Soul Lines (Completed)

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One
Elle's POV

I had lived a relatively bland existence. In all my years of life, I had only been to the hospital twice. The day I was born, and once in the third grade when Nanna had thought I had broken my wrist – we had waited in triage for four hours to be told it was only a bad sprain.

Now, in only a week, I had more than doubled my trips to the hospital. To be fair, the first two visits hadn't been about me. I was there for Arlo, but I had grown accustomed to Aucteraden's industrial-sized hospital.

My third trip should have been about him, Kaden. He needed help. The blood from his wounds had already seeped into the fabric of his sweatpants. They'd barely stayed their ashy grey as he had pulled them on, a reddish stain coating them within seconds.

He shouldn't have even been given the sweatpants. Dishevelled and blood-stained, Kaden had limped into the waiting room, unable to support his own weight. He had been draped over my shoulder, and blood dripped upon the ground leaving a red-smeared trail behind us. The nurse had taken one look at us and tried to usher Kaden into the emergency room, but he'd stubbornly resisted her help, refusing to be looked at until the doctor had agreed to see me first. So as I had been guided into the left room with the nurse, the doctor had followed Kaden closely, his beady eyes watching Kaden's every movement.

Sitting in the hospital room, all alone, I noticed two things. One, the Vermiculo Hospital was smaller than Aucteraden's, claustrophobically so. It had two examination rooms, one of which carried the façade of an emergency room, based solely on the fact that most of the equipment remained in that room. The second thing I noticed was even then, when all of the equipment was stored in one room, there was barely enough equipment to save a life.

In Aucteraden Hospital, there was the constant whirl of breathing machines and the drone of heart monitors, a cacophony of sounds that created a sense of urgency and care. There was none here – no beating hearts, no humming machines, and no stampeding nurses as they walked the halls in search of angelic feats.

The silence was so intense that I could hear the receptionist through the walls. She called incoming patients, rescheduled their appointments, or directed them to the Aucteraden Hospital. No new patients would come in while we were there, and as the night wore on, it was clear she was freeing up the next day.

Most of the night had passed, and I had been waiting so long that I could draw the room from memory. Details such as the furniture configuration down to the number of paddle-pop sticks in the glass on the desk were permanently etched into my mind. The pain was subdued, more of a nuisance now that the drugs had kicked in, and with my ankle elevated, it provided a welcome excuse to avoid testing my pain levels.

When the nurse had first helped me settle into the room, I'd requested to go home, to go curl up in bed with my ankle propped up against a pillow, as I'd always done when I'd sprained it during P.E. Her eyes had shifted between me and the door. She had shaken her head timidly without words and backed out of the room with a glass to fill.

In the first couple of hours, I only had one visitor. Jacobi had more connections than I was aware of because he was by my side within five minutes of being admitted. He made sure I was safe and comfortable before leaving just as abruptly as he had come in, a guilty smile playing on his lips. He was gone before the nurse had time to bring back my glass of water.

As time passed, I managed to convince Lisa to open the window. She'd been hesitant initially, but when I asked a second time, she scurried over to the bay windows and welcomed the fresh air. After the burn of sterilisation had singed my nose and scorched my throat, the wintery air was a welcome relief, and she left with a warning to stay warm.