'I like to pretend I'm okay, because when everyone thinks you're fine, for a little while you forget you're not.'
He doubled over, coughing from sore chords and aching oesophageal muscles. Harsh guttural breaths wracked his frame and he, in the face of her worry, grinned.
The blood stuck to the corners of his lips, marring his teeth and making him look quite grotesque.
Rin worried about her patients, but she never worried about any more than she worried about him.
They'd become friends, it was hard not to be with someone like him, but he could attest to the fact that just because he was likeable didn't mean that people stayed.
She was special.
He had violent bouts, he knew he did, and he shoved people away both physically and emotionally. He was broken somewhere and that therapist that saw him every day agreed, if not for the right reasons.
She assumed that he was suicidal. He let her think so because his real issues were far from easily fixable, might leave him in the hospital forever.
He needed, wanted to leave. If he had to lie, even if it didn't sit well with him, even though he couldn't really say anything anyway so technically it wasn't a lie, he'd do it.
His coughing had started when he'd begun screaming in his nightmares again. Because no sound came out, no nurse came running in to check on him.
He silently screamed till blood nearly chocked him and he had visions of drowning, before startling awake.
Rin found out on one of her night shifts and she hovered.
No one could hover quite like Rin.
He smiled fondly at her as she took his blood-stained shirt to the laundry bin, fretting at him and biting her lip in adorable anxiety.
I love her.
The emotion scared him, but relieved him too.
Everyone he'd supposedly loved before hadn't bothered to even visit him, but if it was her he knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that she would have sent flowers every day she couldn't make it in person.
She waved her hand in front of his face and brought him out of his musings.
"Are you alright Obito? I could get you a strepsil, I'm sure no one will mind."
He shook his head at her but smiled gratefully.
"You're so stubborn…" she muttered in fond exasperation. "Honestly."
She fluffed his pillows and handed him his regular medication along with a glass of water.
Swallow, drink, grimace.
Giggle, shake head, smile.
They'd done the same thing every time she gave him anything pill-shaped and Obito loved it. It was theirs, special and untouched no matter what else was to come.
"Oh, you need to hurry up and get discharged. I have a surprise, and I can't tell you if you're stuck here and can't come."
He blinked rapidly at her, eagerly bouncing on his bed and creakily swinging his legs to balance himself.
He could walk, slowly and shakily, but it was still walking. He'd never go back to the way he was before, but he was getting there.
Every day, he was literally one step closer to the man he used to be. Before silence graced his ears more often than yells, before catatonia became his favoured stance rather than constant fidgeting.
Before Rin alighted onto his little bubble and gently burst it.
She left his room a little while later, and as he sat trying to decipher her annoyingly cryptic answers to silent questions about her secret, a ring glinted ominously on the nurse' hand.