Endymion (athingofbeauty) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-01-30 00:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | endymion, selene |
Who: Endymion and Selene
Where: Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan
When: Friday, moonrise
All the nurses on the floor agreed, there was something... not quite right about the gentleman in room 469.
He wasn't, nor had he ever been, a difficult patient. Couldn't have been easier. There were never any complaints, no demands, no arguments.
The man was, ostensibly, a coma patient. That was the way the staff had been instructed to treat him: just keep him stable, keep him fed and make him comfortable. But no examination had yet managed to find anything wrong with his health. He was in peak physical condition. His brain activity was normal, indicative neither of a coma nor a vegetative state, but rather... sleep. Regular, healthy sleep. They'd even observed instances of REM.
But it wasn't a regular sleep. It couldn't be, because according to Damian Blanc's medical history, he had not woken up once in five years of hospitalisation.
The doctors were, by turns, alarmed and excited. They were eager to run further tests on this man - this medical anomaly - to trial new treatments and inject him with all manner of stimulants in an attempt to wake him from his long repose. One physician in Miami had quite earnestly asked the patient's wife's permission to make him the subject of a new study into sleep disorders.
The wife had refused, just as she had denied all other recommendations for treatment. It was a natural sleep, she'd pointed out, echoing the doctors' own words back at them. Only keep him living comfortably, and let nature take its course.
Rumour had it that she was a Christian Scientist, or else some other weird brand of religious nut, convinced that drugs were unnatural and unnecessary. At night she could be seen praying over her husband - convinced, they said, that he could be healed only through the power of prayer.
How her stern insistence that the young man's blinds be drawn against the sunlight figured into this, though, nobody was quite sure.
But money seemed to be no object for the woman, who had already made an extremely generous donation to the hospital's medical school as a gesture of thanks for all the care its staff had given her husband, so by and large nobody was much inclined to ask too many questions outside the gossip of the staff room. The latter, however, was alive and well, and the night staff had come to wait for the arrival of Mr. Blanc's fair-haired lady come the evening, snatching furtive glimpses as she swept through the corridor to the room where her lover slept.
Tonight was no different, and Endymion's chest rose and fell steadily as he waited for his Lady to appear.