Peroxide (Peterick)

now sit the fuck down

This isn't Gerard's van, for this place reeks of a famished environment rather than fast food bags and faltering air fresheners, and while it's an improvement from that dingy place, I'm even more confused about my location than I was in the vehicle.

Capturing the details has always been my strength, though, and as I glance around the shimmering room, there is a whole array of things that could either heal me or kill me, so maybe I shouldn't have entered this profession so willingly, but it's nevertheless useful to know what surrounds you.

A cart as blank as the rest of the room waits in the corner for its employment, a plethora of tools boasting about how they'll paint incisions into my skin and turn me inside out like I'm in a clothing production factory, every pint of blood just a petty casualty to their forces.

I shouldn't be thinking about gore while I'm in a place such as this, more specifically a place whose whereabouts are unknown, because I've already passed out recently, and I don't need to do so again, as it might entail consequences even worse than before, and that might not be such a bad thing, but I don't want to wake up in a place such as this again with no recollection of where I am.

Yet I've never been so skilled at pushing thoughts from my mind, so I find myself indulging in the horrors of grime and blood and everything in between, the sensation posing as something a teenager encounters to feel falsely empowered, but nothing can last forever, and I find myself becoming bored with the replicated angst.

I move on to the blinds and windows, one blocking the other and further blocking me from seeing outside of it and gathering clues as to where I am and why I'm here, and though it's an inanimate object, I still shun it for being such an obstruction to my inferences.

The only sounds I hear are hushed behind a closed door that I can't transport myself to open effectively, a litany of shouting and business work and ugly sobbing at the loss of something whom I don't understand just as I don't understand this area, and those noises trigger me to do something about the sorrows cutting through people outside, but I can't do anything.

And perhaps worst of all, cords atrophy my skin until all I see is a forest, and to other people it's a normal procedure and the wires aren't that abundant, but with someone like me, someone who has never been inducted into a hospital, even one cord is enough to make me explode in fear of being chained to them forever.

The snapping of the door knob hurries me from my autopsy of the room, though I'm probably the one to be autopsied during this visit, and the implacable silence is vanquished.

"Pete?"

Alternatively, the person that steps through is not the beanie-clad Pete Wentz for whom I was hoping, but a woman shining with a smile and a white lab coat with a clipboard holstered by her chest like a gun that she'll utilize if I'm not compliant. "Actually, I'm Dr. Elisa Yao, and I'll be taking care of you during your stay."

My stay? That phrase is most correlated to hotels, but hotels don't supply razors and knives to their guests while tethering them to an extremely solid bed across from a tiny television that perhaps suggests indoctrination through media, and even this woman's title as a doctor doesn't fit with the setting of a hotel, so where is it that I'm staying? Definitely not a resort with these murky conditions.

"Um, hi," I greet, sidetracked by something other than her faulty answer. "Do you happen to know where I am?"

Elisa angles her head in a farce dialect, hyperbolizing the extent at which she's appalled by my stupidity. "Isn't it obvious?"

"I'd just like to be sure."

"I suppose seizure patients are typically confounded," Elisa mutters in the shallows of her breath, then looking back up at me as if I hadn't heard everything. "You're in a hospital."