DISCLAIMER: Don't own Cowboy Bebop

He vaguely remembered being anaesthetized before they rushed him off to emergency. It seemed like a million voices were babbling over his head. Something about the eye. There was something wrong with it, but he couldn't catch what it was. Meaning floated around him like fish in a tank.

Had he imagined that too?

He remembered being unable to fight for consciousness. He had slipped into blissful sleep.

So why was he staring at the surgeons? He must have been so traumatized by the accident and the blood that he wasdreaming of them. Surgeons that looked like the four fucking horsemen of the apocalypse. A sickly green light suffocated the room…or was that the sickening realization that he had accidentally woken up during his surgical procedure?

Oi. He called. He couldn't breathe or speak. O-O-o-O I I … How can the simple act of moving my lips to speak feel so impossible?

The accident, a surge of pain through his right eye… Doohan's voice over the speakers… It all happened too fast…

What are you doing?

Dead silence. Metal objects being replaced in metallic trays. Smell of antiseptic. Organs suspended in formaldehyde jars like ducks in a butcher's window. White figures loomed over him like reflections in a pond. High-pitched blips echoed through the sanitized vault.

What's.. Wh-a..? Like a fly batting futilely at the window, he just didn't get it. His left eye stared unblinking at the ceiling. What was the other one looking at?

Am I dead?

A voice finally broke through the painful silence. "Cut deeper. It takes a lot of force to get an eye out, and you've really got to pull. Pull harder."

'An eye?' My eye? No, you're not.. You can't .. Please.. don't… Don't don't don't don't don't… His voice screamed in his head like a siren. He couldn't feel anything, let alone twitch a toe, or lick his lips. He imagined turning his head to the side, but watched motionlessly as the surgeon to his left leaned forward to get a better look of the right side of his face.

The surgeon to his right was breathing hard, a sweaty, pinched nostril breathing as he fidgeted with something on the right side of his face. The others were motionless, breathless.. anxiously waiting for something to happen.

I'm being buried alive. I am dead.

No… No not dead.. not yet… Please…Please… Tell me I'm still alive… Anything… please…

Suddenly he heard an excretion, a gross, inhuman suck of skinless eyeball and inner eye socket.

"There, I got it…"

And then a grunt and a curse. A wet splat on cold floor. As he heard his eye fall to the ground followed by: "CARL!" and "Ah, Shit." He cried. He cried in the vaults of his mind, soundless, noiseless, unheard.

When he woke up in his hospital bed the next day, he clutched at the blanket. Had he woken up from the nightmare? The violation felt so raw he didn't dare open his eyes.

When he finally did open them, the world had lost half its colour. What was a dormant hysteria before had escalated into a high-pitched screaming in his head.

Something beautiful had been taken away from him.