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Undead

There was no way of telling how long she had been trapped under bandages and IV drips. There are two parallel lines of stitches across her throat and running up towards her face. She resembled the girl with the green ribbon from the children's horror story. Like one small push would knock her head off.

Had she not been strapped into a bed, she might have.

She felt the leaden weight on her wrist and she knew what damage had been done. To be sure, she pushed a nail into her palm until it bled. Fragile skin. Silent Tenebrae.

Human.

Memories of Caelius came next. The argument near the desk. Lucky. Her arrogance (she didn't regret it. She didn't regret it). The altercations of how she'd ended up in the infirmary.

(Just how did she get here? She remembered the dark, the woman, the dark- ... the infirmary? What had happened in between?)

She remembered this feeling of having a bracelet and being a traitor distinctly, but not the people that came with it. Not Chris angrily threatening to kill in her name. Not Abbi graciously spending hours with her on the island since Chel had been unable to leave. Not any number of people that were crutching her very existence and persistence.

Her first thought was to find a knife. Faster that way.

Her second thought was duh they don't keep knives near patients. She knew that from experience.

Her third thought was how dull it was to wait in a bed when no one was coming and there was nothing to do but heal at the painfully slow rate of a human.

Undead

The moon hunter had a special knack for being the last person to find out what had happened, and as such had no clue about Chel's condition. But the guy spent much of his time in the infirmary anyway, checking on bed ridden hunters, changing sheets, and all the other fun stuff.

As such, he walked past a open door, hands filled with new clean sheets, and froze when he recognized the person strapped to the bed.

The sheets were quickly forgotten, placed on a chair as Jason entered the room, shocked at the state Chel was in, zeroing in on the stitches to her neck and the heavy bracelet on her wrist. There were no shouts or exclaiming given; he knew better than to disturb a sick patient with his frantic calls of what the hell happened to you.

Slow, quiet steps took him to her bedside. He saw one of her fingers digging into her palm, blood welling up from a small wound. A gloved hand reached out to clasp hers, gently trying to coax her hand to relax. No words were spoken, unsure of what could be said in this situation, but his gaze was full of concern for her wellbeing.

Methodical

"Won't feel pain" was a very relative phrase, but Chel couldn't blame this lifer nurse for using bedside manner. When questioned about her desire for anything, she slowly moved her head from side to side (which then resulted in a wince because it twisted the gouges).

Any spark of recognition was gone from her face. Noemi was any other nurse; cute, but a stranger. "You can go care fer someone else. S'fine." She wasn't healing any faster after all.

Vacancy

The worst part about being bedridden with a neck wound was being unable to turn over. She was just painfully stuck on her back, forced between two options: close her eyes or focus on the ceiling. There was nothing else to do.

Even if Tenebrae wasn't liked, he was missed. She had been informed she'd responded well to runic procedures. She could talk now, but it was a soft whisper between pained expressions.

It took Chel a moment to connect that the man from her dream was the same one beside her cot. Thusfar many of these visitors she hadn't known, but this one she did. That made her happy. Then she remembered she knew nothing other than he loved her immensely. That made her unhappy.

"Jack," she said with a voice that sounded like sandpaper on a tin roof, like she was reminding herself of who he was. Her knit eyebrows and the long silence coupled with a glassy, frustrated stare at the ground signaled all was not well.

Vacancy

She shook her head, not wanting to waste the energy on the words to say no. She had a lot of questions bouncing around in her head. Who are you? was at the forefront, but so was why does it hurt, what's missing, where's Tenebrae, it hurts- where's Caelius, who brought me here-

Her hands were cold and limp in Jack's hands. "You love me," she said, pulling one thought from her brain, but not comprehending more than the feelings her memory assigned to him. "That means something."

Vacancy

The stroking was foreign, mixing with claws and black blood, carressing words-

Before she understood her reaction, she moved her hand away. Then she panicked when it wasn't warm anymore and grabbed his hands with an iron grip. Warm blood was better than an empty void.

"I don't know," she told him truthfully, mystified by the events surrounding her trauma. At least with Merlin she'd known.

She held up the hand with the bracelet, trying to communicate without words because it hurt too much. It was agonizing to be choked like this; verbal was her only form of real communication.

It was a silent question. Do you accept me?

vacancy

He didn't freeze over, but keeping ahold of her hands was like staying beside the fire nonetheless, and he welcomed the iron hot grip. Questions of his own wanted to bubble out: short term, long term, temporary, permanent, what else, what else? But he couldn't harry Chel, not in her current condition.

"That's fine." Jack glanced at the bracelet. "That's fine," he repeated, softer, almost belying the fact that he wanted nothing more than to rip it off, bomb be damned. "Let's worry about you recovering first." He peeled a hand out briefly, making a motion with several fingers and his thumb out. Stay.

Undead

She offered no response, which was fine with him; she looked so ill he doubted she could have said anything anyway.

It was such a tiny cut no one else would have bothered, but he still wiped it clean with a damp cloth. It was a small move on his part to try make her feel better.

He walked out of the room then, intending to come back later when she wasn't so sickly.