"They are watching you, and they don't like what they see."

She froze, as if the words he had just spoken were a harsh slap to the face. Her eyes were wide as she just continued to stare at the man in front of her who possibly knew a lot more than she had initially thought.

Schneizel had already lost interest though, eyes losing their sharpness and perceptivity. He dropped her arm carelessly and yawned loudly, turning and laying on his side to face the wall. Right when his head hit the pillow, light snores could be heard emanating from the considerably huge man in the tea green hospital gown.

C.C.'s arm hung in midair where it had once been held in the blonde patient's rough grasp, her mouth agape as she tried to wrap her mind around what he had just told her. She snapped her jaw shut and lowered her arm to her side. C.C. moved closer to the thin hospital bed and grabbed Schneizel's broad shoulder with her two dainty hands. She opened her mouth, but then clamped it shut again before a single sound could escape her pale pink lips.

She did a mental face-to-palm movement. 'After what he just told me, the last thing I want to do is capture their attention by speaking. Well, that is if what he says is true…'

She needed to know. second option: shaking Schneizel and seeing if he would respond to that in the way she needed him to. Her grip on his shoulder tightened as she gently shook the large man into consciousness. He cracked open a single eye slightly and just lifted one of his gigantic paw-like hands and lazily swatted at the hands that she was using to shake him awake. She pursed her doll-like lips, the fear and anxiety no longer present on her face.

'Heh, he probably didn't even know what he was talking about when he said that. Yeah, it was probably just some fleeting thought that he decided to vocalize,'she assured herself without much confidence or certainty behind her own words.

C.C. ran wary fingers through her silky, lime green hair. This always calmed her a bit. And that was definitely something she needed: calm.

She watched as Schneizel slept, unsure of what she should do next. No one would understand her situation, not even Lelouch. As much as she wanted to say something to him about it, he was the last person she could ever talk to. Eh, but whatever. This was just another obstacle she had to conquer before she could reach her goal.

She sighed softly. 'Just one on a list of many,' she thought arduously.

Lelouch patted her gently and affectionately on the head. "Thank you very much for all of the work you put into helping me," he said kindly, flashing her a white, toothy grin.

Tianzi flushed a bright crimson red, unused to receiving praise. Usually she was just yelled at for being incompetent and or useless by Cornelia.

'This is a nice change of pace,' she thought as she reached over and grabbed the piece of paper that was slowly emerging out of the bottom slot on the printer. She briefly glanced over it before handing the thin sheet over to Dr. Lamperouge, who took it gratefully. He spun around quickly but then turned to face Tianzi again.

"Um, would you mind telling me if you noticed where my nurse, C.C., went?" he addressed the young nurse with a puzzled look slightly contorting his beautiful features.

Tianzi could honestly say that she was at a loss, and from the looks of it, so was Dr. Lamperouge. Suddenly his violet eyes lit up and he snapped his fingers in an "Ah that's it!" fashion. The young nurse before him tilted her head to the side ever so slightly as she also remembered that C.C. had gone off down the hallway to look for something.

"That's right! She went to get some pizza!" he laughed slightly at his forgetfulness.

"Oh, well, actually sir-" She tried to tell him that she had gone in the complete other direction than the cafeteria, but he was already halfway down the hall, files in hand and a glimmer in his eyes as he went to go retrieve his wayward nurse so that they could finally go and visit their new patients.

Tianzi sighed, knowing that her soft voice would never carry to his ears now. Her crimson eyes scanned the hallway to her left, the one that C.C. had gone down previously. Not seeing the green haired beauty anywhere, she decided to go and search for her herself, hoping that maybe that would earn her more praise from Dr. Lamperouge.

Tianzi jumped down from her high perch on the rolling chair and smoothed out the barely noticeable wrinkles on her bubblegum pink scrubs, observing the little duckies that were scattered across the satiny soft fabric. She stared appreciatively before giving a small, "Oh!" remembering that she was on a mission. With a determined look on her face, she bustled down the deserted hallway.

C.C. leaned up against the bleached white wall of one of the various maze-like hallways in the G4 wing. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she was pinching the bridge of her nose with her right hand, the left one supporting her right elbow. She was at wits end. The incessant squeaking had yet to let up, getting louder and softer and then softer yet, only to get three times louder again. No matter where she went, she could never quite pinpoint where the noise was originating from; constantly echoing off the walls of the hospital and the inside of her head. There was not much more of this that she could take.

The green haired nurse let out a loud breathy sigh, letting her amber eyes take in the things that she was surrounded by.

'Damn, how big is this place?' There was no real question in there, because she knew exactly how big the G4 wing was, and the entire hospital for that matter. However, where she was now was unfamiliar to her observant eyes. Not only was there the fact that she didn't really know where she was, but she was also completely and utterly alone. Well, except for that bothersome squeaking, but she didn't consider that company. At this point she even wished that Cornelia was somewhere nearby so that she had someone to listen to beside the little voice in her own head.

"Lelouch, where the hell are you?" she asked, not expecting to receive an answer considering the fact that she didn't know how far away he was at this point.

"I believe that I could ask you the same thing," a familiar voice responded, although faintly.

She brightened as he continued to talk to her. "I thought that you said you were going to the cafeteria to get some pizza. I have been walking up and down this place looking for you," Lelouch continued, somewhat angrily.

C.C. sighed. "One, I never said anything about going to get pizza. Two, I didn't even walk in the direction of the cafeteria! Three, I would rather eat a pizza drawn on a cardboard box with crayons by a five-year old than eat the crap that they serve here." She finished with a huff.

"Meeeyow! Kitty's got claws." She could hear him laugh at the little comment that he had made, betting that right now he was thinking that he was sooo clever.

"Anyways," Lelouch chuckled, "I'll be back down there in a second, so just wait there, okay?"

"Hey, Lelouch. Have you been hearing any strange noises?"

"Like what kind of noises? Why?" C.C. could tell that he sounded a bit worried.

"Oh never mind. And for absolutely no reason whatsoever, just making sure that you weren't crazy or something." She cut the connection before he could comment anymore, straightening up and walking down the hallway again. The pale yellow tiles seemed endless and the bleach-white walls were starting t make her dizzy.

The creaking sound was seeming to get closer, but at this point she knew that it was probably just going to get farther away in a matter of seconds.

Except it didn't.

It was still getting louder and the origin of it all was emanating from just around the corner. She stopped dead in her tracks.

Did she really want to know what it was that was disturbing her peace of mind but no one else's? What if it was something that she wasn't quite ready to face? Did she really want to know what this phantom creaking was that made her want to gouge out her ear drums so that she could be left to her own thoughts?

Fuck yes she did.

She glanced behind her quickly to see if anyone else was around. No one. Taking a deep breath she turned the corner that would lead her to what she had been seeking for the past hour. C.C. halted, mid-step.

'What the hell?...'

The squeaking also came to a standstill when she rounded the corner, the source of it staring C.C. right in the face. Well, actually, the amber-eyed nurse was pretty sure that whatever it was, it couldn't see. At least as far as she knew.

The first thing that caught our exotic charmer's attention was the bright white eyes that were staring her straight in the face, almost as if they were piercing into her very soul. They were pure snow-white, whiter than then walls they were surrounded by. It was like someone had come by and painted over the pupil and the iris of each eye with white paint, masking them completely. Then there was everything else about this person that just came rushing at her like a ton of bricks. The grey skin, lack of hair, slight build; thinness of the limbs and overall body, length of the limbs. It was not very hard to mistake who it was that she was looking at. Clearly this was one of her new patients, but there was something eery about the way the patient was staring at her intently, almost like they could see perfectly.

And which one was it? She tilted her head slightly to the side, her lime green hair spilling over her shoulder. The patient just continued to sit there, not moving an inch in the wheelchair that he or she had been placed in. The eyes that were in the long, grey face pivoted to the left, almost unnoticeably because they were clearly white all the way around, not even a single blood vein showing. C.C. turned to see if Lelouch or someone else had appeared behind her. However, there was nothing in the back of her.

Slightly puzzled, she turned back towards the patient in question, only to jump backwards and end up falling on her butt.

In the few seconds that she had been swiveled around, the grey skinned creature had wheeled up about two inches in front of her, not alerting C.C. in the slightest to it's presence. The white-eyed person tilted their head to the side ever so slightly, gazing at C.C. emotionlessly.

She suddenly felt something poking at the back of her mind, as if asking for entrance into her thoughts. The amber-eyed nurse expanded the range of her communication link, thinking that maybe, whatever it was trying to delve into the recesses of her mind, would be able to talk to her.

At first it was fuzzy, all she was getting was gibberish, and some random screams here and there. Her link was like a radio; if you had it tuned to the right station then you could hear what was being played.

She couldn't understand why, but all of a sudden, her mind seemed to be a bit fuzzy and disoriented. What she did know was that she was close to having everything tuned right, because now she could hear bits and pieces of sentences, not necessarily things that made sense, but things nonetheless.

"Are we still on for tonight?" Giggling somewhere in the background. "Of course I didn't forget, silly! I asked her yesterday, but she said she couldn't make it after, well, you know…" It was definitely a female voice that she kept hearing. That was the only thing she really knew though.

"Yeah I heard that they-" A bit of cheering followed. "Oh my god! And you said that they would never win! Now you owe me-" All sorts of different sentences kept stringing together, things that clearly didn't belong in the same context with each other were forming together.

"NO! SLOW DOWN! THERE IS A CURVE UP THERE!!" A lot of screaming followed. Nothing else of particular importance though.

C.C. leaned up against a wall, exhausted and her vision blurring along the edges. The patient in the wheelchair was still staring at her, emotionlessly. C.C. had a feeling that what she had just heard came from the mind of the person before her, presumably a woman based on the voice that she kept constantly hearing.

It was like tunnel vision now. She could barely see anything in front of her more that a few feet and her peripheral vision was shot.

'This must be what it feels like to be high,' she thought absently, letting the warm, soft feelings curl up around her. The last thing that she heard before her world went black was,

"Ha, I've got you now."

A/N: Ah, sorry for the wait. And yes, I know. Really suck-ish chapter. *cowers* Don't kill me! I promise that there will be some interesting things happening next chapter... and it will be longer as well.

Ok, I have a proposition for you, my few and far between readers. If I can get up to 50 reviews by the posting of chapter 5, then I will write and post (immediately) a totally new fic that is yaoi and Code Geass. It has basically nothing to do with this fic. You'll understand the 'basically has nothing to do with this fic' part after I post it, if I get up to 50 reviews. If I didn't appeal to you with the factor of yaoi, then I will give you a virtual cookie (the best kind of cookie!)

And, whoever reviews and gets my lucky number, I will dedicate the new fic to them XD (no guessing, I mean like that person reviews and happens to be lucky number something or other.) So, yeah. I have a lot of lucky numbers, but I do have a super special one. Whoever gets that one will have a choice between the Code Geass or a Bleach yaoi fic to be dedicated to them X3 Feel free to guess either of the couples

REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS! Gotta love 'em. So please leave them XD