ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Waiting

Vignette - Waiting
Dramatis Personae Hive	2014-02-17 (Followed by dinner and upwards of a day later by results.)
Location <NYC> Mount Sinai Hospital - Harlem
On the cutting edge of many medical technologies, Mount Sinai Hospital is often ranked as one of the nation's best hospitals. The medical school attached is one of the best in the world, meaning that even your med students know what they are doing. Chin up, then -- when you come in here badly mutilated after the latest terrible catastrophe in Times Square, you're in good hands. He hasn't eaten this morning, but that's typical, these days. It wasn't so much that he remembered not to as that he just -- doesn't. There's only a hollow ache in his stomach for the first day; by the second it doesn't feel much like anything at all. By the third the thought of food feels a little nauseating, and it's been since Jim's party three days back he bothered with food at all. Hive's lips just twitch slightly when they ask him if he ate anything in the past twelve hours. He fights back a slight wave of nausea. "Nah. I'm -- golden." His hands are shaking a little too much, though, to fill out his forms properly. He turns them over to Flicker, who knows all his personal information perhaps better even than he does, at the moment, and slumps down against Micah's shoulder to wait. His eyes close, head tucking there as comfortably as he can. He'd almost look asleep but his ragged-uncomfortable breathing and the way he flinches every time voices pipe through the intercom, the way his fingers clench hard against his knees, the intermittent press of his mind up against the other two men's, betray his restless agitation. He's brought back eventually, not for anything but a bit of prep from a tech, young and friendly if thrown a little off-kilter by the odd sudden /headaches/ she's developing by his incessant spikes of mental prickling. There's the buzz of clippers, metal vibrating cold against his skin. The mental prickling grows harder, sinks claws in deeper; takes more than the usual shaking to dislodge before he roots himself back to the present. Tips his eyes up to her, grumbles a little crankily, "-- fuck do I want with some missing /patch/ on my head, I mean. Can just take it all off, right?" And then it's back to waiting. Hospitals are good for that. He's almost managed to convince himself he's doing alright, by the time it's time to go. Almost. But everything from there, the bland seafoam-green hospital gown and the rolling bed they put him in, the operating table, the too-bright lights, the snap of rubber gloves and doctors in their masks brings back the rushing sick sense of panic with a vengeance. This time when his mental claws reach out they don't relinquish their hold, grab on and fasten deep, sinking panicky-desperate into Micah and Flicker's minds. It's probably a blessing when the anaesthetic pulls him under. Maybe not for Micah and Flicker, their minds dragged down along with his, but certainly for his surgical team as his sharply digging claws start to slacken their grasping hold and then vanish entirely. It's not till many hours later that he starts to wake, groggy and every bit as cranky as he ever is, back in a hospital bed still in his green gown. One to three days for test results. Somewhere this information filters through his residual anaesthetic haze. And then it's back to waiting.