Terrestrial Alien ✔

Chapter 28: Lies Fit no Locks

Seth

I feel like I'm drifting, faintly, swaying. My consciousness comes back to me in pieces, and the world, at first, is a series of impressions. The flat of something firm but soft beneath me, slowly stilling the drifting feeling. Sheets over my chest, a pillow under my head. Something hard and sharp against my nostrils; breathing in sharp, clean air. A slow pounding, throbbing in my head in time with my heart beat.

I open my eyes.

It's harder than I thought it would be. Like cracking open gluey, gritty sand.

Oddly enough, I can only manage to get one open. The other feels like it's being pressed closed, for some reason... Bandages. Bandages, I realise, as I bring a shaky hand up to touch my face. I feel the starchy fabric against my skin, and it feels weird.

As I move my arm, I feel a tug against my skin, and I glance down. There, wrapped in more white bandages, is some sort of tube running into my forearm, filled with yellow-ish, golden fluid. A little jolt runs through me as I see it, and my immediate reaction is to yank the thing out of my arm. But my other arm aches as I reach to do so, and my fingers feel heavy.

I fumble with the plastic for a moment, only managing to make the place the tube enters my forearm sting further. With a sigh, I give up and leave it be. I lay my head back against pillow, letting my gaze drift upwards as I wait for my body to stop screaming at me.

The ceiling spins above me as I look, blankly, up at it.

It takes awhile for the eye I can open to adjust to the light of the room, and for me to realise that it is not in fact the ceiling that is spinning, but the ceiling fan, twirling in lazy circles above my head.

I stare up at it for a while, till it threatens to make me dizzy, then I let my eyelid fall closed again. I'm... somewhere.

I don't really notice the pair of widened eyes on me until they've been staring for awhile. Over the sound of the fan, I can now make out the sound of someone else's breathing, and I tense. Opening my eye again, I look across the small, white room to meet those of a nurse.

At least, I think she's a nurse. She looks like one, like the ones in the books at the library. She's holding what looks like a clipboard, and she appears to have been doing something on the table across from the foot of my bed when she noticed me waking up. She's stopped.

We stare at each other for a bit, her shoulders tense as she keeps her clipboard close to her. I watch her stiffly as well, unsure of what to do.

She's very clearly an adult, and with her white lab-coat-looking jacket, she reminds me immediately of that first night in the desert, before Joshua ever found me. The men in their coats who peered down at me with those wide eyes, with those metal tooly things and... I think of all the possibilities: everything the nurse might want to do to me, and everything I wouldn't be able to do to stop her from doing.

She's not a real aged adult, at least, not like those men who found my meteor. It takes another moment of looking to realise that her coat is not, in fact, purely stark white, as I had seen right away. Rather, it's a soft cream color. Her skin, beside it, is a template of warm tones in the light from the window. She reminds me, somewhat, of Joshua's mother.

A tight feeling sits coiled in my chest as memories and emotions battle each other in my mind. I think of running away, and I think of staying to apologise for everything I've done to her. I think of the helplessness that pervades both responses, the tears that want to come to my eyes should I attempt to follow either. I don't know what to say or do, and I end up just laying here stiffly, my hands just barely gripping at the sheets.