[Strangers][a Sai drabble set for AyaNara's contest]

You sat on the bed cross-legged. The hospital room was cold and the blanket was too thin, didn’t even do anything, and the whiteness, the endless sterility, made it feel even colder. You wrapped your arms around yourself and closed your eyes.

A door opened and closed. You jumped and looked up. A young man stared back at you, expression still and unreadable. He stood there for a long moment, actually, while you blinked at his sudden appearance. Eventually, the fact that he was there at all dawned on you and you flinched at the rush of confusion.

“You’re dying,” he said. His eyes were flat, endless. The young man pulled a small book out of his pants pocket and began flipping through the pages. After a moment of reading through a page, he said, “I’m sorry.” 

You opened and closed your mouth in silence. “No, it’s okay,” you replied.

“It’s not.” He looked back down at the page and read some more. “You should be upset,” he said, glancing up at you. 

“W-what kind of upset?” You were nearly done with being upset at this point. 

He looked at you, eyes wide, unblinking, impassive. “Scared.” He flipped another page without looking. “You’re not scared.”

“No,” you sighed. “I am. I’m very scared.” You felt small then, sick and weak, and he stared at you blankly.

He consulted his little book again and noted something. “Okay,” he said, turning and leaving. The door slid shut behind him and you stared toward where he’d exited.

-

You sat there, in your bed, tracing geometrical patterns on the cloth when the door opened and shut again. The young man zeroed his flat, dark eyes on you and waited for something to happen, but it didn’t, until he spoke.

“How much longer?” he asked. You blinked at him and tried to do calculations in your head to no avail.

 “I don’t know,” you said, but you didn’t know, it was the truth, and so the words slid into a whisper as the matter dawned on you. You looked toward the monitor, tons of buttons and lights and the beep, the constant hum that was your heart, and thought. It went badly. “I don’t know,” you said again, mainly to yourself, feeling the familiar heat rise under your skin and clog your throat. 

The young man didn’t say anything for a very long time. Then he looked down at his book.  “What did they say?” His voice was level, subdued, uninterested. But he stared without any waver or trepidation, and you began to think he was searching for something. 

You wiped at your eyes. “A month or so. Something like that.” 

“Those kind of predictions tend to be wrong.”

You looked at him and paused. “That’s good, I guess.” You weren’t too sure why he was so confident about that, but maybe he wasn’t actually confident and was just trying to make you feel better. Looking into his vast black eyes, you highly doubted that last thing.

You were going to ask his name when he looked down at the book. “Are you scared yet?”

You measured him with a look. “No, not really… Should I be?” 

His eyes snapped up to yours and there was a silence. “I wouldn’t know,” he said after a moment. “I’ve never been dying before. I don’t plan on it.” 

You stared at him. “Well, I’m scared,” you told him. “And you would be too, if you were like me.”

“I’d be what?”

“Scared.”

He tilted his head. “Why is that?”

“Because dying is scary,” you said.

“Is it?” 

You couldn’t tell if he was serious or mocking you or what. You imagined it might be neither of those things. “Yeah,” you whispered, because nothing else came to mind. “It is.”

The young man blinked owlishly. “Okay,” he said, and turned and left.

-

The nurses milled about, checking vitals, recalibrating the drip, patting your arm as they flitted past. Slowly, they filtered out into the hall and fell into hushed whispers, followed by the creaking furniture and the low hiss of the heater.

You let your eyes flutter shut and when you opened them, two large black irises stared down at you, impassive. You sat up quickly and felt your heart thudding uncomfortably in your chest. “W-what are you doing?” 

The young man shrugged and consulted his little book again. “Visiting.”

“Why?”

“The dying need company.” 

You looked at him carefully now—his skin was pale, too pale, and his eyes dark and still like unbothered water. “Do they?” you replied. 

“Yes.”

“Why is that?”

He seemed to consider something for a moment. “Well, they’re dying. Seems like an awfully lonely task.”

You opened your mouth and then closed it again. He still stared at you with an impassive, neutral expression. “Yeah,” you said . “It is.”  

He blinked. “What’s your name?”

“__________.”

“I’m Sai.” He tilted his head as though in greeting. 

You looked at him and then at the book. “Aren’t you lonely, too?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re visiting strangers.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

He blinked again. “Because there will be less strangers, then.”

“Oh. What’s wrong with strangers?”

“It means you don’t know them.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s lonely.”

The two of you stared at each other for a long moment. Then you smiled and folded your hands in your lap. “There’s a lot of lonely around here, Sai.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he blinked. “That must feel terrible.” No emotion.

The heat was back, blurring everything. “It does.” 

There was a shift by your feet and it took you a moment to realize he’d sat down. You stared at him. He was pulling a sketch pad out of his bag and focusing on this task with tunnel-vision. 

“Thank you.”

He looked up at you, black eyes cat-like, wide and one-dimensional. He seemed confused about your thank-you, and so you shook your head and he returned to his task, but not before pulling out the book and flipping through it. He snapped it shut when he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. Instead, he sighed and you watched him and the monitor whirred and everything was fine.