The hospital's fluorescent lights cannot banish the hollow darkness of mere hours ago. In the sympathetic smile of his nurse, he sees only the twisted smirks of his captors; their laughing faces as under their knife, his perfect rictus of agony tears into a crimson grin. Though the operation left his cheeks numb, he can feel his cracked lips, to which his tongue can give no relief. When he's certain that no doctor is looking, he tears away the gauze wrapped around his face, cold as the steel that cut him. He runs his fingers over the scars, not sparing a moment to cringe at the sutures holding his head together like a rag doll. Gingerly tracing the length of them with his tongue inside his cheek, he can't help but laugh.
It must be swollen, he thinks. And red. Spread ear to ear like a harlequin. My badge of honour!
He can't help but crack a smile that quickly grows to discordant, raspy laughter issuing forth from his throat like blood as he breaks the suture line. The nurses rush in, mouths agape at the spectacle before them. Still cackling madly as they race to tend to him, he tears out his IV and carelessly flings his bandages across the room. He stops laughing only long enough to make eye contact with one frantic young woman as she and her coworkers try to wrestle him to the flat of the bed. He licks his lips, savouring the familiar tang of blood, and asks only one question:
"Why so serious?"