Chapter Two - Human Monsters
"You're going home with a girl." Arata grumbled from his seat. watching Yuugo pack his bag.
Yuugo stopped what he was doing and raised a delicate, dark eyebrow. "Are you jealous, Arata?"
"Of what?" His voice was a little too loud. "No thanks! I've got… things to do."
"As long as I don't catch you and your things in elite servers, I don't really care," Yuugo told him as he walked out the door. Arata sputtered after him and Yuugo tried hard not to roll his eyes.
His sister had been in a technology related accident. His father ran a virtual reality login internet company. It was obvious he'd know a lot about technology as a result. And Arata didn't get his brand new hoodie from flipping burgers or transcribing emails. And he didn't get it for those things either.
But that wasn't his business and so long as he didn't find those people snooping in Kamishiro Corporation's files and not-so-innocently getting into his world and ruining it, Yuugo honestly didn't really care much what Arata was doing. They were only classmates, half-assed friends. And he liked it that way. Friends were for people who didn't have nosy, snooping, mocking women trying to sleep with his father. For people who understood friends and allies.
As he walked out the door, he passed by Ami, who was staring off out the window with a forlorn look on her face. He paused with a frown. His rival, if you could call her that, was nice and well-meaning and rarely looked sad. It was weird to see her look even remotely down.
"Aiba-san?" he said softly.
She turned to him and smiled without even thinking about it and that made him awkwardly, twistingly uncomfortable. "Yuugo-kun," she said. "Going home?"
"Hospital, actually," he said, wincing at how that came out.
Her face didn't fall exactly, but her mouth twitched downward. "Oh. Could you check on Takumi-nii for me? They still won't let me go."
Yuugo felt her words hit him with the impact of a freight train as guilt shoved knives under his nails.
"Of course," he said without really being sure he said it. Yuugo, visibly uncomfortable with the raw gratitude she gave him in her now older, exhausted face, hurried away.
He had forgotten, like an idiot. Her brother and his sister had been in the exact same accident.
The hospital never really changed.
Sure, there was a vending machine now, and the people changed every day. Some of the nurses were new and the technology had changed. But in the end her sister was still sleeping in that bed. Alone.
Sure, she had grown taller, her cheeks sunken in and more IVs in her arms. They changed her regularly, let him help wash her and keep her body from falling apart too much. But she kept sleeping.
On the very bad days, the ones where he was the most lonely and his father's new secretary was holding on a bit too close, he wondered why they didn't pull life support.
He hated himself for wondering because of course dad cared.
Right? He had to. They were all he had left. He had to care.
Still, it felt different going in with someone else. Katou-chan had lost most of the shine in her eyes by now. She followed him and smiled obediently at the nurses but that was a lie. It was a lie that Yuugo told often and very well.
Still she didn't ask a lot of questions and let herself be led into the ward. His sister had had her own room on a nondescript floor once. With more cases of… whatever this was, occurring every year, there was no way to keep it quiet and no way to hide them all.
And thus, the EDEN Syndrome Long Term Ward had been built. Not the best name but the most snappy. the most, well, accurate. If Yuuko wasn't here, he would never have access, not even as the son of one of the heaviest funders of the hospital. But she was, so he did.
"The protocol is to allow one free visit before paperwork," he said as the elevator continued its climb upward. "Following that it's determined who wants to see or not because most people don't. It's easier and less of a fuss, since it's not a contagious disease."
"People often think they're ready for tragedies and pain when they're not." There was something to be said for how firmly she said that, without much proof on the matter. But she had a voice that spoke from experience and the words hit him in the chest in an ugly way.
Yuugo nodded to them anyway and leads her out of the open elevator. The ward was still under construction, with room for more beds and glass in between their loved ones and them. But it felt much bigger than it was, more empty. As always, Yuuko slept on in her own bed with no one checking on her. There had been no change before after all. Next to her was Aiba Takumi, also asleep. They both didn't look like they'd grown. Rather, it was like they'd stretched, their bones rumbling on with cell growth and multiplication and so on, or something.
"Hi you two," he said quietly. "Aiba-san apologizes for not being here. Your mom and uncle are still determined, you know. I haven't seen Father here in awhile either. Kishibe-san occupies a lot of his free time. It's kind of scary." He kepts his voice low, dimly aware of Katou-san looking through the victims one by one around him. "You would make school a lot less boring, Yuuko. All the boys would be after you, probably a lot of girls too… Arata would hate you. You'd be better at algorithms than he is."
He kept talking for a while; he can only come once a week now without getting rumors and such. When he finishes, he turns to see Katou-chan looking at one of the beds. He keeps his footsteps noisy enough as he approaches and she turned to look at him with those dull, tired amber eyes.
"He told me he would be here when I talked to him," she said, gesturing to the bed. Yuugo risked a glance and saw a rather small, harmless looking teenage boy with brown hair. "He said they were taking him away from home."
"EDEN syndrome patients aren't conscious," Yuugo recited by rote.
"Oh no," Katou agreed. "He's not really conscious. He's not in his body. He's in another one. But he knows what caused this to happen. He saw EDEN syndrome's cause. It was a monster."
Kato Juri regarded Kamishiro Yuugo with such ferocity he could almost imagine a lion. "And it kept calling your name."