I am not afraid of Pain… right?
Before I go downstairs and face whatever fallout awaits me for technically dying again, and before I have to unpack the metaphysical equivalent of “hey guys, sorry about the temporary corpse moment”, I want to do the most basic, human thing I can.
I want to get dressed.
Naturally, this means I make a pilgrimage to the nurse’s office to raid the lost-and-found again.
Instead?
I find a crime scene.
Not the blood-and-gore variety I’ve become disturbingly desensitized to, but a different violation entirely. A targeted attack.
The box is empty.
Not a single tragic sock. No glow-in-the-dark scrubs. Not even a pair of jeans with suspicious stains. Just one folded index card sitting at the bottom.
LOST-AND-FOUND RELOCATED. All items are washed, folded, and stored in the Department of Intensive Care.
P.S. Pun intended.
I stare at the card for a full three seconds.
Then I mutter, “Of course.”
The ICU. The land of medical Lazarus-ing. The place with the highest statistical rate of ‘arrived dead-ish, left alive-ish’ in the building. A transitional halfway house between comatose and ‘please sign here to acknowledge you didn’t technically flatline.’
Apparently this is wheremythings live now.
I don’t know whether the guys expected me to wake up again, or they just wanted somewhere to stash my would-be wardrobe in case I did pull off the impossible and die for real this time, but bless their ridiculous hearts.
They prepared for me.
They held space for me.
My guys planned for me.
That thought lands strangely, hot and heavy and startlingly gentle all at once.
My guys.
I have never called them that, not even internally. I’ve called them a lot of things: reckless, violent, god-playing, insufferable, emotionally constipated, catastrophically selfish… but nevermine.
It doesn’t actually sound bad.
…Kind of sounds terrifyingly right.
So. Fine. I go.
The walk to the ICU is easier than the bathroom trek, but still slow going, partly because I forgot the floor plan of this godforsaken hospital. The halls look mostly the same, the same beige color everywhere and signs half-faded from the years of misuse.
But the ICU… The ICU is different.
Two corridors down from the old surgical wing (which immediately makes me think of Nathaniel, of crisp scrubs andsteady hands and whatever surgeon-ghost lingers in the bone marrow of him), the air shifts. The lighting shifts. It feels…awake here. Alive.
The bulbs actually work.
All of them.
