Snippet #1515554

Lost somewhere between pain and distress, Max felt as though time were stretching into some vast, unimaginably terrifying leviathan around him. One moment he was certain that he had been shouting at the Big Nurse to let him go, the next some strange hallucination that wove into the shape of a boy kicking a girl soundly in the face assaulted him, and then it all faded away into a muddle of tears and conversation that made no sense. He wasn’t quite sobbing, being too breathless to cry properly, but the tears blinding him were as visible to the rest of the room as they were to him.

There was no response, of that he was certain. His arm was a blinding pain, held into a twisted position that had him flinching with every tiny movement; he wanted to sit down rather badly for some reason, but a frantic part of himself forbade it. He wondered, in a brief moment of clarity, just what would happen if he allowed his knees to buckle, but the threat of more pain made him hold still. He might have cried out, but there was no judging how much of the shrieking was in his head and how much actually broke past the fog and escaped his gritted teeth.

Vaguely, he knew that a dislocated shoulder could be put back in. He had done it himself on occasion, given how often it decided to displace itself, but for the life of him he couldn’t think why he was thinking of it. He blinked. His eyes found the Big Nurse for a moment, noting that she was saying something, the words lost in a haze of pain and misery. Her letting him go, however, registered, and sent him staggering back with a strangled cry. He wanted nothing more than to be as far away from the woman as possible, but the pain in his arm rapidly curtailed his intentions to bolt through the door and away; seconds after staggering away from her he wound up on his knees, sobbing over his twisted arm.

“...where’s Horatio?” he asked bitterly, hardly expecting to get an answer.