Chapter 12: Who was waiting there
Vlad stared blankly at the ceiling of his hospital room.
It was the middle of the night and his parents had left hours ago. He'd still been unconscious then – a nurse had been the one to tell him after Doctor Jimenez had assured Vlad that his heart had only stopped for about eighty seconds before they'd managed to drag him back into life.
It was concerning, yes, but it wasn't his first heart attack, was it?
No more concerning than the last one, only a few seconds longer.
Vlad, though – Vlad stared up and blankly, because he could tell that this time, it had been different.
He'd been dead.
Dead and out of his body, like a ghost. Silent, unseen, stuck.
Unreachable. Unable to reach out.
He'd been dead, for real. Truly and all the way. It wasn't just that his heart had stopped for a time, that his body had shut down for a while. That had happened before, and none of those times he'd been a ghost outside of himself.
he was dead now
he was still dead
His body might be alive now, brought back from the brink by modern medicine, but the rest of him? His soul, or whatever made a ghost an imprint perhaps not even a real person only an echo of who they used to be a pretender at who they had been – that had been gone.
Dead.
A ghost.
A dead thing ghost chained inside its his old body, keeping it running despite not fitting in it anymore. Despite the cogs not clicking quite right, the angles feeling slightly off.
The nurses and the doctor all seemed certain he was alive, they'd found his pulse and his breathing, they'd checked him for bodily functions – everything worked fine, or as fine as it had worked before.
before he'd finally and truly died before everything had changed turned ended
So, not so fine, and yet, working.
Still, Vlad stared blankly at the ceiling of his hospital room, alone in the dark of the night, and he knew. He could tell. He could feel or couldn't that was basically the same thing the difference.
He didn't react, didn't move when the door was pushed open and the light from the corridor spilled in. He didn't turn over, didn't try to look and see who it was. He didn't speak up and ask.
On the ceiling, the light from the door drew the silhouette of someone standing still in the door frame – a shadow, clear cut against the white rectangle of light.
The person didn't enter, didn't speak up.
Vlad didn't ask, didn't try to look.
He couldn't.
Vlad had been staring blankly at the ceiling for hours because he couldn't do anything else. He supposedly was able to move, to speak, to do what live people could, but. His body hadn't answered any suggestion from his mind since he'd woken up since he'd been dragged back inside this shell this hollow excuse of a body this wreck of necrosis and pain and broken cogs and bared wires.
Doctor Jimenez might have found his pulse and checked his breathing, but Vlad – Vlad couldn't feel either.