Dust and Memories

Hospital Rooms

It had been a long day for Roderich. He had gotten up before the sun to make it to the recording studio for the ungodly time slot the orchestra had scheduled, and had played all day with only one break for lunch. Needless to say, he was ready to be home.

He had not yet showered, but he had eaten, and was wrapped up in a blanket in the corner of the couch with a book in his hands. He hadn't had much leisure time since the move, and he was savoring the little bit of peace he had. 

That was until the phone rang, jolting the musician from his own world. Quirking a brow, he untangled himself from the blanket and set his book down after carefully marking his page. Who would be calling at this time? He wasn't expecting anyone...

The number on the softly glowing screen of the landline shocked him to his core.

It was Basch.

Instantly, worries flooded his mind, and he felt himself jump to the worst possible conclusions. What if it was Lili, or Ms. Zwingli, telling him that Basch was dead? What if they had been attacked? What if Basch was sick?

Taking a deep, steadying breath in hopes to decrease the adrenalin, he picked up the phone. What he heard on the other end was completely unexpected.

He could hear tears in Basch's gruff voice.

"Roderich?" The Swiss asked, clearing his throat in a futile attempt to make his throat sound less hoarse.

"I'm here, Basch."

Fifteen minutes later, Roderich had picked Basch up in his sleek black Lexus, and they were zipping to the hospital as fast as the speed limit would allow. Basch didn't speak to him or look at him, gazing intently at his hands folded in his lap. It wasn't a malicious silence, or a cold silence. It was a silence full of worry, like the eerie quiet that follows a hurricane.

Every once in a while, Roderich would steal a brief glance at the man beside him, wondering just what kind of desperation had driven the normally stubborn man to give him a call. Whatever it was, Roderich wanted to soothe it away from him.

The silence between them was only broken when Basch asked the cheery blonde woman at the front desk for his sister's room. She looked it up, and directed them with a beaming smile, though her sharp, catlike eyes followed them to the elevator.

They hurried through the stark, clean halls to Lili's room, and Basch didn't even knock, bursting into the room, before stopping so suddenly that Roderich ran into him.

Lili was laying on her back in a hospital bed. A mask covered the lower half of her face, and the many tubes branching off of it made it look like a monster of some sort. An IV was connected to the pale, near-translucent skin of her arm with a snakelike tube.

She looked so frail... Her hair, once bright gold, was like patchy corn husks about her pallid, sallow face, and her already small form was almost skeletal.

Roderich caught Basch as he sank to the floor, and gently guided him to the small bay window overlooking a garden cloaked in night, where they sat together, and Roderich allowed Basch to weep into his shoulder for the first time in eight long years.