Turns out I was right about the rain. As if sprinting across campus with a rather heavy dude slung over my shoulder wasn’t hard enough, now I get to do it while being blinded by the water in my face, fighting against the wind, and getting chilled to the bone.
Then again, this mess is my fault, after all, so maybe it’s kind of fitting. At least, it would feel that way if I wasn’t going to get punished enough already. My first instinct after knocking Hisao out was to hide in my room, but I realized that I was making the same mistake twice - Hisao needed help, and I wasn’t about to just leave him without it for the second time in a row.
As nice as it is to know that I’m doing the right thing, however, I still haven’t figured out what I’m supposed to say to the nurse. “Hey, I punched him in the head”? Probably not. I don’t want to lie when Hisao’s safety is involved, but I also can’t bring myself to just throw my hands up and surrender. Surely my lying won’t change how the nurse treats him, so it should be fine, right? I get off without any punishment, and Hisao gets to live. It’s a win-win.
Having decided, at the very least, that I’m going to lie about what happened, I come to my next obstacle - the door leading indoors, to a hallway with a door that leads to the nurse’s office. My hand still hurts like hell from that punch, I put way more into it than I should’ve, but I’m guessing that that’s the least of my worries right now.
I manage to slow down and reach for the door handle, fiddling with it for a moment as both the metal and my hand are wet. The adrenaline that kept me running all the way here is starting to lose its edge, so the process seems to take quite a while. Eventually the handle clicks and I swing the door open, then jump inside, almost slipping on the floor before making my way to the nurse’s office. It’s been a little while since I’ve been here - actually, I haven’t been since the first time I talked to Hisao. I wish I could laugh at that memory, but at the moment, all of my focus is being channeled into bursting through the door.
The nurse, wide-eyed, stares up at me for a second from his desk before quickly standing up and helping to take Hisao off my shoulder. I gather that we’re going to put him down on the examination table, and then I hear the nurse speak: “What happened?”
Well, here goes the lying part. “H-He fell.” Actually, that’s technically true. He did fall. After I hit him. The nurse doesn’t show any signs of objection, though - he’s focused on examining Hisao, checking on his heart, listening to his breathing, looking around to make sure he’s not bleeding. After only a minute or so, he breathes a sigh of relief, then turns to me. “Luckily, it seems like his heart is doing fine, and it doesn’t look like anything urgent is going on.”
“So... He’ll be okay?”
“He’s not going to keel over on us, but I need to do some more checks to make sure I’m not missing anything minor... Starting with asking some more about what happened. You said he fell?”
I try my best to look sad, which isn’t hard at this point. “Yeah.”
After a bit of silence, the nurse asks “So... Where?”
Oh, right. He wants more detail. I need to lie. Falling... People fall on stairs, right? Yeah, stairs will do. “We were going down some stairs from the library - we were supposed to study there, but it was closed - and he tripped and fell, so I carried him here.”
The nurse gives me a rather piercing look, and if I weren’t covered in rain, I’m sure he’d see me sweating. He raises one eyebrow. “You, of all people, were going to the library to study?”
I’m initially confused, but then feel rather offended. Is it really that much of a surprise? “Yeah, Hisao’s been tutoring me. Why?”
He shrugs. “Fair enough, I suppose.” As he turns around to examine Hisao some more, I hear him mutter something about a ‘miracle worker,’ but I decide to let it go. I’d rather stay on his good side, given that it’ll probably help me get away from this whole ordeal unscathed.
Now if only it were that easy to make amends with the guy on the table.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After poking and listening to Hisao for a bit longer, the nurse said that Hisao should be fine, though we’d have to wait until he woke up to be sure. We hoisted Hisao off of the examination table and onto the bed at the back of the office, to let him rest properly. I took a seat next to him and waited. The nurse had to mess with some stuff on his desk, and Hisao was out cold, so it got pretty quiet. Just as I was reaching the point of being unable to take it any longer, though, a first-year came into the office looking for the nurse. So he pulled the privacy curtains across the room, leaving him and his patient on one side and Hisao and me on the other.
So here I am now. Whoever it was that came in has left, and the nurse, occupied with paperwork, has decided to keep the curtains drawn. Looking down at Hisao, I can see that he’s still pretty wet; then again, so am I. Luckily, it sounds like the rain has stopped outside. It may still be grey and cloudy, but at least we won’t have to get rained on again. I hope.
I run my eyes from Hisao’s face down to his chest. His heart. The reason he gets sad, and the reason he can’t run, and the reason he’s here at Yamaku... I almost consider blaming it for the events of the past hour or so, but realize that it’s just one of many factors. His heart, my hand, the both of us coming here, him tutoring me, me running with the track team... Everything just sorta conspired against us. And ended up making today.
Then again, maybe that’s too short-sighted. Today doesn’t have to be an ending. Sure, we made some mistakes, said some things, did some things... But what’s a little fight between friends? It’s not like-
Movement. Hisao stirs, just a little. He’s waking up, slowly. One second it’s his head rolling a few degrees, then his eyelids flutter. I should be ecstatic, but something occurs to me: the nurse is going to talk to him about what happened. And I just lied about what happened. We’re going to need to coordinate.
As I catch glimpses here and there of the whites of his eyes, I lean down close to the side of his head and whisper “Hisao, are you awake?”
No response.
I try again, a bit louder, though still whispering. “Hisao!”
He groans, and rolls over a little. The nurse could easily have heard that. I have to act quickly. I grab his head and face it towards me, and the motion causes his eyes to jerk open, his pupils contracting as they adjust to the harsh light of the nurse’s office. Still, he’s looking me in the eyes. Good enough.
“Hisao, we were walking from the library, and you fell down the stairs, alright?”
He blinks a few times, his brain evidently still needing a little bit of time to wake up.
“Hisao, you fell down the stairs,
do you understand?”
He’s still confused, but he nods, slowly. At this point, I gently lay his head back down, wait a moment, and then exclaim “Hisao, you’re awake!”
As expected, this draws the attention of the nurse, who I hear get up, walk over to the curtain, and pull it aside. He stands there for a few seconds, looking at the newly-conscious boy on the bed. “I think ‘awake’ is a bit of an overstatement.”
He and I laugh, and Hisao manages to chuckle a little, then sit up. The nurse walks over to him, then turns to me. “Miss Miura, I need to do a few more checks on Hisao - could you wait outside for a few minutes?”
I nod and comply, walking outside and taking a seat on one of the benches in the hallway.
Luckily, it’s not too long before Hisao re-emerges; even more luckily, the nurse smiles and waves at the two of us, and warns us to “Be careful!” before heading back into his office. Hisao, his head drooping a little but his eyes fully awake by now, starts walking towards the door leading outside, and I follow, eventually catching up and falling in stride with him.
As we go outside, I notice that it has indeed stopped raining, though the sun is nowhere to be seen due to the overcast canopy above us. Hisao and I walk, side-by-side, towards the dorms, though neither of us is saying anything. I’m not quite sure what he’s feeling like at the moment - part of his poor posture and expressionless face might just be fatigue from what he’s just been through, but then, at least some of it might still be from resentment towards me.
I need to talk to him, but I don’t want to agitate any of that possible resentment - I have to be gentle. Especially with Hisao. He’s already been through so much.
Time, however, is working against me; we approach a fork in the path, and I stop, but he keeps on walking in the direction of the boys’ dorm. I said that I needed to be gentle, but instinct drives me to lunge out and grab one of his hands with mine, just to get him to stay, to talk for a moment.
He spins around, though, as if my touch has shocked him, and although he doesn’t try to pull away from me like before, his face stops me before I can get a single word out. His eyes, wide with fear, stare directly into mine. He’s shaking, nervous, afraid - afraid of
me.
Hardly able to comprehend, my grip on him fails, and my right arm falls limp by my side. Hisao withdraws the hand I was holding on to, takes a few tentative steps backwards, and then, after staring into my eyes for a second, he turns and begins to hurriedly walk away.
I’m not sure how long I stand there for, but by the time I return to my room, the sun has set. I change, I lay down in bed, and then stare at the ceiling, alternating between thinking too hard about my day and trying my best not to think at all.
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