Fear

23

The white noise was constant.

White because it was incessant, like tinnitus in my ears and a throbbing headache behind my eyes. The kind of sound that would drive someone to madness if they weren't already halfway there.

I'd gotten used to it all. This ward. The hiss of machines, the metallic clinking of medical tools, the smell of chemicals and medicines, the nurses murmuring in code, the shuffles and squeaks of shoes on the linoleum floor. I'd gotten used to the routine. Used to the walls.
Used to the comings and goings of staff and patients.

It seemed endless. And this was— what? Only my fourth day?

That was hard to believe.

At some point, I remember looking over the foot of my bed and I'd propped myself up on my elbows.

I could see Tom, still in the bed opposite like a ghost — barely a shape, barely a soul. The curtains around his bay had been left half drawn, one side clipped back with a plastic tie.

This was the first real look I'd had at him. Not the silhouette buried under sheets. Not the pale flashes of skin when the nurses cleaned him or changed his bandages. This was different. This was all of him. Lit up under the brutal fluorescence that buzzed like hornets overhead.
There was nowhere to hide under this light.

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe. My eyes went wide.

He was wrecked. Destroyed.

His face was a landscape of violence — swollen beyond recognition, bruises blooming across his skin. One eye swollen shut, the other barely open. The colours blended in a sickly gradient — purples that bled into black, reds fading into yellowing flesh. Like rotting fruit.

It didn't look real. It looked like SFX makeup. I wanted to believe that's all it was. But I knew.

A slash ran over the bridge of his nose. Two more ripped across his right cheek. And the scar of a previous cut started behind his left ear and ended at the base of his neck in a diagonal line. The skin had healed over, leaving something thick, raised, and faded where the wound had been.

His chest mirrored the same agony. A map of injuries — slashes, welts, ridges of scabbing flesh, and healing cuts that looked like they'd been made with something cruel and serrated. Some were stitched. Others just left to scab over, as if they'd given up partway through caring.

His arms were worse. Lined with cuts, rough and ugly. Some were wide, puckered and healing. Others were thin, surgical almost — not from medicine, but from precision. Purpose. They weren't accidental. They weren't from a fall or a fight.

It was art.
Or someone's idea of it.

I realised — Dylan didn't just beat him. He carved him. And not just once. I didn't need to be told. I knew it.

I could see Dylan's handiwork in every jagged edge of this boy's body. The methodical cruelty. The same way he'd spoken to me, touched me, held me like I wasn't a person but a thing to study and break open.

I felt bile rise in my throat.

And still — even through the horror — I saw things that didn't belong.

Slim fingers. Not built for fists. Hands meant for sketching. Maybe piano. The delicate kind of hands that knew creation, not destruction.

I wondered what his voice had sounded like before.
Did he sing under his breath while he worked? Did someone once kiss the corner of his mouth — the same corner that was split open now — and make him laugh?

That thought gutted me.
He'd been happy once. Had to have been. Right?

I stared at him in disbelief, like my eyes had betrayed me with another hallucination. But then—