Despair's Insanity - an II x DR fic

TTM - 3

The party had not stopped. Once I got back into the cafeteria I only really noticed that Paper and Pepper being missing as the new big difference. The others had gathered together and were yelling, singing, jumping around like toddlers... not my scene. I did notice that Baseball wasn't around though. He said he wasn't gonna come since he was "too weak", so I figured I would go and see him instead.

I went up the elevator this time, and when I got to the third floor I heard the most vile sound known to man... retching coming from the nurse's station. I shivered, but plugged my nose and braved inside.

I found Pepper, hunched over in the corner with a bucket, and Baseball still sat in bed, looking extremely uncomfortable. He glanced to me and smiled through his clear pain.

"Hey Lifering... I think she had a little too much to drink."

"She didn't have too much- she just got one of the motive symptoms!" Oh fuck. Fan. He looked right at me with his sickening little face, gesturing toward Pepper and finally frowning a bit. "Well- maybe she is just drunk. Nausea wasn't one of the symptom vials I'd stuck in there. Gross!"

"Fan, I'm not in the mood to deal with YOU right now, so just tell me what the motive is," I said. Fan scoffed, eyes wide, before he eventually looked away and bothered to do what I had asked.

"Test Tube concentrated the essence of Tissues' symptoms back in the day- back when she lived here! She had vials of liquid that when ingested, gave you the current magnitude of the given symptom that Tissues exhibits. She's not here, so I took them out of her closet and threw them into the punch! Everyone who had some will get at most one symptom. Mood swings, violent heat waves, vertigo, vertistop-" I interrupted him.

"What's vertistop??"

"...Y'know- back when I interviewed Tissues he didn't really explain it to me. Anyway. There's also severe dehydration and throat soreness, aggressive mucus production that can fill up the lungs, but usually ends in loud, violent sneezes... I could go on, but you didn't drink any, and neither did Baseball. I'll be telling the others later, but since you're my favowite!" He pressed his fingertip to my nose, and I resisted the urge to throttle his ass. "My favowite character deserves to know first. Anyway, good luck finding out what the hell is wrong with Pepper! She's been useless this whole time!"

With some cackling, he disappeared and left me with a hammered person, and Baseball. I sat beside Baseball and grumbled to myself about Fan and his stupid shenanigans... Baseball looked at me with hesitance, but then reached over to grab my hand.

"Don't worry about him," he said with a weak smile, "it'll all be alright. You're healthy, yeah?" I nodded. "You'll be able to help them, then. I think Tissues would be good, too, since he lives with all that combined anyway, right?"

"Right." He looked up at me and chuckled.

"If you want, I can help too."

"You- you shouldn't," I said as quickly as I could. "You're hurt. You need to focus on getting better."

"You also need to focus on feeling better. I'm ninety percent sure you're developing depression."

"Blah. Don't care about that."

"Lifering, c'mon."

"I can worry about that when all of this isn't relevant, ok? Just let me worry about myself." Baseball let go of my hand, a little dejected.

"That's not going to make me worry any less..." I felt my heart ache a little at the fact that I made him a little upset, but I was right. I got up from the chair. "What- where are you going?"

"I'm going to talk to Oj about potential quarantine for everyone. I don't know if the symptoms will spread to people, but I can't take that risk. YOU could get a severe illness because you're still trying to recover, and your immune system's probably fighting off a ton of things." Baseball looked back at Pepper, and then nodded.

"That's smart. You go ahead, then. I'll just sit here and make sure Pepper's ok." I waved goodbye, waited for him to do the same, and closed the door to go look for Oj... he's in his office. I knew that by now.