After dragging her tired body back home, Levi's fiancée and Noah's elder sister, opened her communicator to find her fiancé had sent her a baffling message: "We need to talk. Urgently. As soon as you are free. Critical importance."
(・―・)
Urgent talk of critical importance?
With her???
She snorted a laugh. Knowing the temper of her fiancé, if it was indeed something important, he would have broken into the hospital and kidnapped her away without a second thought.
Since the only thing he did was to send a text message, it would mean that this matter was just one of those things that Astar Levi thought to be paramount but was actually trivial in everyone else's point of view. Like helping him choose his tie for the wedding.
Or getting a light injury while doing something embarrassing so instead of visiting a hospital and having to explain how he got it, he would "urgently" require her free healing services.
She snickered again and checked the time of his message. Sent 8 hours ago. Meh, if he needed healing, it had probably been solved by now. ╮(╯∀╰)╭
If he didn't need healing, it could wait until tomorrow. 👍
Thus, she responded with "Lunch tomorrow at the usual place and time", shut off her communicator, and went to bed with peace of mind.
However, Levi, who was still in the middle of a dramatic episode of... uh... having his vinegar tank overturned? Did not go to bed with peace of mind at all!
Not! At! All!!!
In fact, this was objectively the worst night of his life! Simply the worst!
And just when he thought that this night couldn't get any worse, the much-awaited response from his fiancée arrived.
Wait until tomorrow to talk to her?!? Impossible!! This matter had to be settled right now!!! Right this instant!!
Tomorrow he needed to run in, guns blazing, knocking his baby off his feet, right into his, Levi's, arms!
He didn't have the luxury of waiting for 12 hours!
Look what happened in a mere half an hour of Levi's absence (he dared not recall the image...)! Who knows what could happen in 12 bloody hours?!?
Promptly, Levi called his fiancée. And then stared with abject fury at his communicator.
Son of a bitch! She turned off her communicator!!! She bloody turned her communicator off!!!
(ノ꒪Д꒪)ノ ︵ ┻━┻
Was he not clear enough in expressing his urgency and the paramount importance of this matter?!?
Levi paced back and forth in his room, seriously contemplating dropping in for a midnight visit.
No, no, he couldn't do that!
What if he disturbed his baby's sleep?
Even worse, what if his baby thought he had dropped in for a late-night rendezvous with his sister?! He couldn't let his darling misunderstand! He, Levi, was 100% loyal to his little cabbage!
In the end, with gritted teeth and a cramping stomach, Levi decided to endure until morning.
***
15 minutes before the clock struck 8 AM, Noah was already showered, dressed, sated, and ready to be picked up. As expected from his silly-cute brother-in-law, the doorbell rang before the scheduled time.
Chuckling to himself, Noah merrily hopped to the door and swung it open to welcome his brother-in-law with a big smile, and... nearly got a heart attack!!! 😱
A scream of bloody murder got stuck in Noah's throat, coming out as a cute squeak that perfectly matched his current appearance of a Bambi caught in the headlights. Stiffly he gaped at the walking corpse standing in front of his door.
It was dressed in black from head to toe, making the sickly pallor of its skin appear even more discomforting. The sharp contrast of black and white didn't stop there, the huge dark circles underneath its eyes looked like a fashion statement of a death metal band.
Yet the most disturbing of all were the bloodshot eyes gazing down with a manic look that was somewhere in-between mad and dead. When its eyes landed on Noah, they burned fiercely as if the creature wanted to devour him whole into its stomach!
Holy mother of god!!! Noah's soul nearly left his body in fright! Only after giving the undead a closer look did Noah recognize the zombie as his brother-in-law!
What the fuck happened last night?! Why did his usually lovely brother-in-law exude an aura of bloody murder like a demon of carnage who just escaped from the depths of hell?!?
Instantly, Noah's previous happy mood flipped into distress and worry, "Brother? What happened??"
Upon seeing Noah's anxious concern, the dark glint in Levi's eyes flickered out, and he abruptly woke up from his craze. No matter how bad he felt, he couldn't let his dark mood dampen his darling's day. The last thing he wanted to do was to frighten or sadden his baby!
And why should he, Levi, be in such an abysmal mood anyway? Even with an entire restaurant of dying people, his baby hadn't been this distressed! His baby clearly cared for him, Levi, the most!
And just like that, Levi's crumbling mess of a heart miraculously revived.
Noah, utterly unaware of the bullshit running through the other's head, was still out of his mind with worry. Could it be that his brother-in-law was sick?! (Blackie: (☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞ Spot on! Sick in the head!)
Even if the other had stayed up all night, it was impossible to look like the living dead the morning after!
Noah was indeed right about that. Levi hadn't merely stayed up throughout the night. No, no, no! His night was much more colorful.
Though Levi had gone to bed around midnight, he had laid awake until dawn. Throughout the night, not only was he tormented by a migraine and stomach cramps, he would even see the image of his baby, coquettishly riding another man, every time he closed his eyes!
By the time the dawn arrived, Levi had been mentally and physically tormented to the point that he was finally unable to keep his eyes open any longer.
He drifted off into a restless slumber plagued by hellish nightmares. In his dreams, his darling had been taken away from him and was together with other men. Levi frantically tried everything to stop the horrid chain of events, to make his baby look at him, to stop his darling from being intimate with another, to take back what should have been his.
The nightmare kept twisting and escalating, tormenting him for what seemed like an eternity.
Who knows how long he would have struggled with this harrowing manifestation of all his fears, unable to wake up, if not for that one moment?
That one moment, in which the nightmare touched Levi's breaking point.
It was one thing to have his baby taken away by others, it was entirely another to have him disappear from this world forever.
An image of his darling's mangled cold body ripped Levi's guts out, brutally shocking him awake.
In those several moments that took Levi to shift between dreams and reality, his frenzied madness had ended up accidentally demolishing the entire west wing of the mansion.
Everyone freaked out, the army was nearly mobilized, the reporters and peacekeepers hounded the premises, his parents almost had a heart attack, the old housekeeper actually DID have a heart attack...
In short, yeah, worst night + morning of Levi's life. Looking and feeling like the undead was 1000% justified.
Author Note
In case you are wondering, the housekeeper survived the heart attack and will be just fine.