![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosanicusNo. 10: BLOW TO THE HEAD
Slurred Words | Passing Out from Pain | "I can't think straight."
328 words, Bertie, coda to Dark Intruder
Bertie smelled the hospital room before he saw it. His face was pressed into a pillow that had clearly been starched within an inch of its life, and the scent of that mingled with disinfectant and several-day-old flowers told him exactly what he would see when he found the strength to open his eyes.
Said strength, he was ashamed to discover, was not rapidly forthcoming. He shifted slightly, felt the rasp of bandages against his forehead, and then an all-consuming, drowning pain that started at the crown of his skull and swallowed everything else as it went.
He must have made some sort of noise, because he heard a sudden exclamation from nearby. The pain in his head prevented him from making any sense of it. It felt like he’d been put in a vice, or possibly as if his brain had been removed and put through a lemon squeezer.
It was bad enough that, before whatever commotion was taking place around him could come to an end, he slipped back beneath the waves of sleep.
His dreams were strange and unnerving, blinding fog and boggy ground sucking at his ankles as he stumbled across an endless moor. Biggles and Ginger flew over at a hundred feet and threw down a ladder, but it disappeared before Bertie could lay a finger on it. Algy drove past in a sports car full of black dogs with glowing red eyes. His father, a rare figure in Bertie’s conscious life, turned up to berate him for getting lost.
The next time he woke, it was easier to open his eyes. He blinked once, twice, and just about managed to focus on the figure sitting at his bedside.
“Oh, thank God,” said Algy. He squeezed Bertie’s fingers, familiar callouses almost as much of a balm to Bertie’s soul as the floaty, muzzy sensation of the morphine drip. “Much longer and I think Ginger might have actually paced a hole through the floor.”
Slurred Words | Passing Out from Pain | "I can't think straight."
328 words, Bertie, coda to Dark Intruder
Bertie smelled the hospital room before he saw it. His face was pressed into a pillow that had clearly been starched within an inch of its life, and the scent of that mingled with disinfectant and several-day-old flowers told him exactly what he would see when he found the strength to open his eyes.
Said strength, he was ashamed to discover, was not rapidly forthcoming. He shifted slightly, felt the rasp of bandages against his forehead, and then an all-consuming, drowning pain that started at the crown of his skull and swallowed everything else as it went.
He must have made some sort of noise, because he heard a sudden exclamation from nearby. The pain in his head prevented him from making any sense of it. It felt like he’d been put in a vice, or possibly as if his brain had been removed and put through a lemon squeezer.
It was bad enough that, before whatever commotion was taking place around him could come to an end, he slipped back beneath the waves of sleep.
His dreams were strange and unnerving, blinding fog and boggy ground sucking at his ankles as he stumbled across an endless moor. Biggles and Ginger flew over at a hundred feet and threw down a ladder, but it disappeared before Bertie could lay a finger on it. Algy drove past in a sports car full of black dogs with glowing red eyes. His father, a rare figure in Bertie’s conscious life, turned up to berate him for getting lost.
The next time he woke, it was easier to open his eyes. He blinked once, twice, and just about managed to focus on the figure sitting at his bedside.
“Oh, thank God,” said Algy. He squeezed Bertie’s fingers, familiar callouses almost as much of a balm to Bertie’s soul as the floaty, muzzy sensation of the morphine drip. “Much longer and I think Ginger might have actually paced a hole through the floor.”
no subject
Date: 2024-10-10 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-10 08:20 pm (UTC)