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 time exhaustion pulled me under those three words dragged me back up. By the time 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 me 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 me 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 somewhere? Had he chosen not to reach out? The possibilities became darker the longer I let them run and by the time 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 medical facility that had no business existing this far from the city unless someone with considerable resources had decided it should. A sign near the main entrance read: Mizuhara Central Medical 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 men 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 hummed in steady rhythm. Monitors glowed softly. An IV line ran from a stand to the bed to someone .

And in the bed was Felix.

I stopped where I was.

The room, the machines, my grandfather behind me, everything went to the edges of my awareness. All I could see was his face. Older than I remembered. 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 blamed on the pavement with complete sincerity while I laughed at him.

I remembered laughing at him.

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

Felix being alive.

The relief hit me so hard my knees went uncertain beneath me.

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

I turned to my grandfather.

"You knew." My voice came out louder than I intended. The guards outside shifted. "You knew he was alive and you let me 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 meant 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 men noticed movement."

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 me immediately. I ordered him to get Felix to a hospital."

"What did the doctors find?"

"They stabilized him. But the damage was severe." Another pause, measured 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 somewhere between the two that had no clean name.

"You moved him here," I said.

"Yes."

"Privately."

"Yes."

"And said nothing to me."

"No."

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

"Why."

For the first time since I had arrived at this estate my grandfather looked tired. Not frail. Not diminished. Simply tired, in the way that carrying something for a long time 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 come back to you. It would have been another weight. A crueler one."

Part of me understood it.

That was what made me angrier.

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

"I know."

No argument. No careful reframe. Just those two words, accepted and still.

I stood. "I need air."

He nodded and did not stop me.

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 moment without meaning to. Different versions of it surfacing in the small hours when sleep would not come. 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 something closer to exhaustion. The deepest kind, the bone-level kind that arrived after something 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 something on the side table caught my eye.

A clipboard, partially visible beneath several documents. 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 time to be certain. freewёbnoνel.com

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 something had happened in this room that had been marked enough to circle in red. Something 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.