0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
(This one hurt to write...)
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Chapter 4; First Born Son
The first thing he was aware of was the cold, he was freezing, and everything was terribly bright. Illuminated rectangles flipping up from beyond his feet.
He saw his hand, groping with numb, half limp fingers, and pulling a clear thing away from his face, he likened it to a jellyfish, holding onto him with four thin stretchy tentacles wrapped tightly around his head. It hissed at him as he pulled it away.
Then there were faces, pale white featureless things with wide black eyes appearing and disappearing out of the brightness.
His ears were ringing, a shrill, dull sound.
"Just stay still, son, stay still." One of the faces had hands, and it pressed the jellyfish back over his face. When he fought and pulled it away again the red smear along the left side was so vivid and brilliant against the whiteness.
He didn't know where he was, what had happened, or even who he was until that moment, and then it started dripping back.
For a while, everything was terribly still and silent around him, and he feared that this was death and nothing else mattered but that fear for a long while.
The world phased in slowly, the brightness fading and with it the shrill screeching sound in his ears.
There was a face over him, shrouded in white and blue with splatters of red on the front. It was a roundish face, older, smiling sadly, and those thick lips moved, sound delayed a few seconds behind the motion of words;
"You're going home."
Home?
Everything became darker, more visceral after that moment. A hallway, lights flipping down from above his head as he was moved laterally through space. He thought maybe he was floating in icy water, carried away like an iceberg on the current.
There were lights in the ceiling, he was sure it was a ceiling now, as he came back to himself by inches. Flashing, spinning yellow emergency lights, air vents, little antennas for radios, domed camera lenses.
He missed the first of those, but was able to tilt his head enough to catch the second, amused by the way the reflection was curved around the shape of its silvery surface. Four white clad figures pushing a gurney with only a dark head visible beneath a Mylar emergency blanket, white sheets and a pile of equipment in a red flimsy container.
Where was he?
One of the figures leaned over him smiling; "Hey there… Everything's OK, you just relax."
His brows scrunched curiously; "That's Sir to you…" It didn't come out right but he felt too drained to try again and settled on scowling.
And then he was looking up the side of a building to a great, vast, eternal dark sky and the light around him was all red.
It was too much for his mind to comprehend at the moment and his eyes fell closed, when he opened them again the noise around him was deafening and instinctually he tried to flinch away from it, wanting to cover his head, and two men with heads like insects were guiding him, voices distorted and ruined amid the whine and roar of some unseen monster somewhere away behind him.
A monolith loomed out of the night at him, a gaping industrial mouth and he felt himself tilting, suddenly overwhelmingly nauseous.
He was in the belly of a whale… Steel ribs were visible in the gray-green walls. Lights in little cages to keep the fires burning hung to either side of him, stacks of sheets and heads and bloody bandages.
He shut his eyes tightly against the horror of it; it's all just a dream, just a dream…
His eyes opened again and he was in pain… Everything hurt and he couldn't move.
The world was gray and green and bloody red. And above him, on a shelf, there was another person, he turned his head slowly and peered out, up and down a seemingly impossible length of shelves. On some there were heads swathed in gauze, on others there were young men with more tubes and wires sticking out of them than a computer.
There were IV bags hanging from hooks, and blood transfusion bags dangling like lanterns in a Chinese parade.
He felt small, insignificant, and utterly alone. Just a number amid the masses of casualties. A statistic.
A woman in fatigues knelt beside him, she shifted the bags of fluids hanging by his head, not even noticing his eyes were open, and pushed the blankets back.
He noticed his nakedness first, humiliated that this woman and her cold blue eyes were the first to see him, then he noticed the bandages. Ugly thick things tied around his thigh, taped to his hip and stomach, wrapped around his ribs, stained and stark against all the dull sepia around him, then he saw beige and remembered spraining his wrist once and the school nurse wrapping his arm in one… but now there was nothing there. Just a lump of bloody gauze and stained wrappings.
Even when the woman flipped the blankets back up he was staring at the spot. The single hot point of agony in his whole body was centralized there, and now he knew why.
He didn't understand it. His mind just wouldn't function and all he could do was stare.
When he woke again he didn't open his eyes. He just laid there struggling to wiggle his fingers. In his mind he could feel them moving, could feel the muscles flexing could feel the ache of a cramp in his palm.
There was a beep off to his right, steadily growing faster, and he could feel another jellyfish on his face, hissing at him—
And there was something else… Like water coming from a spigot.
"Shhhh, it's alright, its over."
A hand smoothed over his head, cool and callused and smelling somehow sweet and fruity and acidic.
He remembered that feeling, that voice, and carefully pried his eyes open, worried he might not be able to manage it because his lids felt glued together and sweat made them sting, when he did get them open he wished he hadn't.
His father was a tall man nearing fifty with black hair speckled with white and silver, and dark eyes. He wore a permanent frown and often spent hours just staring into nothing without speaking or moving at all, but here he was, sitting there in a sweatshirt with a pin-on ID tag on the left side of his breast. He didn't smile, which seemed so unnatural because he and Kadar looked so much alike, and the youngest Al Sayf was always smiling, always intent and—
"I thought I'd lost you too." He formed his palm against the top of Malik's head, leaning close with such a cold, lifeless look in his eyes; "It's just the two of us now… I—I'll take care of you, you just focus on getting better, alright?" He tried to smile comfortingly, but it came out more as a wince, something pained and unattractive.
"I'm sorry…" There was no sound behind it, his mouth and throat were too sore and dry from fever, tightening and burning as the weight of it all crashed down on him, his vision blurring and rippling, "I didn't protect him—I'm so sorry."
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0