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 Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 11:43 pm
"Khalid! ******** hell, KHALID!"
She couldn't panic. She couldn't panic. (She was panicking).
Blood had already begun to stain the beige carpeting of the apartment, but Ursula's focus was on the limp seventeen year old still in her arms. She was tired from the teleporting, but the adrenaline was still pumping in her, her heart pounding in her chest as eyes frantically searched the apartment.
The young woman had left the General-King to his own bidding only half an hour earlier when she'd departed to meet with Khaldun, but if he wasn't in the apartment anymore....
"Khalid, please, it's Khaldun, he's hurt!" Her voice was shrill, and it was shaking. The calm and collected Captain that had cursed out the two senshi only minutes earlier had vanished, replaced by a frantic, nearly screaming woman. This wasn't just any injury. This wasn't just any lieutenant wounded in battle. This was Khaldun, this was Little Dreads, and oh god, why was he so still, why was he so ******** still.
Falling to her knees, she struggled to straighten the boy out on the ground, his head now resting in her lap. Trembling fingers reached out to touch his neck (where the hell was the pulse supposed to be again??) while her other hand quickly brushed away the tangle of dreadlocks that had fallen over his face.
Tears were welling up and she looked over towards the bedroom, the bathroom, anywhere.
"Khalid!"
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 12:14 am
The General-King had been working at the table, abandoning whatever he was doing with his laptop (glaring at it; furtively looking at the back of it; trying to work on a word processor) when Nealite came in, dragging the Lieutenant with her. The still, bloodied, cut-up Lieutenant who was a dead weight, staining her with his blood, making Nealite look more panicky and white and terrified than he'd seen her in a while.
Not just any Lieutenant.
Hematite.
Ursula was looking up at him, tearless, white, frantic. He dropped to his knees -- everything was slow, the world stopped, the world went into hard focus -- and his hand, through molasses, went to Khaldun's neck. Went there and stayed there until he found the thready, uneven pulse. Once he had the pulse, the world went back to its regular speed: colours, lights, Nealite's own frantic breathing. And Khaldun. Khaldun, stained in blood.
He took Khaldun into his arms, lifted him up, stood. He carried him like he was a sack of potatoes, and she had never seen his expression like this before. Khaldun -- Khaldun was in his arms. Bleeding. Dying, maybe.
"Who did this."
Khalid's voice was a sepulchre.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 12:37 am
"I don't know. I don't know."
She was still on her knees, a faint wave of relief washing over her at Khalid's arrival, her mind still replaying the scene she'd stumbled across as she clutched to details, any small detail that could prove useful. "Blue hair. There was a girl with blue, short hair, and the other had green? She was tan. Tan. I don't know either of them."
Hands fell down on the ground and she clumsily pulled herself up to her feet, high heels wobbling as she found her balance. "He went into one of those... <********>, what do you call them? One of those swirls."
Her hand moved in a circular pattern as her mind raced, "Whirlpool. Those little bitches had him pulled into a whirlpool as I arrived, and I teleported as soon as he shot out. I don't know what else they did, but oh God, Khalid, we have to take him to the hospital."
She drew closer, but couldn't bring herself to touch him. She couldn't bring herself to do anything but stare, stare at the poor broken boy held in the General-King's arms. This couldn't be Nova again. He couldn't die. He couldn't.
"Hospital," she repeated, her voice still struggling to remain calm, "We need the hospital."
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 1:52 am
Khalid was lost, looking at the younger man in his arms -- as though he hadn't heard anything, as though nothing Ursula said was getting through to him. She'd never seen Charonite so out of control. He should have been moving. He should have been decisive. He should have been already making the move to take Hematite to a hospital, not just.... staring at him in his arms, crumpled and bleeding. Staring. Staring and lost. She'd just told him that Sailor Nerissa and an unknown had beaten the s**t out of Hematite to the point of dying --
-- ... --
-- and he couldn't do anything.
"Hospital," he suddenly said, tightly. "Hospital."
And he teleported out.
Nealite followed, knowing his trail by now -- they both appeared in a crappy, scrubby field in the dark across the road from Destiny City Memorial, right next to a used car yard and on the other side a race track. They crossed the street -- it was full of cars -- and headed to the ER portion. Somehow Charonite had managed to power Hematite down so that it was Khaldun in his arms, broken, not Hematite himself -- Ursula was following no matter how exhausted she was. Couldn't not.
Khalid motored himself back so that he slammed through the side door to the ER, the night one --
"I NEED A ******** DOCTOR!"
It was a hillbilly bellow. He wasn't wearing shoes. He was wild-eyed. Frankly, Gunn Killingworth at that point looked like a freaked-out, bloodstained druggie. "I need a <******** DOCTOR," he bellowed again, and at that point people started getting into motion.
They took Khaldun away.
Khalid kept on trying to go with him -- "I'm his guardian," he said. No, Mr. Killingworth, we have to take him into triage -- "I'm his ******** guardian."
Both he and Ursula ended up sitting on those nasty plastic chairs, waiting, and Charonite stared straight ahead at nothing.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 2:50 am
She felt helpless. She felt helpless as she trailed behind him into the ER, helpless as she watched the nurses and doctors cart Khaldun back on a stretcher. His face looked ashen, and there was still no sign of consciousness. The doors swung slowly, back and forth, and then stilled, a barrier between them now. What they could be doing to the teenager at this point... no, Ursula couldn't think about it. All she could do was take Khalid's hand, take it and lead them both to the plastic chairs she'd never hoped to sit in. She'd seen them before, on General Hospital and various other soaps that she used to watch religiously. When did her life decide to become a soap opera?
He was silent and still, refusing to talk. She thought, at first, he was staring at the doors that Khaldun had been rushed through, but she soon concluded that he was off in his own world. A world she could not follow him into.
Biting her bottom lip, Ursula took it upon herself to cut off the approaching nurse, snatching away the clipboard and pen before the pudgy woman could bother Mister Killingworth for the needed information. Shooing her away with a half-hearted snap, Ursula sat down and began to fill out what information she could on Khaldun. Every once in a while, she had to gently nudge Khalid for the answer to a question, and he would sometimes answer, in that sullen, hollow voice that terrified her.
She was scared. She had never seen Khalid like this, never been put in a situation where she had to take control. She didn't like it. She hated it.
Finally finishing with the forms (or what she was able to finish of them), she returned them to the nurse's station before making her way back towards the plastic chairs. There, she continued to wring her hands together nervously, her lip torn from being chewed on as Ursula looked down at her clothes, and then at Khalid's. Both stained with blood, far too much blood. And Khalid, god, he looked so lost, so helpless. What could she possibly do to comfort him? Was there anything to do?
Time went by, slow as it ever could, and after what seemed like hours of silence, save for the brief interruption of a new ER admittance, she dared to reach her hand over and place it on his shoulder.
"Khalid, I -"
"Mr. Killingworth?"
Both heads shot up to stare at the older gentleman in a white labcoat that had just made his way through the doors leading to triage. The man was looking down at the clipboard as he read off the name (Killingworth? Someone was actually named Killingworth?) and then glanced around the room for the owner of the name. His eyes settled on the gym teacher just as Charonite arrived at his side, having shot out of his chair at Kill, Ursula hot at his heels. Both of them began to talk at once, as the doctor took a step back, startled.
"Khaldun, is he-"
"Is he alright, Doc-"
"Please." The man cut them off with a wave and a stern look, both adults frantic enough for the information this man held to both silence their tongues. Straightening himself up, the shorter man led them both to the side and away from the double doors he'd entered from.
"I'm Doctor Stevenson. Now, it says here you're Khaldun's guardian?" the Doctor began, flipping through the forms on his clipboard before looking up to glance at Ursula hesitantly, then back towards the tall, intimidating shoeless man. Having second thoughts, he turned back towards Ursula, deciding it wiser (and healthier) for him to address her, "And what relation are you to Mr. Cilentani?"
Once identities were confirmed and squared away (damn you, HIPAA, of all the times to worry about your goddamn privacy acts), Dr. Stevenson removed his glasses, laying them on the clipboard as two fingers rose to rub the area between his eyes before he began speaking.
"Mister Killingworth, I don't know how to put this gently, so I'm just going to say it. Khaldun almost didn't make it, but you brought him in with just enough time to spare. He lost a lot of blood. He's still in surgery at the moment; some ribs were cracked and there are several fractures in his right leg."
Then the man paused, a dreadful sign to both adults standing there, hanging off every word he said. Wasn't this the part where the doctor smiled, patted the parent on the back and said how lucky of a boy he was for making it through such an ordeal?
That moment never came.
Instead: "Khaldun is in a coma."
A what?
"He suffered a severe head injury, and we believe he slipped into it shortly afterwards. We won't be sure of anything until after surgery, though, to see what we can do to test for neurological damage."
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 3:07 am
It was very quiet, and it was very still. After a few moments, it was Charonite who said:
"Is it a skull fracture?"
The doctor hesitated with the grimace of talking to somebody who had either watched a lot of ER, Scrubs and Chicago Hope, or somebody who just knew a little more of their stuff -- "Penetrating brain injury. There's a fluid leak, and he's in the early catatonic stages, I can't give you a Glasgow -- "
"I want to know," said Charonite, "what the ******** yaw is on the bits of his skull that are in his brain."
"I can't tell you. I'm sorry. We're still working on it." He raised the clipboard, as though in defence, when Khalid opened his mouth again. "We can't tell you. All we can do is try to alleviate the pressure, do a scan, test for the damage. He is still in surgery. If you want to stay here, there's places for family -- "
"I want to know," said the dark-skinned man, "when he will be getting out from under your god damned knives."
"I can't tell you that. Understand. I can't tell you."
Charonite let out a long breath after a few tense, awkward moments where it looked as though Ursula was going to have to let go of squeezing his hand and step between the two men -- he was barefoot, he was in his jeans, he looked like he'd come from the east side of Destiny City. Ursula, in comparison, was someone the doctor looked to -- bloodstained but neat. The doctor finally said haplessly; "You'll be wanting to make a statement, talk to the police about the details of the hit-and-run that got him -- "
"That can wait," said Khalid, "and so will we."
There was nothing more worrisome than that tone of voice, nor that stare.
So they were back to the chairs.
After long, long, long moments of silence, Charonite said blankly: "I have to go to him." (This wasn't possible, he wasn't even off the table, he wasn't) "I have to go to him."
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 3:40 am
"He's going to be okay, the doctors know what they're doing."
Hands were still holding on to his, two pale slender hands attempting to cover the much larger one between them, gentle soft skin rubbing up and down over coarseness, one of the few physical signs Ursula had to show him, to express that she was still there, still sitting by him, still supporting him.
Ursula didn't know if the doctors really had a clue as to what they were doing. But they were doctors, they got paid oodles of money for doing what they did, so they should have some idea... right? No, surely they would. They were doctors.
"It's okay," she continued to prattle, her voice low and hushed. Across the room, a mother and child stared at them. Or rather, the child continued to stare at the shoeless black man who sat in front of them as small fingers pointed out his bare feet, his mother reprimanding him and doing her best to distract him while all the while staring at them herself. "It's okay, darling. Everything's going to be okay. Khal's a toughass, remember? I mean, he's always resisting you, he's always putting up a fight. He's not a quitter, he won't quit. It's going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay."
She was repeating her words, as if trying to convince herself of what she was telling him. Her head moved to rest against his arm as her hands continued to massage his, her eyes weary and tired from the emotional strain of the evening. But she couldn't sleep, no, she couldn't sleep even if she wanted to. Too much was at stake, too much was dangling in limbo, despite her own attempt at reassuring her fiancé.
"It's going to be okay."
An hour passed, and then another. Few words were exchanged, most of them being Ursula continuing to drill "Everything will be okay" into both of their heads. Patients and families came and went. Some were happy. Some were devastated. Ursula herself attempted to focus on the happier families, allowing a slight bit of hope to rise within her at the chance that they too would soon share such an experience. They had to. This wasn't supposed to end this way, not for Khal, not for her, not for Charonite.
After what seemed to take forever, another doctor arrived to inform the couple that Khaldun was finally, at long last, out of surgery. It took both the doctor and Ursula to restrain Khalid back to his chair (what was the point, he argued, of telling them he was out of surgery if they weren't going to allow him to go back and goddamn see his own goddamn ward), and after another treacherous hour of waiting, a nurse arrived from behind another door, beckoning Mister Killingworth forward.
It was time to go back and see him.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 3:52 am
They went to see him.
He was in the Glasgow ward -- not the worst of the Glasgow wards, where the comatose patients were kept alive only on machines (and where Laney Sutton now slumbered). It didn't matter a damn. They'd gotten what they wanted out of Barren Pines: thirty-strong sentient, clever youma, corrupted from slowly mangled starseeds, enough to give the new officers that were going to join their ranks. But none of that mattered. All that mattered was Khaldun, who looked oddly young in the bed with pipes coming out his nose and his masses of dreadlocks shaved off: they had cut open a flap in his skull at the side and obviously operated there, then sealed it over again. He had tubes at his wrists. He just had tubes.
"I want to know why he's not awake," said Charonite to the doctor, slow and ponderous.
"We alleviated the pressure of the fragment in his brain," said Dr. Stevenson. "It was only in a few millimeters deep, but it was over a wide area. He's responsive to some stimuli. But he's still comatose. In the first twenty-four to forty-eight hour period, we have a lot of hope, it's good to remain positive -- he's breathing by himself."
"I want to stay with him."
Dr. Stevenson looked at the haggard man, opened his mouth, and closed it again. "Of course."
He went away, doing something with a nurse, and Charonite looked back at his fiancée who was nearly dead on her feet: "You go. I'll stay."
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 4:26 am
"Like hell I'm leaving either of you here."
Her words were choked out, feet stumbling forward awkwardly as both hands moved to reach out and grab hold of one of his arms like a child would. Her head returned to resting against him as she could do nothing but stare at the teenager lying before them.
Khaldun, while standing, would tower over Ursula, just as his guardian did. But there, on the hospital bed, he looked small and lifeless. The machines surrounding him were making strange, unnerving noises. Were they supposed to sound like that? Was everything operating properly, as it should? How would they know if it wasn't? Did they really have to shave his head? What was that coming out of it? Were all those tubes necessary? What was in them, circulating into his body?
She could hardly recognize him, and it was only thanks to the long pale scar across his face that she could even tell it was Khaldun Cilentani laid out in the bed. He was no longer her Little Dreads.
Eyes closed, far too tired to cry as her heart grew heavy with that realization. Ursula didn't know much about comas, but what she did know failed to allow for much room for hoping. Didn't it take weeks, sometimes, for patients to wake up from these? Didn't some patients never wake up? Was Khaldun destined to be a vegetable, lying in a bed like this for the rest of his life?
Charonite was silent, still watching his ward. She turned to look at the bare room around them, and quickly spotted a chair in the corner, similar to the horribly uncomfortable plastic chairs found in the ER waiting area.
Releasing hold of her betrothed, she moved across the room to take hold of the chair. Her feet were not her own, she felt like a zombie, void of emotion, void of feeling. None of this seemed real. Sure, they fought senshi, they fought with the intent to win, to crush the enemy. But if they lost, they bounced back. They bounced back, they didn't wind up in terrifying hospital rooms attached to machines and plugs.
She dragged the chair over to the General-King and ordered him to sit, her voice lacking the demand it usually held. Before he could object, she'd already exited the room to harass one of the nearby nurses on duty, and soon returned with not only a matching and equally uncomfortable chair for herself, but a reluctant promise of thin hospital blankets and undersized pillows.
It was going to be a long night.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 4:30 am
"You know what."
Charonite's voice was low and gravelly. He was staring at Khaldun, not her, watching Khaldun and all of the beeping machines -- "You know. You know what, Ursula?" Low and urgent. "We probably put most of everyone <******** in here in a <******** coma."
All of them. The Dark Kingdom.
"And I don't give a ******** could translate. She was going to be his wife one day. She was good at this:
Khalid was giving the finger directly to God. Probably directly to Kunzite as well. Is this something you're doing to me, for my sins? Is this payback for everything I have done and am doing? Is this a response for my evil?
Go to Hell.
"I don't care."
And then he subsided into silence.
It was going to be a long night.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 5:54 am
The first few times Khaldun awoke on his own were nothing for Gunn Killingworth or Ursula Johnson to get their hopes up over. For a few minutes he'd blink and open his eyes or move, or even both, but he wasn't talking. He lapsed back into unconsciousness just as quickly, and the waiting continued. Inside the hospital, with fluorescent lights buzzing over their heads and that malaise thick enough to be tangible, time didn't flow quite the same. There wasn't day or night, or weekdays, just methodical beeping and the routine sweeps by doctors and nurses and janitors to mark the passing of the hours. Maybe they were only hours that spanned between the breaks in his comatose state. Maybe they were days, or minutes. Khaldun wouldn't remember any of it. Even the fight he'd been injured in would only come back in hazy snippets at first.
They got a whole fifteen minutes out of him next, when he'd seemingly been awakened by a doctor talking in a hushed voice, but any questions Khaldun was asked were unfortunately answered in nonsense. The prognosis was looking better, though with head injuries there was really no telling what kind of damage may have been done. Khaldun was coming out of the worst of it, ever so slowly, but the doctors were unwilling to speculate about his condition. The subject was avoided, at least conversationally.
Khaldun was a notorious insomniac. For him, sleeping was always a trap, a waste of his time, something to put off as long as he could. And even when he was going 72 hours strong on nothing but caffeinated soda and willpower, he didn't just 'pass out' on the nearest available piece of furniture. He'd never, in all his memory, fell asleep in the middle of nowhere like a narcoleptic. There was always a place. It was his dorm room. Always. He held out till he could make it so. Because it was safe. Patterns were safe. Routine was safe. Things weren't supposed to change. Change was the root of all evil.
The room he opened his eyes to was not his dorm room.
In fact, it was no room like any he'd ever seen before, practically alien, and the more his darting eyes took in those first couple seconds, the more confused he was becoming. Charonite had a strict policy on hospitals, and because of it, Khaldun had never been to one. So, in a moderately drugged and three-quarters conscious state, he panicked, fingers clumsily tearing at the bedsheet and failing to disentangle himself. The details of things in the room weren't all sinking in yet - it was like they had to reach him one at a time. Bed. Curtain. Tubes. People. But he didn't know where he was. He didn't know where he was and why he was here and - why was he here why was he here where the hell was here - It took longer than it should have for him to articulate himself, but when he did, it was with a resounding (if slurred) "WHAT THE ******** a doctor had been present, they wouldn't be sure whether to give this a 3 or a 4 on the verbal Glasgow scale just yet.
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Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 3:36 am
There were few things worse than waking up in a hospital bed with tubes up pretty much every orifice you owned, not knowing where the ******** you were, feeling as though you'd been put in a blender set to SCREW ME UP. But there was nothing worse than waking up to all this and suddenly finding that the person sitting hunched in a chair next to your bed, dead-eyed, looking as though he hadn't slept for the entire time that you'd been on-and-off living and live and well --
-- was Gunn Killingworth.
"Stop. Be still. It's."
His hand reached out to grab hold of Khaldun's arm, and his eyes were intense -- pale grey, looking at him, looking at him a little as though he hadn't seen him in a year. "It's all right." God, he was gruff. What was happening? He was dead; he was in Hell. "Don't ******** move an inch -- don't try to yank that out, for ******** sake."
Horrifying.
"Be still."
He had to swallow before he said it. It sounded as though Charonite hadn't spoken in a while. He said, finally: "You're in Destiny City Memorial. Don't pull that out -- I don't care what it's ******** attached to." Despairing. "Where's a ******** nurse?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 6:35 am
Khaldun leaned up slightly, scrabbled, fell back with a dull thump and pain in his side. He couldn't remember anything that told him what he could be doing here. The events preceding unconsciousness weren't all there. What had he been doing the day before? He wasn't getting - he didn't even know why he'd forgotten everything before, he couldn't get it again, could he!? Everything hurt too much. His head didn't even feel right, but it was all those ******** tubes that had his attention. There were tubes in his nose, so he was breathing through his mouth in short bursts, like his lungs were contemplating hyperventilating. He had to get out of all of this. There was a sharp creak of cheap plastic, and Khaldun turned his head sharply. He didn't have any expectations of what to see at his bedside, but he had expectations of what not to see. Gunn Killingworth was at the top of that list. But Gunn Killingworth was staring back at him from a hospital chair.
It was a shock. Khaldun looked at him like he was the ghost of Christmas future, stared for a few long seconds, and then quickly turned his attention to removing the hollow plastic that had been jabbed into him. Fingers brushed along tubes, but he couldn't decide what to try and yank out first. One arm was suddenly incapacitated by the General-King's grip, and he looked back at Killingworth like an animal caught in a bear trap. This was not all right. 'All right' was some poor hapless creature that had gone extinct years ago in the face of whatever the ******** this place was. He couldn't be dead, dead people didn't get haunted by the living. Hell though, that was entirely possible. This matched the definition of hell pretty perfectly. Dizzily he considered trying to pry his arm free...
"No," he wheezed. Destiny City Memorial was the hospital, he'd heard of it, he'd never... but no, no nurse. Killingworth still had him by one arm. His free one he'd been gripping whatever the hell had been shoved in his nose with the intent to get it the hell out like all the other ones he'd been touching off on in his confusion. Like it was his first day on the job defusing a bomb. Cut the red wire. There was no ******** red wire here. Tubes. All over. How did they get then in his arms? And a headache that felt like it was not at all limited to his head - that was just where it was the worst. He reluctantly let go of the tubes and moved his hand to his face to rub across half of it as if exasperated. The look on his face was still wild eyed, spooked like a horse. "No. No nurse."
Killingworth looked like he hadn't slept in... it looked a lot longer than a day. How long? How long had he been out? It didn't feel that long, but... Khaldun had always hated Killingworth's ghostly eyes, just as much as the rest of the man. Avoiding looking at them was his normal approach, eyes on the floor instead. Not today, though. Even though Khaldun despised him, resented him, the General-King was a familiar sight in an unfamiliar place. And he had answers, even if he never did give them to anyone else most of the time. Khaldun had never noticed before how tired Charonite could look - the sunglasses weren't just a gimmick. He'd even sounded... upset? Was that possible? Charonite? There were a hundred questions, but some were pushing themselves to the forefront without any semblance of a mental filter. At least he wasn't picking at the IV or anything. His voice sounded just as strained by its use as Killingworth's did. "Why - why am I here? Why are you here? I can leave now, can't I - wh-"
He turned his head against his pillow slightly, and back, and whatever questions he'd been about to ask were tossed aside for a contemplative silence. He felt the pillowcase against his skull. Except that couldn't be possible, because he had dreadlocks. He moved the free arm to his head to brush through his eccentric hairstyle for reassurance. His fingers traced the stubble of a newly-shaved head, from front to back. He used to have dreadlocks. The fingers gathered themselves into a fist, knuckles white.
"My hair." Grimacing widely, he looked like he had the first day after he'd been struck by his terrible amnesia. Confused, upset, without a clue where he was. He'd been left nothing but his appearance as any indication of who he used to be. He had dreadlocks. Charonite had them, too, but Khaldun had kept his despite how they gave the impression the two of them were related (Charonite was a friend of Khaldun's parents. He'd discovered this much. It wasn't enough.). Should have rid himself of them, but never had, because he liked to think he had a good reason to get them. That's what he lacked as Hematite, as himself these days. Reasons. Instant gratifications and present dangers were the only things that he could contemplate. But he'd been someone else, once, and if ever there was an unrealistic wish, his was to know who he'd been. What he'd lost. To know, because he didn't have anything but a crisscross scar and dreadlocks as reminders and remnants. And now, just the scar. He wasn't even angry, he was beyond it, humiliated. His voice was thin, threatening to break. His composure was held together by absolutely nothing now. "What the ******** happened to my hair."
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Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 5:50 pm
"You had bits of your skull in your goddamn brain, which at least proves you've got one," said the General-King, roughly. "They can't fork that out without taking off your hair. Stop bitching."
He leant back in that crappy plastic chair -- there were folds in his shirt that exactly matched the crinkles of the chair that he was in. He had been there. He had been there a very long time, watching Khaldun (augh) in his bed, sitting there unsleeping. Sleeping would have been a little more swallowable. Sitting there watching unsleeping and probably unblinking was much worse. "You were in a ******** coma," his leader said succinctly. "You're lucky you didn't wake up some god damned vegetable, all right? Bone in your brain. This isn't like Tisiphone blowing up your weapon. You were dying, for the love of ******** Charonite sound... upset?
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Posted: Wed Dec 30, 2009 3:24 am
"In my brain?! But - well couldn't they have - they didn't need to - rrgh." Disbelieving, he continued to stare at the General-King, ignoring the insults instead of stewing over them just this once. All his attention was focused there, away from the tubes, the machines, the antiseptic in the air, before he could lapse into another panic attack. Both hands were folded over his chest while he lay in the bed - he was afraid that trying to sit up would get Killingworth worked up after all the tube-pulling, and he absolutely did not want any more of this hospital treatment from a nurse or anyone else. It was hard to believe what Charonite was saying, but he had no reason to lie. A coma, a head injury. What a way to go - or nearly go. Didn't feel like a coma, but he did feel like he'd fallen down a flight of stairs. Still, there should have been some other way to pick the pieces out of his brain that didn't require them to shave his head. It was uncomfortable to even imagine; he didn't think he'd be able to look into a mirror again for a long time. His eyes switched to looking down at the bedsheets in detail, trying to think but having a hard time of it. Any memory misplaced set off alarms in his head, precautionary. "I don't remember... did I fall or something?"
Khaldun was a soldier, a grunt, and someone had his fealty. No lieutenant he'd ever seen had a weapon that was useful for jack s**t in the face of magic. Some would die if they were outmatched or didn't know when to run. It wasn't glorious. Just fighting, a weapon in his hands and a promise that if he didn't have the balls to wield it then he could consider himself dead as soon as a senshi caught sight of him. It was just how things were, and to Khaldun it was how things had always been. Death was supposed to be the price of failure on the battlefield. Khaldun didn't think too much on how he was going to die. It wasn't like he thought he was invincible or anything, and he was well aware it was going to happen eventually, sooner rather than later even. But how? It was just kind of depressing to bother contemplating it on top of what he already had to think about, which was planning all the evasive maneuvers to prevent fatality. The best guess he had was that one day he'd lose to a senshi like Tisiphone, and just bleed to death in some alley. And that'd be that. He'd accepted fate a while back, even if he wasn't keen on meeting it. It was in the cards: dying alone.
But he wasn't alone, here, and that was what struck him. What was he to the General-King? He always felt like the man only bothered with him as some kind of obligation, and that neither party was happy with the arrangement. In only a year, Khaldun had been exposed to enough of Charonite's wrath to realize nothing stopped him from punching, kicking, backhanding, degrading the lieutenant at a moment's notice. The Negaverse trumped everything, according to Charonite at least. If Khaldun had failed the Negaverse somehow to end up here, why hadn't he been left to die for making a fatal mistake? If it was an accident, why would the General-King have bothered to show up at the hospital at all? Not just shown up. Killingworth looked pretty ******** tired. But his shirt, his whole disheveled look - this wasn't some lucky drop-in visit on his part. He'd been here this whole time, not even sleeping, hadn't he? (It was pretty ******** weird on second thought, but it was Charonite, so...) Just sitting there, waiting, for what could have been days. Could have been more than days. For what? Why?
Nealite was... right... about him? Jesus christ.
Khaldun backtracked mentally. Something off about how he was talking, his tone. It wasn't some normal cue. Knowing the way Charonite usually was, vicious and remorseless with his words, this sounded halfhearted in comparison. Was he upset? He sounded upset. But Charonite didn't get upset, he got angry. Really angry. For all the horrible things he said and did... but it was definitely not anger even in this attempt. Like some kind of anomaly, something that shouldn't happen. A sin against nature. Even the teen had to try something to dispel it.
It was awkward. Khaldun gave Killingworth a crooked smile, repeated something he'd said far too often in the gym teacher's office or the Negaverse subspace. Regular humor always went over the General-King's head anyway - he knew from experience. "Sorry, sir. It won't happen again."
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