Fire on the Nearest Horizon (Pt 3)

The boy sat in a hospital bed and winced at the feeling of cold air meeting his open gash in the form of the kiss of reunited lovers. It felt like the pain you get after sitting on your legs for too long, but multiplied and carried throughout his arm, burning and aching.

He heard the nurses outside of the room whispering amongst themselves as he sat there, tears settled in the corner of each eye, ready to overflow if provoked. Their words of resentment brought him to turn away from the door and take his mask to his face.

The truth was this: people couldn't stand his face. He never understood why they did the things they did, but he didn't complain. His mother was the w...best woman. She tried, tried so hard to comfort him when he was in pain, but it didn't hide the fact that she hate-despised-him. She sat and told him stories: things that happened at work, funny episodes of shows from so long ago, or just plain old folktales.

She occasionally stared off into nothing, so he found himself looking at her eyes until he noticed they weren't glazed over as his aunt's had become. She looked so much kinder then, but it meant that her whiskey wasn't lumping her hatred into pleasantries, so he was often sent to bed without food and ridiculed. He was a stubborn child, so he waited until she was in her room and listened in to the conversations she had with herself.

He desperately hoped it was something simple, like her regrets about drinking in the past and present, but she instead ranted about how many embarrassments he caused for the family by being "that one waste of space" He sat up in his bed and felt the tears rolling down his cheeks, but he refused to let anyone hear.

He eventually drifted off, too parched to keep crying, but he woke up in a hospital with an IV drip nearby. "Can, can I have a glass of water, please?" he asked the nurse quietly, to which he nodded and gave him one from god knows where. "Thanks," he rasped before taking a sip and feeling twenty times more refreshed than before.

"What's your name?" the inquisitive almost-adult asked the nurse, sipping on the cold water as he leaned on his uninjured arm.

"Remy Delauvoux."

"I wish my last name was Delauvoux."

Remy felt his face heat up, and he just nearly shut down. "What's your name?" Remy saw his confusion and practically felt it when he asked: "Don't they tell you the patient's name or something?"

"My attention span is shorter than my patience."

"Oh," he nodded, "same. It's Cam Lou, by the way."