Head Down

Chapter 18

A/N: No more pitchforks! I promise you'll only be a little disappointed in this chapter, and I even updated earlier than last time! Woohoo! Anyway, I need to ask my amazing readers a Q:

If Nate were to give Katie flowers (roses are included) what would they be?

COMMENT, Fan, Vote!

XOXO

NATE'S POV

At first I don't move from where I stand, which when you think about it is kind of contradictory. I ran and ran and ran to get here, but at the sight of my mate I can't even inch myself forward. Shock might be a contributing factor, and for that fact alone I'm glad everyone gave me this time for myself. I couldn't have handled seeing her with everyone watching.

At the second I get a full view of my mate my senses are tuned up tenfold, and so are my emotions. My mind swims with questions and thoughts and feelings and sights and smells and sounds and and and.....it's difficult to think, let alone tell when one thing starts and another begins in the cramped space inside my head. I feel dizzy, but I could never pass out or lose consciousness. Not while she's like this.

In contrast to my cramped thoughts, the scene in front of me is painfully, agonizingly clear.

The fluorescent lighting is a bright white, along with everything else in the room including the walls, floors, and beds. There are fourteen stick straight rows of said beds all with stainless steel railing, and stands next to them -for holding fluid bags. Not a single one is unmade, even that which holds Katie. There are no windows, and no sign that golden sunlight ever touched the clean surfaces within. Floor to ceiling cabinets (with a counter separating them into halves, half attached to the floor, half to the ceiling) line the wall on either side of the door -the only entrance- that I know hold medical supplies. Three stainless steel sinks are placed at even intervals on either side of the door (six total), and are the only thing interrupting the sleek white counter space. The entire room is clean and swims with the sharp odor of antiseptic, leaving nothing to the imagination that this is a medical room of some kind.

Seven bed rows away from me lies Katie, on the right as I suspected. She is the only thing different in this ungodly sterile, even place. Miraculously at this point my legs finally obey my command to move, and I am at the foot of her bed in seconds.

The sight of her show's just how little the pain I felt this morning was. That, that was nothing. Nothing at all compared to this. Here, my heart actually breaks.

Now, I break.

The white, generic blanket comes up to where I estimate to be her belly button, and from there up she is covered in bandages. Their white is slightly more creamy, in stark contrast with the rest of the room, and rap all the way from under the blankets up to her underarms. They also cover her left shoulder, and from her right elbow to thumb. For how thickly and precisely the gauze is wrapped, they do little to hide her damages. Almost everywhere there are bandages, small ridges sprout up, signaling stitches, underneath the taught fabric. Tiny stains of blood seep through them, showing where the bleeding was worst.

Her skin is a deathly pale color -save for her purple arm- making her blend in with the rest of the room, and shines with sweat. The brown hair that was so clean and smooth this morning is now greasy and matted to her skin wherever it touches, and is tucked neatly underneath her. The lips I had never dared to study before for danger of getting carried away are now such a pale pink it's difficult to tell when they begin and her normal skin ends -the only way is to identify the cracks from dehydration on her mouth.

On the right side of the bed a stainless steel cart stands, on top of which is a metal basin with no lid. Inside there is a thin layering of red soaked gauze, which is covered in brown shards of glass. Their sizes range from barely larger than a grain of sand to bigger than my thumb, and each is covered in my mates blood. Drenched in it. So much so, in fact, that the bin smells more like Katie than she does. Another reason for that could be found on the other side of the bed, where a huge red bag of blood is attached to my mate's left elbow by way of IV. A second, equally large bag is being fed into her as well, but instead of blood it is filled with a clear and oddly sweet smelling liquid. Morphine.