Joey, Tristan, and Tea walked through the doors of the critical care unit with worry and trepidation. The walls, a blank white, did little to comfort visitors of the hospitals most troubled patients. The silence surrounding them only emphasized the blank isolation that lay within.
A nurse at a nearby desk looked up when she saw the three teenagers walk hesitantly inside.
"Can I help you?" she asked, looking up from a computer. Her hands kept typing, regardless of where her attention went. The three exchanged a glance.
"We're here to visit our friend." Tea finally spoke up. "Ryou Bakura."
The nurse stopped typing. She picked up a book of patient records, and started flipping through them.
"Ah yes, Bakura. He was just admitted."
The three friends nodded.
"Normally, we only let visitors in one at a time, but since we're not very busy right now, I think I can let you three go in at the same time." She smiled. "As long as you promise to be quiet, and not disturb the other patients."
"We'll be very respectful." Tea smiled back. Tristan, and even Joey, nodded in response.
The nurse gestured to a pair of doors in the back of the room.
"Straight through that door. Bakura's room is the third on the left."
They turned, and followed her instructions. The inside of the critical care unit operated panoptically. A semicircle of rooms surrounded the center station, where doctors busily hustled between the two. A head nurse, meanwhile, could watch over all of the rooms at once. She gave little notice, though, to the three visitors.
Instead, a team of boisterous doctors captured her attention. The group of five specialists stood arguing around a microscope, their papers flying around with their dramatic gestures.
"There it is." Joey whispered, pointing to a room with Ryou's name taped to the door. They ignored the team of doctors, correctly fearing that they were arguing about Ryou's mysterious condition.
"… Poor Ryou…" Tea sighed, while Joey turned the handle and walked slowly inside.
The room was as sterile as the hallway, the dull white walls creating a very uneasy atmosphere. It looked more like a morgue than a place where people come to get better.
They silently slid into the room, so as not to disturb their ill friend.
Ryou lay on the bed, his thin frame draped loosely in a white hospital gown. For the first time, now out of his thick school uniform, the three friends saw how frail he actually looked. His eyes were closed, but he didn't appear to be sleeping.
A small clear tube brought fresh oxygen to his nose, while his chest rose and fell with labored breathing. The machines on his left beeped with each passing heartbeat, the monitor above his shoulder sketching jagged and uneven lines. At the same time, several bags of clear liquid dripped intravenously into Ryou's left arm. One was a nutrient solution. The rest were powerful antibiotics.
A ventilator machine had been wheeled in on his right, but it was not plugged in. Ryou was still breathing on his own, albeit weakly. It's presence, though, indicated that he might need it at any given moment.
"… Ryou?" Tristan finally broke the monotony of the beeping machines. "Can you hear us?"
The white-haired boy blinked wearily, and opened his eyes. He nodded slightly.
They followed quickly with a variety of questions, all at once. But Ryou couldn't understand them.
"How are you feeling?" Tea finally asked, her voice sticking out amongst the other two.
"… I'm… f..fine…" he managed to answer. It was the only response he ever gave when prompted with that sort of question.
He wanted to get up, so he wouldn't seem like a burden. He even tried to get up, but he couldn't muster the strength.
"No, man. You're not." Joey corrected him. "You're in the hospital. In the Critical Care Unit. You're not fine. Somethin's definitely wrong."
"… And the doctors…" Tristan paused. He wasn't sure if he should actually be relaying this information to Ryou. "… They're not sure what's wrong."
Ryou nodded weakly. He knew that already. He just didn't want to admit it. His yami had said it weeks ago.
"… o..okay…" he responded weakly, gasping for breath between his short words. "… I'm… I'm not… fine…"
Ryou turned his head away from his friends, listening to his own breath wheeze through his open mouth. His chest hurt. His head hurt. Everything… hurt. He thought about everything his yami had said to him, everything that they both had willfully ignored. Until now, that is.
"I… I think I… caught some…something… in… in the shadow realm…" he finally admitted, coughing fitfully.
Tea rubbed his chest as he coughed. She cringed as her fingers smoothed over exposed ribs. Eventually, the coughing fit quieted down, leaving Ryou gasping for breath. Tristan and Joey looked on, hardly believing that this was the same happy duelist they saw sitting in Kaiba's kitchen room just a few weeks ago. He was a mere shell of himself, if that.
"…I… I think I'm… going to… to be sick…" he whispered, trying to sit up.
Joey helped lift him slightly, enough for Ryou to vomit an uneasy quantity of clotting blood into a pink basin that Tristan had grabbed from the little table. He coughed again.
Tristan looked at the contents of the pan and fought the urge to vomit himself. The substance looked more like tar than blood, but it certainly didn't look like food.
Tea rubbed Ryou's back a little before Joey lowered him back down to the bed. The white haired boy coughed messily when his back hit the mattress.
"… He is really sick…" Tristan muttered to himself as he put the basin back on the table, trying to ignore its contents.
Ryou closed his eyes again, the beeping of the heart monitor slowing down as his body relaxed slightly.
Tea glanced up at Tristan worriedly.
"… We… we should probably let him rest…" she finally whispered.
Ryou made no acknowledgements that she spoke. Perhaps he actually had fallen asleep.
"You're right." Joey whispered back. He turned his attention to Ryou again. "You rest, buddy… We'll be just down the hall… if ya' need us."
He smiled, hoping it would give the sick Ryou a little enthusiasm.
"That's right…" Tristan agreed, also smiling.
Tea brushed his white bangs from his hot forehead before finally standing up.
"… We'll be back to see you again really soon…" she whispered.
Ryou was asleep by the time they snuck out of the room.
Outside, the doctors were still arguing. Joey closed the door quickly, so that their shouting wouldn't wake Ryou. As sick as he was, he needed to save his strength. Perhaps some sleep would make a world of difference for him.
Already three nurses tried to calm the discussion down, but it hadn't worked.
They simply kept shouting.
As the three teens walked down the hall, they could easily hear the conversation. And their fears were correct. The doctors were fighting about Ryou.
"It can't possibly be a new microbe… What do you mean it doesn't share all of the characteristics of an anaerobic bacterium? What exactly is it!"
"Where did the boy acquire such a disease?"
"Forget that! Is he contagious? Can this microbe be spread? If so, how? And who's already been infected with it? I propose we shut down this entire floor!"
"We've seen no evidence so far that it's spread to anyone except the boy!"
"We've seen no evidence that it's contained either!"
"It doesn't seem to reproduce on its own… but with each sample we took from the boy, there are more and more of these cells in his bloodstream. You explain that!"
"I wish I could!"
"Quiet! Please… you're disturbing the patients…" one of the nurses attempted to interrupt. But she found herself quickly outvoted.
"Get me another sample!"
"What other symptoms does he have? Can we treat them alone?"
"Does it respond to any of the known drugs?"
"We've already put him on vancomycin, a macrolide, and high doses of amoxicillin and aminoglycosides... But it's not having any immediate effect."
"What do you mean it's not having an effect?"
"The microbe seems to be resistant to all of those drugs. If we increase the dosage, they may reach toxicity."
Tea, Tristan, and Joey stood there for a moment, wishing they couldn't actually hear the conversation between the doctors.
"We don't have much of a choice."
"You sound like a bunch of imbeciles! They're almost to toxic levels!"
"Does it respond to radiation?"
"Get a sample down to the lab and find out!"
"Call the government. Maybe this is some kind of agent of biological warfare that got released…"
"We should shut down the whole floor!"
"We don't even know what it is, shut up!"
"You could just as easily be infected with it now too!"
"I've run samples on myself and a few of the nurses that handled the patient. They show no signs of the illness… I don't think it's communicable."
"I want all of you working on this. It must respond to something. Get your assistants busy on the problem right away!"
Realizing that the doctors could probably continue shouting for hours, they finally turned their backs and walked out the door. As they walked, one of the doctors burst loudly into Ryou's room for another sample of his blood.