Everything or Nothing

Maybe I Just want him All to Myself

Chuuya wakes up in the morning to the warmth of sunlight coming in through the window shades, his face scrunching up as he snuggles deeper under his covers—but hospital blankets are never actually that warm.

Finally, he cracks one eyelid open—however reluctantly—and the first thing he sees are camellias, sitting in a vase on the table beside his bed. Chuuya has gotten plenty of flowers before, but...well, they were always get well flowers.

These aren't that.

Whether he likes it or not, his lips quirk up into a small smile.

Eventually, he forces himself to sit up, stretching his arms over his head.

He hasn't actually been outside of a hospital in three weeks. The first week after his attack, then the two weeks after he was transferred...

And sure, it's not like he's actually going to be out and roaming the world, but it still feels a little less confining and depressing than a hospital bed.

Which also means that he gets to wear normal clothes again, even if he technically doesn't have any here right now, Dazai said someone they were meeting with this morning would be bringing something for him—which, Chuuya will admit, he thought it was a little weird, but he's just ready to wear something that doesn't have an elastic waistband.

For now, his only real task is to shower before they arrive—and it's depressing, that such a simple thing is so daunting now. He didn't feel it yesterday—because he has good days, and he has bad days—but today isn't a particularly okay one.

Just lifting his arms over his head to wash his hair is monumentally difficult, his upper body wracked with tremors as he fights the urge to just sit on the shower floor and wash his hair. And he knows he could, that it's been thoroughly sanitized, but the idea of it just grosses him out and makes him feel like a senior-fucking-citizen, so he pushes himself, to the point where he's shaky and exhausted by the time he steps out, forcing himself to pull his hospital garb back on before collapsing into the arm chair beside his bed, and he figures out that when he tilts his body to the side and rests his arm against the arm rest while he's brushing his hair, it isn't as exhausting.

He still feels like his arms are about to fall off, but hey, he gets the job done.

You did have an actual heart attack. A voice in his head reminds him softly.

Did you expect to feel normal?

He doesn't know what he expected, but he also knows that he's supposed to peak, and then decline. That was how Mori explained it.

In about two more weeks, he'll have recovered from the attack as much as he can, and then his heart is going to begin the slow process of failing until he has his next surgery.

Which he may or may not survive. Mori reluctantly explained the other day that because of the recent strain on Chuuya's body—his odds aren't as good as they were.

So...If his next two weeks are as close as he ever gets to normal again...how is he going to deal with that?

Chuuya is silently contemplating that outcome when there's a knock at the door, and he immediately straightens up, trying to act natural as he tosses the hairbrush aside, like he isn't struggling to perform basic tasks. "Come in!"

Unfortunately for him, the one person who he can't pull one over on is the one who walks inside.

"Good morning," Mori sighs, picking up Chuuya's chart from the end of his bed as he starts to look over his changes in the last twelve hours. "Feeling any change, today?"