NaNo2014 day 2

[shamera]

“And the last thing you remember?”

Hope looked away from Dr. Cline and toward his father, who was sitting next to him on the plastic chair near his bed. It couldn’t be very comfortable, he had seen Snow squirming around in that thing, complaining about the lack of cushions.

Bartholomew Estheim gave him an encouraging nod.

Hope looked back toward his doctor, still tired just from moving his neck. He concentrated hard to form the words in his mouth, as his tongue was still have trouble obeying his commands. “I… dunno.”

“It should come back to you in time.” Dr. Cline reassured him, swiping down notes on his medical tablet. “You’re doing very well. It may be a bit early for me to say this, but… it seems as if your surgery was a complete success. You’re a very lucky young man.”

Hope gave a strained smile. The others had explained to him, slowly, and multiple times since he tended to fall asleep on them mid-story, about what happened. There had been an earthquake, the first one that the former residents of Cocoon had ever experienced, which taught them a little bit more about the land of Gran Pulse: mostly, that there were many areas which could not support heavy structures, and that the land itself was not always stable.

He and a great deal of other people had been in the accident, Hope was told. He had fallen from a great height, but Vanille managed to catch him with her rod before he hit the ground, although he stuck his head several times along the way down. It was the reason why she panicked, why she wouldn’t leave him alone unless pestered, as his recent coma had been a direct result of those head injuries. Apparently her rod had also caused several more injuries, but those were all easily healed over with the help of manadrives.

She had saved his life then.

It had been the brain injuries that required more delicate care, the doctor sprouting off several long words that Hope couldn’t yet make out. Things were slowly getting clearer, but…

“And can you feel that?” Dr. Clive was saying. Hope nodded at the touch on the bottom of his foot. “Can you move your foot for me? Good, good.”

“Doctor?” Bartholomew asked anxiously after a moment of silence as Dr. Cline noted things down on his tablet.

“Hmm?” The doctor hummed, not looking up from his tablet for a moment before he startled. “Oh, I’m sorry. No, it’s all good news. Considering the initial extent of his injuries, I’d say your son is amazing condition. I’d like for him to stay another two weeks, mostly for further assessment along with physical therapy. From what I can see… well, it’s better than anything we would have hoped for.”

“Two weeks.” Bartholomew sounded disbelieving. “Surely it can’t be that bad.”

Dr. Cline shook his head, but looked as if he had told many patients and their families the exact same thing over the years, and already expected the reaction. “Head injuries are always a delicate matter. There may be quite a few holes in his memory, and while he is in good condition now, not many have the experience necessary to deal with the following muscular and speech therapy. He has a very limited range of motion at the moment, and it’s important to understand that this may come from the brain needing to heal and relearn motion rather than the body.”

“I…” His father seemed overwhelmed. “Yes, that would be a lot to deal with.”

“Family members are encouraged to participate as well.” Dr. Cline assured him. “Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been allowed as patients could be distracted by other people there, but encouragement is a greater motivation than deterrent. I know you and the rest of your family have not left his side, so…”

“Ah.” Bartholomew breathed out. “They’re… yes, I suppose so.”

Hope closed his eyes then, satisfied with having stayed awake so long.

—

“Bored, are we?”

Hope set down the puzzle as Dr. Cline entered the room, pushing himself further up in his bed. It had only been three days, but a productive three days nevertheless. While his physical rehabilitation was a little slow, his speech therapy had progressed in leaps and bounds. His dexterity had improved, and thus, Hope had also managed to stay awake for hours at a time, leaving him with very little to do when he refused visitors.

He wanted some time to himself to work on remembering them rather than face their disappointed faces. It seemed as if the others didn’t quite understand, but they left nevertheless when Hope started raising his voice and slurring his words in distress.

He nodded his head in answer to the question, and held out the completed puzzle.

“Remarkable.” Dr. Cline murmured as he accepted the completed item. “Simply remarkable. I’d say you’d be ready to head home in half the time I projected. How are you doing today, Hope? And say it in words.”

Hope frowned. He was still feeling terribly self-conscious about his faltering words.

“I,” he hesitated for just a moment, forcing his lips to enunciate better. “Feel fine, doctor.”

“Good, good.” The doctor bustled about the room, making notes the entire time. “Ms. Farron was asking for you earlier, if you feel up to taking visitors. She said she’d come back in another hour or so if you’re amendable and the two of you could have dinner together.”

Hope shrugged. He liked whenever Light was around, although he couldn’t understand why yet. She was a calming presence, and tended to turn a blind eye whenever Hope was having trouble expressing his words or even swallowing his food, unlike the others who immediately jumped to help him. It let him feel calmer about his mistakes, like he wasn’t something that needed help with every little task. Because of that, it had only been her and his father visiting him the past day since Hope tended to make a fuss when the others stayed for too long.

“I’ll tell her that’s a yes, then.” The doctor hummed in thought. “And bring you more things, shall I? Perhaps a few books this time?”

Hope nodded, and then added quietly, “Please.”

—

Within another two days, Hope was growing more than a little restless.

There was just nothing to do in the night hours. While there was someone who used to stay with him through the night, Hope had long since told the others to go home and sleep as well after seeing the dark circles under Vanille’s eyes. Nothing was going to happen to him during the night, after all. It wasn’t as if he was going to slip into a coma again, not when he was this awake and aware.

He set down the old fashioned paper-bound book he had been given for a moment, already bored with the tripe storyline written within, and listened to the beeping of the hospital at night. The lights were dimmed for the night so that those asleep would not be disturbed, but Hope’s room was empty of anyone but himself.

He wondered why. Listening to the gossip of nurses during the day revealed the hospital to be overfull, and yet there was an empty bed next to his.

He wanted to… to do something. It felt strange to not have anything important to do. It felt like a ticking clock in the back of his mind, urging him to be productive before time ran out, and the feeling made him antsy. The hour on the clock read far too early in the morning (or perhaps late at night) for anyone to rightfully be awake, but…

He pushed off the covers and slipped his legs over the side of the bed, brushing against the pushed down handles. He was still tired from the earlier exercises, but his body was recovering faster than his mind. It was never his muscles that gave out first, but rather mental exhaustion trying to consciously control his movements.

With a breath to prepare himself, Hope slipped from the bed and settled onto the floor, noting the cold linoleum underneath his feet. Steady. He was steady at the moment. He wondered if he could make it to the rec room before anyone caught him, and whether it would be alright for him to stay in that room a few hours. Maybe he’d be able to find something there to do, rather than read the flimsy books that had been brought to him. Maybe he could do something else. Study. So much time spent in the hospital meant that he must have missed a lot, right?

He made it to the door and peeked out into the hallway cautiously. Coast clear. Hope slipped into the hall, sidestepping various obstacles to make his way down to the rec room, luckily still on the same floor. There was a night shift nurse behind the counter in a lit part of the hall next to the elevators, but she merely gave him a frown as he slipped past her, turning away to ignore his presence.

The small recreational room was brightly lit still, colorful and empty except for a young child sitting by himself in a corner, bandages wrapped tightly around a bald head and his left arm in a cast. Hope stared for a moment, but then went back to scanning the rest of the room when it seemed the child was ignoring him as well. There were several small shelves of books along one brightly painted wall, and crates of toys and puzzles shoved against another corner by the tightly drawn curtains.

Childish, Hope thought, and wondered why that didn’t feel right. Why he hadn’t noticed it before. But then again, Dr. Cline mentioned before that he would notice more and more of his surroundings as time went on. Perhaps he just skipped the information before this.

He wandered to one of the shelves and sat down on the floor cross-legged, entirely ignoring the bench and seats next to him. None of the books looked interesting, all childish scrawls and simple plots. He scanned over the titles with a finger, pausing slightly at a science encyclopedia and then bypassing it entirely. Boring. He needed something to do.

Another few moments of restlessness and Hope shuffled himself toward the standing chalkboard to the left, brushing off the previous stick figures and misspelt words until the board was entirely empty. He picked up a broken piece of chalk, and then hovered his hand slightly over the board.

Something to do.

He drew a circle. Gave it a rotational and gravitational axis to turn into a more three dimensional model. Maybe a scale just to see how large it was… like a planet. Like Cocoon. Probably not as large, though, although he wasn’t sure why he was drawing a planet. Mass had weight, after all, and weight was something that needed to be carefully calculated, otherwise the entire planet might collapse into itself.

But, and here his brow furrowed as he used the empty space on the chalkboard to figure out the equations necessary to calculate the weight of a planet, it wouldn’t just the weight by itself, but the weight of people as well. People, belongings, animals, structures, and entire biospheres. Drawing a planet was harder than he had initially thought. He was barely scratching the surface and already running out of space on the chalkboard, even if the sphere itself took up barely a fraction of the space.

“What are you doing?”

Hope startled and dropped his chalk as the young boy who had previously been seated in the corner plopped himself down next to him. The child couldn’t have been older than ten old, and was sickly pale, his right hand used to stable himself on the ground as he leaned back.

“I’m…” Hope blinked. What had he been doing? “I’m making a world.”

“Oh.” The child responded. “Like Cocoon? That looks like math, though. With letters. And squiggly lines. Yeesh, it looks like something my sister does for her homework, except way longer. What’s it supposed to be?”

Hope glanced back to the sprawling equations across the chalkboard. He… “It’s just simple physics. I’m trying to solve the density for the amount of mass needed to form a shell like Cocoon’s.”

“Liar.” The child accused. “C’mon, tell the truth. Is it your math homework, or did you make it up?”

It was nothing more than a brain exercise. A warm-up. A way of letting out the frustration he felt from being confined and told to rest all the time. It was something that felt familiar in an unfamiliar place and situations.

The silence must have been the answer the child needed, as he only nodded and then challenged, “If you can do math like that, why don’t you help me solve this puzzle? I’m not going to bed until it’s done, and Nurse Buzzkill outside’s been trying to hound me to go back for hours.”

“Wha—?”

“Here.” There was a cube dumped onto his lap by the child. “You’re supposed to get all the same colors onto the same sides, but I can only finish one side. See? It’s like… three by three on each side, and apparently it’s all math or something like that. So how do you finish that, Mr. Math Genius?”

Math genius, he wasn’t a math genius. Something about the entire conversation just wasn’t adding up. It made the back of his head ache. Everything was wrong. The brightly colored room, the children’s books…

“If you can’t solve it, you’re lying about the planet drawing.” The child accused gleefully.

Hope frowned. “I’m not —”

“What is going on here?”

“Geez, chill.” The child responded to the nurse’s dismayed tone, even as Hope flinched back. “We’re just talking. No one’s dying, the world’s not ending, no need to shout.”

“You were supposed to the in bed hours ago.” The nurse told the child sternly, and then turned her attention on Hope. “And you. What are you doing here?”

“Obviously,” the child answered before Hope could so much as think of a reply. “Because he’d a kid and something bad happened so he ended up in a hospital. Duh. Why else would he be wearing a hospital gown and in pediatrics?”

A kid? No, no, that wasn’t right. There was that accident, yes, but he wasn’t a kid.

The nurse looked furious. “I want both of you back in your rooms! It’s past lights out and you’re disturbing the rest of the ward. Especially you, l’Cie, you’re not to go near any of the children here, do you hear me?”

Hope didn’t wait for further reprimand, instead stumbling to his feet as quickly as he could and racing past the nurse and down the hallway back to the safety of his room.