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Dreams

First the drugs killed the dreams, and then they made them strange: mostly focused around crooked hallways, none actually related to the pain that still swirled around his stomach, nor to the trauma that caused it. This was probably for the best. They turned something terrible into a more amorphous kind of monster, something faceless and lurking and still frightening but without the immediacy of real danger.

They faded, as he woke, in fits and starts, aching and sick with a rasp in his throat, and certainly weren't enough to keep him from going back to sleep.

Stitches

On the third day Taym demonstrated his remarkable ability to look like he ought to be lounging in an alleyway somewhere even in a lab coat and scrubs. He also still smelled like cigarettes.

"Ambrodiel," he said, flipping through the chart at the foot of Ever's bed and then cheerfully unloading his pockets onto the bedside table. "Feeling pretty shitty?"

Stitches

"Can't," he returned, still cheery. "Work to do."

He was not procuring cigarettes and paperbacks, the usual contents of Taym's pockets. He was instead procuring catgut and a curved, hermetically-sealed needle, which he opened with a satisfying ripping noise. His hands, as per usual, were shaking, and after a couple of attempts to join the one to the other, he pushed both towards Ever, serious. "Maybe you ought to do this part. Don't worry. I usually level out after the first couple stitches. Might be a little crooked, but them's the breaks."

Stitches

With an exaggerated sigh, Taym dropped the needle back on the bedside table, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

"If you're going to be all panicky about it it sucks all the fun right out of tormenting you. You did need that. But they've got people around here with more than a few days of training and without this--" and here he held his trembling hands aloft "--for ******** sake."

Stitches

"Yeah, yeah, ******** you too." Reaching into the lab coat, Taym procured a couple of battered paperbacks, one a collection of academic essays on Proust in French, the other a chatty, outdated book on the history of various attempts to Latinize English. He dropped them on the table next to the still-sealed scissors and stood to go.

"For when you come around," he said. "Also they're gonna tell you not to smoke, just tell them to ******** off."

Bad Choices

A sign of just how critical his condition had been was this: after a few days, Ever actually dug out his phone to text Cee, out of desperation.



He didn't even sign it. Focusing on the screen for that long made his head hurt a bit.

Five minutes later, though, he added.

Breath out

Zeke was already aware of what was going on, not because anyone had told him, but because he was one of the Mists on rotation in the infirmary. It had been quite the shock when he'd walked into the ICU to find a very pale post-op Ever. For the first day he hasn't really known how to process what had happened. By the second he was pissed, not at the Life, but at the situation, and whatever had left him in such a sorry state.

On the third day he'd been given a mission, it kept him busy until after the sun had gone down, and a shower and change had kept him a little longer. By the time he'd found his way back to Ever's room it was close to nine. He could have been there more, but he was saving himself, and Ever, from the awkwardness that had settled in the last time something had happened to him, though he seemed, at least, visually more at ease this time around.

There was a book in his hand as he sank down into the chair beside the bed, glasses resting on his nose. A finger slid into the point between the pages he'd last left off at, but his attention was settled on the figure in the bed.

Was he asleep?