AN: Holy wow, the angsty-ness of the following chapter is staggering. Warning: there are some pretty strong angst-ridden themes including references to suicide and death. If you are prone to fainting at displays of massive angst, do not read past the point when I say 'pomplemousse.' K? Also wanted to add, I'm sorry if there are some random spelling errors in here, since my computer's death I've been writing on a computer with Braille on the keys instead of letters and that keeps randomly reading out stuff so it's sorta confusing for me. If you notice any things that need to be fixed, lemme know and I'll try to edit them. Alright... pomplemousse!
Chapter 22 – My Shades of Gray
The world isn't made up of just black and white, and I think we've all known that since whenever it was that the civil rights movements took place. I never was good at history. This theory doesn't just pertain to people, but to just about everything. No matter what you're talking about, there are always two possible extremes. The first is the beautiful, idealized belief where everything is good and there is something akin to a happily ever after in the end. The second one is pretty much the worst case scenario when Lord Voldemort takes over and inevitably the world gets disintegrated by aliens. Or, you know, something like that. But the truth of the matter is that in the end, reality is usually a blend of the both of them.
As I laid back, crossing my ankles and folding my arms behind my head, I could only think one thing: This place is so not what I expected it to be.
I'd always tried to imagine what this would be like, ever since I was eight and saw it for the first time. I'd broken my arm and when we were leaving the hospital I saw him, just laying there and looking like he was asleep except for all of the tubes and wires attached to and even coming out of him. He looked like an experiment for a mad scientist, kinda like that old Frankenstein movie I'd watched with Dad before he'd gone away. I'd asked, and Dan said he was in a coma, which he explained as a really, really deep sleep that's hard to wake up from.
For a long time, that's exactly what I thought it would be like: sleep. Peaceful, full of dreams, and the person would just exist in a little fantasy world until they either woke up or just died. Yeah, I've always been an optimist.
Then I took my first pysch rotation and they gave me a different theory. A few of the students in my class presented the idea that coma patients' minds were still aware of everything around them, but their bodies were disconnected from their brains and it left them incapable of responding to the external stimuli. Despite all of the medical facts they used to support this, I didn't like to believe this idea. Mostly because it sounded eerily like being trapped in your own body, and the thought of being stuck, unable to move no matter what is going on around you, is pretty terrifying to me. I don't like having to hold still for long periods of time.
Turns out that the truth is something in between the two. I'm sure as hell trapped in here, but I'm trapped inside my head instead of my body.
If someone had asked, I would've thought the world in my head was colorful and flashy, and maybe full of dancing and unicorns like my daydreams. There might be a soundtrack in the background: The Fray, like I always seem to hear whenever something significant is going on in my life, or if I was really lucky there'd be Journey. And I would most definitely not be alone. So needless to say, I was pretty surprised to learn that the inside of my brain looks a whole lot like Sacred Heart.
When I first woke up here, it didn't. I was just a long, empty hallway lined with locked doors and windows that had been painted over so I couldn't see through them. Everything was gray; the tiled floor, the doors, the indistinct mist of a ceiling, the paint coating the windows. Even the scrubs and long sleeved shirt I always wore beneath them were drab layered over dreary. Who'd have reckoned the world in my head was so damn boring?
I hadn't known I was in a coma at that point. I honestly thought I was dead. When I started hearing the low hum of voices occasionally speaking from the other sides of doors, I mighta gone just a little bit crazy. As in the 'screaming and trying to beat down doors' kind of crazy. The voices never paid any attention to me, and disappeared at their own leisure. I spent a long time running up and down the hall, which seemed to go on forever in both directions, trying doors in case one would let me out. Which they never did. All of the voices I heard sounded familiar but I couldn't place them. The words were hardly more than murmurs so I couldn't understand them, and I started to think they were taunting me. Further proof of an already well known fact: I do not do well in solitude.
Eventually I'd heard my name from beyond a door and finally recognized the voice as Turk. You can imagine, I freaked out. By this time I'd concluded I must be in some sort of hell, because surely fire and brimstone couldn't be worse than this, so the thought of my Chocolate Bear being in hell too made me more than just a little scared. This time his voice was louder than the others had been, although I still never caught anything more than my name, and it seemed to be moving down the hall. I'd followed it and that's when I reached the first corner.
After Turk's voice died down to a hum again, joined by another male voice I thought I might know, I finally realized what the halls reminded me of. The flat walls, doors with little windows in them (also painted gray, sadly) and the larger windows beside them, the square tiled floor. In a way even my clothes were a hint.
Oh, and it should be noted this is the same time I remembered that before waking up here I'd been in the real Sacred Heart. I could recall the accident, my weak condition, the anaphylaxis. It didn't take a lot of thought to figure out that I was in a coma, and that this gray Sacred Heart existed only in my head.
A loud wailing that my paternal instincts told me was without a doubt Sam was what eventually led me to where I'm laying now. I'd followed his crying like I'd followed Turk's voice, desperate to find him or some way to get back to him. Even when his crying stopped I kept running until I'd reached the place that all halls lead to. No, not Rome. The nurses' station.
It was gray, just like everything else. The cupboards and counters were empty; no phones, no files or tacked up notices, and no rolling office chairs. So I've taken to laying on the countertops, re-evaluating memories that I hadn't been able to remember before coming here, and waiting for more voices.
I know they are the key to getting out of here. I can feel it when I follow them, the anticipation of something important just ahead. But then the voice would go away, and somehow I would wind up back at the nurses' station even when I was sure that I was moving away from it. If I could just get someone to talk to me long enough, I knew I could make it out.
That was the other importance I'd discovered. When the voices were murmurs they weren't talking to me, so I reasoned that must be when they were talking to each other and my comatose ears were just picking up on the white noise. If I followed those voices, I only ended up walking out one side of the station and in the other. The voices were always louder when I heard them say my name, when they were talking to me. It was easier to follow these voices, and I could always recognize who they were; Turk, Elliot, Carla, Kim one time, even someone who I'm pretty sure was Dr. Kelso, as hard as it is to believe. But they always went away again and I always ended up laying back down on the counter, staring up at the misty ceiling.
I tried not to think about it, but I never heard Dr. Cox talking to me. I hadn't expected him to, and I knew I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. Still, after this last month, I had wanted to think that something had changed. He'd been there for me through – almost – this whole thing, surely he wouldn't bail on me now, right?
Elliot's voice echoed down a hall and I jumped off the counter in pursuit. Her words had a thick, garbled sound to them so I figured she was crying again. I wanted to yell at her, tell her not to cry and to just keep talking, but I'd barely gone down a hall and around a corner when she was gone again. Another six steps and I was in the station again.
I screamed in frustration and threw myself at the nearest door, but it did about as much good as it had the last hundred times. The door didn't so much as shake in its frame, and I didn't feel even the slightest sting where my body had collided with the metal. When I'd woken up, the lack of pain had been a relief after the hell I'd been feeling. Now it only made me angrier. Even that awful burning in my lungs would have been better than this numbness. It made me feel like I was already dead.
Apparently my friends had started to think so too, because they didn't talk to me as much as they used to. There were longer stretches of nothing as I waited to hear them, and when they came they didn't last as long. I tried to convince myself it was just a mind trick, that I was just exaggerating time in my head because I had no way of telling in here, but I knew it wasn't true. They were giving up hope, and in doing so they were cutting of what I was sure was my only chance at escape.
Turk's voice appeared in a left hand hall and I raced after it, pushing myself faster than I'd ever done before. Turk wouldn't give up on me. He was my best friend. He had to stick by me, we were Bears together. I flew through the labyrinth of passages as I listened to his horribly hollow voice coming from beyond the doors on either side of me. That hollowness proved it, didn't it? He needed his J-Dizzle and he had to keep trying for me so he wouldn't be so empty any more.
Then why had his voice faded?
"NO!" I knew that screaming wouldn't help, it never had before, but I couldn't stop myself from shouting up at the cloudlike ceiling in desperation. "No, Turk, no!" Not my Super C-Bear. He couldn't give up. "Turk, please!" I'd been so sure that the one person who'd never give up on me was Turk. But now his voice was gone and I'd just stumbled back into the nurses' station.
I don't remember the movement but suddenly I was on the floor, my knees having given out. I'd lost all motivation to stand so instead I curled into a ball on the hard floor. Turk was giving up on me, so there couldn't be any hope left. I wanted to cry, something I hadn't willingly done since my dad had deserted the family. Dan had called me a baby, and Mom had told me that I needed to be a strong boy before she left for the bar to drown her sorrows in alcohol and the first eager man she found. I had only cried four times in my life since that day, and each time I remember fighting the tears until they had stopped and retreated. But now, when I wanted nothing more than to just let them fall and indulge myself in my utter hopelessness, they wouldn't come.
I wasn't going to be able to endure this much longer. If there was no possibility of getting out of here, I wasn't about to hang out in this private hell until my body finally gave out on me. Even death would be a reprieve from this.
Heaving myself to my feet, I began looking around. There had to be something. Some way. I glanced furtively at the nearest window. Broken glass would work. Summoning every ounce of strength I could, I barreled head first into the large sheet of glass. Nothing. I bounced off without so much as a flash of pain, and the window didn't even tremble under the force. The dull thud of my skull against the window resounded off down the halls mockingly.
"NO!" I hurled myself again and again at the glass with the same affect before turning and bringing my forehead down against the corner of the counter. Still nothing. My hands closed around my throat and I waited for the lethargy and the darkness to tease the edges of my vision. Except it never came, and I realized, a little belatedly, that as a figment of my own imagination it wasn't likely that I needed to breathe in the first place. "Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it!"
"Newbie!"
I could only stare ahead numbly, too surprised as the yell reverberated around me. Maybe the suffocation was working and I was hallucinating. I couldn't have just heard that voice. Everyone else had gone away and he just showed up now. Impossible. Still, I couldn't stop my hopes from flying.
"Newbie!"
"Dr. Cox," I gasped out, dropping my hands. It really was him. He was talking to me, and I didn't even care that he sounded angry. This was my chance, and I was taking it. I tore down the hall, chasing that familiar, berating voice.
A constant stream of nicknames sounded through the doors ahead of me. Mostly Newbie, but the occasional girls' name too, as well as the time I distinctly heard labradoodle. I didn't even bother trying to figure that out, I had more important concerns. Still, I was thanking the fact that he sounded so frustrated because it meant that he was really going at it. An angry Dr. Cox rant had to give me enough time.
I wasn't taking any chances this time, so any time his voice would falter or grow fainter, I would stop moving until it picked up again. The sense of urgency in my chest was stronger than ever. And then I rounded a corner and saw it; the door to a patient room was ajar.
There was a plaque outside this door that read 'ICU 204.' This was it. Racing forward before Dr. Cox's voice could go away, I threw open the door.
Whatever I'd been expecting, it was not this. I thought maybe there would be a flash of light and I'd wake up, or maybe I'd see myself laying in a hospital bed and I would touch my body and be drawn back into it. Instead, I was standing at the edge of what I thought was a sheet of glass that reached all the way to the horizon in every direction, reflecting the murky mist sky that was still overhead. A closer inspection showed that it wasn't glass but water, although the water was so frightfully still it didn't look real. It was also gray, though whether on its own or because it was reflecting the sky I don't know. I stared at the flat expanse and then down into the darkness that crowded beneath the surface, making it impossible to see the bottom. Was this really my way out?"
"Protégé…"
I was almost too shocked by the word to notice, but as Dr. Cox's voice had risen I thought I'd seen a faint glimmer beneath the surface of the pool. Was I supposed to go in there? The word 'protégé' rang around me and I saw it again. I frowned uneasily at the water, but what other choice did I really have. Gritting my teeth, I jumped.
Instantly, I began sinking like a rock. No matter how hard I kicked, I just kept going down. The lighter grays above me were being washed out by the charcoal shadows of the deep water. I could no longer see my hands as they clawed frantically through the water that was pulling me down.
Panic set in fast. What had I done? I couldn't see the flicker of light that I'd jumped in after, although I could still hear Dr. Cox talking. What if the light had actually been reflected off the surface from above? I never looked up. Maybe I was supposed to go up. Now that I thought about it, sinking down into the dark just sounded too much like dying. Wasn't that how it was usually described?
Pain suddenly began coursing through me, so strongly I almost stopped kicking. Everywhere hurt. All of my limbs, my head, my chest. The waves of pain were debilitating. I gasped and my lungs seared.
" … always called you 'Newbie,' … my substitute word … instead of my protégé, you're my Newbie … "
Actually, it was sort of nice to just sit and listen to Dr. Cox, so nice that I quit struggling so I could hear him better. If I was going to die listening to this, then maybe it wasn't so bad. At least I knew he cared. I'd always known, but it was nice to finally hear it.
" … you've been a good – Newbie … "
I smiled vaguely. It had never occurred to me what that name could possibly mean. I had always thought it was demeaning. I knew I was the only person he used it for, I had jealously guarded that honor if only to have something significantly ours, but now it meant so much more. Every time he'd said it, he was acknowledging me as his protégé. That made a warm feeling blossom in my chest.
The warmth quickly turned into a terrible heat. I couldn't recall inhaling, but the air that filled my lungs ripped through me like fire. My heart was pounding radically against the flames, painfully so. Sudden fear gripped me. I didn't want to die yet. I had to get back to thank Dr. Cox, to watch my son grow, to play silly games with Turk, to tell Elliot that I loved her. This couldn't be the end.
Drowsiness was eating away at my thoughts and I couldn't focus. My body wouldn't respond as I tried to kick out again. I felt like lead as I continued to sink into the cool, black abyss, and the pressure was crushing me. I couldn't fight any longer. I was too weak.
The last thing I knew was a sudden stillness in my ribcage as my heart gave out.