Elle reached out, brushing back a few strands of hair that had fallen down onto Kay's forehead, giving him a slightly boyish expression. She smiled slightly, imaginig what Kay must have been like as a boy. It was hard to picture, that was for sure.
"I have your lunch for you," she said with a smile, sitting down beside him and arranging the tray with his food on it in her lap before picking up the spoon and dipping it into one of the mashed foods arranged on the tray. She had been forced to leave him for a little while earlier in the day to go to the store in search of something that he could eat. He seemed to be able to tolerate things orally and she was sure that he would prefer to be give nutrition this way rather than through a feeding tube put down his nose or placed directly into his stomach.
"Nice strained peas," she murmured as she slipped a spoonful of the food into his mouth, gently dabbing his lips with a napkin after feeding him the bite. "Bet it's been a very long while since you've had those."
She continued to slowly feed him, offering him alternating bites of the peas, some strained spinach that caused his lips to twitch a bit in an expression of distaste that made her giggle, mashed peaches and some sort of finely ground meat that had been mashed into an unrecognizable brown glob.
"You know, some of these things look a whole lot tastier on the jar than they do on the plate," Elle murmured as she fed him a bit more of the spinach. It was very slow going, sometimes taking a minute or longer for him to manage to swallow the small amounts of food she was putting in his mouth, but he was doing it.
Zed slowly pushed the door open and stepped in stopping for a moment ot stare at Elle, sitting there gently spooning baby food into Kay's mouth, talking to him softly as if he could hear her. He quickly looked away, not able to stand the sight of his friend laying there like that, so helpless.
"Zed?" Elle said as she turned, looking up at him. It had been five days now and it was very obvious that Zed didn't want to be down here, that he would find any excuse he could to avoid visiting.
"How is he?" Zed asked as he forced himself to walk over to Kay's bedside. He couldn't bare to look at his old friend in this condition and everywhere around the room there were signs of just how bad Kay was: the baby food, diapers. Zed cringed at the thought of those.
"He's stable and he's able to swallow now. That's good," Elle said. Kay hadn't made any obvious signs of improvement in the last couple of days but she wasn't going to give up hope. Sometimes a person could reach a plateau in their recovery and be stuck there for a long time. It didn't mean they weren't going to get better.
"Has he done anything, anything at all to indicate when he's going to wake up?" Zed asked.
"Not yet. Zed, the brain's really tricky to deal with," Elle told him. "He could wake up right now or days from now. We just have to be patient and have hope. Kay's strong. He's going to pull through this. Would you like to sit with him for awhile? I'm sure he would appreciate the company."
"No. I....uh, I have something to do upstairs. Alien delegation that needs my attention," Zed murmured as he backed towards the door. He hated himself for doing this but he just couldn't take it, could stand sitting by that bed watching his friend waste away, watching him slowly die.