My Shattered Soul

Chapter 9

Unknown; September 5th, 2017, Early Evening

It'd been a few hours since they put Andrew to bed and Alex needed to check on him, if he still wasn't awake there could have been some head trauma that needed to be treated. Alex took a breath, raising her hand to knock on the thin metallic door, not sure if she should just open the door, if he was still asleep it wouldn't matter. Two minutes passed before the thin clangs finally filled the air.

"Come in." Andrews thin voice called through the door.

Alex sighed, feeling herself calm a little as she turned the handle and pushed the door open. "You're awake," she said, stepping all the way into the room." she coughed, wheezing in a harsh gasp as her lungs filled with the tangy pungent smell of blood.

Alex looked over at Andrew, her hands flying to cover her nose as her stomach flipped in a familiar sickening lurch. "I...fuck! Are you bleeding?" she asked, looking him over.

He was sitting up in the bed, his eyes droopy and his hair mussed. When she spoke he turned to look at his left side where blood had begun to soak through the thin material of his orange shirt.

"Oh, um, yeah." He grumbled, sounding dazed.

"I'll be right back," Alex said, before slipping into the bathroom to grab a first aid kit. She grabbed it and went back to Andrew's room. "Here, let me get that," she said, sitting down on the corner of the bed. "Hold this up." She said, lifting the bottom of his shirt, to examine the wound. The cut was wide, but it didn't look deep, and it wasn't bleeding much.

Just enough to scratch at the edge of her mind, reawakening the desperate crawling ache in her stomach.

Andrew flinched a little when she whipped the blood away with an alcohol swab.

"Well, this doesn't look too bad," she said, grabbing the antibiotic ointment and squeezing some onto a sterile gauze pad.

He leaned away from me when I pressed the gauze pad against the cut. "Fuck, that's cold." he chuckled, weakly.

Alex found one of the biggest bandages in the kit and covered the gauze with it.

"Charles called; he and Comet have been helping your mother look for you. Apparently, there was a spell blocking my signal so they couldn't reach me on the island. I told them we found you and to make sure your mother knows you're alright, but to alert the hospital rep so we could take you in as soon as we get there." Alex said.

"Alright, thanks." he tried to smile.

Alex took a breath, standing up quickly and heading for the door. "It'll be a few hours before we're back in North Carolina, but you shouldn't let yourself fall back to sleep. Come sit out here with us," she suggested.

"Alright," he said.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Salisbury, NC; September 5th, 2017, Late Evening

They were at the hospital. Andrew did in fact have a concussion and they were only allowing two people in at a time to visit him.

Comet was sitting by the window and Alex was standing by the door.

"So you really don't remember anything?" Comet asked.

"No, I...left Charles outside the restroom. I was washing my hands...and everything just...went dark. I had these...flashes...of bright light and pain." Andrew said, twitching as he thought back to his time with the Destroyers. "But the first thing I actually remember...Sophie and Emma were laughing...and there was...a YouTube video playing."