The V-tuber Who Became Obsessed With Me Chapter 78: The patient

( this Chapter is told from raina’s pov)

My grandfather’s words were the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes.

Felix isn’t dead.

I had barely slept. Every ti exhaustion pulled under those three words dragged back up. By the ti pale morning light appeared around the curtain edges I had given up and lay on my back staring at the ceiling instead.

Not alive. Not safe. Not well.

Just not dead.

The distinction bothered more the longer I sat with it.

I dressed and stepped into the hallway. The estate was already moving. Servants through the corridors, guards at their positions, the low sound of conversation drifting up from the kitchen. The compound carrying on exactly as it always had, as though my entire understanding of the last four years had not shifted the night before.

I found my grandfather outside on the stone garden path, hands folded behind his back, dark kimono moving in the morning breeze. When he saw approaching he stopped.

"Let’s go."

"Where?"

"You’ll see."

He walked toward the front entrance where several black cars were already waiting. A guard opened the rear door. I got in after him and the convoy pulled away from the estate without another word exchanged between us.

The drive lasted forty minutes.

I spent most of it watching the landscape through the window while questions moved through my head in a loop that had no resolution. Was Felix conscious? Had he been hiding sowhere? Had he chosen not to reach out? The possibilities beca darker the longer I let them run and by the ti the cars began slowing I had worked myself into a state I was trying not to show.

Then I looked up and saw the building.

Large. Modern. The kind of dical facility that had no business existing this far from the city unless soone with considerable resources had decided it should. A sign near the main entrance read: Mizuhara Central dical Institute.

I turned to my grandfather.

He was already stepping out of the car.

Inside, a nurse appeared before we had crossed the lobby. No paperwork. No waiting area. No questions. She simply bowed and led us to a private elevator, pressed the button for the sixth floor and stood silently as the doors closed.

When they opened again the corridor beyond was empty except for two n in dark suits positioned outside a single room at the far end. Both bowed when they saw Katsuro. One reached forward and opened the door.

I stepped inside.

The room was dim, curtains drawn against the morning. Machines humd in steady rhythm. Monitors glowed softly. An IV line ran from a stand to the bed to soone .

And in the bed was Felix.

I stopped where I was.

The room, the machines, my grandfather behind , everything went to the edges of my awareness. All I could see was his face. Older than I rembered. Thinner. But his. Unmistakably, impossibly his. The dark hair. The structure of his jaw. The faint scar he had gotten from a bicycle fall in our second year, the one he had blad on the pavent with complete sincerity while I laughed at him.

I rembered laughing at him.

The mory arrived with such force that I felt it physically. Because for four years every mory of Felix had ended the sa way. Blood on the floor. Silence. A phone call made in the dark. And now here was a different mory surfacing underneath all of that. A library bench. Felix stealing my lecture notes because he had missed half the sester. Felix grinning when I threatened to report him. Felix being impossible and warm and entirely himself.

Felix being alive.

The relief hit so hard my knees went uncertain beneath .

Then the anger followed imdiately behind it, hot and sharp and with nowhere to go.

I turned to my grandfather.

"You knew." My voice ca out louder than I intended. The guards outside shifted. "You knew he was alive and you let spend four years believing I killed him."

"Himari—"

"No." I took a step toward him. "You had no right."

He held my gaze and said simply, "Not here."

The hospital cafeteria occupied a whole wing of the lower floor. It was empty when we arrived, which almost certainly ant Katsuro had arranged for it to be. We sat across from each other at a table near the window. Tea appeared. Neither of us touched it.

"Speak," I said.

He folded his hands on the table. "After Tengu arrived that night, everything had already been prepared. The grave. The cover. All of it." He paused. "Then one of the n noticed movent."

I said nothing.

"A finger. Tengu checked him again and found a pulse. Weak, barely present, but there." His gaze moved briefly toward the window. "He called imdiately. I ordered him to get Felix to a hospital."

"What did the doctors find?"

"They stabilized him. But the damage was severe." Another pause, asured and deliberate. "He never regained consciousness. They classified it as a persistent disorder of consciousness. Present enough to sustain, unreachable enough that they could not predict what recovery, if any, was possible."

Not dead. Not awake. Suspended sowhere between the two that had no clean na.

"You moved him here," I said.

"Yes."

"Privately."

"Yes."

"And said nothing to ."

"No."

No softening. No repositioning. Just the direct answer, sitting there between us without apology or defense.

"Why."

For the first ti since I had arrived at this estate my grandfather looked tired. Not frail. Not diminished. Simply tired, in the way that carrying sothing for a long ti eventually shows regardless of how composed the person carrying it remains.

"Because you were already breaking apart," he said. "I didn’t see the purpose in telling you he was alive if there was no way for him to co back to you. It would have been another weight. A crueler one."

Part of understood it.

That was what made angrier.

"That was not your decision to make," I said.

"I know."

No argunt. No careful refra. Just those two words, accepted and still.

I stood. "I need air."

He nodded and did not stop .

I found myself back outside Felix’s room without consciously deciding to go there.

The guard opened the door and I went in and stood at the foot of the bed. The machines continued their rhythm. The monitors blinked steadily. Felix lay exactly as I had left him.

I walked slowly to the side of the bed.

For years I had rehearsed this mont without aning to. Different versions of it surfacing in the small hours when sleep would not co. What I would say. What I would feel. What his face would look like. In every version I had been terrified.

Standing here now I felt sothing closer to exhaustion. The deepest kind, the bone-level kind that arrived after sothing you had been braced against for too long finally resolved itself into a different shape than you had prepared for.

I looked at him. At the IV line running into the back of his hand. At the shallow assisted rhythm of his chest. At the scar along his jaw.

Then sothing on the side table caught my eye.

A clipboard, partially visible beneath several docunts. One line near the bottom of the visible page had been circled in red ink.

I leaned slightly forward.

It was a nursing report. I scanned it quickly and then stopped.

The circled line read: Patient responded.

The date beside it was three weeks ago.

Not three years. Not four. Three weeks.

I read it again. Then a third ti to be certain.

Patient responded.

My pulse shifted. I straightened slowly and turned to look at Felix. The machines continued their steady rhythm. The room was exactly as it had been when I walked in. Nothing had moved. Nothing had changed.

And yet.

I looked back at the chart. At those two circled words and the date beside them. Three weeks ago sothing had happened in this room that had been marked enough to circle in red. Sothing significant enough that whoever wrote it had wanted it found.

I turned back to Felix.

"Felix?"

The machines beeped.

The monitors glowed.

He lay completely still.

But I stood there in that dim room with those two words sitting in my eyeline and found that I was no longer certain, the way I had been certain about so many things in the last four years.