Conflicted (Brothers Conflict)

Chapter Nineteen

Natsume left for work making sure to tuck me back in under the covers before he left as I was apparently combating demons in my sleep and had thrown the covers off of me and managed to knock over all the pillows keeping my leg propped up. I fell back asleep and was dead to the world until the early afternoon.

"Evie?" A soft almost feminine sounding voice sounded next to me and soft manicured hands lightly shook my shoulder.

My eyes fluttered open and I hurriedly rubbed at the crusty bits stuck to my eyelashes trying to keep my eyes glued shut. Hikaru was leaning over me looking concerned. How did he get in? He was taking his stalking too seriously; did he learn how to pick locks?

"Hikaru, what are you doing here?"

He was dressed in men's fashion today with his long auburn hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. The look suited him, though I was starting to think he could pull off any look without trying. "We were supposed to be having an interview." He reminded me, his gaze flicked to my leg propped up on a mound of pillows, teetering slightly as if it were about to slip off. "Perhaps we should go see Masa-nii. I think you might be worse off than I thought."

"What are you talking about? I'm fine." I grumbled as I struggled to sit up. My body felt strangely heavy, lethargic and warm. Tossing the blankets away from me, I shakily pulled myself into a sitting position. The room began to spin once I was upright and I hurriedly snapped my eyes shut. That wasn't a good sign. Perhaps I'd somehow concussed myself and the doctors were only concerned with my bleeding injury and didn't realize something else could be wrong.

Hikaru frowned slightly before pressing one of his soft well-manicured hands to my forehead, "You're running a fever."

That explained the dizzy feeling when I changed my elevation. "I'm fine." I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

Hikaru caught my unbandaged wrist in his hand, "Evie, you're not fine-."

"Want to see how not fine I am? Even in this condition I can still kick your ass. Let me go please." I growled.

Hikaru released me, watching me carefully, "Hm. Is this part of your hero complex? You have to do everything for everyone else, but people aren't allowed to help you? Does accepting help from others make you weak in some way?"

"What?! I don't have a hero comple-.!"

Hikaru cut me off as he burst out laughing at this, "Evie-chan, that's laughable. You have the biggest hero complex I've ever seen, you're like a comic book character. Taking it upon yourself to clean up the streets, fight crime and teach at risk citizens how to defend themselves. You've been running yourself ragged for months, it's no wonder you're running a fever. Your body is telling you it's time to take a break. Pass the torch to your sidekick for a few days."

"I'm sorry, were you supposed to be interviewing me or were you just going to throw baseless wild accusations around hoping something would stick?" I glowered. "And I don't have a sidekick!"

"Oh? Then who's this?" Hikaru extended his phone to me, flashing a picture of me with my arm around Chase allowing him to help me away from the hospital.

"What the fuck?! You really are a stalker!" I paled. Damn! I was letting him dangle me on the hook again, I had to turn this around I had to throw him off his game. "The resolution looks too good to be a phone, you use a professional camera with one of those peeping tom lens'...the kind that can snap photos of people through windows. I'm learning quite a lot about you."