobby out of destroying my life...?"
He rushed home as fast as he could. As soon as he opened the front door of the house, he saw Roxas kneeling on the living room floor, holding Xion close with one arm and clutching at his own heart with his other hand. Xion was curled into him, shivering and whimpering.
"Isa!" Roxas burst out in great relief. "I thought you weren't supposed to come until-"
"Is her condition better, worse, or the same as it was when you called me?" Isa demanded, dropping his bag and crouching to feel Xion's forehead.
"Worse..."
[. . .]
"You'll have to wait until we get you to the hospital," he said, rising back to his feet.
"N-No...I have to..."
Ignoring her, Isa dug his phone and wallet out of his bag so he could shove them into his pockets. "Do you have your phone and wallet on you?" he asked Roxas.
"M-My phone's here, but my wallet's in my school bag, I think-"
Isa had retrieved it, and had just found Xion's as well, when he heard Roxas calling him urgently.
[. . .]
Isa ordered, leaping to his feet and practically flinging himself across to his closet. 'Coat, coat, where's my wretched coat, is this mine or Lea's...?'
"What are you doing?" Roxas said in alarm when Isa stepped back toward the bathroom, zipping down his old Organization coat as far as he could without crippling himself.
"I'm taking her to the hospital now. We don't have time to go the long way."
"You're gonna take her through a dark corridor?!"
"Move." Isa started wrestling Xion into her own protective coat.
"Isa! You can't go through the corridors!"
"Get off me."
"I'll take her!"
"No." Isa stood up with Xion in his arms.
"Isa stop it! If you use the corridors, Xehanort might come back."
"If that happens, you have permission to kill me," Isa snapped, turning away.
"Isa!" Roxas shouted.
Isa gestured, and a dark portal opened before him. Xion stirred. "Saa-chan, no..."
Roxas rushed into Isa's path and pushed him back. "No. I'LL take her, give her to me!"
"Move, Roxas!"
"Please!" Roxas cried, finally breaking into the tears he'd been struggling against all this time. "I know I messed up and you can't trust me anymore, but it doesn't matter, does it? You don't even care about us, you don't care if Xion dies, so please please please let me take her and just call Axel or something, I really can do this..."
Isa stared in shock, no longer resisting as Roxas struggled to pull Xion out of his arms. "Roxas, I..."
"I won't mess up again," Roxas said, sniffing hard to try to quell the tears. "I promise."
"Roxas, it wasn't- Wait! Get your coat, you fool!"
Once they were gone, Isa ran, racing to the hospital as fast as he could and trying to text Lea at the same time. "STAY at work, you cant help. just come to hospital afterward. STAY." No reply, which meant that Lea had probably completely ignored him and was now running to the hospital, too. "You'll be just as useless there as I am, Lea..."
o.o.o.o.o
Xion would recover from the poisoning. Once the nurse left them alone, Roxas crawled onto the bed and curled up next to his twin, face hidden against her shoulder, as she held his hand. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
"It's okay," she whispered back.
Lea hugged them both and said, a little awkwardly but sincerely, "I love you guys. Don't scare me like that, okay?"
"Okay. And don't scare us, either."
"Heh, I won't." Then, wondering where Isa had disappeared to, Lea went to look for him, and found him in a waiting room. Isa was sitting in a chair in a corner - not studying. He had gone back home to get some schoolwork, but it simply lay on the seat next to him as he stared off into space. "Hey...Isa?"
Wordlessly, Isa picked up a textbook, opened it, and stared at the page as if he was reading it.
"Isa, cut it out. Come hang out with us."
"...Roxas thinks I don't care about them."
"Do you?" Lea said cautiously, and regretted it when Isa gave him an injured look. He sat down next to his friend. "What's going on?"
"I...did resent them at one point...I still do sometimes...they can be quite irritating..."
Lea rolled his eyes and prompted, "But?"
"...But they're my family now, and I-" Isa looked around and lowered his voice before continuing, "and I do care about them. They're not threats anymore, they're not nuisances...at least, not all the time...I see things in them now to admire and appreciate." A pause. "I thought they knew that. I thought it would be obvious that I would be upset if they got hurt."
"Well...sometimes, Isa...you have to, you know - talk to people. Not everyone's smart like me and can read your mind. Sometimes you have to go to those people you used to hate and tell them you don't hate them anymore, or they'll think you still hate them."
After a while, Isa finally got up and went back to the hospital room. Roxas and Xion were watching TV together. Isa flinched away from the ponies and came to stand by Xion's bed. She looked up at him. Roxas gripped her hand tighter and kept his eyes on the TV.
Isa couldn't meet her gaze while he did it, but he leaned down and kissed Xion's forehead. "I'm glad you'll be all right."
"Did you come home early from school?" she asked. "I don't remember very well..."
"Er...yes, I did."
She smiled at him. "You weren't supposed to."
He rested a hand on the side of her head to draw her close. "I know I've never specifically told you, but...I care about you, Xion. I was worried about you."
"..."
"Don't cry!"
"Okay," she sobbed. He sighed and held her until she calmed down, ignoring Lea smiling at them from across the room. Roxas was watching them, too, but quickly pretended he was engrossed in the pony cartoon again when Isa looked at him. Isa went around and laid a hand on the young man's shoulder, noting that he flinched. "Roxas..."
"What," Roxas said defensively.
"I'm proud of you, you know. You did well bringing her here - you were right when you said you could handle the task."
"..."
"And - you did well earlier, also."
Roxas stiffened in surprise.
"You did your best, and all will be well. Thank you, Roxas. We were right to trust you." He thought that this warranted some sort of response, and was displeased until Xion reached to stroke her brother's hair and Isa finally realized that Roxas wasn't answering because he didn't want to reveal that he was crying. 'Oh...'
Well, this was awkward. A little embarrassed at all the things he'd forced himself to say, Isa backed up and then turned to leave again, needing to be alone.
"Isa," Lea said softly as he passed, "thank you."
Isa mumbled something, he was not even sure what, and went to search for a good place to read.
The morning after Xion came home, it was quieter than usual, since she was resting in bed as Lea and Isa went about their morning routines, and Roxas was apparently sleeping in, since he wouldn't have to go to school again.
He did, however, have to be up before the men left, so as their departure time drew closer and closer, they paused more and more often to yell up at the loft.
"Roxas, wake up, we're leaving soon."
"Rox! Come on, buddy, up and at 'em."
"Roxas, I'm about to come up there and drag you down by force."
"Seriously, Roxas, let's go."
Lea finally climbed up to physically haul the sleeping teenager out of bed. "Isa!"
Hearing the tone of his friend's voice, Isa immediately veered over until he stood at the foot of the ladder. "What?"
"Help me get him down, I think he's sick."
"Not again..."
Xion, wrapped up in a quilt, came shuffling into the living room. She watched Lea and Isa carrying Roxas's limp body over to the sofa. "What's wrong with him?" she croaked.
"Must've caught whatever you have, Xi."
"Oh no!"
"He'll be fine..."
Xion shuffle-ran to her brother and knelt beside him, anxiously smoothing his hair out of his pale face. "Roxas...are you awake...?"
Lea and Isa were silent as they worked together, taking Roxas's temperature, finding something he could eat for breakfast that wouldn't upset his stomach, making sure he had blankets and water...
Glancing at the clock, Isa finally murmured, "Lea...I can't miss school. I truly can't. I'm already going to be late to my first class."
Lea looked at him helplessly.
"It will be all right - Roxas insists on paying the hospital bills, and you said we can make the rent if we buy nothing else until then. If we ration the food here carefully, and have the children eat at your mother's house..."
Lea smiled a little and shook his head. "Sometimes, I just need to know when to quit." He pulled out his phone. "Hey, Mom... Yeah. Yeah, everything's going great- No! No, wait, it's not, that's actually why I'm calling."
He expelled a breath. "Look, I..." His voice faded to a mumble as he spoke. "I know I said I'm a grown-up and I can take care of myself now, and that I can handle everything and I don't need you and I'm perfectly capable of running my own place and taking care of my own family and I don't need my mom to keep baby-sitting me and I'm not gonna be one of those people who make their parents raise their kids, but..."
Isa forced himself to be patient and not point meaningfully at the clock.
Lea sighed and leaned back against the wall. "Usually I can handle it, it's just...hard sometimes. And I've been working my butt off and I can make rent this month, it's just, both the kids are sick and I can't stay home to watch them because, well, then I won't make rent, and Isa is, you know, busy, too, and I just...it's only for maybe a day or two, just until the kids get better, and I- ...Mom, I need help."
Both their mothers came together. Mrs. Hayes went straight to hug Lea ("You should have called us sooner!"), who was past the sentimental mood now and reacted by simply whining. Mrs. Tsukino kissed her son's cheek in a distracted way and then went to fuss over the teenagers, cuddling Xion and cooing at Roxas.
"It's good to see you, too, Mother," Isa said dryly. "I'm leaving now."
"I gotta go, too, Mom," Lea said, breaking away. "Look, I - I really appreciate this. I'll never ask again, I swear."
"Lea, you are always my son, and you can always ask for help." She kissed him one last time. "Go on, love, we'll take care of things here."
"All right." Lea took one last look back, smiled, and left for work feeling lighter.
o.o.o
Author's Notes: I spontaneously decided to write a "sick fic" when I myself was sick. ^^; It got a lot longer than I expected, I kept getting ideas... LOL, poor Saïx is so fun to torment. XD I adore SaiShi...
I did look up this kind of poisoning; I definitely took artistic license, but still, you CAN die from overdosing on over-the-counter pain relievers. Please read the warning labels, follow the directions, and be careful when you're using any kind of medication.
Okay, so - I know I told some of you that I wasn't going to censor this story, and my reason for censoring anyway was actually not because of the sensitivity of the content. (And for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, there was a really awkward scene in this story that I was ANGSTING big-time about how to handle, whether or not to censor, how to post, etc.) I was very, very close to tacking the full version onto the end of First Blood, but at the last minute, I decided to just cut out the scene and group this story with the rest of the BbF&ML fics. The deciding factor was, yet again, me trying to write about things that I really have no clue about. *sweatdrop* Artistic license is one thing, but there was one element that could have been a really ludicrous mistake, and I didn't want to risk breaking the limits of plausibility, so...I ended up doing the easiest thing after all. *sweatdrop*
Basically, the scene that got cut out was where Isa & Roxas had to change Xion's clothes (because it never occurred to Roxas that people who've been drinking water and juice and soup all day will have to use the restroom at some point, and will need help doing so when they're sick...), and in the process, Isa discovered an alarming symptom that made him want to get Xion to the hospital ASAP. (They had a towel covering her, btw; neither of the guys actually saw anything.) Isa managed to get through the ordeal in a businesslike way, even though he was mentally going, "Whyyyyyyy meeeeee? DX DX Dang it Lea this is all your fault AGAIN" the whole time. Roxas, in addition to having zero sexual attraction to his sister, was also pretty worried about her, and feeling guilty about how he messed up and made her even more sick than before. Xion herself wasn't entirely lucid and was too sick to care. The VERY LAST thing I wanted was for people to jump to wrong assumptions, or to accuse Isa and Roxas of things that would have never crossed their minds. It's certainly an awkward situation, but situations like that happen in life when you're a caretaker, you know? :/