Endlessly: Doki Doki Literature Club Oneshots

Flatline (Sayori/MC)

I used to hate hospitals. In my young mind, they were nothing but a torture dungeon full of eerily smiling people and the overwhelming scent of disinfectant. Seeing a hospital scene in a movie was enough to induce stress and send beads of sweat down my forehead. And the day my appendix thought to act up was one of the most terrifying of my life as a child. And I had to go to the hospital, the place where happy dreams go to die, to get it fixed.

I grew out of that fear, eventually and thankfully. Hospitals still intimidate me to some degree, though not enough to express it. Maybe because they're always to clean for my tastes, or that the smell of that cleanliness always seemed to sting my nostrils. Perhaps it was the massive size of every building associated with medicine, looming and tall and wide, a maze of rooms and sickness. Or maybe it was simply the fact that something was always going on in a hospital, and that something was usually wrong.

Terribly, terribly wrong.

That, I think, is exactly what I didn't quite fully understand as a child. I was mortified of being the person in the bed, needles in my arms and tubes down my throat and up my nose, a monitor next to me tracking the life that was left within me. That was a scary thought, if course; it's reasonable for anyone to be afraid of that.

But that was only half of it, maybe even less than half. A fear of death is understandable, yet unjustified. Death is release, it is freedom. No matter one's religious beliefs, death breaks you out of the prison of life and pulls your drowned soul out of the waters of your dying body.

But to lie on the other end of the spectrum and to sit at the foot of the deathbed of someone you love, to quiver and quake with apprehension and terror at the inevitable, praying against the odds that they would be okay...

Then to watch the monitor next to them gradually slow to a dull stop...

That, that was the pain most unbearable to anyone.

That was something I could never understand.

Until now.

I was starting to hate that sound of that stupid monitor and it's relentless audible pulsing. But it was beautiful, too, in a sick and twisted way, because it was the only thing that let me know that she was still okay.

I adjusted my position on the chair and gripped Sayori's hand just a little tighter. My eyes traveled up and down her resting form for the umpteenth time within the last five minutes. Her free arm lay limp at her side, an IV needle stuck into her wrist. Her coral hair was spread out across the pillow in shocking disarray. Her eyes were closed, crystal blue irises shelled away from view. A respirator mask was strapped across her mouth and nose, inducing the slow and feeble rising and falling of her chest.

I began to think how beautiful she looked in that blue polka dotted hospital gown, and, really, how beautiful she looked in everything. And even more so, how stupid I was to have not seen it before.

How had I not seen it?

Her parents had left town yesterday morning, leaving Sayori home alone and I with the sole duty of ensuring she was up and ready for school on time. Having prepared myself for the day an hour earlier, I headed over to her house and let myself in. I knocked at her bedroom door. Nothing. I tried again. And again. And again.

Still nothing.

Left dumbfounded at how she could possibly sleep this heavily, I pulled her door open and...