(A/N at the end of the chapter.)

Chapter 4: Better Than Sex

Summary: Dr. García tends to the wounded

Sands fed himself. He fucking fed himself.

It took him an hour – sixty miserable shitty minutes of spearing invisible eggs and apple with a fork he couldn't see, while his brain ran through its repertoire of negative emotions. Frustration, defeat and anger had all dropped by for lunch. But the guest who stayed the longest was despair.

Deep, irresistible despair that rocked his whole being.

It was there, in his Adam's apple, making it hard to swallow. He felt it at the bottom of his stomach, and he could no longer tell the dry heaves and the sobs apart. It made his abdominal muscles cramp and his bones ache. He drowned.

He had never known despair could feel like this.

Sands supposed he should feel proud of himself. He should pretend that feeding himself was somehow this fucking great achievement, up there with finding the cure for cancer and ending famine. But he couldn't. He couldn't celebrate the fact that he had achieved the level of independence of a two year-old.

This wasn't life. It just wasn't.

Throughout his lunch ordeal, Gloria didn't say a word, and neither did he. She just stood there (or maybe she didn't, he couldn't tell). When he finished, the only words he managed to get out were 'I'm done. Thank you.'

'You're welcome,' she replied with empathy in her voice, and removed the tray from his lap. This time he noticed how her fingertips brushed his arms when she tried to locate the tray.

Fuck blindness. Just fuck it to Hell and leave it to die.

As the contents of the tray jingled lightly, she walked out of his room, crossed the "hall", and went into the kitchen. The familiar sounds of china and cutlery stopped and Gloria disappeared from his world – a world defined by the reach of his hearing.

He was left alone to think.

That was never a good thing.

Before he had the chance to stop it, his brain was pondering the many meanings of the word "Blind" – one of his new favourite hobbies. Once he was done, he repeated the exercise from the top, just to be extra sure he wasn't leaving anything out.

He then amused himself by running through his growing list of things he'd never see again. That list was now alphabetised - it was that long. He chuckled. And then worried about his mental sanity. Or perhaps he chuckled because it was true that when you ran out of tears all you had left was laughter.

He couldn't say how much time had passed when the sound of the doorbell broke the silence that enveloped him. Gloria abandoned whatever she was doing and returned to the land of the living, as the sound of her footsteps re-entered Sands's world.

She opened the front door and a male voice greeted her. Sands couldn't really catch much (Close the front door, fuckers! I can't eavesdrop with all that racket outside!), but it sounded like the man was just making polite conversation about Mazatlan.

The street-noise was shut out. There were footsteps, and his door was opened slowly. Sands couldn't hear any movement – they must be staring at him. Figuratively speaking, in Gloria's case. After a few seconds, she spoke up in a whisper. 'Sheldon, are you asleep?'

He grunted a negative, and this seemed to please her. 'Dr. García is here to see you,' she said, in a tone of voice one usually reserves for children. "Your little friend has come over to play."

García. Well, surprise, surprise. The fucker dropped by every day like clockwork, anxious to dig into Sands's wounds. He must have a serious case of bandage fetish - maybe he was into bondage. Sombrero, fluffy Xicano moustache, black leather Dominatrix costume, white lab coat.

The doctor also suffered from disturbing loquaciousness. He launched into rapid-fire pointless conversation as soon as he approached Sands and started fiddling with the bullet-hole in his left thigh. Talk, talk, prod, pick, wash, smear, prod, talk. It just went on and on, as it did every day.

Sands couldn't care less. He had discovered that everything stopped being real now that all he saw was blackness – he found he could just retreat into his mind, and block out the world, including overeager chatty village doctors tending to wounds that should hurt.

Only they didn't hurt. Because, you see, your brain could only concentrate on one kind of pain at a time. And when you had your eyes ripped out of your head, all other pain became pedestrian.

He had recently developed a new fantasy. There were no Polynesian twins with breasts hard as grapefruits in this fantasy, and there was no frolicking in the sand, surf and sun under a coconut tree. No, his new fantasy was infinitely better than all the ones that came before it.

In it, Dr. García had been able to save one of his eyes (Sands now realized you didn't need two) and it was there, healing, under the protective cover of one of the cotton pads taped across his sockets.

The best moment was when the good doc removed the pad and his eye was bombarded with all the colours of the rainbow and all the shapes in the world. It was better than a thousand orgasms.

Polynesian twins couldn't even come close.

Sands smiled in rapture, but García just kept blabbering on. Something about how his bullet-grazed arm had healed nicely, and how the bandages should be kept off his leg wounds from now on. (Bandages off? What happened to your fetish, doc?) Arm and legs, legs and arm. Who cared about those? Eyes. Eyes were all that mattered.

Dr. García must have realized that, because he moved his attentions to Sands's face and removed the patches.

As usual, there were no rainbows.

The doc did his thing (whatever it was) to the eyeless sockets, talking all through it. Talking to Sands? Talking to Gloria? Didn't matter. There were much more interesting things to think about than the doctor's voice.

Things like colourful rainbows under a coconut tree in Polynesia.

Sometimes, fantasies were all you had.

A/N:

I would just like to thank Kerttu, quick29 and vanillafluffy from the bottom of my heart. I never expected anyone would review, so your words of support meant a lot to me.

Thank you,

Finduilas.