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Soul pushed the door open slowly and quietly as he could, Heart peering over his shoulder into the daylit room. The change in air pressure as the door moved sent a weak swoosh of bitter cold air directly into the hallway where the two stood, and though Heart shivered at his back and pulled his hoodie sleeves over his hands, Soul welcomed the change in temperature with silent contentment, easing the phantom ache in his head from seeing Mind fitfully resting through the worst of one of his migraines.
The Moon prodded Soul’s shoulder, reminding him of why’d they’d come in the first place; checking up on their Mind. The glass of water and bottle of painkillers in his hands served to help move him forward. They were useless to Soul until they got to their intended recipient, and by the looks of it, Mind would definitely be glad to be given both.
“Can you close the curtains a bit before I wake him?” Soul spoke with a hushed whisper, motioning to the window across the room with his head. “The sun’s gonna set soon and will be terrible on his headache when it shines in here.”
Heart nodded and complied without hesitation, carefully trekking across Mind’s spotless room with hands outstretched so that he could find his way. As soon as the other had begun pulling the curtains shut, casting the room into shade, Soul at last made his way into the room.
Moving forward with steps just light enough to be free of sound, Soul padded into the room and set the glass of water on the nightstand at Mind’s bedside before gently prodding the sleeping Sun’s shoulder.
He frowned at the soft sound of discomfort the other made, once again feeling the phantom sensation of a headache press at his skull brought on by his sympathy. Mind stayed still, not even acknowledging Soul and Heart with an attempt to look up at them or roll to face them, a testament to how bad off he must have felt. He did, however, make another small sound before speaking softly.
“Soul?” The aforementioned sat gently on the edge of the bed, peering over the blanket Mind had bunched in front of his face to try and see how he was doing to practically no avail. Heart nudged his way forward with his legs until he found himself at the bed, sitting down on the floor next to Soul and leaning his head on the comforter.
“The one and only,” Soul deadpanned with a reverent hush. “And Heart’s here too, I guess.”
Heart poked Soul’s ribs with a huff. Ouch. Drama queen.
“Brought you some water and painkillers, if you’re up for it.”
He phrased it as a choice despite knowing that Mind would not turn them away. Exactly as expected, Mind slowly lifted himself into sitting up, but slumped forward until, back of his hand pressed to his head, he had managed to lean onto Soul’s shoulder.
Soul allowed himself a soft chuckle, patting Mind’s leg before popping the lid off of the medicine and placing a few of the pills into The Sun’s hands, the cup of water following soon after.
It took a moment, Mind’s movements were lethargic and clumsy (very unlike his usual tendency to be stiff, methodical, and near robotic in his motions), but he took the painkillers with ease and drank about a fourth of the glass before handing it back with a grimace.
Soul pursed his lips, taking the glass and throwing an unsatisfied glance at the other before he could lie back down and shield himself from Soul’s gaze with his blanket.
“Didn’t drink very much. You sure you don’t want more?”
Mind shook his head and immediately regret the decision, Soul could tell.
“Nauseous,” he supplied with little more than a whisper, hand covering his eyes as if the darkness aggravated his head just as the light did. Soul sighed and shrugged, putting the cup back on the nightstand. Good enough for now, he thought.
“How’re you feeling, Mind?” Heart spoke up, hand reaching across the bed to find the other half’s leg under the covers.
“Unsatisfactory, to say the least.”
The Sun’s deep voice lacked any of its usual bite as he answered Heart’s question genuinely, falling back onto his pillow and shivering until Soul could help him pull the blanket over his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” Heart’s voice was barely audible, but in the silence so rarely heard in their home, it could have been heard from another room.
“Nothing to be sorry for, Heart,” Mind said sternly, but not unkindly before burying his face into the blanket. Soul nodded and placed a hand on Heart’s hair, ruffling the multitude of ringlet curls in a silent show of affectionate comfort.
Heart didn’t look convinced of Mind’s response.
They all sat in silence for a long moment, the only sound being that of a small clock ticking on Mind’s writing desk and the anxious shuffling of Heart where he sat on the floor. Soul just gently grazed his knuckle up and down Mind’s back, hoping that the contact would bring some sort of comfort to the other when there was little else to do for him until the pain meds hopefully kicked in.
It wasn’t until Mind shook with a particularly hard shudder and a genuine whimper of pain hit The Soul’s ears that he had realized he had let his thoughts wander far enough to leave him tuned out from the moment entirely. He perked up immediately, Heart doing the opposite and hiding his face, now buried behind his arms when he hugged his knees to his chest.
“Mister Sun?” Soul prodded the bedridden Mind’s shoulder again before opting to run a hand through his hair, combing the tangled curls away from where they obscured his face. Much to his surprise, his fingertips were met with heat equivalent to that of Heart’s perpetual warmth, yet worryingly unlike Mind, who’s skin tended to feel cold as ice near constantly.
This was…an unexpected find. Something wasn’t quite right.
“What’s wrong? Everything alright?” Soul tried to keep his voice devoid of worry.
Mind shivered and sniffed, rubbing a shaking hand across his eyes where Soul could barely see the silvery glint of tears starting to slip down his face in the darkness. Pity for the man wrung at Soul’s gut and filled him with genuine concern.
“God, it—“ Mind choked on a hiccuped sob. “It hurts. So much…“
It looked as though Mind was holding himself back from fully losing himself to the pain, jaw clenched, knuckles white as he gripped the sheets, his hair, his skull. He’d paled considerably, the only color in his face being a blue tinted flush across his cheeks which rung alarm bells in Soul’s brain.
He leaned over, placing the back of his hand against Mind’s temple and feeling the heat he knew wasn’t supposed to be there. Humming in displeasure, Soul just rested his hand over Mind’s eyes, hoping that his permanently ice cold hands would help ease the discomfort (luckily, Mind seemed to appreciate the gesture, as he clutched Soul’s wrist with a weak grip and pushed his face further into the other’s cool palm).
After a moment of consideration, Soul turned to the other half in the room with a lighthearted tone and worried smile.
“Hmm, I’m afraid this might be a bit more than the run of the mill migraine, Mister Moon.”
His expression was quick to drop at the sight of Heart.
From the floor, Heart let out a mournful cry, gasping for air as his shoulders shook. The sound genuinely caught Soul off guard, and after a quick pat of Mind’s shoulder as if to say ‘just one moment, bud’’ and to free himself of the other’s grip, he slid from the bed to be sitting next to the crying Moon on the floor.
Hesitantly, his arms opened to the man, who threw himself into an embrace without waiting. Heart buried his face into Soul’s jacket, shaking with silent sobs.
“I’m sorry,” Heart whispered, squeezing Soul tighter. “I- I don’t m-mean to—“
“What?” Was the only brilliant response Soul could think to say to the other.
Heart kept crying, admissions of guilt and a plethora of apologies weaved in between his gasps and sniffles. Soul just let the man cry for a moment, running through the possible reasons why he felt sorrow, as if he had done something to cause Mind’s sudden bout of feeling languished and under the weather, but ultimately came up blank.
“Heart, this isn’t your fault?” Confusion poured from The Soul, who was trying desperately to understand Heart’s thought process so he could counter it with some reasonable comfort. “Why do you- do you think that it is?”
“I’ve… gotten bad again,” Was all the explanation that Soul received in response as Heart tapped his forehead as if embarrassed.
It wasn't much, but it was enough to finally click the pieces into place.
Heart may have been, you know, the heart, the emotion and feeling that the Whole needed, but nothing affected the Whole’s mind and general mental state so strongly as he did. As the Whole’s mental state declined with Heart’s occasional episode of depression or anxiety, so too did the mind; and The Mind, the personified mental state, was quick to follow.
Soul mentally face-palmed as the realization finally hit him. He should have known that Heart’s recent struggles correlated with that of Mind’s migraines and eventual slump to illness.
“Oh… Juno… that’s not your fault. That’s- that’s a part of—“ He waved a hand around at nothing in particular. “—this. Not being one. Being apart. And this?” Soul tapped Heart’s head gently, copying what motion the other had done just a moment before. “Is not your fault, mate. You and I know better than anyone that sometimes we can’t help feeling this way.”
Heart sniffled and went mostly silent, nodding into Soul’s shoulder weakly.
“O-okay… I’m s-sorry.” Soul pat his back in response, letting him know silently that he had nothing to be sorry for.
“How’re you holding up back there, Mister Mind?”
Mind let out a raspy groan from behind them and then went quiet and still, even his shivers fading into nothing.
The headache must be unbearable if it was bad enough to knock him out, Soul thought to himself with a nervous gulp, feeling his own temples ache sharply at the thought.
“Shit—“ Soul stood abruptly, pushing himself away from Heart’s embrace and clumsily rushing to Mind’s side. Even Heart raised himself to his knees and leaned further over the edge of the bed to try and figure out what was happening.
The other had only paled further in the moments Soul was no longer next to him. Sweat beaded on his furrowed brow and his face was flushed so deeply navy that the black eye he sported (a remnant from a previous fight of his and Heart’s that never seemed to fully heal) near perfectly blended in with the color and the shadowy bags under his eyes.
All in all, it was pretty clear that the Sun was not faring so well, but this was not what worried Soul.
No, what caught Soul’s attention was the sharp, horizontal slit of blue that had not previously been there, running across Mind’s nose and stopping just below the man’s left eye. The vein of blue bled into others that were still barely visible, perfectly parallel and perpendicular to each other running down the side of his face and past the edge of his t-shirt.
Soul blanched. Suddenly the sympathetic pangs in his head from observing the other’s migraine seemed much more sinister than before.
“Did you two get in a goddamn fight I didn’t know about?!“ Soul whirled to face Heart in a fury, the man flinching at Soul’s suddenly raised voice.
“Wh-what?” Heart managed. “Wh-no? We’ve been pretty alright for the past few days, but mainly because we haven’t talked much?”
“God— okay. You better not have,” Soul pulled the comforter away from Mind and positioned an arm under his shoulders so that he could lift him into a sitting position. “You two just never tend to fracture so easily on your own.”
This was true; of the handful of times in which the halves had begun to fall apart into beings less human than they should have been, it had almost always been because one of their arguments had gone too far. Never had there been a situation in which Mind fell prey to pure emotion, Heart to pure logic, in such a way as it was happening now.
Heart backed away when he realized Soul was moving Mind, trying to not be in the way. He frowned and began hiccuping with sobs again.
“Fracture? Oh- oh god. Soul? Is he okay?”
His unspoken question of ‘Did I make it worse?’ went unspoken, but Soul could practically hear the question in Heart’s voice already.
“Juno, you already know this is not your fault. Alright?” Soul said with a sternness he hoped would get the message through to Heart.
Heart buried his face in his hands. Soul wished there was more he could do about that at the moment.
“Heart, I need you to work with me here, mate. I know you haven’t seen Mind around much, but when you have, has he been, like, acting weird or different?” The Soul pulled Mind up and to his chest as he spoke, letting the other’s head fall limp against his torso and beginning to examine the slices of blue that extended past the sleeves of his shirt and to his fingertips. “He didn’t mention anything was wrong to me until this migraine hit, but maybe he told you differently…?”
The Moon shrugged, rubbing weakly at the cloth over his eyes.
“He- he asked me about crying the other d-day? Was asking wh-why I did it, or something? I didn’t think it was anything serious though; I just thought… I thought he was being mean…”
Soul just sighed and nodded. If that told him anything, it told him that just maybe, Mind had gotten bad enough to divert from a healthy mix of his logic and feeling to rely solely on what he inherently wasn’t: a purely emotional being, like Heart.
They were halves. Opposites. The Mind could not thrive off of pure emotion the way The Heart could. It needed logic and rational thought. Pure feeling would do more harm than good, and it was evident in Mind’s current state.
Soul watched as Mind furrowed his brows in his unconscious state, one of the still faded seams in his skin growing darker as it etched itself into existence.
Yeah, that’s probably exactly what was happening. He said so to Heart, explaining his reasoning briefly to the other.
Heart wrapped his arms around himself and swayed in an attempt to comfort himself. “I- I didn’t know. I’m sorry…”
Soul laughed nervously, more out of a feeling of being unsure of how exactly to respond.
“Heart, you had just as little idea as I did. You don’t need to apologize.”
Heart, unsurprisingly, still did not seem convinced of The Soul’s words. Soul only sighed and turned his at attention back to Mind, still fitfully asleep in his arms.
“We need to wake him up and get him to think,” Soul muttered to no one in particular as he ran a hand through the other’s hair, hoping that the solution would really be that simple. Movement from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he glanced at Heart as the other slowly crept closer until he had rested his chin on Soul’s knee.
Soul smiled softly, affectionately ruffling Heart’s perfect curls for a second time that day.
“Any ideas on what to do?” Soul offered, Heart’s posture stiffening at the question before eventually relaxing after a few moments.
“Just— ask him ‘why’, maybe?” The moon reached out a hand and took Mind’s in his own, wincing as his fingers brushed over the perfectly straight fissures formed in his skin. “You could…”
Heart hesitated, nose wrinkling in something akin to disgust, or maybe hatred, as he seemed to parse out potential options to help mind.
“I hate that I’m going to say this…” Heart mumbled, eliciting a small huff of laughter from Soul. “But… we have to try and remind him of how much he hates my emotions.”
Soul did laugh at that as well; full, hearty cackles despite the seriousness of the situation and the look of disdain on Heart’s face.
“He doesn’t hate emotion, mate. He just struggles with it,” Soul began. “But, that’s a good idea! Reminding him how he is logical at… uhhh… at heart? That’s… not a very good way to say that. You know what I mean—“
It was The Moon’s turn to smile at Soul that time, lips upturned in the slightest semblance of an amused grin, only marred by the tears still glistening on his cheeks.
Soul shifted Mind gently in his arms, extending a now freed hand towards Heart and gently pulling, guiding him into an embrace. Heart hastily wiped tears away, falling into Soul’s arms and even wrapping a tight arm around Mind’s still sleeping form.
Hours passed— well, maybe not— but in the comfortably enveloping grasp of the others, time seemed to slow to a stop, only resuming when Mind shivered and Heart flinched at the sudden movement.
The Moon broke the silence and pulled away from the other two, finger running anxiously through one of his curls, wrapping it taught around his knuckle.
“He’ll… he’ll be okay soon, right? I mean- other than… w-what I’ve caused…?”
“He’ll be right as rain in no time, and so will you, mate. I’ll make sure of it. We are all going to be okay.”
A pause. Heart nodded, an expression of nervous hesitance, maybe fear, evident in the way his lip trembled and the fact that he began rubbing at his eyes, as if preparing for tears yet to come.
And then, Heart wrapping Soul in a tight squeeze of a hug, whispered apology for nothing he could control gone ignored by the Soul, if only for the time being.
“Alright, Juno, let’s get our Mind back, shall we?”