Obsession (Ayano x Budo)

Chapter 24

It was night. The hospital room was submerged in darkness. The shadows, which hung over the row of hospital beds in a blanket of black, shrank away only from the window at the end of the room. Outside it, a half moon, like a broken disk dangling from the clouds, emitted a weak glow.

A second later, a silhouette of a head blocked the moon.

The window to the hospital room shuddered softly before being carefully lifted. The night air flowed from it like a cool, refreshing wave. As it did, a figure clad in black descended through the opening and stepped down onto the floor without a sound. The window was shut again, noiselessly, as if it had never been opened.

Ayano Aishi crept forward. She knew which bed she was looking for - the one right in the middle, shielded by a long floor-length curtain that obscured and curved around the occupant like an embrace.

She grasped a handful of the cold fabric, and pulled it to the side, stepping into the cubicle and letting the curtain fall behind her again. As it fell back into place, the small space inside was shut in the darkness once more as the moon's glow was blocked.

Ayano took out her phone from the jacket pocket and, with a click of a button, let the flashlight blast into bright life. The enclosed space was suddenly alight, and Ayano saw the occupant's face for the first time since that morning in the cupboard. It was Taro.

All at once, she staggered. Her eyes stared wide at Taro, taking in his face which was so horribly bludgeoned, and she had to force herself to shut off the part of herself that was screaming in horror.

The entire right side of his face, spread like some sort of horrible disease, was discolored into a deep, purple black. It was puffed too, and the smooth terrain of his face was disrupted by a patches of raw brown flesh, where it looked as if his the skin had been pushed and scraped across gravel. Her eyes continued unwillingly.

The hospital gown exposed his neck. Ayano almost wished she hadn't looked. His neck was striped with brown-purple markings that ran across the throat, obviously bearing evidence of strangulation. She struggled to look away from those fingermarks, and her mind's eye unfolded a picture of her imagination. She saw a hand slowly clamping around Taro's throat, then squeezing the life out of him while he struggled, gurgling, maybe, in distress.

She pulled herself out of the conjured image and shut her phone. The room was immediately cast back into the shadows. She didn't want to see him anymore, and waited for the blood jumping in her ears to normalize.

All around her, in the darkness, she heard the steady sound of heart rate monitors, of distant nurses' voices outside, and the low rumbling of the hospital machinery, which was buzzing like the shivering string of a cello. And yet, in the middle of this subtle cacophony, was the gentle rasping of Taro's lungs. He was alive. She zoned in on the sound of his breathing and watched the outline of his chest rise and fall for about a minute. She was suddenly filled with a great sense of gratitude and relief. I'm so glad you're alright Taro. If you weren't, it would have been my fault, and I don't know what I would have done. Truthfully, she knew what she would have done.

Ayano slowly opened her phone again, but this time, when the light filled the room, she turned her head away from Taro's face. Instead, she focused her gaze on the pile of documents next to Taro's bedside, which was a pile of papers on a clipboard. Patient Information. As quiet as a panther, Ayano slipped forward. Her fingers sifted through the papers, eyes scanning the lines of written words, waiting for something significant that would pop out... Heart rate, blood pressure, doctors notes, drugs taken and lots of graphs... and then, finally, there was the assessment of his wounds. Ayano's finger stopped flipping the pages and held it in place with her thumb while her eyes ran across the words-