Chapter 9: I saw within
Vlad gave Doctor Jimenez a pinched smile.
The older man didn't comment. He probably thought his patient was trying to be polite while being in pain – which, true. He'd been free from the fevers for the last few days, but that only meant he was available to actually feel the pain where a large, luminescent group of pimples stretched over his left jaw.
The rest of Vlad's face was alright enough, right now – acne, sure, like when he'd been fourteen, except it glowed slightly and he was twenty-two – but not that spot.
It throbbed, and often he'd find himself wanting to press on the pimples to just make it stop – but he remembered what had happened when one of the pimples had been torn open the other day couldn't feel his fingertips and he was never sure of whether he was actually pushing against anything or just...
He had no idea of how those particular pimples felt to the touch, because he had no – working – fingertips to use his sense of touch. However, when he talked – when he ate, when he simply opened his mouth – that part felt rigid, inhumanly stiff.
Smiling only happened on the right side of his face, for now.
Of course his smile wasn't quite all there.
The real reason, though – Vlad couldn't completely smile, true, but even if he had been able to, he wasn't sure it would have been much more convincing – was because everything was tinted with shades of red since halfway through his current medical examination, and he didn't know if he should how to tell the doctor about everything else.
Vlad was seeing red in one eye – the right one – but the other was acting entirely normal. He knew that, because Doctor Jimenez had asked him to close one eye and then the other when Vlad had started feeling weird and all of a sudden red like blood like fire like pain everything had been basked in scarlet.
Left eye open only: everything was normal.
Right eye open only: everything was red and some things were there that weren't supposed to be things he could see with that eye but not the other one things which hovered in the air like tendrils of dark scarlet smoke things which glowed an incandescent dark pink like his and the doctor's veins his more than Doctor Jimenez's things that seemed lighter perhaps pink like the smear on the wall next to the bathroom's door where Vlad had collapsed yesterday when he'd lost all feeling in his legs like the round little blotches where he'd coughed on the bed's sheets this morning things he couldn't describe or explain without sounding like he was hallucinating. It was a bit like looking through a filter, except some of the lighter shades were more visible, pinkier – and that only on the abnormal things Vlad wasn't supposed to be seeing at all.
Things that weren't there when he only looked with his left eye.
When he kept both eyes open, the red would come and go like static on a malfunctioning TV screen, like a shaky neon light, buzzing in for an instant and disappearing just as fast and sometimes taking half his sight over like something trying to let itself be recognized just in the corner of your eye something on another plane not quite there not quite true not quite present and yet. The things he saw – the things that weren't there – only appeared through the red.
It felt like watching a horror movie with a blinking ghost.
It felt absolutely exhausting, and Vlad was starting to feel a headache as flashes of green red kept buzzing in, again and again and again.
The only thing Doctor Jimenez had been able to tell him – frowning, silently frustrated with Vlad's abnormal case, unable to really help did he feel as useless as Vlad did these days? – was that the capillaries in his right eye were abnormally visible – not like a broken blood vessel, not like something that happened to normal people and didn't cause them to actually see red – but it wasn't to a point that should be concerning.
Except that it was definitely doing something weird to him and they couldn't just ignore it.
Like everything else in the last two months.
Nothing was normal anymore not even you Vladislav and they knew, by now – they knew that something new, one more weird thing about his body was cause for alarm, because it would, it always did, turn out for the worse.
For now he was seeing red through one eye.
What if it remained that way?
What if it spread to his other eye?
What if it got worse, what if he started having hallucinations, what if his eyes started desiccating too for some reason, what if he went blind by tomorrow?
what if what if what if what if
what if it was his body giving up on him again just a bit more shutting down point by point until there was nothing left until Vlad was left truly dead and gone
Vlad looked at the doctor, who sighed and said he'd call in a colleague, an ophthalmologist, to get a look at his eyes. Make some appropriate tests.
Doctor Jimenez's face and hands and neck – everything without clothes hiding it – kept being overlaid with a translucent, glowing, pulsating circulatory system – but it was still better than looking at his own hands radiating with a sharp dark pink glow where he supposed his veins were except where the necrosis had settled.
Vlad's hands the veins the glow were completely still
they shone but they didn't pulsate there was no flow at all not where the dead flesh clung to his bones not where life had deserted his fingers
At least the doctor seemed alive, him.
Vlad had no idea no understanding of why he could see that but he could
but not in his hands
Alive and completely lost, perhaps. Doctor Jimenez made to leave with a last word, but.
Vlad felt a sharp pain again still more in his right eye and flinched – blinked too.
The doctor stopped right in his tracks, looking alarmed.
"Mister Master?"
Vlad blinked again.
There was something in his eyelashes, something thick and dark and not supposed to be there it felt like tears but it wasn't was it. Only his right eye's.
He couldn't see the color, not with the flash of green red, not with the abnormal static in his sight.
It hurt.
hurts
The headache was getting worse.
It wasn't tears, he knew that.
not tears of water of salt of pain of sadness
"Mister Master, can you hear me? You're bleeding and we need to do something about it, so try not to move, alright?"
tears of blood of death perhaps
It was blood. It was blood rolling down his right cheek, cluttering his eyelashes. It was blood and red like his sight like pain like agony that the doctor was trying to get through, to see if there was something more, something worse behind it.
If Vlad had just started bleeding randomly like when he'd vomit blood like so many other instances since he'd been brought to that hospital or if there was a clear reason behind it, something they could treat for once.
Vlad ground his teeth – and that, too, felt weird. Not quite like usual.
Like there was something wrong with everything his teeth too just like with his eyes his hands his skin his legs his stomach his mind his thoughts his memories his life his death everything was wrong and his head hurt.
Right now he only cared that he was bleeding from his right eye and everything was red and he could guess the doctor's circulatory system as the older man got closer to examine him and Vlad just tried not to move, not to react, not to scream and fling Doctor Jimenez away from him.