Bittersweet

Chapter 4: Feelings of Contradiction

"There is no Angel. There never was."

Those were the last words Rogue heard before he hyperventilated and passed out.

He tried. He really tried to keep his emotions under control, but they had broken free. Why wouldn't they? Rogue just lost his one chance to find some answers and save Sting. Wait, Sting!

Rogue's eyes burst open as he sat up in a bed that wasn't his own. The room he was currently in smelled like chemicals, rubbing alcohol, and disinfectant. His brain registered the fact that he was in a hospital, which was indeed where he was.

At first, he couldn't see anything. His vision was blurred and his head was throbbing, but that didn't stop him from screaming out in desperation. "Sting! Where's Sting?! Sting, where are you?!"

Sweat dripped from the sides of his head, landing on his hands which were curled up into fists. His body shook violently.

The monitor beside his bed displayed waves representing his heart rate; they were increasing again, rapidly going up and down, and the machine started beeping violently.

The door to his room burst open, and three people rushed to his side the second the monitor went off, but Rogue couldn't make out any of them. All he saw was a mixture of blue, black, brown, pink, purple, green, and red.

"Rogue, calm down!" a familiar voice called out to him. Rogue recognized the voice as Ultear's. That explained the red and purple. Then the other colors must've been...

"Roguey! Please stop freaking out! Sting's safe, I swear!" a girlier, younger voice yelled. Meredy.

"He is safe. He woke up moments after you collapsed and returned home," the third, final voice confirmed.

It took a couple of minutes for Rogue to fully calm down. Soon, the monitor showed that his heart rate was back to normal, causing everyone else in the room to breathe out a sigh of relief.

"Sting...didn't come to check on me?" Rogue thought out loud. It wasn't normal. Sting always checked on Rogue, even for the smallest things. It didn't make sense to him, or maybe it did? Was this somehow tied into his odd behavior?

"No. He didn't know where you were, so he thought you went home and decided to go back too. We were going to tell him what really happened but he just took off," Ultear answered.

"What happened?" Rogue asked, clutching his head. He guessed that this was what Sting must've gone through. Oh, right. That problem was still in existence.

"After I told you that nobody named Angel worked at our store, you just collapsed..." Meredy whispered. "I was so worried..."

"I'm fine," Rogue assured, rubbing his forehead. "So...Angel...isn't real...?"

Jellal shook his head. Rogue's vision had cleared up so he could see them clearly now.

"It must've just been a bad dream," Jellal told him, helping him out of the bed.

"Probably," Rogue mumbled, stepping off the furniture. "But there's...one thing I don't understand..."

"And what would that be?" Jellal asked.

"If...Angel really isn't real...then why is Sting...acting so weird? Or did I dream that too?" Rogue wondered, cursing the fact that his terrible nightmares still plagued his mind.

"What does this 'Angel' and Sting have to do with one another?" Ultear questioned, tilting her head sideways.

"I..I'm not sure. It's just that..." Rogue took a deep breath. "I took Sting to your store, but none of you were there. There was some new woman named Angel. She was looking at Sting in a weird way and I didn't like it...but anyways, that's not the point...she got him addicted to some new dessert called PassionParfaits, and after that he started acting differently. I'm not saying there's a correlation between the desserts and his behavior. I just thought she was the one behind it all."