Thread: Vertigo (VivifiedVanityxSeven)

Dr. Benedict Beesley had worked as a leading E.R. surgeon and attending physician in Miami's Mercy Hospital for two decades. In those twenty years, he had seen several lifetimes worth of horror - he had seen people bleed out on the floor, watched others gradually kill themselves with heroin, and had seen victims of car accidents come in with entire limbs torn off. And yet, somehow, as he flipped through the chart in his hands, Dr. Beesley found the capacity to be astonished by what he was looking at. Beside him, an intern named Jamie looked on with similar awe, Two fractured metacarpals, one broken phalange, right hand, Beesley said, glancing up at the curtained bed in front of him, and then back at the chart, Dislocated left shoulder, a stab wound to the left sartorious muscle - it looks like it just missed an artery, what the hell was he stabbed with? Beesley flipped through the papers, Object unknown - par for the course, I guess - we've got head trauma, a lacerated right forearm, a punctured windpipe , jesus, and two gunshot wounds, both of which avoided major organs, and we've got him handcuffed to a bed why ? Jamie lifted his shoulders in a shrug and Beesley did the same he supposed there was a reason the room had a steady rotation of police officers outside of it, but somehow the restraints seemed excessive. Most people stop moving after the broken hand, Beesley said, This guy isn't going anywhere any time soon. We'll be lucky if we can keep him conscious for longer than a couple of minutes, he's fresh out of surgery and he's going to be drugged out of his mind - he's not about to run off anywhere. He's got a long road of recovery ahead of him, too. He's no threat to anyone right now. Jamie reached out and pushed the curtain aside - but he immediately reeled back when he found a pair of enormous, icy eyes regarding him with all the warmth of an Alaskan floe. Not only was the John Doe awake, he was sitting up, hunched over in the bed, his breathing audible through the bandage on his neck, a horrible rasping and hitching sound that could be heard with each inhalation. Jesus. Beesley said, putting a hand on Jamie's shoulder to steady the intern from tripping over himself, simultaneously hiding the fact he had also nearly jumped out of his skin. From everything he had heard about the patient, Beesley had expected the man to be enormous - maybe six-foot-four, heavily muscled with biceps the size of his head and the sort of face that boxers got after years of being in the ring - but that wasn't what he was looking at. Instead, the man in front of them was thin, young, and possessed of angular, finely-boned features if Beasley had encountered him on the street, he might have thought the John Doe was a college student that could use a few extra sandwiches. Silence hung between them for several painful moments, broken only by the gravelly breathing sweat from pain and medication had caused the patient's hair to stick to the sides of his face in a way that made it clear it took enormous effort to stay upright, yet he remained that way, watching them, completely motionless. He didn't even seem to be blinking. Let's up his sedatives a few CCs, Beesley said out of the side of his mouth, and Jamie nodded vigorously, scratching it down on the chart. --- Four days passed in a blur of scalpels, sutures, pain, and the pink fog of sedatives as massive doses of benzodiazepines and morphine swam through his bloodstream at some point the borders that edged dreams and reality had softened and conjoined and Jackson had stopped being certain if he was asleep or awake. Needles went in, needles came out. Interns passed through, but only for moments at a time. A giant iguana with a bomber hat gave him a funny look and then rode its tricycle out of the room. Women in scrubs appeared from time to time most of them were older, tired-looking women, but one day - - one day, one of them was Lisa. On that day, she approached his bedside very quietly she pushed his hair back away from his face, leaned in close and she smiled at him the way she had in the bar, just before their flight from Texas. Then she sweetly rammed a pencil into his eye. Jackson woke up, bringing his hand to his face pain sang through every part of him, through his injured shoulder and broken hand, through the ache in his skull and the pull of sutures on his neck and in his chest and leg and stomach. Bruises burned. Muscles screamed. But he didn't make a noise the pain was comforting, it was familiar and reliable. He wanted it. He focused on it. The pain meant he was between doses - it meant he had time to think. They would come for him soon, he knew that much - though he had never failed to complete a job before, his line of work didn't have the luxury of second chances. After all, the Deputy Secretary wasn't about to forget the missile that had been launched into his hotel room - his entire staff would be on high alert, his public appearances would be reduced only to private interviews, his family outings would take place behind barbed wire. The window of opportunity had slammed shut, and Jackson had been the one to close it. He looked down at the handcuffs that chained his right arm to the bed under any other circumstance he would have felt insulted by the limited restraints, but the broken fingers of his left hand were clumsy and unsteady and the world swam around him when he tried to focus for too long - so he supposed the logic was sound. Jackson shifted on the bed his body ached from inactivity, but he forced himself upright, rising like Bela Lugosi from the grave, clenching his jaw in counter-protest to his resisting muscles. He moved his legs over the side of the bed, touching his feet to the floor his thigh stung, and he remembered the high heel that had been embedded into it. A strappy black pump, predictably sensible, not adventurous at all, but deceptively useful when weaponized. He pulled the hospital gown up his leg, eyeing the bandages on his thigh the muscles in his jaw worked in annoyance. He should have killed her on the plane. He should have killed her after she made the call. He should have strangled her to death in her seat - he could have done it quietly, no one would have heard. He would have even kept his promise and called the dog away from her father afterwards he was honest, after all. Jackson brought his hand up to his throat, bruised fingers touching against the bandages he found there. A pen, of all things. Clever girl. If he ever saw her again, he decided, he would need to write her back.