Die a Hero

Dying Would Be Easier

Waking up was not pleasant. I began to sleepily come to with a very uncomfortable feeling of extreme nausea, which made me want to fall back asleep so I didn’t have to deal with it, when a combination of spasms and involuntary gagging violently dragged me the rest of the way out of my slumber. I was just barely able to hurl the upper part of my body halfway off the bed before last night’s half-digested soup and toast violently forced their way back up and onto the floor. “Fuck,” I said loudly, before looking around and noticing the red call button situated on the side of my bed. I went to reach for it, but Frostbite was there, helping me back up into bed, raising the back of it with the remote, wiping the vomit off my chin and the sides of my mouth, and handing me a barf bag before I could. At least, I assumed it was Frostbite, I’d never seen him without his mask before, but I guess in hurrying to see what the commotion I was making was about he had forgotten to put it on. 
He wasn’t unattractive, but there was something deeply unsettling about seeing him without his mask. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, though, and that just made it that much harder to stop staring at him. He left the room in the direction of where I assumed the kitchen was, based on where he brought the food from last night, and returned a little bit later with a mop and a bucket of water with some soapy bubbles floating on top. He started cleaning the vomit off the floor, my eyes never leaving his face as he did so. Eventually he paused, looked at me with exhaustion in his eyes, and asked, “why do you keep looking at me like that?”
“You have a face,” was all that my equally exhausted, slightly drugged-out, and still flabbergasted brain could manage as a response.
He stifled a laugh and said, “yes, I do,” the same way you would respond to a toddler. A moment later, though, his smile faded as he realized what I meant. 
“Oh. Yes, I do,” he said in a much more serious tone.
It was at this moment that I realized for the first time that I still had my mask on. I lifted my hand up to my face, touched my mask, and looked at him questioningly.
“There wasn’t any medical reason to remove it, and I scanned it when I scanned you for tracers and bugs and it came up clean, so I figured it wasn’t my place. If you want to show me your face, you should be able to choose to do so,” he responded to my unasked question.
I sat there, speechless for a moment, before replying. “That’s… Oddly thoughtful for a villain.”
“Villain’s just a label society put on me because they didn’t approve of what I do. I’m not a bad guy,” was his response.
I thought about this while he finished cleaning up my vomit and took the bucket and mop back towards the presumed kitchen area. He came back after a few minutes with a bottle of water and a sleeve of saltines.
“Here, you need to hydrate, and I remember you mentioned earlier that the last time something similar happened you couldn’t keep anything with flavor down, so saltines for if you get peckish.”
“Thank you,” I replied. I opened the bottle of water and chugged the whole thing in a few seconds. He went back into the kitchen area and returned with a few more. I smiled gratefully.
“Do you need anything else?” he asked.
I shook my head no, and he started to head towards the light switch by the door before I called out, “Wait.”
“What is it?” he asked.
I reached up towards my face and removed my mask, then placed it on the tray-table beside me. Frostbite stared at me for a long while before saying, “you look weird without your mask.”
I laughed, which I instantly regretted because the pain both inside and on the surface of my stomach increased exponentially. I winced, then replied, “you do, too, weirdo.”
He smirked at that, then headed to leave again before I blurted out, “My name is Raven, by the way, but I mostly just go by Rae these days.”
“Nice to meet you, Rae,” he responded, before turning off the light. He paused for a second then said, “that should cover the cost of the paralytic,” before leaving the room.

I wish I could say the rest of the night went better, but it really didn’t. I kept tossing and turning, never really properly getting back to sleep. When morning came Frostbite came in, went to the kitchen area, and came back with a bowl of plain oatmeal. I thanked him, then ate it in silence as he went back into the kitchen, presumably to prepare his own breakfast. He came out after about an hour with a few more bottles of water, having noticed mine had been finished during the night, and another box of juice. I took both gratefully and finished the juice quickly. He took the juice from me and threw it in a trash can in the corner before replacing my bandages and checking me over. He commented on how unusually warm I was, and asked if that was a half-vampire thing, it wasn’t, before taking my temperature.
“38 celsius” he said, “mild fever, nothing too concerning for now, but I’ll have to keep my eye on that. In the meantime, get plenty of rest, and don’t be afraid to call out if you need more water, a sedative to help you sleep, pain killers, food, or a book or something else to keep you entertained. I will continue to study the effect of this so-called ‘vamp poison’ on your blood, and run tests to see if I can identify what it is.”
With that, he left the room, and I was left alone with my thoughts. I lasted about 20 seconds before my brain started inventing abominable creations and I decided that sleep would probably be a better bet. This time I had much less trouble falling asleep, breakfast had exhausted me, and I drifted off in no time at all.
The rest of the day was uneventful, drink water, eat, have bandages replaced, drink juice, have temperature checked, sleep. My temperature increased very slightly throughout the day, and I began to feel the fever. The blanket became unbearable to me, so I tossed it aside. Soon my thin gown felt like it was smothering me, and I took it off until I was just laying there in my underwear and bandages. Not much time later the bandages began to feel increasingly smothering, but, knowing I shouldn’t remove those, I called Frostbite for some ice instead. He went in the direction of where I assumed his bedroom was, curiously, and returned with a strange looking blanked a bit thicker than the one I already had on my bed. I looked at him perplexed, but quickly understood what was going on as he froze the blanket as he put it on me.
The blanket seemed a quite ingenious invention. It retained the cold for quite a long time, all the while there was a protective layer of fabric that kept it from becoming too unbearable. It was the kind of thing that would only really work properly with his power, so I had to assume he invented it, or at the very least it was invented for him.
He came in approximately every hour at first to check to make sure the blanket was cold enough, but the intervals decreased as my fever increased. I don’t know much about what happened over the next few days, my fever quickly reached and then slightly exceeded 40 celsius. I became increasingly delirious, and suddenly understood the term ‘fever dream’. I can’t begin to describe how strange the images my brain conjured up were, but I can say that the singing, dancing monkey quartet was probably the least weird part.
At some point I came to for a little bit and realized that I was no longer under the ice blanket, but instead I was hugging a man-shaped block of ice. Something in the back of my mind registered that this was probably Frostbite, but I didn’t care at that moment because his cold felt so nice against my feverish skin. I cuddled up closer to him and fell back asleep.
My fever started to break after 5 days of unbearable heat. When it was down to a measly 39 celsius Frostbite switched me back to the ice blanket. Day 6 was spent mainly uneventfully, but I did read an interesting book from Frostbite’s personal library. On day 7, however, things changed. Someone came knocking at the door, and Frostbite did not seem happy to see whoever it was when he answered. The two argued for a bit before Frostbite said, “Okay, just give me a moment to make sure nothing burns down while I’m gone.” That statement had me a little concerned, until he walked in and, assuming I had heard at least part of the conversation from the look on my face, assured me that he hadn’t been working on anything too flammable since I had been here. He then told me he had to go out for a few hours, and asked if I thought I’d need anything during that time. I asked for some more water, some snacks and a new book, and he refroze the ice blanket before finally leaving to go do whatever was so urgent with whoever was at the door, leaving me alone in his place for the first time.