No Time to Die - Part II

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The first thing you notice when waking up is the sound. Beeping, slowly and steadily, and breathing. It sounds like two persons, one a more rattled breath and the other very quiet but close to you.

Next comes the pain. Your body feels as if it has been crushed to bits, and breathing has never been so uncomfortable. You moan, unable to open your eyes yet, and someone shuffles next to you. It takes only a second until you feel a cold liquid run through your veins, starting from your right arm and spreading through your whole body. It muffles the pain and covers everything under a dull blanket, even the sound.

"You're awake", a familiar voice mutters, and at first you can't really designate it to a certain person. But then the face of Chishiya comes to your mind, his silver-white hair and his condescending eyes, and you realize that he's the one looking down at you – literally, this time.

"What the hell happened?" you want to ask, but whatever comes out of your mouth has barely anything to do with human speech. Chishiya understands you anyway and chuckles dryly. "You had a haemothorax", he states as if you'd immediately know what that is supposed to mean, "and you're just waking up from anesthesia. The ambulance said it was a car accident. I'd like to know more though about how exactly you landed on my surgery table."

The only answer you can give is a moan, and the pieces still don't want to form a bigger picture. You remember getting ready for work, then thinking about the surprisingly warm weather... But everything that happened afterwards is a blurred mess locked behind waves of pain.

"Uuugh..." Your mouth feels dry and the taste is terrible. Bitter, somehow, with a hint of blood. It's giving you the urge to gag. "Wa... water..."

The blonde next to you sighs and doesn't say more, but his face disappears out of your vision. For a moment, it leaves you scared to be alone, but Chishiya returns shortly after and helps you to raise your head so you can take a few sips out of a plastic cup. Despite the plastic taste of the water itself, it helps a lot to get rid of that weird taste on your tongue, and speaking turns out to be much easier now.

From the corner of your eye, you can now see another bed on the other side of the room. Whoever is lying there is still asleep, and several tubes are coming from their body. Still waking up from anesthesia, just like you. And for a brief moment, it makes you wonder what they went through and why they're here.

"I... I was on my way to work..." you begin to trace the events of this day, and while not everything comes together as you talk, you begin to remember most of it. There had been a car accident, squealing tires, shattering glass, shouting people. The accident itself had been at the other side of the street, but another truck on your side, trying to evade the crash, had veered off the road and hit the sidewalk instead. It might be a blessing that you can't recall the collision, and then you woke up here.

Since you've regained consciousness now, Chishiya orders a nurse to bring you to your room. He accompanies you through the hallway, listening to all snippets that make their way back into your memory, but then he has to get back to work, nodding to you when your eyes plead him to come back once his shift is done.

Hospitals are a scary place, even more so when you're the patient, and you don't want to be alone. Knowing that Chishiya will be there in a couple of hours is a soothing thought, and the time passes rather quickly since the nurses check on all your injuries and you have two roommates to talk to. One of them has been here for a week now after a planned bypass, and the other, a woman in her seventies, has had a check-up on her artificial heart-valve that caused problems some days ago.

It turns out that the haemothorax that Chishiya operated on wasn't the only damage you received in that accident, but a sprained ankle and several bruises and cuts. On top of that, your head is close to explode in a throbbing pain and you feel sick, probably the concussion one of the nurses talked about. They insist to keep you here for at least one or two nights to make sure everything heals appropriately, and never before have you been glad about Chishiya working several shifts in a row.

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