In Between

Chapter Twenty-three: The Hospital

"Excuse me?" Kieran said quietly. He was trying to get a woman's attention at the front desk, but she was busy—busy flirting with one of the doctors while Soren's blood dripped onto the cold, grey tiles.

"Hey!" Cain snapped.

The nurse looked up in annoyance at being interrupted. "Can I help you, young man?" she asked condescendingly.

Cain glowered at her. She was barely older than him, perhaps by two or three years, and was obviously acting superior to impress the handsome doctor in the stark-white lab coat. He's probably twice your age with a wife and children, you stupid—"Hi, my brother needs urgent medical attention. Could you spare a minute of your valuable time and find him a room?" Cain asked, interrupting his own thoughts. He didn't have time to be disgusted by this floozy and pretend to be polite when Soren was growing paler and paler. He was leaning heavily on Cain for support and had stopped answering Kieran's questions.

"What kind of injury is it?" the nurse asked stiffly.

Cain indicated the areas where Kieran had hastily wrapped gauze around Soren's open gashes. The white strips of fabric were already stained dark red which emphasized his brother's pasty complexion from the bloodless. "What do you think is wrong with him? Are you a nurse or not?" he snapped impatiently.

The doctor she had been flirting with was alerted by the venom in his tone and quickly stepped in to avoid a scene. "Karin is just an intern. I'm Dr. Jan. You can come with me," he said to Karin's disappointment.

Cain readjusted the arm draped over his shoulder, and he and Kieran half-carried Soren down the hall. Bri followed closely behind with an anxious hand resting against Soren's back. The doctor led them into an empty room and told them to lay the patient on the bed. As soon as this was done, the three of them were ushered out of the room by two nurses who instructed them to sit in the waiting room. "But I'm family! I should be allowed to stay," Cain growled.

"Sorry, but it's the rules. No visitors during the treatments," the Dr. Jan said firmly, and he closed the door in their faces.

Kieran muttered something about just doing what they said (he always did everything that anybody said), and the three of them retraced their steps to Kieran's mother.

"Will your friend be alright?" she asked, stroking Kieran's hair once.

"I expect they'll give us an update after they look him over," he mumbled, dropping into a chair in the waiting room.

"I'll fetch us something warm to drink," Mrs. Dalhart said kindly, and she left to find the hospital's café.

Tangling with the law did not do to Kieran's appearance what it did to Draven's. He looked exhausted with dark shadows under his eyes and a hunched figure that made him seem frail. After a full minute of watching Kieran as he fell into an even deeper depression, Cain briefly wondered if he should be trying to cheer his friend up before remembering that positivity was Soren's area of expertise.

Cain's default setting was the opposite of cheerful, and he often wondered if there was anything in the Inbetween that could cheer him up when he was determined to be miserable. If he couldn't even make himself feel better than it seemed like there was no point in trying to help Kieran. So Cain decided to do what he always did when there was nothing that he could do—he sat brooding in silence. This was part of a personal philosophy in which everything was almost always exactly what it seemed and people would do best to accept each harsh reality and suffer in silence.

"...Are you alright, Kieran?" Bri asked awkwardly, reaching over to pat his arm. The robotic motion of her gesture suggested that she was also inexperienced at lifting the mood. Cain supposed that was because Apryl, like Soren, was the one who usually did the cheering up. We have that in common, Cain thought. We're both the older siblings, but we spend half our time with them taking care of us instead of the other way around.