The Calm and the Storm [#NaNoWriMo15]

9. Dog in the Manger

His head was pounding almost as fast as his heart when he came around. He couldn't feel his legs. He could feel a light tingling sensation running up and down his arms, but that was the only part of his body that he was aware of. Everything else was just... silent. Especially the air around him.

When he worked up the courage and the energy, Atticus pried his eyelids open and blinked them once, twice and three times until his blurred vision settled in. He could feel tears down his cheeks, long since dried up, and he lifted his arm gingerly to rub them off with the fabric of his shirt. It was different than the one Reyna had given him; it had been changed. He blinked furiously once more as his gaze settled onto something pale and shrivelled as he looked forward. He was lying down and becoming more aware of his surroundings as he realised he was looking at the ceiling of a room that felt too small to be Bones' basement.

And his eyes widened as he realised that that was the last thing he could remember. Tied to a chair in his brother's best friend's basement with nowhere to go. But he wasn't there anymore, because he could feel the soft comfort of a mattress beneath him, with blankets and sheets over half of his chest down to his legs. Perhaps he was in a hospital? Did someone ring a hospital after he fell unconscious? Unless he was knocked out and taken to someone else's basement, but even if that was the case they wouldn't have taken caution in putting him in a bed, so he had no idea where he actually was.

But his legs were worrying him more than his location. They weren't coming back to him. Oddly enough, he could feel only one, but the other one felt like it almost didn't exist. And then it hit him.

Oh. Oh no.

He threw the covers off of his body and looked down. One leg of his jeans had been rolled up around his thigh to reveal a long, makeshift splint running the length of his limb. It was made completely out of things you'd find around a regular house; the leg of a chair to act as the support with thick tape holding it firmly in place. But beneath that his knee was wrapped thoroughly in a white bandage. He didn't bend it. He didn't dare bend it.

He was recalling what had happened in little snippets of scenes, seeing Nathaniel in majority of them. He had done something... bad, to earn a savage kick to his knee cap. And the boots his brother had been wearing confirmed his suspicions. They had been his favourite work boots, with the steel toes. He had been kicked with a steel-toe work boot.

And now his leg was beyond repair, and he hardly knew what he had done to deserve it. Something about his parents, he could faintly remember...

Forced to avert his gaze from his shattered knee, Atticus looked around to get familiar with where he was. He didn't know if he was supposed to be surprised at the fact that he recognised the space as his own room in his newly bought apartment. At that point, nothing should've surprised him but he couldn't help but wonder. Who had brought him here? No one knew where he lived that could've been there, that cared enough to splint his leg and make him comfortable. In his own bed. Reyna couldn't have known; she hadn't left that factory in her whole life so Atticus assumed that she didn't know much about the outside world.

And then his heart began to pound. Reyna. She couldn't live without that electricity, and if he'd been unconscious for long then she didn't have much time at all.

Atticus attempted to clamber out of his bed, but he could hardly move his arms without a sharp stab of pain ripping through them and down into his leg. He didn't know how long it had been since he'd moved his body properly, and it was showing now. But he grit his teeth together and he did it anyway, swinging his right leg off the side of the bed as it was positioned in the centre of his small room. Once that was down, he clenched his jaw tight and his fists tighter as he gently inched his broken leg to the same side his good one was at, one little bit at a time. He bit his tongue down from groaning or shouting when he jolted it a little too abruptly, but it was all going fine until he got to the edge of the bed. Now, he clearly didn't get that far in his thinking because before he could realise his mistake, his leg was falling, and it was falling fast towards the floor. The hard, solid floor.