Asahi/Nishinoya, Period cramps
Asahi’s lying in a half-aware daze of pain, and there’s a ringing in her ears and spinning behind her eyelids that makes her feel dizzy and nauseous.
No, wait.
She bolts upright and stumbles across the hallway. The bathroom door hits the wall with a bang, and she just barely makes it to the toilet on shaky legs before she collapses to her knees and throws up, one arm wrapped around her abdomen and the other clutching the toilet seat in a clammy grip.
She spits, groans, and puts the lid down before she flushes the toilet. The porcelain is cool and she rests her cheek against it. It feels good. The rest of her feels like it’s burning.
When she looks down at herself, she realizes that she really is burnt -- there’s an angry stripe of red across her lower belly, rough and blistering. She’s burned herself with her heating pad. It’s not the first time this has happened, either; between superficial burns to her skin and the relentless, twisting pain of menstrual cramps, she’ll take the burns. Every time.
Not that the heat is really helping at this point, anyway.
Asahi deliberates between just laying down on the tile floor and waiting for death, or trying to crawl all the way back across the hallway to her bed. Then her uterus gives a particularly strong spasm and she curls around it with a whimper. Floor it is, then.
She has no idea how much time has passed, by the time she musters enough energy and the acute aching in her abdomen lessens enough that she can limp back to bed like a kicked dog. It felt like hours, days, but Asahi knows that sometimes seconds feel like hours, when she’s in pain and can’t do anything to fix it.
Asahi realizes, blearily, that there’s a paper bag on her nightstand. She doesn’t think it was there before -- whenever before was. There’s a note.
I’ll be back soon! Don’t push yourself too hard.
And then, as if that wasn’t enough to have Asahi’s stomach tingling in a different kind of way than the nausea, it follows with, Feel better. I love you!! xox <3.
The bag is full and rattles in a way that makes Asahi’s spirits perk up hopefully. Sure enough, when she dumps it onto the bed, a bottle of painkillers spills out -- followed by a box of a different brand, and another, smaller bottle of still another brand.
She reads the instructions quickly, and dry-swallows one of each kind. Thus fortified, she picks through the other offerings -- a box of tampons, one of extra-absorbent-extra-long pads, two packages of gummy candies, and six chocolate bars, as well as a volleyball magazine and a new sports headband.
There’s a lump in her throat that has nothing to do with the pills as she fishes her phone out from the tangle of blankets on her bed and opens up her messaging app with shaky fingers.
I love you, she sends to Nishinoya. It seems woefully inadequate; her body still feels like it’s trying to kill her in the most dramatic and painful of ways, but she feels better already, and it’s not all just the painkillers.
Her phone blips three times in rapid succession.
AWWWWWW! I luv u 2 babe <3 <3 <3
did u get my package? do u feel better
i cn give u a back massage when i get home just hang in there ok <3