Chapter Text
Ranmaru hates hospitals.
He hated them long before he landed his ass in the ICU; long before he totaled his car and consequently, totaled his life.
It’s the smell, he thinks. Antiseptic and piss and tears and the weird rubbery-cottonish smell of scrubs. It makes him sick.
It’s also the sounds. Steady beeping of heart monitors and the crying of someone who just lost their loved one and the screaming of someone in immense pain.
The point is, he hates hospitals. Hates them and their pristine white floors and their never ending supply of hand sanitizer and their false promises.
On some level, he knows they’re probably trying their best.
On another, more prominent level, he doesn’t care.
Ranmaru sighs.
His room is boring. White walls, white floor, white sheets, a leather recliner next to his bed, and some weird modern art piece hanging on the wall that’s basically just a blue square with a white splotch of paint in the middle.
And, of course, the whole being in a coma thing is pretty boring, too.
He’s not stupid. When he first “woke up”, five days ago, he saw the tubes and wires sticking out of his body and immediately understood.
It took him a while to remember what happened.
The accident was the result of a simple mistake - his own fault, really - turning too fast into an intersection. The other car had been going too fast to stop.
Simple. Stupid. Mistake.
No one has visited him. Ranmaru’s parents have been out of the picture for years, and his friends probably don’t even know he’s here. The only constant is the teal-haired nurse who visits him five times a day to make sure he hasn’t died yet.
Ranmaru stares at the ceiling. So far, he’s counted 37 tiles, and 358 holes in each tile, making for a grand total of 13,246 holes in the entire ceiling.
Ranmaru hates math almost as much as he hates hospitals.
“Morning, Ranmaru.”
The teal-haired nurse walks in with his clipboard, leaning over Ranmaru’s body to check the monitors and such.
Briefly, Ranmaru catches a glimpse of his name tag and realizes he’s never bothered to find out his name. Before he can read it fully, the nurse moves.
“Same as always.” He sighs when he’s done, and pats Ranmaru’s arm gently. “Sheesh.”
And quick as he came, he’s gone, leaving Ranmaru alone again.
He groans loudly, knowing no one can hear him.
“He’s kind of an asshole, huh?”
Ranmaru sits straight up - or he thinks he does, it’s hard to tell with the whole coma thing - and is greeted by a girl standing at the foot of his bed.
She’s pretty, he observes.
Wearing a pair of jeans and a cute white blouse, the girl looks to be about his age. Eighteen or nineteen; twenty at most. Her orange hair is chopped in a strange, uneven cut, and falls just below her shoulders.
He wonders if it feels as soft as it looks, then blushes.
“Wait.”
It hits him like the car that had landed him in the hospital only days before.
”Can you hear me?” Ranmaru asks, bewildered.
The girl’s gaze falls on him. Her eyes travel their way up his body, and he feels like an item being inspected in a grocery store.
“Of course I can hear you.” She says, putting her hands on her hips. “Why wouldn’t I be able to?”
Ranmaru is completely dumbfounded. The first time he woke up, he had screamed himself hoarse trying to get someone’s, anyone’s attention. Then he’d turned, seen his own body below him, and screamed some more.
It didn’t matter. No one came.
”I’m…”
Dead, he wants to say. Basically dead.
”You’re in a coma, yeah.” The girl tells him. “Not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal.” He scoffs. “Who’re you, huh? A hallucination? Somethin’ in my head?”
“Oh. I guess it’s rude to not introduce myself.”
She walks closer, stopping at his side. This close, he can smell an overwhelming scent of strawberries. It reminds him of the perfume samples Anzu used to force him to try when she had a job at some weird soap shop.
His heart aches. Poor Anzu. She must be worried sick by now.
”I’m Sara.”
Sara gives him a small smile. She does not offer a hand for a handshake, which he finds odd, but he doesn’t know if he could touch her anyways.
”I’m Ranmaru.” He replies. “So, you’re not just a really pretty hallucination, then?”
He blushes deeply when he realizes what he just said, but Sara only laughs.
“No. I’m as real as you.”
Real as me? And just how real is that?
”I guess it’s nice to meet you, Sara.” Ranmaru finally says. “Sucks that it’s like this.”
Sara blinks at him. Her eyes are wide, and a strange shade of purple that he’s never seen.
“Yeah. It sucks.”
They’re both quiet for several moments. Sara stares intently at the bed, while Ranmaru tries to look at anything that isn’t her.
”If you ain’t a hallucination,” he finally says, “Then what - who are you?”
Sara fiddles with the edge of her blouse as she speaks.
“Think of me…as a guardian angel. Here to keep you company.”
Ranmaru snorts out a laugh.
”Guardian angel? Seriously?”
He’s never believed in a god. God with a capital G, the gods of years past; any sort of divine power. Ranmaru Kageyama believes in the cruelty of the world and the work he can do with his own hands, because those things are guaranteed. Those things, he can count on.
“Oh, you’re not the first skeptic.” Sara says with a light laugh. “Met an ex-cop once who thought I was just the result of too many late nights and coffee pots.”
Ranmaru runs a hand through his hair and sighs. He feels oddly naked, though he’s wearing a hospital gown. The bandages he always kept wrapped around his arms are back - not on his physical body, but on this projection of himself.
“What am I?” He whispers, looking down at his hands.
They are his hands - the same hands he’s had his whole life - but they’re wrong, somehow. There’s a strange transparency to them, as if he’s looking through a foggy window.
“You’re you.” Sara explains simply. “I’m sure I could find the scientific terms, if you’d like. But the simple truth is that this is you, Ranmaru. Your mind is running and your body isn’t.”
Ranmaru shifts uncomfortably.
”So, this is like, astral projection?”
He remembers seeing that in a movie or something, a long time ago. Some strange, obscure ghost movie that he’d watched alone in his room at 2am and couldn’t sleep after.
”It’s whatever you’d like to call it.”
Sara sits on the edge of his bed, the sunlight coming in through the window making her hair glow a bright yellow.
“You’re stuck, Ranmaru. It’s simple.”
Out of nowhere, a coin appears in between her index and middle finger. It’s silver; sunlight deflecting off of it.
“A coin has two sides.”
Sara flips it between her fingers.
”And humans always place their bets on one side or the other.”
She balances it on her thumb and flips it. With one swift move, she snatches it out of the air, catching it between her index and middle finger once more.
“But there’s an in-between, Ranmaru.”
Her other index finger runs along the ridges of the coin.
“And that’s where you are, right now.”
Ranmaru reaches out to touch the coin, but Sara keeps it out of his reach. She smiles at him again, this time a little amused.
“I’ve never been great at metaphors.” He admits, retracting his hand to rub the back of his neck.
It’s true, but he completely understands what Sara just told him. He wishes he didn’t - the implications are too much for him to handle.
Just a nicer way of saying half-dead, Sara.
Sara laughs and tucks the coin away.
”What I’m saying is, don’t place your bet just yet.”