Visitation [Mia]
Jul 12, 2013 16:10:19 GMT -5
Post by Clement Evans on Jul 12, 2013 16:10:19 GMT -5
((Backdated to July 4th.))
Clement's second hospital stay in less than a week was more serious but thankfully less eventful than his first. The burn treatments, broken bones, and medication meant he was either asleep or in too much pain to pull out all his tubes and try climbing out of the bed. For five days, anyway. By the end of the sixth, his wrists were back in the padded restraints and the hospital orderlies duly noted that when another set of nurses wrote something in ALL CAPS in red pen on a patient's files, it should probably be done without question.
The burn on Clement's face was close enough to his eyes that the gauze that covered it often overlapped onto his field of vision, reminding him badly of the time six years ago when he'd also had bandages over his eyes. Even with his hands buckled to the bed, he'd tried to move the bandage around by rubbing his face against the stiff sheets to shift the tube gauze that was holding everything in place, driving the nurses to distraction.
What finally stilled him surprised everyone.
Mia Bell was not a relation. Or even a friend. But she was a persistent and cheerful visitor with a quiet presence, and Clement was much more tractable after she left. He had been asleep or woozy the first visit, confused for the next, and by the time he left the hospital for Hammel's infirmary he seemed past resignation and into grudging acceptance. He might've even looked forward to seeing her, not that he'd admit it. No one had ever come to see him as a visitor and not as an official. And she kept coming. Not every day, but often enough.
It was a little weird.
In the Hammel infirmary, Clement did not have his hands tied down but had been told restraints existed if he wanted to make an issue of it. The upright cot was enough like a chair and close enough to the ground that he stayed on it, and there were no tubes or wires to remove. The bandages over his burns were smaller and more lightly wrapped, though he still had fading bruises on his eyes and chest. Clement was also wearing pajamas for the first time. A light blue cotton set, much too big, but easy for him to get in an out of, with the buttons down the front undone to give Dr. Nik easy access to his injuries. The material felt... insubstantial. Like he was wearing nothing. Clement didn't understand the point of wearing something that didn't have any weight to it, but people were weird.
It was the Fourth. A holiday he both liked and disliked. Liked, because it meant free entertainment in the form of evening fireworks, disliked because it meant if he was stuck at home whoever was watching him would be drunk by 10 a.m. Most other holidays only had that second part, but also a third part that meant embarrassment at school when he had to listen to all the kids tell what they got for Christmas or didn't have a Halloween costume. This Fourth would see him inside for the fireworks, which was a minus, but had the double plus of not having either of the other two parts, and the lack of the second was more than enough to cover the lack of the first.
There wasn't a lot to do in the infirmary, but Dr. Nik played the radio and Clement was always ready to catch up on his deficit of sleep. He murmured Korean to himself, told himself all the old folk tales Ajima used to tell him and Minho about evil foxes and courageous tigers. He did the stretching exercises he was supposed to do as well, to keep the skin over his chest and shoulders pliable. And Mia was coming today.
Scraping his tongue over his teeth, Clement hoped he could keep the stutter out of his words. Sometimes she made him nervous, being so nice. And on days he knew she was coming he tried to put things in his head and mouth back in English before she arrived so he didn't have to do the whole start and stop that sometimes happened too. Back in Cali, he'd have called her Bell-sunbaenim and she probably would've understood. Here, she might think he was calling her names, though she deserved the title, in Clement's opinion.
Looking up when he heard the door open, Clement didn't smile when he saw her, but his expression was not unpleasant. His eyes were alternately wide and squinted, a little surprised she'd come (she said she would, but... a lot of people said a lot of things that never happened), and trying to see her better.
When she was settled, he said, brain firmly reminding him to speak in English, "Hi."
And English or not, he remembered just in time not to dip in a bow, because his ribs would do extremely ugly things to him.
*sunbaenim - 'sunbae' is the word for older student, '-nim' is the added article of respect
Clement's second hospital stay in less than a week was more serious but thankfully less eventful than his first. The burn treatments, broken bones, and medication meant he was either asleep or in too much pain to pull out all his tubes and try climbing out of the bed. For five days, anyway. By the end of the sixth, his wrists were back in the padded restraints and the hospital orderlies duly noted that when another set of nurses wrote something in ALL CAPS in red pen on a patient's files, it should probably be done without question.
The burn on Clement's face was close enough to his eyes that the gauze that covered it often overlapped onto his field of vision, reminding him badly of the time six years ago when he'd also had bandages over his eyes. Even with his hands buckled to the bed, he'd tried to move the bandage around by rubbing his face against the stiff sheets to shift the tube gauze that was holding everything in place, driving the nurses to distraction.
What finally stilled him surprised everyone.
Mia Bell was not a relation. Or even a friend. But she was a persistent and cheerful visitor with a quiet presence, and Clement was much more tractable after she left. He had been asleep or woozy the first visit, confused for the next, and by the time he left the hospital for Hammel's infirmary he seemed past resignation and into grudging acceptance. He might've even looked forward to seeing her, not that he'd admit it. No one had ever come to see him as a visitor and not as an official. And she kept coming. Not every day, but often enough.
It was a little weird.
In the Hammel infirmary, Clement did not have his hands tied down but had been told restraints existed if he wanted to make an issue of it. The upright cot was enough like a chair and close enough to the ground that he stayed on it, and there were no tubes or wires to remove. The bandages over his burns were smaller and more lightly wrapped, though he still had fading bruises on his eyes and chest. Clement was also wearing pajamas for the first time. A light blue cotton set, much too big, but easy for him to get in an out of, with the buttons down the front undone to give Dr. Nik easy access to his injuries. The material felt... insubstantial. Like he was wearing nothing. Clement didn't understand the point of wearing something that didn't have any weight to it, but people were weird.
It was the Fourth. A holiday he both liked and disliked. Liked, because it meant free entertainment in the form of evening fireworks, disliked because it meant if he was stuck at home whoever was watching him would be drunk by 10 a.m. Most other holidays only had that second part, but also a third part that meant embarrassment at school when he had to listen to all the kids tell what they got for Christmas or didn't have a Halloween costume. This Fourth would see him inside for the fireworks, which was a minus, but had the double plus of not having either of the other two parts, and the lack of the second was more than enough to cover the lack of the first.
There wasn't a lot to do in the infirmary, but Dr. Nik played the radio and Clement was always ready to catch up on his deficit of sleep. He murmured Korean to himself, told himself all the old folk tales Ajima used to tell him and Minho about evil foxes and courageous tigers. He did the stretching exercises he was supposed to do as well, to keep the skin over his chest and shoulders pliable. And Mia was coming today.
Scraping his tongue over his teeth, Clement hoped he could keep the stutter out of his words. Sometimes she made him nervous, being so nice. And on days he knew she was coming he tried to put things in his head and mouth back in English before she arrived so he didn't have to do the whole start and stop that sometimes happened too. Back in Cali, he'd have called her Bell-sunbaenim and she probably would've understood. Here, she might think he was calling her names, though she deserved the title, in Clement's opinion.
Looking up when he heard the door open, Clement didn't smile when he saw her, but his expression was not unpleasant. His eyes were alternately wide and squinted, a little surprised she'd come (she said she would, but... a lot of people said a lot of things that never happened), and trying to see her better.
When she was settled, he said, brain firmly reminding him to speak in English, "Hi."
And English or not, he remembered just in time not to dip in a bow, because his ribs would do extremely ugly things to him.
*sunbaenim - 'sunbae' is the word for older student, '-nim' is the added article of respect
