White cotton, everywhere.
'I can't see.'
He'd say this out loud, but he can't open his mouth without getting gagged by cotton gauze.
Quickly accepting his fate, he leans and falls back into the comfort of the mediocre bed.
"No, sit back up! Ah! I covered your face completely?! Sorry!! Come back up, I'll fix it."
He rises with a dry exhale, pulled back up by the sheer brute force of his nurse.
"Why didn't you say anything?"
A pair of black, frozen over eyes stare back at her like a dead fish's through a haze of bandages.
The nurse quickly begins unraveling them, revealing the world in front of him once again.
The room is an average private hospital room. There's some shelves, a bathroom, a guest chair that's never been used, a clock, a heart monitor beeping quietly, and other devices he has no desire to pay mind to. He doesn't mind the bed he sits on– the sterile cold white sheets, and the window beside his bed showing a forest line outside below.
The nurse herself, Nurse Kate, is an overworked and overbearing attending nurse at the hospital, Creedmoor Specialty Health Center. In her late twenties, she has sharp features and pale skin– rosy cheeks and veiny arms. She has light freckles across her face that match her dirty blonde hair tied back in a messy ponytail. She wears light green scrubs and has a photo ID car hanging around her neck, displaying her full name, Ms. Kate Douglas, and a big smile. Ms. Kate Douglas in real life though, right now, looks frantic, clumsy, and has a slight furrow in her brow as she fixes his bandages.
As the bandages are unraveled, they reveal more of his face. Besides a pair of dead black eyes, he has dark brown unruly hair. There's a sharp roman nose, a thin mouth, a pale forehead with a linear scar stretching from his thick dark eyebrows to his hair-line, raw and red and bleeding as if the scar had since been clawed to shreds– that is quickly re-covered by bandages. He stares absentmindedly at, or through, the nurse before him as she continues to reapply and readjust the rest of his bandages.
Complete, she puts her hands on her hips in satisfaction.
"Done."
But her usual dutiful zest has an undertone of… something else. Her voice almost sounded like it trembled, if only for a split second there. His dark, empty eyes flicker down to the hands on her scrubs' hips. They clutch the material rather tightly, the soft pink scrubs crumpling under the sharp, thin, rather veiny hands for someone still in the full of her youthful beginning of adulthood. And the usual soft, pinkish flush of her warm cheeks is gone, leaving her skin slightly pale.
He yawns. The taste of cotton lingers in his mouth.
Kate scolds him per usual.
"Honestly, I've been your nurse for two weeks now, and you haven't changed one bit. I thought it would wear off, but you're still horribly lazy."
He shifts slightly in the hospital bed, his long slender figure completely wrapped in bandages between the thin sheets. His eyes don't leave hers, dark and empty.
She frowns, exasperated.
"Lazy."
His thin lips slightly part. His voice is quiet and dry– desolate and somehow wrong, as if it were foreign to him.
"I'm conserving energy."
Hands still on her hips, Kate eyes him with a skeptically raised brow.
"That implies you're saving it for something."
"Then I'm lazy."
"Honestly…"
The nurse scolds and sighs again. But she lets it go, and turns to check the heart monitor hooked up beside him, and scratches some data onto the papers attached to the clipboard she carries practically attached at the hip.
"Well, everything looks normal again today, besides your terrible lethargy."
She sighs again, scribbling notes with a little orange pencil.
"Lazy as usual, Dezi Moreno."
"That's not my name."
The pencil drops, hitting the vinyl floor with a click.
"Oops."
She sets her clipboard down on the table tray attached to his bed, and beds down to pick it up.
His dead eyes stare down at her trembling hands as she picks it up.
On her way up, her head raises to the calendar on the wall beside the bed.
"Oh, it's a full moon tonight."
Then her eyes trail up to the clock above it. Returning to her feet, she clutches the pencil tightly in one hand, her other back on her hip.
"Anyways, it's 9:15. That's all for today, Dezi. You and your lazy self can get some oh-so-desired sleep."
Near the end, her voice sped up slightly.
His eyes flicker back down to the hand on her hip. The thin veiny hand clutches the material of the green scrubs rather tightly. The material crumples between her pale knuckles.
'If she has somewhere to hurry and be, she should just drop the formalities and go.'
"Sure, Kate."
She gives a satisfied nod, a frantic smile.
"Goodnight."
She dashes out of the room, the sliding door slamming shut behind her.
His eyes drift over to the bed tray table. Alone in the room, he murmurs to himself.
"You forgot your clipboard."