Disclaimer: Not owned by me, of course.
Author's Notes: Originally written as a birthday present for Kilerkki. Finally ran across it again and decided to post it here. Requests are practically the only way I'll write romance—but even then, it'll almost never be fluff. Particularly for pairings where someone is doomed. You have been warned.
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Coloring Silence
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ANBU members should be used to visiting the hospital (or the morgue) by three months into their service. Comrades lying still beneath white sheets are as common a sight as the blood sprays that accompany severed limbs.
Yuugao will never forget what Hayate looks like this time.
The fluorescent light bulbs make what visible skin there is blue-tinged and waxy. It is the skin of someone dead of hypothermia or drowning. She can make out a vein (crooked and greenish-blue and still) on the back of his left hand. There is no red-blue visible, and for that she is grateful.
Yuugao was gone on a mission for two weeks, and she is both relieved and angry for not being here sooner, for not being by his side.
Watching the tube drain yellow pus and blood from his right lung is torture enough—she doesn't know what she would do if she saw what he was before.
There are dark circles under his eyes, so dark they could be bruises. Tiny plastic tubing snakes over his sunken cheeks and disappears in his nostrils. Yuugao wants nothing more than to kiss his lips, but Hayate is busy kissing something else: a thick tube shoves his lips apart, jamming past his teeth and back down the darkness of his throat.
She only dares to grip the railing on his bed. If she touches him, he will break apart.
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There are fewer tubes and wires and machines, but two dozen are two dozen too many. Hayate is not as blue this time, but the drainage from his lungs is still a seeping yellow-red.
The medics claim he has regained consciousness twice—each time he woke in agony. They won't let him wake now—he is so doped up that he'll test positive on drug screening tests for the next month.
But he is breathing. And that's what Yuugao watches him do.
The rise and fall of his chest is the barest of movements, but the most suspenseful she has ever seen. It takes nine seconds between each rise and each fall and every time she expects that he won't make it to that next rise. Once, it takes eleven seconds and she is pressing the emergency call button and shouting for someone, anyone, to make his breathing normal, to keep him alive. She is not satisfied until the harassed medics have proven to her twice over that Hayate is in no more danger now than before this hiccough in breathing.
Once they leave, she moves back to his bedside and brushes a finger along his cheek.
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The tube that drains his lungs is no longer a necessity, but it is a frequent companion. Hayate briefly flirts with consciousness, and sometimes Yuugao is there for the spectacle. She always takes his hand then and watches the pain and confusion and drugs in his eyes until they close again.
Sometimes he tries to mouth things at her, around the tubes down his throat, but it makes him look like a dying fish and she can't ever decipher them anyway, so she tells him to be still. Miraculously, he does as she orders and falls back asleep.
The medics talk to her and tell her everything that happened. How they can't cure him, and how he'll have to come in for regular treatments or else he'll run the risk of drowning on his continuously dissolving lungs.
When she goes back to his bedside, he is awake. He struggles for a moment, and she takes his hand.
This time, when he mouths I love you, she understands.
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-End-
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