Chapter Text
Calix
The doctors usually didn’t bother wasting anesthetics on him.
The suppressants they used made all his senses foggy, like he was underwater, but he could still feel the pain. He could feel every incision they made, every new tube snaking under his skin. And he remembered all of it. The pain was etched deep into the fabric of his mind, terrorizing him even when nobody was touching him.
It wasn’t always like that. When he was first admitted to the hospital, he was almost always hooked up to IV sedatives, except for when they needed him for their research. Eventually, his body grew tolerant to them. Eventually, he stopped fighting. Eventually, they stopped administering the sedatives. Eventually, he didn’t need drugs to feel numb to the pain.
Sometimes, though, he couldn’t help but struggle. That was when they sedated him, but it never lasted long. He always came back just in time for the pain to start brand new.
Through the mind-numbing pain and dull ringing in his ears, he could catch glimpses of conversation between the doctors. What was for lunch that day, how the kids were, how much blood the boy had lost during their last experiment, last night’s episode of Real Housewives. The constant jumble of words meant nothing to his unfocused mind, but he latched onto them like they were his only lifeline. The only thing keeping him sane—if you could call him that.
“Did you hear? They brought in a new patient today,” one of the doctors said. There were hands on the boy’s arms, sharp pinpricks of pain as they adjusted the intravenous tubes embedded in his skin.
“Really? It’s been months since there was a new one. We’ve been stuck with this one,” someone responded, and flicked the boy’s forehead. He would have flinched away if he had enough energy to move his head.
“Aw, that’s not very nice, Hennings. This one is plenty fun, isn’t he?”
Laughter from the soldiers across the room. Someone’s hot breath on his cheek as they leaned closer. A hand on his thigh.
“He’s awake,” they said, stepping back.
The boy didn’t open his eyes. Maybe if he kept them closed, they would go away. Maybe if he just didn’t react, they’d leave him alone.
Of course they wouldn’t. They never did.
Cold latex gloves touched his face, prodding at his cheeks and the metal embedded in them. Pain flared in his mind like flashing red lights; his nerves were on fire. His eyes flew open.
“There he is,” the doctor said with a smile that sent terrified shivers down his spine, patting his cheek once more. “How about we get started?”
Noam
There was technology everywhere in the hospital. Computers on mobile nurse’s stations, MRI machines, cellphones in doctors’ pockets that they probably shouldn’t have, security cameras around every corner.
And Noam couldn’t feel any of it.
After five months trapped in the white halls of the hospital, he could still remember the buzz of magic in his veins. Now, there was nothing. No hum of electricity in the air, no silver-blue magic at the tips of his fingers. Not a single damn thing.
He could hear the machines beeping right next to his head, reminding him that, unfortunately, he was still alive, but he couldn’t feel them. He couldn’t sense the gears of a doctor’s watch turning with each passing second, even if he could hear the ticking.
He felt empty.
Hollow.
Powerless.
Sometimes, in the rare moments where he wasn’t too drugged up to think properly, he wondered if this was how Dara felt in those days he spent locked up in his room with suppressants coursing through his blood. If this was how helpless he had felt, unable to do anything but sit there and suffer.
No. This was so, so much worse.
He felt selfish for thinking that, but it was true. Dara never had to experience doctors cutting into his body, carving away at skin and bone until every nerve was naked and exposed. He never had to listen to nurses discuss him like he was a shiny new plaything when they thought he was asleep. And Noam was glad, in a way, that Dara never had to endure that kind of agony.
Sometimes, when the pain got to his head and pushed him to the brink of insanity and then just over, he imagined that he could see Dara, standing off to the side as a surgeon tore into Noam’s flesh like he was a piece of meat. He would have this smile on his face that could’ve meant a million different things. Noam could never quite tell if it was sympathy or something worse. He chose not to think about what that something worse could be.
And, in his worst moments, he would call out to him, screaming Dara’s name until his voice was raw. Nurses would glance back over their shoulders at the empty corner and then look back at Noam with a giggle.
That was worse than the needles and dull scalpels.
It wasn’t just Dara. If he was delirious enough, his father would be there, more lifelike than Noam had ever seen him in the years before his death. His mother, too, purple and green bruises around her throat like blooming flowers.
Sometimes he forgot that they were all dead.