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It was too bright.
At the moment, nothing else registered. It was too bright. Reflexively, his eyes narrowed even from how barely they’d just creased open, and a pained breath caught in his mouth -- or rather, it would have, could he have coaxed any sort of sound from the raw, tender mess of his throat. He felt like he’d tried to drink a sand dune but inhaled it instead. Swallowing hurt. Blinking hurt. Existing hurt.
The shrill chirp of medical equipment garbled in his ears like he was submerged in water, the heart monitor at his side a rising staccato of increasingly impatient cries for attention, and panic jolted through his body like a hot wave when he realized that his throat was so sore because something was still in it. He tried to lift his hand to reach for...whatever-it-was, to pull the offending blockage out of his esophagus like base survival instinct was screaming at him, but he simply didn’t have the strength; at his side, his fingers flexed and trembled feebly, and the lack of physical response infuriated him. Unreasonably so.
At his side, the heart monitor was growing raucous.
There was a voice -- no, two. Two voices. Both female. Something about that realization made his stomach sink; he’d been expecting someone else. Someone taller, colder, rougher around the edges. He supposed that couldn’t be helped. The first voice was unfamiliar, gentle yet somehow commanding, a quiet and almost throaty sound that resonated in his half-drowsed ears and made him feel like it would lull him back into torpor. But the second voice jerked him back out of his sway immediately, high-lilting and panicked and intimately familiar. The one person he’d never wanted to see him like this.
“Mn -” It was all the sound he could muster, his chest heaving with the exertion, his stomach twinging and burning as the muscles there tensed and spasmed. His eyes watered and threatened to spill over, but he couldn’t tell if it was from the pain or not. I’m so sorry. He couldn’t let her see him hurting -- couldn’t let her see him so broken and useless. I’m so damn sorry.
“Tenmei!” There was a metallic clatter, what must have been a chair scraping backwards along the tiled floor as its occupant flew to her feet. “Oh my god, Tenmei, sweetheart, talk to me, say something --”
“Miss Kakyoin!” The other voice again. It must have been the attending nurse, he only barely realized. “Please, his condition isn’t stable enough yet!”
There was a pause, then a rustle of fabric...then, the unmistakable sound of choked sobbing. The heart monitor chimed in with its own quickly-rising chorus. He couldn’t stop his own tears from coming, stomach twisting and buckling with exertion. At his side, unfamiliar hands lifted his wrist to adjust the housing of the IV seated in his vein; the nurse made a quiet noise in what must have been concern, but he could hardly process it. The room was growing so deliciously dim again, sensation fading away as one last low breath hiccoughed from his throat before he slid into the sweet, painless reprieve of unconsciousness.
It was dark, this time. It was dark, and it was cold, and he hurt. He wanted the nurse to come back, to do whatever it was she’d done before that took the light and the sound and the pain away and just let him sleep. The hollow pangs in his stomach, though, told him exactly why he’d awakened. How long had it been, after all, since he’d last eaten anything? He didn’t even know how long he’d been in this room, much less how much longer before that he’d been --
Realization impacted Kakyoin as if he’d been slapped, and he fought to keep from choking on the tubing still laced down his throat. How long had he been in surgeries? Had they induced a coma? Was that why he was so bleary, why it was such an impossibility for him to actually focus on anything? Drawing in a long, slow breath with the aid of the oxygen tubes strapped to his nose, he forced himself to be still, to swallow the mess of nerves he was certain would otherwise leap out of his throat and splatter against the hospital floor. Panicking would get him nowhere. He knew this. He needed to compose himself.
Amethyst eyes peeked tenderly open, blinking to clear the sleep away before slowly scanning the room around himself. Was he alone again? Ah -- no. She was still there. His mother, folded in around herself in a tiny hospital armchair, her eyes red and puffy, her lips curled in a deep-set scowl.
Just like that, his resolve crumbled again.
An almost-strangled sound left him, and his mother’s eyes were on him in a flash; she pulled herself to her feet, quieter this time, and took a few tentative steps towards the hospital bed her son was laid out atop.
Something tried to leave his lips. Perhaps it was another apology. Perhaps it was a call of her name. Over the ventilator mask, it was impossible to know. The frown on his mother’s lips twisted and distorted as she worried one corner of her mouth, her hand gently cupping one of his bruised and bandaged temples before skimming down to rest along the edge of his jaw.
“It’s okay. I’m here.” The resolution in her voice was admirable. It was clear where he’d gotten it from himself. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Instinct drove him to lean against her palm, his gaze lingering on her own with only the drone of the heart monitor and the low rasp of the artificial lungs at his side interrupting the silence. He wondered if he was back in Japan, or if they’d flown her out to Cairo. Was that why his father wasn’t here? It must have been so hard for her to get time off of work on such short notice. What a terrible thing for him to have done -- he’d created such an inconvenience.
He couldn’t bring himself to truly regret it, though. He’d stood atop that building in the dead-heat of Egyptian night knowing damn well the risk he was taking for the sake of his friends. He didn’t care. Kakyoin Noriaki had done what needed to be done, and nothing in the world could take that away from him.
His mother’s hand was so warm. Despite the hunger prickling in his stomach, he felt his eyelids fluttering again, and try to fight it though he may, there was simply no denying the siren song of slumber. The last thing the redhead saw before drifting off again was the tiniest hint of a smile on his mother’s lips, and for some reason, that made everything about this so much more worth it.
It could have been a day later, or two, or ten. He honestly couldn’t tell any more. Hours bled into one another and became little more than snippets of dreamlike recollection under the constant haze of morphine and opiates, but he honestly couldn’t bring himself to care so long as it kept the pain at bay.
The nurse had told him, that morning as they were removing the feeding tube and the ventilator, that it had been two months. He had indeed been in an induced coma. He’d had countless organs cut and stitched, some removed entirely and replaced with artificial counterparts. A portion of his spine had been exchanged for mechanical components. Both of his legs had been dislocated, and with how long he’d been unconscious, the levels of muscular atrophy were severe; it would take serious effort for him to learn how to stand again, much less walk. His clavicle had been shattered, and one of his forearms broken. He supposed that was why he hadn’t been able to move his hand before.
There was more, of course, but he’d requested it in writing. His mother was already looking squeamish enough. Besides that, even the knowledge that, between the Speedwagon Foundation’s backing and a generous contribution from Joestar Realty, all of the redhead’s medical bills were accounted for did precious little to calm her nerves -- she was, understandably, furious.
“I can’t believe that an adult could be so irresponsible.” Her voice was quiet, silently fuming. “How could he let something like this happen? How could he take you out of the country without even telling us? What is wrong with him?”
“...Mister Joestar isn’t at fault for this.”Kakyoin’s own voice was barely there, rough and scratchy after so long of being rubbed raw by plastic tubing, but his words were as proud as they ever were. “I went with him of my own volition.”
“Tenmei...?” His mother was fixing him with a glare growing quickly dangerous.
“I owed it to Jotaro, if nothing else. He...” How could he say this and have it sound remotely believable? Everything that had happened over those fifty days seemed so fantastical, so otherworldly and bizarre, that it might as well have been a medicine-tainted hallucination to his mundane, entirely normal mother. “He saved my life, and I refuse to let something like that go unrepaid.”
“That...that delinquent?” The word was spat like it left a sour aftertaste in its wake. “I had him leave the premise. He was threatening the nurses. He was smoking indoors, Tenmei! What sort of values have we taught you?”
Despite everything else, the hospital lights and the antiseptic stench and the godawful constant beeping at his side, a laugh burst from Kakyoin’s lips.
He immediately regretted it.
When he managed to stop clutching at his stomach a good five minutes later, he met his mother’s half-bewildered, half-livid gaze with a calm evenness that seemed to stun even her. “I’ll have to start at the very beginning. Otherwise you’d never believe a word of it. Is that all right...?”
“Kakyoin Tenmei, I am your mother. I think an explanation is the very least you could offer me.” She was trying so hard to stay mad, he knew, but it was failing. The hardness in her eyes was gone. The creases in her forehead were fading. It was only a matter of time until she would smile again, and right now, there was nothing he could think of that he wanted to see more.