Death of the Heart // Phan

Chapter 1

Phil hums lightly to himself as he prepares dinner. He places his hands on his hips and stares triumphantly down at his creation. A delicious pizza lays on the counter, ready to be put in the oven. The dough was hand crafted out of their finest ingredients, the meats freshly cut, the veggies picked right out of the garden, and the marinara mixed with their own tomatoes and herbs. It was truly a masterpiece.

"Phil," Dan calls from their small apartment family room, "have you put the frozen pizza in the oven yet?"

"It is not frozen," Phil yells back harshly, fantasy popped. "I created it with my own blood, sweat, and tears."

"I sure hope none of that got into the pizza, Gordon Ramsay," Dan says with a smirk, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

"No one asked for your sass, Dan," Phil sniffs, opening the oven and sliding the pizza onto the rack. "Speaking of sass, how was work today? Make any more patients cry?"

The smirk on Dan's face quickly disappears. "She did not cry," Dan says with a glare, turning his nose up. "She was just... a little upset."

Phil grins. Last night Dan had come home with a very interesting story. A young woman had been admitted to the hospital with a broken arm and Dan had been in charge over her. After doing a check up on her, Dan tried to crack a joke:

"It doesn't look too bad, I'll only have to amputate half your arm."

It appeared the girl wasn't in a very humorous mood for she immediately burst into hysterical tears. It took three nurses 20 minutes to fully calm her down. Meanwhile Dan was getting a thorough scolding from another nurse.

"A little upset," Phil repeated, grin deepening. "Right."

"Okay, Phil," Dan snaps back, "let's talk about the time you thought you made some miraculous discovery but it turned out to just be a blob of cheese that had fallen from your glasses onto the microscope slide."

Phil sticks out his lower lip in a pout. His work was in the field of microbiology: examining viruses, medicines, cells, and other body-related microscopic things. "That's not a fair counter attack, you're the one who made the macaroni."

"And who bought the extra stringy cheese?" Dan says, staring at Phil with a  pointed gaze.

"My eyes were tired that day," Phil whines childishly, slumping back against the counter.

"Excuses excuses," Dan says, leaning back against the counter with Phil.

As usual, Phil decides to be the peacemaker and not bring up the time Dan accidentally gave a patient slightly too much morphine. How Dan still had a job was a mystery to him. "Have you gotten any more patients with cardidenturiatus?"

"Cardidenturiatus," Dan repeats with a groan. His demeanor was immediately deflated. "Two more people have come in with it. We're keeping them all in a special ward away from the other patients."

"So that's 15 people in total?" Phil asks, a frown on his face.

Dan nods. "And still no other cases of it anywhere else in the world, at least as far as we know. Let's just hope it stays that way. We still have no idea what's causing it."

Ever since they'd gotten the notice a new disease had been discovered, the lab had been fervently searching to find the cause and cure for it. So far, no luck. It was only a week and a half ago that the first patient had come in, complaining about extreme nausea and a rash. Thinking it was some common illness, the doctors treated the man with some medicine and sent him home. But a few days later the man returned, now in an ambulance. The rash had turned into horribly itchy blotches all over his body. Upon scratching, the itchiness would fire back with more venom than before. On top of that, he was racked with fever that the doctors were unable to bring down.