Learning To Count(Otabek x Yuri) [boyxboy]

Chapter Ten

'Ms. Plisetsky, could you come with me and we'll fill out the paperwork?' A tall woman dragged Yuri's mother away and he was left to sit alone in the recovery clinic he'd been banished to. The Eastwick Centre was miles from home- for some reason, it had been seen fit for him to be exiled to Scotland, of all places. The drive down had been horrific, with his mum silently crying for most of it and him desperately wishing he hadn't lost his phone at Rafael's party so that he could text Otabek. He had been sent away so quickly he hadn't even had the chance to say goodbye and already he missed him like hell. His mother hadn't even tried to make him eat, and this had been the most painful of all. He could see that she was at a loss for what to do and while all he wanted was to nestle into her protective arms, he just couldn't face it when he was so ashamed of what he'd done to her. She tried to make lighthearted conversation, asking him if he was tired, if the NG tube was giving him any grief, this and that and all that she could think of that avoided the topic of him slowly trying to kill himself, but her efforts were in vain. She got him a bottle of water and that was it, yet he was sorely persuaded to drink. He claimed that it was the uncomfortable tube, but he couldn't really feel it anymore- it was the way his skin was crawling thinking of the food that had already been poured down his throat. He didn't feel hungry anymore and it terrified him to the extent that even swallowing was a strain because it felt like even his own saliva was seething with calories, all seeking to cram his stomach with even more fat until all his (admittedly unsatisfactory) progress had been undone.
Upon their arrival late the evening after he was taken to hospital, they were greeted by a jovial looking woman and taken through to wait outside the office of Mrs. Kadahki, who ran the whole show. Now he was sat outside the office on an uncomfortably hard chair, his legs pressed together and his hands gripping at each other. After they'd done all the paperwork and everything, Yuri was taken into a room slightly further up the corridor where a nurse was waiting for him. She was almost as short as him and smiled brightly, her teeth a brilliant white against her dark lips.
'Hi, Yuri,' She gestured for him to sit down on the inspection bed, which he did obediently. 'I'm going to give you a quick checkover, is that okay?'
He nodded uncertainly, hoping both that she would say he didn't need hospitalisation so he could go home and continue to starve himself and that she would tell him he was incredibly sick and needed to stay. His mind was distorted like that. First she took his height and weighed him, not letting him see the weight that was registered. He was half glad for it- he hated to see his weight enough as it was, but now, when he could physically feel the extra weight he was carrying, it would be torture to see the number. Next she drew some blood to enact a blood analysis and emptied the syringe into a vial.
'Okay, I just need to take your heart rate,' She placed a pulse reader on his arm and he shifted uncomfortably as it squeezed tighter. 'Just a few more seconds.'
He closed his eyes and tried to ignore it, hating the feeling it gave him of strong nausea.
'Right,' She took it off and at last he could breathe again. 'Your heart rate is slow and irregular. Not a good sign. Anyway, I'll let you go now and I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning.'
He was sent out into the corridor again, where he stood next to his mother in stony silence. He knew why he was there, and deep down he knew he needed to be; he was subconsciously aware of his predicament. Barely able to eat, losing all his hair, coughing up blood, completely helpless at school because he was so overruled by hunger pangs and his body was shutting down on him until he couldn't think. He'd lost his childhood to this obsession, something he could never get back. He regretted ever thinking it would be okay to lose 'just a few pounds'. These few pounds had grown to a few more, then ten, then twenty. At long last Mrs. Kadahki emerged from her office and asked if she could speak to Yuri alone for a bit. He trembled with nerves as he followed her into his office, tugging at his sleeves and trying not to give away his emotions. Her office was small but spacious, and he felt a little less claustrophobic once inside. He sat in the swivel chair opposite her desk and regretted it the instant he did so. He was so het up and anxious that he couldn't help himself from oscillating from side to side.
'Yuri Plisetsky,' She stretched out the vowels in his first name, rolling them across her mouth.'I am Mrs. Kadahki and we're just going to have a little chinwag before I send you on your way. Nurse McReedie will be giving you a tour. I'm sure you're very nervous, so I can do all the talking for you. You'll be staying here for about two months as an estimate, depending on how willing you are to work with us and how you cope with treatment.'
He stiffened at the word treatment, and at the sentence she passed. Two months seemed an awfully long time.
'You'll receive two hours of counselling a day from Monday to Friday, then on weekends we have activities set up and visitation. No visits for the first week, I'm afraid, just while you're settling in.
'Every day at 6am sharp you must be ready for your weigh-in, which will include weighing, breathing and heart rate and all such requirements to take an accurate measure of your improvement. This will all be done by the nurses. After that, breakfast is at 7:30am and you'll be under very close supervision. Of course, for you it's tube feeding. You'll probably keep the tube for a few days until you show physical improvements. You'll have round-the-clock supervision for the first few days, and different nurses will be on rotation- they're all lovely, I assure you. At 8:30am is creative therapy, which is it compulsory but strongly advised. If you don't join in, you must stay in the common room where you can watch films, read books and talk to the other patients. Morning snack is at 11am and you'll be taking supplements with them until you've achieved a certain weight. Then you have group therapy until lunch, after which you have one-on-one therapy and activities. Dinner is 6pm and you will also have an evening snack at 8pm, then you must be in bed by 10pm. You're sharing a room with two other patients, who you'll meet in just a moment. Does this all sound in order?'
He just nodded, completely overwhelmed and absolutely paralytic with fear. He'd forgotten there would be other people- they'd all see right through him, how much of a faker he was. Added to that, they'd all be much thinner than he was and he'd feel both humiliated and encouraged to lose more weight.
'Any questions?' She asked him as he stood up, but he shook his head. He wanted to escape as soon as possible. 'Wonderful. Say goodbye to your mum and I'll pass you over to Nurse Scott.'
She bundled him out the door and he hugged his mum awkwardly, wishing she would stop crying. She was still sniffling when he said goodbye and watched her walk off, a strong sense of guilt ramming him full-force in the stomach. He needed to try. If not for himself, then for her. This was just a fleeting moment of positivity, but it felt important somehow. He knew within minutes he'd be back to his usual mindset, but it was nice to feel like he had something to recover for, even if he had no plans to genuinely recover. He'd just trick them into thinking he was okay so he could go home. Another smiling nurse (were they all trained to smile like that? Didn't their jaws ache?) put a hand on his back and steered him down into a corridor that looked exactly the same, explaining that this was where the rooms were. Two girls were sat on the floor outside a room, one of them crying and the other comforting them. They stared at him as he walked past and he ducked his head in embarrassment, wishing they would ignore him. They weren't as skeletal as he'd thought the other inpatients might be, but nevertheless they looked dire with huge black bags under their eyes and pale skin. They kind of looked like vampires, and death definitely did not become them.
'This is your room,' The nurse opened a door and led him inside the room. 'You're sharing with Katie and Shannon.'
The walls were a generic cream and everything in the room was just as dull and lifeless. It would have been insufferable had it not been for the bright posters and paintings that adorned the wall, writing scrawled over many of them. A lot of them were motivational quotes that made him cringe, but there were messages written underneath that almost brought a smile to play at his lips. At that moment, a tall wait of a girl with hair down to her waist and skin so pale she practically blended into the white sheets came dancing in with a short, elvish girl in a floral headscarf in her wake. They both had flushed cheeks and wide grins on their cheerful faces.
'Where's our new- oh!' She caught sight of Yuri and startled. 'Is this the new roommate?'
'This is Yuri,' The nurse patted him on the shoulder. 'Yes, your new roommate. Yuri, this is Katie and Shannon.'
She pointed to the two girls in question, failing to specify which was which. They both waved eagerly and, while he waved back shyly, he resisted the urge to retreat into a cupboard and hide for the remainder of his stay. He highly doubted there would be any other boys, and he had seen the surprise registered on their faces when they saw him.
Before he could settle in, the nurse had to go through the entirety of his bag, combing through for any contraband he may have been attempting to smuggle in, like cigarettes, laxatives or food. It beat him as to why they'd have an issue with him smuggling food in if they were trying to get him to eat it in the first place. Content, she aided him in his unpacking- his mum had overpacked and he'd gone through it, taking most of it out. All his clothes were the same anyway- a load of oversized sweaters and black jeans. He was then taken on a whistle-stop tour of the building.
She began with the most important room; the dining room. It was small so that they could easily keep an eye on all the patients with their limited staff. There were three tables, all with a list on them of who sat where, evaluated by risk. He wasn't on a list yet because he was going down to the medical bay at dinner-time to be tube fed, but a dietician at the hospital had ensured he was still able to swallow food (using water and the smallest amount of food possible) so he was able to participate in snacks. The room linked through to a conservatory filled with bright flowers and quaint little window seats. It was freezing in there and he made a mental note to spend some time in there as he'd once read that being cold and shivering burned calories.
Next up on the itinerary was the common room, which was enormous compared to the rest of the site. Six girls were all sat in a huddle together on one of the luxurious velvet couches watching a movie on the flatscreen TV. So that was why the place was so expensive... Nurse Scott told them to say hi to the new patient, and they all have monosyllabic greetings and the mandatory glance to feign interest. Once they actually saw him this blossomed into real interest and one of them paused the movie. Right, his gender gave him added zest because boys didn't get mentally ill. Certainly not enough to get hospitalised. They introduced themselves and while their names faded into nothing relatively quickly, he was pretty sure he would remember their piercing, morbidly curious stares for as long as he lived.
'Want to watch with us?' One of them piped up, and he looked helplessly at Nurse Scott.
'Tour's not over,' She told them for him, and he was grateful that he didn't have to talk. 'Maybe after.'
They walked through into the next corridor and the drab cream walls were interspersed with doors that were obnoxiously labelled with words such as 'wet play' and then general names like 'Therapy 1' and 'Therapy 2'. Distracted by reading these he managed to walk right into somebody, and by bizarre coincidence it was one of the girls from his room. She smiled and apologised, and this incurred a minor revelation within him. She looked happy. Happy to be there, if happiness was the word for it. He knew he was a terrible judge of weight but she looked healthy to him. He didn't know why, but he felt a sense of dread set inside. He should want that- he should want his own happiness, but he detested the idea with vigour. He would continue tumbling down his anorexic shortcut to passive suicide. If they made him gain weight there, he'd never want to leave because he couldn't stand for anybody to see him like that. Otabek would see him. What if he posted another picture of him and everyone said he looked fat? They had no reservations saying he looked too skinny, so he doubted they'd have any about calling him fat. It wasn't just that though- he couldn't imagine his life without an eating disorder. It had become his everything; it was his comfort blanket. It gave him something to fixate and focus on when he couldn't remember who he was anymore. He was Yuri Plisetsky, the boy turning himself into a skeleton. That was who he was. It had become such a part of him that he was afraid to let it go lest he should find that he no longer recognised what was underneath. She finished the tour within a minute or so, pointing out the garden when she brought him back to the common room and explaining that it was far too cold to go outside in 'his state'. He tried not to take offence but it kind of irked him. She set him free and he was beckoned over to sit with the girls who had invited him to watch a film with them earlier. He sat precariously on the armchair beside them, their sofa already crammed to bursting. The film was in Spanish and his eyes were too tired to scan the subtitles, so he just stared blankly at the faces. He craved interaction, but not with the girls surrounding him. He was tragically homesick already and he was even missing his stupid schoolfriends, even if they did get a little draining every now and then. Especially when they were hounding him about stupid parties that he didn't especially want to go to in the first place. His worries about Otabek and typical boy drama concerning sex seemed trivial now, in light of being sent to a clinic. Thinking about Otabek made his throat swell up and his eyes sting a little. He didn't think he could miss somebody he barely knew this much. He'd made the tiniest mark on Otabek's life, barely even a dent, but Yuri's life had changed tumultuously. He wouldn't say he was any better than he had been before they'd met, but he had something to make him smile. And blush, apparently- his cheeks were burning up with heat and he had to press his cold hands against them to quell the fire. He wanted to talk to Otabek, but not only had he lost his phone- they weren't allowed them at the clinic. He could understand why, as the internet was a lethal place (he'd gotten the tiniest dose of it just from comments on Otabek's picture of him that one time) and unsafe for anybody who needed hospitalisation for an eating disorder. Once it had finished and the credits were rolling, the girls turned their attentions to him.
'How long are you here for?'
'Two months,' He grumbled, unable to help a miserable expression creeping across his face.
'You say that like it's a prison sentence.'
'May as well be,' He shrugged.
'It actually passes really quick. You'll make friends and then you won't want to leave.'
'I can't wait to get the hell out of here,' He scoffed. He couldn't see that ever being a reality for him. 'Because I want to see my friends from home.'
'I have a phone you can borrow,' A redhead whispered conspiratorially, glancing furtively at the two nurses in the room. He leaned forwards, his interest piqued. 'I mean, only for five minutes or so. It's hard to charge it.'
'Really? Wait, I don't know their numbers off by heart,' He bit his lip. There was only one person he wanted to call, and unfortunately he couldn't private message Otabek as his messages were too full already and he'd never see them. Maybe that could be a good thing? He could say whatever he wanted and never be discovered... But he couldn't miss a chance to hear his voice. He wanted to apologise for ruining his night and being so needy all the time. He needed to hear him say something encouraging to get him through the next two months or he was worried he might not make it through the next half hour.
'Message them on something and ask for their numbers,' She said this like it was obvious. 'If you come to my room- second on the right- in the middle of the night, you can use it. I'm Cassie, by the way.'
'Thanks so much,' He whispered back, racking his brains for how he could get Otabek's attention. Hopefully he'd have some other social media he could contact him on. Facebook, maybe? Then again, who even used Facebook these days? He'd have to try anyway. It was all he had to hold on to.

Yuri had no idea how the hell he was supposed to sneak anywhere in the middle of the night when he was still being tube fed at 11pm. It had taken them ages to sort everything out and they'd insisted on explaining everything to him, meaning from the moment after a phone had been offered to him in secret he hadn't been left unsupervised thanks to his scrupulous new routine. At evening snack, he hadn't talked to anybody because he'd been feeling sick with nerves. Everybody else had eaten theirs with minimal fuss, but he'd just sat and stared at his. He couldn't bear the thought of going down easy. They'd all look at him and wonder why he was there if he could eat so easily. Truth be told, he wanted nothing more than to eat, but the pressure not to was too great. The nurses had been unflappable, telling him he'd just have extra calories for his tube feeding. He'd managed to drink half of his Fortisip because liquid calories somehow seemed less threatening, and now he was slowly having his stomach filled against his own will. He lay and watched the formula drain through the tube millimetre by millimetre, each measurement making him want to cry. He was so bloated already and he longed to rip the tube out and hide somewhere they could never find him, but he didn't exactly have much choice in the matter. A rotund nurse had been guarding him for the whole time, and there was still half an inch of formula left. He didn't think he had the guts to go to a girl he didn't really know's room in the middle of the night and wake her up to borrow her phone. He had to put a call through to Otabek though, so when the nurse unhooked the formula from his tube and fastened the cap over the end of it he pretended to fall asleep so that she left quickly. He waited until he heard her footsteps fade away and took this chance to fold back the duvet as quietly as he could and slip out of bed. With one last brief look back at Katie and Shannon, both sound asleep, he crept out the door and tiptoed down the hall. He felt cold paranoia roll down his spine and cause the hairs on the back of his neck to bristle and stand to attention. Every creak of the old building and complaining of the pipes made him jump, and he hadn't even faced the biggest hurdle yet. He had to pluck up the courage to enter Cassie's room and wake her up first, and for this he needed a lot of bravery. With all the stoicism he could muster he forced himself to walk down the corridor until he reached what he assumed to be the correct door. He breathed a huge sigh of relief to see that she had a bedside lamp on and her and her two roommates were deep in discussion. She looked up and instantly beckoned him closer, handing him a cracked phone covered in stickers.
'Here. Do what you want with it, just give it back in five minutes.'
He nodded and retreated to a corner of the room, his first port of call being to go to Facebook and search up Otabek. Since his name was pretty unique, it didn't take long to find him, or to see that he hadn't been active in two years. That was a positive. It did present some hilarious pictures of him as a 17 year old with some questionable poses and a lot of stuff he probably shouldn't have been doing at that age, but Yuri didn't have the time to stalk him. He messaged him anyway, and on Instagram too, hoping it would miraculously get through somehow. He looked at his profile to see when he last posted and was alarmed to see that he featured in his latest post. It was a picture of them together at Rafael's party, probably one of the ones some guy with a camera had been taking all night. They were stood on a sofa and grinning at each other whilst dancing riotously- frankly, it struck him as adorable. He didn't even care too much that he looked fat in it; it was a cute photo and everybody's attention would be on Otabek, anyway. He belonged in the pages of some grungy fashion magazine with his sultry looks and the brooding expression he cast every now and then when he was thinking. The caption underneath read,
'Missing you already, I hope you're breaking the rules and reading this.'
Very enigmatic and certainly nothing anybody would understand or be able to make any assumptions from, but enough to make him smile. As he read it, the phone vibrated and died.
'Shit,' He gasped, and Cassie looked over at him.
'Sorry, like I said. I guess you didn't get a reply? If you do, I'll tell you and you can use it again until you get to call them.'
'Really?'
'Sure. I remember how much it sucked when I first came here. Hell, I still miss my friends from home. For now just try to forget about anything outside of these walls, because what's within them is all you need to worry about.'