Shadows | A Forever Fan-Fiction - Sequel to Lights

Chapter Thirty-Seven: No Solution

The darkness engulfed me even in consciousness. I couldn't see. My eyes refused to open, but I could tell where I was by the tell-tale scent of menthol and latex gloves. From the silence of a morphine-induced sleep flowered the hissing and beeping of machines and monitors, accompanied by the gentle murmur of hospital chatter.

"Help," I said simply. No one answered. My hands felt for my face, and met bandages, cloth. Fear seared through me as I suddenly forgot where I was and what had happened. "Help!" Hysteria was spiralling upwards, bubbling outwards, the vestiges of a panic attack exploding in me, until I felt hands gripping me firmly, and realised there was someone trying to calm me down.

"LaVaughn, it's okay," the person repeated over and over.

That's my name, I realised. I'm in a hospital. It's morning. Late spring, maybe. I was attacked. A vague memory of falling through air slid through my mind fluidly.

"Duvall," I breathed softly, suddenly filled with recognition as he began to pull away part of the bandage. I could still only see through my right eye. Another bandage still covered my left eye. I tried to brush it away, but he shook his head and smoothed it back down. "Why are you here? Where's Dr. Morgan? Where's Jo? And the man - Adam - I was fighting with?"

"Your eye is still healing. Your body suffered massive traumas. Four stories of empty air... It was miraculous you survived. You..." He paused, turning towards the wall. "You were dead, during surgery. Technically. Your heart stopped. You didn't breathe. Your blood pressure fell. But you're here. Six hairline fractures, three broken bones, and lots of internal bleeding."

I frowned at him, a bitter taste filling my mouth.

"You tried to kill me."

"You would've killed him." My legs felt stiff, uncomfortable. I saw the pale white cast wrapped around it, sterile fluorescent light bounding off of it. "I had a plan, but you just had to change things, you just had to show up."

"I had to, because he's an evil murderer. Are you going to try and kill me now?" I tensed in the bed, not sure that in my current state I would be able to defend myself.

"No. I'm a doctor. I help people."

"You never helped me." I could see hurt reflected visibly in his eyes. His eyes held this ancientness within them, as though he were a thousand years old. His eyes were too young to look like that. He had no right.

He breathed out through his nose and turned towards the blinds, which were closed. Rain gently specked the concrete countenance of the exterior of the hospital. "Get out. Now."

"Please, hear me out," he offered, except it wasn't really an offer, since I couldn't move. "I just... want to say something, okay, and then... Then you never have to see me again." There was a thin layer of vulnerability draped over his voice, cracks breaking down the façade of tough, troubled Duvall.

"Do I have a choice?"

He shrugged, words tugging at his lips, and he spoke again, this time with meaning, intent, rather than the tentativeness of someone who had no idea how to put together the impossibility that was their life. "I was young when I joined the Maverick. Maybe fifteen, sixteen. It was already more of a cult back then, a terrorist reform group centred around the belief that they could live forever. They had this leader. Nat, he called himself, after Nat Turner. Wanted free range rights and equality. But he was a real warmonger, for a poor cause. He was killed, in a stint they tried to pull off about a decade ago - you were probably a few years younger than I was. Bombing. He got shot, thought."

"I remember," I stated. "If he's the person I think he is, then he didn't die during the bombing, though. He died serving... serving the man you almost let kill me. He was shot in the chest, if I recall correctly."