Lost and Found

Caught

           I woke up to voices talking frantically all around me, flashing red lights, and my brothers surrounding me. It was weird. It was like I was there, but I wasn't. I felt the pain go away for just a moment, and then I blacked out again.

           I suddenly felt aware of my surroundings and felt something in my throat and if it hadn't been for my decreased level of energy, I would have pulled it out faster than the speed of light. My eyes fluttered open and I noticed I was in a white room. I looked around me, with half open eyes, and saw a nurse handling something on my chest. It looked like a tube coming out of me??

            My eyes widened in panic but I couldn't say anything with the tube stuck down my throat. As my body woke up with me, I began to feel the pain. It was horrible. I eyed the nurse's hands warily as she managed the tube...in my stomach? When she touched it, I couldn't feel it, as I suspected I was on pain medication but it still made me nauseous.

             I was still confused on how and when I'd gotten there, not to mention how long I'd been out of it. The tubes inserted into my body started to make me anxious as well.

               I heard the heart rate monitor beeping faster at the same moment the nurse did. She noticed my eyes were open and the stricken look on my face, then rushed out of the room.

              I started to get really claustrophobic really quickly after she left, because I was all alone again. I couldn't move, breathe for myself, or talk. It felt like all my emotions from the past years were bubbling up inside me. I normally wasn't so emotional. I decided to blame it on drugs they'd most likely given me and to just let it all out.

              Tears silently ran down my face and everything around me soon became blurry. I heard a commotion by the door that the nurse had exited a few minutes before and noticed Nick walk in hurriedly. Leo was right behind him.

             I could barely see through the wall of tears in my eyes but I knew it was them because of the way they walked. Which was almost authoritatively. The blurred figures grew closer and the smaller one- Nick, sat on the bed and looked at me with a look of pure sympathy. Leo wiped the hair back away from my face and he leaned down to gently embrace me, careful not to mess with anything attached to me. "

"            I'm sorry." He whispered. "It'll all be okay, I promise." It pained me that I still couldn't say anything to them, like 'How did I get here?' and 'What's wrong with me?' I raised my hand slowly, so as to not rip off any unknown wires or tubes from them and reached for the tape on my face keeping the breathing tube in. Nick and Leo both grabbed my hand at the same moment to stop me. "You can't
take it out yet." Nick blurted. "The nurse has to do it."

             A few uncomfortable moments later, I was breathing on my own, but my throat was very sore and I had trouble talking. I sat up, ignoring the screaming pain of the literal tube that clearly went through my stomach.

            Not soon after, the rest of my brothers came to visit me, although they never came all at once. Nick was there the most but they all came at one point. Lorenzo came mostly In the late evenings with Luke. Leo came frequently, and I wondered if it was partly because I fell on him Even with the constant commotion of my brothers, I still couldn't stand being in the same spot.

             The only upside to my stay in the hospital was my relief from bad dreams. With one of them next to me always, I felt oddly at ease. Especially during the night. They did get annoying nonetheless, They'd rarely even let me talk and constantly told me I needed to just lie back and rest.

             A few days later, my "resting" was relocated to my room at their house, and not being able to talk was driving me insane.

              Nick and Leo came to hang out with me quite a bit, but I was still restless. They refused to let me get up from the couch for at least 2 solid days. I will admit, it was weird to have people fussing about me as I had always been on my own.

            On day 2, I was surprised to find out that even Luke popped in for a moment, as I had only seen him a few times even though we lived in the same house. Our brief interaction was strained and I could tell he was struggling to come up with words.

              He came in while I was sleeping and I awakened to him watching me sleep. It wasn't in a weird way though. "Hey," I said groggily, almost startling him with the fact that I was awake. He was leaning against the doorframe, with his arms crossed, which I was starting to notice all my brothers did. With his eyebrows in a deep crease, I could tell he had something on his mind, but didn't feel comfortable enough with him to ask him about it.

              He seemed at a loss for words and my eyes fell to his perfectly clean suit. Why did he wear a suit in our house? The silence was getting awkward so I took it upon myself to start the conversation. "Were you watching me sleep?" I said with a smirk as I sat up.

             Clearly he didn't have my sense of humor, as he didn't say anything or even smile. My ribs always hurt when I made any sudden movements so I bit my lip to try to ease my pain of moving positions.

               Luke got an almost guilty look on his face when he saw I was in pain but said nothing. "I've got to get back to work." Luke said quickly, obviously trying to get out of a conversation with his little sister he barely knew. I nodded and he nodded back before I saw him walk away. I could tell Luke didn't like me as much as the others, in fact, he seemed irritated I was here at all. No one else came by my room to visit me for a while after that so I fell asleep.

               A few hours later I woke up and my throat felt dry. I got up from the couch for the first time in days and walked slowly for minimum pain to go downstairs for some water. It was late at night and my watch read 1:03 AM.

               I stepped lightly across the hardwood as not to wake anyone else up. I assumed everyone else in the house would be asleep, but I assumed wrong. No more than 10 steps away from the kitchen door, I heard voices down a hallway that Nick had never shown me on our tour of the house.

              I had thought the door to the hallway was a closet but it stood wide open and it was a long dark hallway. I was going to ignore the voices and just go to the kitchen to get the water until I heard my name and couldn't bring myself to not care.

              I stepped through the doorway as quietly as possible and crept down the hallway. All the doors on the left and right of me were closed except for one door at the end that had the light on and the door open. As I got closer, I had more of a bad feeling about spying on the boys. I stopped in the hallway once their voices were in earshot.

               You were supposed to keep an eye on her!" Someone spat angrily. It sounded like one of my brothers but I couldn't figure out which one, as I had never heard any of them yell so viciously. "I hired you to keep her safe, a simple job, but you couldn't even do that!" I heard a scoff. Then I heard pleading from a voice I didn't recognize.

            I was utterly confused until the moment it all clicked. "Get rid of him." I heard the man say. I realized at the last possible second that they would be coming out of the doorway so I ran as fast as I physically could with my injury, making it to the end of the hallway.

             I looked behind me for a split second and ran into someone. I was right next to the mysterious hallway so I was caught. I looked up into the eyes of the large person I ran into and recognised the chocolatey eyes as Lorenzo's. He looked unbelievably angry and surprised at the same time.

             I wished I had ignored the voices and had gotten the water