Count your fingers

4. Anywhere but here

Trigger warnings: blood and gore

When Derek becomes aware of his surroundings, the first thing that crosses his mind is not: "It worked!" To the contrary, he fervently wishes he was still in the prison, because that was so much more preferable to being tied to a metal table with his insides cut open, his intestines exposed to the air. It says a lot about his life that he recognises the feeling of having his intestines out in the open, though it was never in the way they are right now. The pain registers on a level that tells him they've been working on him for some time now, the pain no longer sharp and immediate, but thrumming and all-encompassing.

His awareness disrupts the fast but steady beeping of a machine to his side, attracting the attention of some of the people dressed in white around the table. They're wearing white scrubs that cover their whole body, with blue gloves that go up to their elbows. Some of them have blood on their gloves. His blood. Their faces are hidden by surgical masks and protective glasses. They all wear a white cap on their head, hiding their hair and rendering them eerie duplicates of each other. Bright lights above him keep him from seeing clearly, he has to squint to not be blinded by them. The room smells sterile, like in a hospital.

Derek would shift, were he not already fully in Beta shift. His clawed hands rest uselessly on the cold metal, his arms stretched out away from his sides. Trying to feel anything other than the lancing hot pain in his abdomen, he vaguely registers needles poking in the insides of his elbows, a tight band around his forehead that keeps his head in place.

The people that are working on him, operating him, examining him, are talking quietly amongst each other in a language that he can't understand. If he had to guess he would say it's Slavic, yet it sounds even more unfamiliar than that. They know he's awake, every now and then one of them looks in the direction of his face, yet nobody reacts to him. He feels like he's being dissected alive. A medical experiment. An oversized lab rat.

Time lengthens and tightens until Derek loses all awareness of it. He's unconscious for some bouts of time. When he comes to at some point, the room is quiet and empty, except for the beeping monitor next to him. The pain has simmered down to a dull throbbing, another familiar experience. He's healing, albeit slowly.

Despite not being present for the whole ordeal, he's exhausted. Just before he closes his eyes, he hears a door open. Another figure in white steps in, holding something in his blue hands.

He wakes up in a cell. A completely white room of roughly six by six feet, with rounded corners, a cot against one wall and a small table with a stool against the other. The table and stool are mounted into the wall, made of the same smooth, white surface as the rest of the room. There's no window and no light source, the light just seems to be there.

There's a metal food tray on the table, the smell of cooled down dinner the only thing to convince Derek to get up from his cot. His stomach is knitted together again, everything back in place, the skin still red and tender from having to grow back. It feels like he's one wrong move away from ripping his wounds open again. He'll need sustenance to heal properly, to replenish his energy. So he sits down on the stool and forces himself to eat every last bit of the food. It looks like food and it tastes like food, the scent and taste just slightly off; like someone who has never tasted food in their life tried to replicate it based on looking at pictures in a cookbook. You know something's not right, though you can't point out what. The mashed potatoes look their part, yet taste like someone mixed in cardboard at some point in the cooking process; same goes for the generic mix of cooked vegetables next to it. He also wonders if the chicken ever really lived. Derek needs to eat, so he eats. Bite after bite, mechanically moving the spoon to and from his mouth.