Pacifier

🧨Camille🌹

The room I awoke to was cold and not quite white. The off white, grey of a hospital room I recognised from all the times I'd run away from them as a teenager.

I could hear not just one but two heart monitors, their steady beating out of time with one another, both beating steadily. Safely.

I knew that one of them was my own. I ached, almost everywhere, internally too, like an ache in my brain, not a headache but something else.

I felt like I'd been asleep for far too long, that kind of groggy, hungry, dehydrated aching, like I didn't want to open my eyes.

But I did and when I did I saw the wires going through a canular in my hand and I saw Johnny, unconscious and wired up to a machine too.

The second heartbeat was his and he wasn't waking up, or hadn't woken up yet.
Unless perhaps he was only sleeping - a thought I wouldn't let myself entertain for very long.

The last time I'd seen him I'd thought we were dying. I'd nuzzled into his side, his arms closing around me, and when I'd closed my eyes and told myself we were both only sleeping, I'd known in my heart that we were going to die there together. That we wouldn't see one another again in this world.

But now I was awake. We hadn't died, at least we hadn't died yet, and though I didn't know how long we'd been out for I had a feeling it was far too long.

My body hurt as I tried to sit myself up. I needed a drink of water, my mouth and my lips felt like paper. I wondered if when I found a mirror I would look dead.

"John," I tried to say but my throat was scratchy, too dry, and my words were and airy whisper which couldn't have reached him from across the room whether hed been awake or not.
"Johnny," I tried to speak up, tried and felt my voice scratch and crack.

He didn't stir, because he wasn't only sleeping. I swallowed down and tried to adjust to that. Tried to accept that id woken up before him and that from now until they day he stirred - if he stirred - I was going to be tortured with the what if and the what now.

In that moment I knew we must be the only two bottlemen left in the city, but I didn't feel lonely even if technically I was alone.
Even if Johnny wasn't waking up any time soon.

The skin around my canular was dry and itchy and when I tried to lift my hand I felt the insert tug on my skin. The sharp sting left me wincing as I tried to reposition myself.

It wasn't until I tried to move like that that I remembered the damage I had done that night.

It seemed like a distant memory, or perhaps not a memory at all. Not something that had happened to me but something instead that I'd seen in a film once, a long time ago, that I was remembering only now.

I tried to push myself up, trying to get a better look at John, wondering when I realised that I couldn't quite get the angle right, that perhaps they had positioned us that way on purpose. We were, after all, in a room of our own.

Perhaps we weren't the kind of sight they thought anyone deserved to see. Perhaps they didn't want me waking first and slipping into a state of shock at the sight of him.

I'd have rather that than been left not knowing.

So the first thing I asked when the nurse came in was how he was doing. Not how long we'd been in, not what was going on, what sort of state id been in. Just, "how is he?"

And she hadn't looked surprised.

She'd smiled softly, full of sympathy and then she'd turned back to Johnny, checking the tubes which fed under his skin. Taking readings and making notes.