Chapter Text
Interlude II.
Can ye hear the road from this place?
Can ye hear footsteps, voices?
Can ye see the blood on my sleeve?
I have fallen in the forest, did ye hear me?
In the loneliness,
oh, the loneliness,
and the scream to prove
to everyone
that I exist.
-Frightened Rabbit; The Loneliness and the Scream
February 16th, 2235
Edinburgh, Scotland
He looked down at his bruised, scabbed knuckles and listened to his mum talking to the doctor, though only half-heartedly. She'd chattered lightly the whole two and some hours from Aberdeen to Edinburgh about things unrelated to the bruises, and he had tried to figure out how to answer, but talking was just out of reach. He'd maybe managed a few dozen words the entire week, and most of those were 'aye, ma'am,' or 'no, sir,' and he knew he was in trouble, he'd been fighting again, but he couldn't summon up any explanation, any more than he could summon up words.
Montgomery hated fighting. But it seemed all he was capable of, these days. Fixing things and breaking things. Fixing machines. Breaking noses.
His own face smarted quite a bit; the lad who'd been harassing him was a lot bigger, and a lot older, and Montgomery had lost that one, but he'd gone down swinging anyway.
Why they couldn't just have him checked out in the hospital in Aberdeen, he didn't know. Coming all the way down here made no sense, but his mum must have needed to do something else in Edinburgh. Montgomery's life had always bent to hers; he didn't think, not even then, that it could have ever been otherwise.
The nurse who stepped into his peripheral vision wasn't very old, and she had on a bright colored lab coat, the sort geared towards children. He might have found that laughable, in a cynical way, but that required having heart even for bitterness and Montgomery just didn’t.
He managed to force a half a smile for her, though -- the other half was too sore -- and then went back to rubbing his knuckles, the pain radiating up the fine bones of his hand and into his forearm.
It drowned out the dull ache the cold, wet air outside had caused in his right shoulder, at least.
"Will ye come with me?" the nurse asked, leaning over and smiling more, and her more genteel accent made him half-smile again more genuinely, though he still didn't quite feel it.
He bobbed his head in a nod and stood up, looking to his mum to make sure she knew. She nodded back to him, and something in her expression sort of-- sort of threw him a bit, something he couldn't quite get a grasp on, but it made him uneasy.
Even so, the nurse was nice. He flinched his way through the careful examination, sitting up on the table, and then she was running a dermal regenerator over the cuts and scrapes, though there wasn't all that much that could be done for the bruising itself. He'd been through this a number of times now, though admittedly, it had become a fair bit more regular the past couple months. Some part of him was tempted to engineer his own dermal regenerator, just to save all the trouble.
He was almost done when his mum walked in with a doctor, who was one of those large types with a fixed smile that didn't seem wholly real, and once he was finished being patched up, Montgomery hopped down from the table, waiting to go.
"I'll be back tomorrow, t' check on ye," his mother said, not really looking at him.
There was a long moment where that didn't quite filter in, and Montgomery frowned, confused. "...tomorrow?"
"Aye. Ye'll be just fine, they're just gonna sort ye out," she said, more quickly.
But even before she was done speaking, his heart slammed into high gear so hard it hurt, the realization of what must be happening, that she was leaving him here-- and instantly he looked for the doors, and they were both occupied by orderlies just stepping in--
--he snapped a look back at her, eyes wide, heart racing. "...Mum...?"
She still wouldn't look at him; the nurse who'd patched him up set a hand on his shoulder, and without thinking he jerked away from it, backing away from the table and staring at his mother, and then she said, "They're just gonna take care o' ye, fix what's gone wrong, y’ken?"
"I'm nae broken!" Montgomery shot back, incredulously, and there were the orderlies closing in, all of ‘em a lot bigger'n him, and every nerve-ending screamed for him to run, and his voice cracked as he pleaded, "Mum, please...! "
"Ye'll be fine," she said, her voice quivering, and the doctor put an arm around her shoulders and was leading her for the door--
--and he bolted for that door, panicked--
--and never made it.