Superman
…
Mokuba sat on a cold, plastic chair right outside his brother's hospital room, nervously glancing back at the closed door, hoping to either hear the door knob click or actually see it open. For hours, that hope seemed to be pointless, because the door remained firmly closed, and what seemed like hundreds of doctors had entered, but none had come out.
He felt cold, despite the fact that the hospital was in reality way too warm for the average person, and was much too acutely aware of nearly everything going on around him. He heard every word the chatty medical staff gossiped at the nurse's station, smelled the peanut butter crackers a woman sitting about twenty feet crunched on, and somehow sensed whenever a door nearby was about to open.
Still, that door was never his brother's, and Mokuba's anxiety was now growing every second. He was about to go find some water when another doctor approached his brother's room, and Mokuba couldn't help himself-he whipped around and placed himself between the door and the doctor.
"Please," he pleaded, desperate tears filling his eyes. "People keep going in there, but no one's come out to tell me what's wrong. What happened to my brother? I need to know."
The doctor's mouth opened in shock for a moment, before he stepped back and gave Mokuba an earnest look. "I'm sorry, I was just paged for a consult. I'll send his primary out to speak with you right now."
Mokuba frowned. "A consult? Are you a specialist?"
"Infectious diseases," the doctor said as a couple interns appeared behind him. "We need to take some blood. I really need to enter, though, and like I said, I'll send the primary physician right out."
Reluctantly, Mokuba stepped aside, trembling with a fresh batch of anxiety. Fortunately, the specialist stayed true to his world, and within minutes, another doctor exited the room. This one was a petite young woman with wavy chestnut-colored hair and giant doe eyes. Despite her soft and gentle appearance, Mokuba immediately felt defensive when she glanced at the chart before looking at him-didn't she know what was going on? Was she a new doctor? How could he request another if she didn't know what she was doing?
The boy's rampaging train of thought was cut off when she called his name, and the world went quiet, albeit in a frightening way. He raised his hand.
"I'm Mokuba," he said, his voice shaking the slightest bit. "Why's there an infectious disease specialist seeing my brother?"
"He's taking a blood sample," the woman said gently, and ushered him to the nearest empty room. "Has he been out of the country recently?"
Mokuba shook his head furiously. "No, Seto hasn't had to go away on business for months...why? Is he sick?"
"That's what we're trying to figure out," she said, flipping through the chart before looking back at him. "To be perfectly honest, this isn't something I've ever seen before. His vitals are fine…his brain activity is at such a level that he should be awake. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was a perfectly healthy young man."
Mokuba slid down against the wall, rocking himself slightly to stop the trembling. He didn't know what do say, and he knew there was nothing he could do. The spasmodic sick, flipping sensation in his stomach fired up once again, stronger than ever. All these tests and all this uncertainty was the worst kind of déjà vu-and the memory of his brother's first coma slammed into his mind like a freight train through a glass building, along with another alarming realization.
The younger Kaiba had never been anywhere nearly as skeptical as his elder counterpart. At least, not after he'd experienced fairy tale-like horrors himself; in the same vein Seto couldn't bring himself to deal with magic and destiny and inconvenient coincidences on top of everything else he had to put up with in his life, Mokuba couldn't look past them. He couldn't ignore the things he'd seen –let alone the things he'd felt- like Seto could, and he'd learned to accept that when logic and reason couldn't explain something, then there was something greater at work. And usually something that ended up with someone getting hurt.
As if he were suddenly in some sort of trance, Mokuba pushed himself back up to his feet as soon as the infectious disease specialist and his intern entourage filed out the door, along with the handful of other doctors in the room. All of them were holding tubes of his brother's blood, and although Mokuba was sure he'd never seen so much blood before in his life, he remained stoic and motionless. The sole female doctor frowned and stepped forward, as if she were trying to gain his attention.
"You can go see him," she said quietly. "We'll let you know when something comes back."
"No," Mokuba said flatly, "Can't. Need someone else." He turned around and walked down the hall towards the elevators, leaving the final remaining doctor staring bewilderedly in his wake, completely mystified about what had just happened.