jin character piece #8
Jan. 5th, 2019 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bipolyjackAfter bawling in Triple’s office like a first grader with a skinned knee, all Jin wants in the world is to go back to their apartment and sleep. But the simple step of catching a train feels like an insurmountable obstacle and they suspect they won’t be allowed to leave AEGIS premises anyway, so Jin wanders up to the infirmary, finds the room they were in before the whole thing with Marshall Law went down (the plastic bag is still there on the side table), collapses into bed, and passes the fuck out.
A nurse rouses them with some difficulty the next morning, when they find they’ve been stripped out of their shredded clothing and manhandled into a hospital gown. They’re ten minutes late to Swansong’s address and they leave as soon as it’s over, head throbbing, staggering back to the infirmary without pausing to talk to Soul and the others. Not that Soul would want to talk to them, why would she? They sleep for two days uninterrupted. The next time they wake, it’s from a dream of Ben saying “I was hoping you’d come with me” and their head doesn’t hurt so bad now, everything’s kind of numb and floaty, but they ask for morphine anyway, knowing there’s a good chance the doctor won’t give it to them because of the head trauma. She considers them for a long moment before authorizing a low dose. They must look pretty fucking pitiful. She warns them not to get used to it.
More days drift by. Jin’s not counting. They sleep when they can, and beg for painkillers when they can’t. If anyone tries to visit, they sleep through it.
The particular smell of hospitals used to be familiar to the point of ambivalence. Jin’s father came home smelling like work all the time, and many of the spaces Jin inhabited on campus smelled like that, clean, cotton and plastic and metal. It hadn’t taken long in the NutriTech labs for Jin to start thinking of the constant head-swimming presence of antiseptics as less of a scent and more of a stink. Bolting awake in the small hours of the night, sweaty and gulping for air, muscle-thick fingers scrabbling at the slow-healing scar across their chest, the sterile smell of the AEGIS infirmary is finally too much for them. Gotta get out.
Jin reaches for the plastic bag on the bedside table. One change of clothes - 4x white tshirt, basketball shorts, boxers. No socks. Motherfucker. No cigarettes and no lighter either. Doctor must have confiscated those.
There’s nothing of Ben’s in the bag, because why would there be.
Jin swings their legs out of bed and pulls the tubes out of their arm, slowly and at a neutral angle like the textbooks say to do it, muscle standing out sharp-edged and veins visibly writhing as they draw the needles free of the skin. The blood that beads there glints like dull metal. They strip off the hospital gown with less difficulty than expected, the nanobots smoothing their movements, and get dressed, settling their glasses on their nose for the first time in days. They find their shoes beside the visitor’s chair and put those on too, shoving their sockless feet in there, because fuck that asshole. Their head swims a little as they bend to tighten the laces.
A night nurse meets them at the door, glancing between them and the name written on the clipboard hanging on the wall outside. “Shima? Where do you think you’re going? Get back to bed.”
Dammit. Shoulda gone for the window. “I’m - I gotta -” Usually they have no trouble coming up with an off-the-cuff brazen lie, but all this being upright is making their head pound and they can’t think of a coherent thing to say other than the not particularly convincing, I’m losing my fucking marbles, I can’t be here any fucking more. But they don’t fight the nurse as she lays a hand on their arm and leads them gently back to the bed, sits them down on the edge of it.
“Gotta get my homework,” says Jin dumbly as the nurse tugs their shoes back off and hooks them up to the machines again. She doesn’t make them put on the medical gown.
“No books or screens for at least another week,” she says, checking their pulse with brisk efficiency. “You can have someone bring it to you after that, maybe.”
Jin doesn’t mention that the person who habitually brings them their missed assignments is gone, and also that they never used to miss assignments, and also that all they really want is to be doing those assignments on the living room floor with Ben on the couch behind them pointing out Jin’s mistakes over their shoulder and the physics guys passing a bottle of vodka back and forth and Jori curled up in the armchair with her philosophy reading and Felipe making stovetop popcorn in the kitchen with the TV on. They want to wear the cute crop tops and ripped jeans and sleeveless hoodies that are still folded neatly away in the bottom two dresser drawers in their apartment, clothes they bought when they were just figuring out how to be fashionable and they still had the energy to spend their allowance on things other than cigarettes and freezer meals. They want to look in the mirror and see hickeys on their neck and the long, lean body testosterone gave them, not veins twitching and grotesque muscles bulging under their skin and their chest bisected by a long, shiny scar and the pucker of a bullet wound in their bicep. They haven’t looked properly yet, but ever since they went all embracing-their-namesake and smashed their way through NutriTech 2.0 (which, fuck, Jesus, they haven’t even attempted to deal with that yet), it seems like their limbs and shoulders are bulkier than they were before, like they’ve been working out instead of sleeping eighteen hours a day and drinking their meals through a straw.
Jin waits until the nurse has slipped out and shut the door behind her before they pull the loose neck of their tshirt up over their nose, inhaling the tobacco smell that no amount of washing will remove and the generic detergent they share with Marcus and Cassidy. They force their eyes to close and relax, try to pretend they’re lying in their own extra-long twin in their apartment with its shitty squeaky frame and the pillow they brought with them from their parents’ house in California, but their brain, their fucking pudding brain that’s been rattled around so bad in their skull, that they have even less control over than the nanobots apparently, puts them instead in the double bed in Ben’s room, their forehead resting against the back of his neck and one arm draped across his middle, his breathing a steady rise and fall under their hand.
The noise Jin makes as they let the shirt fall away from their face and turn into the hospital pillow, taking a big lungful of harsh hospital smell, could be interpreted as a whine. But no one is here to interpret anything now, and for that, if nothing else, Jin is grateful.
