It wasn't quiet, exactly. Tsume snored a little in her sleep, and Kakashi's breath rasped through his mask. The dogs paced, claws ticking restlessly on the floor, and eventually curled up together between the beds. Machines beeped softly as they kept Kuromaru breathing. Footsteps tapped briskly down the corridor outside the closed door. Somewhere down the hall, a woman wept.

It wasn't quiet. Silence clogged Ryouma's ears anyway, thick and heavy, laced with the slow rhythms of sleeping breath. He caught himself counting--first Kuromaru, then Tsume, then Kakashi, because he couldn't focus on more than one of them at once--and stopped. But there was nothing else to listen to, and no way not to hear it...

Sleep tugged at him. He shook himself awake, spent thirty seconds entertaining himself with a fantasy about clambering out of bed and sneaking down to the cafeteria for coffee, and almost drifted off again in the middle of it. This time, he clenched his jaw. Pain speared through the fog of exhaustion, clearing his vision and quickening his heart. Tsume turned her head against his chest, nuzzling closer. The soft gauze of the bandages rubbed against his skin.

"Nightmares'd have a ways to go to make this worse," Ryouma whispered. "But I betcha they could do it."

An arm's length away, Kuromaru's respirator rasped a steady agreement. Ryouma set his jaw, ground the dull throb into a stabbing ache, and stayed awake.