Marcus Caravahlo (_caravahlo_) wrote in horror_story, @ 2013-05-06 12:08:00 |
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The surgeons were using the words ‘cautiously optimistic’ but their expressions conveyed something more to the tune of ‘impressed with themselves.’ Cocooning themselves in protective layers of lab coats and denial, most of the doctors weren’t fully aware of the Crows Landing crumble going on just outside the hospital doors -- and within them -- nor did they wish to be. Losing one of their own had been sad, of course, and the death of Dr. Wren Spengler had meant increased shifts and longer hours.
The possibility of losing Dr. Bryant O’Neill, funeral home director and often medical examiner, wasn’t particularly sad. But the chance to save his life would be gratifying, especially considering the condition he’d been in after he’d been dug out of the explosion. It hadn’t been promising. Indeed, if Bryant had been in other parts of the house, he’d be in a number of pieces now, gelid smears of blood and brain on charred brick and mortar. Luckily for the mortician, he’d left the autopsy room and the cold storage wall unit that was nearly at capacity, gone past embalming and drainage tables, past the entrance to the crematory furnace and all the way to his... private office. There were slides and samples to add to his collections, photographs that he wished to file. Sad as the recent influx of decedents were to their family members, they were proving a curiosity to Bryant. Chase Parry had been the first to truly penetrate his sense of morbid fascination by being so terribly, awfully young. It was making him see the body pile-up as beyond simply out of the ordinary and into an uneasy sense of wrongness. People died, young and old alike, but this was getting to be just a tad much.
He hadn’t had time to ponder the subject further when the world fragmented, so quickly that Bryant was only aware of far too much sound and the taste of blood before the jumble went dark. After that, there was a sense of pressure that outranked pain. Periods of darkness were broken up by periods of hazy awareness: knowing he was hurt but not knowing how, darkness, knowing he was pinned down but not knowing by what, darkness, knowing he’d been discovered but not by who, blessed darkness. If he hadn’t been muttering, Bryant would’ve been mistaken for one of his corpses and accidentally left to die.
It would appear Frankenbrit’s propensity to blather on had saved his life, for the present. Intermingled with the moaning recitations of every bone in the human body were childhood prayers and a single name that was barely distinguishable from the rest of the fading mumbles. The periods where Bryant was nearly conscious -- away from the darkness, closer to hell -- he continued this ragged repetition even as trauma surgeons talked over his battered, bloody frame. The name was eventually distinguishable as “Marcus.”
Now, away from the ambulance where his heart had stopped, away from the triage bays and ORs in which he’d leaked blood and bile, Bryant O’Neill lay in a hospital bed utterly insensible for the present. Surgeons were waiting for him to stabilize further before they went in for another go ‘round. Broken ribs had pierced his lungs and liver as knitting needles are tucked into balls of yarn for safekeeping. His legs hadn’t been salvageable, though a particularly ambitious young surgeon had tried. They had better luck with his left arm and hand. Each of the five fingers there was broken, but at least he hadn’t lost any. His arm could mend. His right arm, trapped under his chest, was unscathed. Not a burn, not a break, not so much as a scratch. Truly optimistic doctors were taking bets on how long it would take Bryant to want to get back to work. The realists were waiting for the swelling in his brain to go down. If it went down.
There was a cerebral shunt in place and a patch of tangled russet hair -- hair that never would stay tidy, not with the way he’d tug at it and run his hands through it -- had been shaved away. The hole in his head distracted from the damage to his face, the left side of his jaw burned and scraped raw, bandaged, the not-quite-right shape of his nose. With some difficulty, Bryant breathed in and out, well below the glassy surface of consciousness.
==========
The explosion had sounded throughout the entire town (hardly a difficult task, given the town’s size; a gunshot of the right caliber could do the same thing), and Marcus heard it from the parking lot of the grocery store. People around him had stopped in their tracks, wondering what the hell it was, and Marcus’s first thought was that someone was setting explosives off in the forest. Given the craziness that had been going on of late, he wouldn’t be too surprised. Because Bryant lived near the woods, he shot off a quick text: 5:23pm> u hear that, mijo? know what it fucking was? The silence he got in response wasn’t unusual. Certainly not if the older man was still engrossed in his work. Marcus was curious, but largely unconcerned as he returned to his truck.
Minutes later, when he was unloading the groceries into his home and heard the blaring sirens from the town’s few emergency response vehicles, that was when he began to worry. It sounded like they were headed to the South end of town, down Fleet street. Bryant lived down there. He hadn’t texted back.
When the sirens made the return trip, this time sounding off in the direction of the hospital, Marcus abandoned a half-eaten sandwich to run out to his truck to follow them. He knew that he might be mistaken. That it might not be Bryant. But he also knew that nobody would tell him if it was. Why would they? He wasn’t going to wait to find out about it from the news, or the fucking grapevine. He had to fucking know. And if it wasn’t the mortician in the back of the ambulance, then fuck it. No harm, no foul. Marcus could worry about his tendency to overreact after the fact. Besides, someone was in the ambulance, and that person was alive, if they were running sirens to the hospital; there was no reason to rush for the dead. So Marcus might be useful. The hospital was terribly short-staffed.
It was hours before he was able to find out anything definitive. He wasn’t on shift, and the ladies in receiving were determined to be unhelpful. That the mortician had been brought in, rushed to surgery... that was all freely given, but when pressed for more information -- how bad was it? Where was he, now? Who’s with him? -- they either didn’t have it, or weren’t convinced that he needed to know it. So Marcus had to spend most his time pacing in the fucking waiting room like a goddamn patient, himself. At least until Karyn came on shift. It wasn’t one of his nights to be on duty, but she didn’t stop him from going back into the nursing station, or pulling up files. She didn’t question his need to know, nor did she try to stop him from going back into the ICU. Which was good, since he probably would have broken her jaw if she’d tried.
He’d seen the assessment, by that point.
“Fuck,” he hissed, his go-to expletive, usually sufficient for things that were too difficult to put into words. It fell flat in the ICU ward, however, overshadowed by the hum of the machinery. The monitoring units. Even the soft sigh coming from the air vent system wasn’t impressed. But Bryant was alive. Unconscious, unrecognizable, but alive. There was that, at least. “You scared the shit out of me, you motherfucker. Tried to come sooner. They wouldn’t let me.”
Marcus found himself a chair, and pulled it over to the hospital bed. Looking at Bryant was enough to confirm everything the charts said. For once in his life, Marcus actually felt afraid to touch someone. He didn’t even know where to start. The right arm was just about the only thing that was unmarred, so he reached for that hand, not wanting to disturb but needing to make his presence known somehow. Maybe he hadn’t come fast enough, but he had come, and it was important that Bryant know that he was there.
The ragged, pained sound of the older man’s breathing did compete with the machines. It drowned everything else out, and Marcus was moved to talk just to combat that noise. “You know you’re the first person I let sleep in my fucking bed since my wife split? Fucked a lot of people since, but didn’t take anyone else home with me. Until you. …Should’ve told you that. Should’ve told you a lot of fucking things. Shit, I can’t... You’re killing me, Bryant, what the fuck am I supposed to say to this?”
It wasn’t fair. Marcus hated himself for fixating on that, knowing very well that life didn’t give a shit about fairness, but it wasn’t. There were bandages covering parts of this man that he’d marked, himself, just days ago. Flesh that he’d tasted had been scraped or burned away, and that went far beyond unfair and into the territory of maddening. Even if Bryant lived, they’d need to do grafts. If.
There wasn’t a more daunting word in the entire English language than if. Marcus hated it. He squeezed the hand, trying to be optimistic. "Okay, it looks real bad, mijo. But these fuckers don’t know you. I do. You can fucking do this. You got this. I’ll help you. I’m good at this shit, too. Pull through it, and I’ll get you better. Fuck, we can get you new legs... You think losing some parts’ll chase me off? That’s not how this works. Thought I made that fucking clear.”
But he hadn’t, not really. Why would that be clear? Marcus knew his reputation better than anyone. Bryant had become an obsession, the brighter focus in Marcus’s life, but it had only been recently that the older man had even considered reciprocating. The mortician was lonely, and Marcus was pushy... willing to knock down walls and force his way through hoops if he had to. Equally willing to tread more gently. Spend a night making out like a fucking teenager without pushing too hard, too fast. That didn’t mean what they had was important. For all he knew, Marcus could have been anyone, and Bryant just didn’t want to be alone. He felt like he mattered to the mortician, but it could have been wishful thinking. Projection. For all Bryant knew, Marcus was planning to split the second he got bored. Hell, Marcus wasn’t even sure that he wouldn’t. No real promises had been made. He’d been careful about that. As a result, he’d never even had Bryant. Not really. So why this gut-wrenching fear of loss?
“Fuck,” he said again, more forcefully this time. Trying not to sound as scared as felt. Trying not to feel as defeated as he was. “All right. I hope to fuck you’re listening, ‘cause this is how this needs to go down. I’m gonna need you to live through tonight. Then I need you to make it through tomorrow, and at least a few more fucking years after that because I just fucking got you, and I’m not fucking done yet. So... just do that for me. Survive the night. Do that, and I’ll do anything you fucking want.”
=========
There was no indication whatsoever that Bryant heard the pleas and commands of Marcus Caravahlo, his curses or questions. The hand in his was slack and unresponsive but the ragged breathing continued on. At least there was that. Bryant was all at once right next to Marcus and oceans away, bobbing on an uncertain current, hoping there wouldn’t be a storm. He was afraid of storms. On some other plane of existence, in some other time, in some other life he wouldn’t be able to recall on his rise to consciousness, Bryant prayed. Jesus, saviour, meek and mild, pray for me an orphan child. Jesu salvatorem, mansuetus ac mitis. Iesu. However it was bloody spelt. Whatever the ruddy conjugation. These lapses could be forgiven in his current state. It was an automatic sort of prayer, born of repetition, the bread and butter of the Catholic Church in its mindlessness, said again and again until it lacked meaning and became mere words going through the motion of prayer. Where were the words that existed to explain God? Where were the words to explain the Devil? Where were the bloody, stinking, stupid words to explain the way Crows Landing was collapsing in on itself like a lacerated lung? ‘This is the way the world ends.’
If he could, he would tell Marcus everything he knew now, except there weren’t any bleeding words now and Bryant’s consciousness ebbed and whorled, waiting for high tide so he could find himself again, to find those pesky words. To find Marcus. Then Bryant would tell everything: the way he’d seen that deputy’s soul still housed within while he performed the autopsy, how he could have sworn he saw it rip itself from the mangled body to trot after the sheriff the same way it had in life. The truth to the death of the boy. The monsters that had been made. The darkness, the madness, that had descended over the Landing like a coffin-lid. From this omnipotent threshold, Bryant would tell Marcus about demonic possession, how some of the dead were getting a bit of a nudge and taking root again when they should’ve gone on, doing black and despicable things. How most of the living were doing the same, dark little deeds that snowballed. Like the dog. He would’ve said that he’d been wrong, wrong for a month or more, very wrong for the past week or two: there were no accidental deaths in Crows Landing these days, no suicides, certainly no natural deaths. If he could, Bryant would go back and redo those autopsies again and again and mark them all ‘undetermined’ because there was no good way to explain how the townspeople had been puppeted into the homicide racket by an evil entity. How they’d become evil entities themselves.
Where were the words for that?
Oh, the puzzle pieces were all there, if the right person knew how to look at them. Bryant wasn’t that right person and in this wavering place, the water rising, the rain starting... he thought that maybe Marcus wasn’t the right person to assemble the puzzle, either. Maybe there was no one left that could.
‘This is the way the world ends. This is the way--’ Marcus, though. Marcus. Wherever he was, he was thinking about Marcus. If he were able, Bryant would... he would... well, he didn’t rightly know. Perhaps he’d say something noble, tell him to save himself. Perhaps he’d say something selfish, tell him not to go. Please don’t go. Don’t leave. I need you. I needed you before I even knew you.
The broken body on the bed shuddered ever-so-slightly and stilled, puffing out a sigh nearly inaudible over the continued beeping of monitors and the hum of machines. There was a memory of pain, a pebble thrown into the pond of darkness Bryant now inhabited. Slowly -- if he stayed -- pain would cease to be a memory and start to be a reality. Slowly and yet too soon. Might be easier to just go ahead and die, slip away quietly and apologetically, the same way he’d duck out of a party where he’d tried so desperately hard to fit in and be liked. Maybe he’d always expected to perish in such a way, without much of a fuss, terribly sorry for causing any trouble. ‘Not a bang but a whimper;’ a hollow man as surely as any of T.S. Eliot’s hollow men. Except there’d already been the bang, hadn’t there? So perhaps Bryant ought to exert a little energy, stick around for the end of the world. On some level, Marcus’ words had been heard and understood, more to the tune of ‘try and live now, that’s a good chap’ and less like ‘don’t you die on me, fucker’ but they came to the same thing. For Marcus, he’d try.
Time passed; Bryant didn’t. Time enough for doctors and nurses to look in on him. Time enough for the sheriff to stride to the ICU entrance with a nurse fluttering ineffectively at his elbow. To the entrance, not through it -- the cop was all soot and sweat, more storm than his typical stone -- zeroing in on the mortician’s bed before utilizing Marcus’ own go-to expletive, loud enough to hear over all of the machinery, spinning on his heel and stalking away before another word could be said.
Not long after that, the scales finally tipped: the side of the pain won out over the balance of darkness. The swelling was going down; the tide was creeping up. Bryant hummed out dismay, his hand twitching in Marcus’, eyes moving sluggishly from beneath closed lids.
=========
No protective waves of medication shielded Marcus from the storm. Forced to endure the punishment of consciousness, the younger man was certainly feeling more weathered with each moment spent fixated on the rise and fall of Bryant’s chest. Occasionally, the catheter tube leading to the ventriculoperitoneal shunt would distract his gaze, pulling it like a magnet to the shaved patch. The tape holding the tube in place. His eyes would linger there masochistically, until the fear had honed itself on the whole picture. Making it so that he couldn’t deny the gravity of Bryant’s condition even a small amount. Bandages and dressings could lie, or at least omit some of the details. A tube siphoning cerebrospinal fluids through a hole in the skull was blunt honesty. A fucking declaration: This man almost died. This man should be dead. There was no arguing with that, and no ignoring it.
When there were no more words, Marcus fell into silence. He’d never learned how to pray, but after pleading his case to Bryant, his last recourse was God. Begging didn’t come easily, even when it was kept in his head. His pleas were dripping with anger. Threat. Don’t you dare fucking take him...
Doctors and nurses would come in, risking his ire. The nurses he could chase off. He wasn’t on shift. He wasn’t strictly allowed to be there. There was no need to keep vigil. If it was that important to him, they could call if there was a change in the coroner’s condition. Marcus fought their arguments with a calm he didn’t feel. He explained in no uncertain terms that they would have to call hospital security to remove him, that he would then very likely break someone’s nose on his way out, and that there would then be an arrest to be made (“so you might as well call in the fucking cops, too, while you’re at it”). Point made; the nurses let him be. The breathing continued. Bryant’s vitals stayed more or less stable, if concerning.
The doctors were more entitled, and Marcus knew better than to toss threats their way. He had to struggle to keep himself from interfering whenever they touched Bryant. Had to struggle not to yell at their lack of guarantees. He knew the fucking drill, but it didn’t make their forced optimism and non-answers easier to swallow. He didn’t even notice the sheriff start to walk in, let alone leave. Nothing outside of that hospital bed was important enough to register. It was all just the overall chaos of the storm. His part now was to act as shelter and sword, to protect and defend. He’d fucked up. Somehow, he’d fucked up without even meaning to. Everything had gone to hell, people he’d known - cared about - had been falling left and right, but he’d never considered that Bryant might be in danger. No more than he’d worried about himself. Shit, the irritating deaf kid had even gone missing, and still Marcus hadn’t thought of it. He could have convinced Bryant to leave town with him. Maybe. At the very least, he should have been there, instead of giving the other man space. He might have been able to stop it from happening.
Guilt settled in, cozying up to anger like a lover, making itself at home. Fear was pushed back by the two into a corner for a while, though it flared brilliantly when Bryant made a pained sound, overshadowing all other emotions as it was twisted by those skilled, twitching fingers into hope. Marcus jerked forward as if electrified, squeezing the hand too tightly in his own.
“Hey,” he croaked, feeling an absurd expression play out on his face. A grimace of some kind, unfamiliar to him. It had been so many years since he’d had to fight back tears like this, he’d largely forgotten how. “It’s me. I’m here, mijo. Bryant. I got you. It’s all fucked up, but don’t panic. You with me?”
=========
Senses returned in stages. Touch came first, the sensations of pressure and pain; Bryant’s right fingers curled in a too-tight grip as he reflexively tried to move splinted left fingers. Pain increased. Pain was tricky like that: it was hot and cold all at once, crawled over skin and under bone, and little pain wasn’t always overridden by great big pain. Smell was the next sense, a jumble: betadine and familiar hair products and antiseptic and copper and plastic. Taste: blood. Hearing...? Hearing was exhausting to untangle, to separate out telemetric beeps and blips from human speech, layered over a wet rattling pattern that he would have been aghast to learn came from his own drawing of breath.
Four down, one to go. Bryant tried to open his eyes.
The lids were heavy, though not nearly as heavy as his arms, his chest. Not his legs, though. His legs simply felt like they were asleep. Bryant had no idea that he didn’t have legs anymore, not below the knees. It wasn’t really something he gave a scrap of thought to, buffeted as he was by medical-grade pain management -- which didn’t quite manage to do the whole job, but bully for trying -- and the sound of Marcus’ voice.
Marcus! What a terrible sense of relief it was to know Marcus was all right. It was unclear to him why he thought the younger man might not be okay, some lingering sense of unease, origin unknown. Whatever meandering thoughts he’d had whilst unconscious had been washed away by the tide. Maybe the worry stemmed from knowing that Something Bad had happened to him, Bryant, and perhaps Marcus had been nearby.
He redoubled his efforts to open his eyes. If this had been a made-for-television cinematic experience or some badly written romance, Bryant’s eyelids would’ve already fluttered open by now and been instantly clear, refreshed after slumber -- never mind the fact that he had a VF shunt in his head, thanks, or that he had more broken ribs than whole -- and he would have given his beloved a beatific smile, softly answered, ‘Yes, Marcus, I’m with you, and I’m ever-so-glad to be, for I had the most ferocious dreams and need you to protect me.’
This was not, however, some work of pale fiction. His mouth tried to open, to say something reassuring and apologetic -- Marcus sounded just ruddy awful and that was likely Bryant’s fault -- but he only managed a gagging cough and an alien noise somewhere between a moan and a whine. Though it hurt, he felt pinned down and tried to thrash in the bed, which really only amounted to quivering. Marcus’ reassurances were no match for pain and disorientation, though eventually it got sorted out in Bryant’s somewhat scrambled brain that he was as close to safe as he was going to get, here with Marcus. Weakly, he clutched at the hand that held his and wrenched his eyes open. So bright after the darkness. And they wouldn’t focus, damn them, but then Marcus would always be recognizable as Marcus, even blurry and indistinct. It was more exhausting to keep his eyes open than it had been to pick apart all of the sounds in this relatively quiet corner of the hospital; Bryant had to let the lids slam closed and begin again. This time, when he opened dazed, dull blue eyes, they were able to locate Marcus faster, to start to focus on his face.
God, it hurt, it just hurt. Hurt to breathe. Hurt to move. Hurt to remember anything that might have happened. His throat should have been dry from lack of water but wasn’t. There was blood, after all, lubricating his inner workings, seeping from wounds unseen. Bryant was completely unaware that a pink-tinged fleck of spittle crept from the corner of his mouth as he tried to harness whatever strength he could muster just to utter the first syllable of the first word he wanted to say: “Mmmm... Mmmar...”
==========
“Don’t,” Marcus instructed, willing to take the recognition in those clouded eyes and leave it at that. Amazed and thrilled that Bryant had forced himself awake; Marcus hadn’t really been expecting the other man to regain consciousness, not if he were being honest with himself. At least not for another day or so. He couldn’t feel the other man’s pain, but he felt how weak Bryant’s grip was. The heartbreaking shudder. The pain was all over. Bryant trembled when he was nervous, but he wasn’t fragile like this. Marcus had seen a lot of shit, but he’d never been faced with such a thorough shattering of something he cared about. Someone. “You don’t gotta say shit, mijo. I got you. You’ll be okay, just takes time...”
So much time. Willpower, too... but Marcus had enough of that for both of them. The legs... were a major fucking drawback, admittedly. He was a pro with a wheelchair, though, and he owned a truck. Transport wouldn’t be that difficult. If it was, he could get a van. Bryant was looking at weeks in the hospital... maybe months? Once he was stable, they’d want to transfer him to a facility with more resources. That was plenty of time for Marcus to get a Hoyer for his place, which would serve until Bryant had built up the upper body strength to transfer himself in and out of a chair. It’d be a year or more of recovery before they could start looking at prosthetics, but insurance should cover the bulk of it. There’d be more surgeries, a daunting amount of physical therapy, a regimen of medications. Marcus was already coming up with an itinerary for Bryant’s recovery. Nevermind that they’d just started dating, that he’d had no intention of making this man a permanent fixture in his life, or that he’d been given no indication that Bryant would even welcome that or want his help. Nevermind that there was clearly blood present in the other man’s saliva, and that was actually not the best sign.
It was also a marked change in condition. Bryant was conscious, possibly lucid. He was trying to speak. Marcus needed to alert the doctor on duty. The call button was right fucking there. He kept holding Bryant’s hand, instead, leaning in close, afraid to break eye contact. “I’ll get you through this, and they’ll catch the fucker who did it. I’ll stay right here. I won’t let nobody fucking touch you. You’re mine. Eres mío. Okay? Deal?”
============
‘I got you. I got you.’ Did Marcus really keep repeating that or was that Bryant’s brain latching onto something and playing it in his head, over and over again? That was too sophisticated a concept to truly grasp now, too abstract for a brain barely making the correct synaptic connections for pulse and respiration. Whether it was real or not, it was a comforting collection of words. Safety, even as an illusion, was incredibly appealing.
Okay, Marcus. Deal. Of course, those words wouldn’t pass the Briton’s lips; it was all he could do to keep looking at Marcus, to try and grip his hand harder to show that at least some of the words the younger man was saying were getting through to him. He looked at Marcus as if Marcus should be able to read his mind and all the words he couldn’t make come out of his mouth. The CSF going through the tubing was starting to redden; Bryant was thankfully oblivious to this. He was ignorant of how hurt he was, of whatever ‘fucker’ had done it to him, of what ‘it’ even was.
Bryant’s world was shrinking faster by the second, had ceased to be whatever his life was before these moments. He wasn’t a coroner anymore, or a surgeon, or a mortician, or even a doctor. It was hard to even think of himself as human. He was this shaking mass of tissue lying on a bed; he was pain given form and the only thing that kept him from being nothing at all was this man -- the world for him was Marcus, he was Marcus -- holding his hand and claiming him, giving him a name, a label, and a reason to live, extending a sense of belonging and safety. It should have been enough to cling to. It would have been enough.
If only he could have gotten a better grip on it.
There just wasn’t time enough, strength enough. Not in this broken shell. The first concerned noises came from the monitors... and blood -- not pinkish saliva but red blood, darkening blood -- started coming from Bryant’s mouth. Concerned noises became klaxons, insistent, and there was more blood, more shaking, violent spasms that caused more pain which caused more spasms. His autonomic processes were going haywire, essential systems shutting down at a rapid rate so far unlike his slow rise to consciousness that it was almost unbelievable. It happened so fast.
==========
“Bryant? Bryant!” Marcus felt the bones in the mortician's hand grind together as he squeezed too tightly. The hand that wasn't crushing Bryant's reached blindly for the call button, though the staff had already been alerted. His exclamation had been heard. Nurses were coming. The doctor. He could hear them, riding in with the rest of the storm, joining the chaos.
The blood. Oh, God, the blood. The surgeons had fucked up. Internal bleeding, blood in the lungs. Had something shifted while he slept? Had that been what woke him? The legs were the most obvious thing to fixate on, being impossible not to notice first... but the ribcage had largely been obliterated, as well. Hours had been spent delicately removing shards of bone from organ tissue. The surgeons who'd done the deed had been confident. Self-congratulatory fuckers. At home now, probably asleep in their beds, without any idea that they'd fucked up. When word got to them, it'd be little more than a disappointment. The way the town had gone to hell, there'd be some new tragedy for them to fixate on by noon. Patients who'd have the decency to be easier to fix.
Fuck. It wasn't supposed to go down like this. He'd been prepared to help. To save, not mourn. “No. No, Bryant, don't fuck this up... please, don't do this... you can't die, you fucker. You can't just fucking leave...”
==========
This is how the world ends for one Dr. Bryant O’Neill. This is how the world ends: with both a bang and a whimper. A final sound was pulled from him as tears came down unseeing eyes. Afraid and apologetic, Bryant’s spirit hastily fled from his body as the heart monitor flat-lined and his stare became fixed, pupils dilated. Craven to the core, he couldn’t stay here in this pain, couldn’t stay to watch Marcus’ pain in response. Bryant was done with pain, beyond it.
=========
When the heart monitor flat-lined, Marcus cried out, drawing every eye in the unit that was capable of moving towards him. Stoicism wasn't in his skill set. He yelled at the body, and when that didn't have an effect, he yelled at the machines, the staff; his fucking co-workers, people he knew. People who thought it noble that he'd sacrifice his time to sit watch over a friendless man, but couldn't fathom why he'd care so much about this particular death when there'd been so many others before it.
He didn't try to explain, too busy demanding resuscitation. When Bryant failed to be resuscitated, Marcus lost all semblance of nobility when he started issuing more threats in his panic. As it happened, he didn't break any noses or jaws on his way out. After giving the doctor a preliminary shove, Marcus was escorted out of the hospital by security. They weren't unkind about it, but the scene was uncalled for. He was advised to go home, get some rest. That last suggestion so ridiculous that Marcus did actually laugh before telling them all to go fuck themselves.