Chapter 10: Vilified
When Vlad's parents came to see him, they found their son with an eyepatch over his right eye, staring absently ahead of him.
He kept his hands under the bed sheet, even if he wanted to reach out, to touch them.
to feel something else than the touch of nurses and doctors
to feel anything at all
if he could feel if his sense of touch had still been there
He had dead fingers and an eye that would flicker between red and nothing, and he didn't want them to see any of it. He couldn't hide the glowing pimples or the grey hair, but he could hide the fingers and the eye.
He hadn't had a fever in a week.
He also hadn't slept in a week – but he wasn't tired, he wasn't hurting, he wasn't falling asleep, he wasn't anything.
dead people do not need to sleep
He hadn't felt his body in six days, even if he could move – only, his sense of touch had been as cold as a dead body's.
He was missing a nail on his left hand – it had torn off the day before, when he'd bumped his dead hand against the bathroom's tiles. Not overly surprising, not even to the doctors. Dead nails on dead hands on a dead body kept running by a dead heart and a dead soul were weak, and that was what his hands were, even if he could, by some absurd and cruel twist of fate, still move them.
For all he knew, by next week his hands would be alive or pretend so again.
He could hide the torn nail.
Vlad tried for a smile, and perhaps he accomplished something resembling it, because his mother sat down next to his bed with his father instead of staring back with no words to give no words to describe what she was seeing what had become of her son.
"Vladislav..."
She was the only one who called him by his full name, just like she'd insisted on "Ekatarina" after some of her friends had asked if they could call her "Kate".
She looked old, Vlad suddenly realized – older than her sixties, tired, bloodless. Her hair was whiter than his, her skin paper-thin, one of her eyes washed over. Cataract.
"Mama, Dad... Are you..."
He couldn't ask.
His father looked barely better than her, and that was with the limping. Malcolm Masters had been well-built, before his work accident flash of green, but even if he'd gotten thinner afterwards, he was now unhealthily meager.
They hadn't looked like that, last time he'd seen them. He couldn't ask if they were well, not when he could see that they weren't.
He wondered if it was because of him, somehow. If worrying had made it all worse. They weren't that old, yet. They shouldn't look so frail.
"...Thanks for coming."
He wanted to reach out, to make sure they were truly there not only washed-out ghosts but if he did that they'd see his hands. The skin and the hair were bad enough – and so was the knowledge that he'd spent enough weeks in a hospital bed to start counting the months.
His father shook his head.
"Of course we did, son. Dasha is looking into taking a holiday, to come around for your birthday if she can't sooner. Tell us, how are you?"
Vlad barely hesitated: he wouldn't tell them the truth how he felt dead inside and outside how nothing made sense how he shouldn't be alive at all but only what he couldn't get away with omitting. What they could easily see, what would explain his long stay in the hospital.
He spoke of the fevers, of the itching, of throwing up anything he ate some days.
They didn't ask about the accident "banzai!" green everywhere pain hurts help and it was probably for the best. He didn't want to talk about it.
he dreamed it enough as it was nightmares and flashbacks and Jack's dangerous enthusiasm
when he could sleep at all
At one point his father fell asleep, and Vlad and his mother watched him in silence for a time.
Eventually his mother sighed, pushed her too-white hair out of her face – contemplated doing the same for her some, given the look on her face. Ultimately didn't – perhaps because of his skin ugly full of rashes and ectoplasmic pimples hard to the touch like some scales-riddled approximation of a man's face because she didn't want to hurt him if she inadvertently touched one of the abscesses.
maybe she just didn't want to see more of those
"Your father tires faster, these days."
Vlad bit his lip and didn't comment that he himself hadn't slept in days. It had nothing to do with his father's health, and she didn't need to know that.
you know the stories Vladislav
"Mama..."
Her voice had been haunting him for weeks, now, and he couldn't help but wonder – were those stories she'd told him, once upon a time? How much of it was him imagining attributing her knowledge he knew to be true things he didn't want to admit even to himself a curse of death and stillness wrapped in his blood her quiet whispers, and how much came from Belarusian folklore?
Vlad had grown interested in ghosts because of folklore, of tales across cultures of undead things and of spirits from beyond the grave. He'd continued with a more scientific approach – determining why and how and what was true and what wasn't – but he'd never let go of the myths.
Myths all came from somewhere.
Some were true, to a point.
what if he was a tale too
what would be worst cautionary or monstrous the one who wanted too much and lost everything or the one who grew into the unnatural
which one
mother please which one
"Mama, those stories from your home country... Could you tell me again?"
The old – frail, weak – woman sitting by his bed watched him attentively for a long time, and Vlad wondered if she realized why he was asking. If his mother could tell his doubts his fears the gnawing void when he should be sleeping at night.
Her eyes wandered to the bed sheet, as if seeking the hands he kept hidden – and then she looked back at his face, eye to eye.
"Which ones?"
Vlad couldn't tell what his mother thought at that moment – and perhaps she couldn't tell what he thought either. Maybe they were both searching for the other and finding them too far away.
"The ones... The restless dead. Those who will not remain in their graves, who keep tormenting their..."
His mother and father, old and weakened beyond their years. Jack and Maddie, absent. Dasha, far away and successful and yet called back. The doctors and nurses, powerless to help despite their knowledge of the human body.
none of this would be happening if he'd died that day if Jack hadn't botched the job if they'd never tried it at all if he hadn't been struck with green acidic burning ectoplasm on his skin in his lungs
if he was alive or dead but not lost in between
"The ones who won't leave their family to grieve."
Vlad looked away as he finished. He couldn't didn't want to know tell if his mother's face told more than it should, if she understood why he asked.
does she suspect? what would it matter even if she did
of course it would Vlad didn't want her to know to be afraid to be worried
She answered him, of course, and she didn't ask. She'd told Dasha and him some of those stories, when they were younger. He could have been asking out of curiosity, because he didn't have much else to do in this hospital room, for days on end, than to think back on so many inconsequential things. A death theme wasn't surprising either.
At some point, his father's voice surprised them both. They hadn't realized the old man had woken back up.
"Who comes to visit you, son?"
Vlad had no answer to give his father. He only kept looking down, at where his forearms disappeared under the sheet.
no one does
only you
Maddie could have come and explained to the doctors, or at least she could have come to see him, even if the staff didn't believe her about ectoplasm. Maybe it was more difficult for Jack, considering he'd been the one who'd caused Vlad's hospitalization. It could be that someone kept the other man from visiting – but that had never stopped Jack before, had it? How many times had Jack gotten into trouble because he couldn't take "no" for an answer, because he jumped "banzai!" in without looking?
Maybe the doctors didn't want them to visit because they'd been talking about ectoplasm over anything else, because Jack had Jack had blasted him in the face with the proto-portal. Because they didn't consider his friends safe.
Vlad's father huffed and shook his head.
"In my family, we say the restless dead to be so because no one took care of them when they were still alive. Your grandma would tell you that also applies to accidental endangerment, if she was still alive."
a flash of green
Vlad tried to shake his head, to say it wasn't like that – but he couldn't.
"Jack these calculations aren't right" "banzai!"
His father Vlad had been in an accident at work in college eight years two months ago, and since then he had a limp kept dying kept burning kept rotting like a corpse. The colleague friends who'd been with him back when it had happened hadn't been at fault – the machinery had been faulty not Maddie but Jack though maybe the proto-portal hadn't been quite finished maybe they'd have needed to recalibrate afterwards but that was experimentation and that was why there were safety measures and Jack had ignored each and every last one of those – and the man had argued with the company on his father's behalf while he'd been stuck in the hospital with a crushed hip no one had come to see him. They were still friends today.
Vlad said he had friends but he hadn't seen them since
Vlad and Dasha and their mother had visited whenever they could.
"Dad, I... They must have a reason, maybe they aren't allowed because..."
Jack's fault
"...because..."
Vlad couldn't tell more, he kept butting on that word – his breath was getting shorter, too, and what was that noise?
Jack's fault
the green the pain the loneliness the fear the horror the fevers the void the necrosis the red
Jack's fault
His mother and father looked worried, half out of their chairs, and Vlad couldn't tell them everything was alright, he couldn't reassure them at all.
it wouldn't be true anyway
Something wet at the bottom of his eyepatch, dripping from behind, pushing past its border, a single drop rolling down his acne-riddled skin.
Instead of everything being black behind the eyepatch, everything was dark red.
a flash of green
His other eye couldn't focus, not with the frantic beeping of the heart monitor.
Were his parents still there? He didn't want them to see that the blood dripping from his abnormal eye the cardiac arrest his dead hands flailing out of the bed sheet, they didn't need to see that.
"banzai!"
hurts burns please make it stop Jack
For a short moment he could see – could focus enough to distinguish what he saw – and he wasn't sitting in bed anymore, he could see the bed higher up, and the chairs in which his parents had sat they weren't there anymore good they didn't have to witness any of it didn't they.
His back hurt as hands rolled him over on the floor, and someone put something cold on his torso.
cold a flash of green pain burns help hurts can't breath
"Mister Masters!"
A vague form standing over him, maybe Doctor Jimenez?
"Clear!"
Jack's fault
A violent shock flashed through his torso and Vlad blacked out.