He stirred a few times in the next two days and one night he spent in the hospital, coming close but never quite breaching the surface to retake consciousness. His nurses spoke in hushed whispers and his doctors consulted each other in a grim manner, wary of waking him from his drug-induced slumber for fear of putting him in pain, yet unwilling to perform any sort of procedure without his cognizant consent. He wore a bracelet that read "John Doe" and laid, unmoving, in a white hospital bed in a bare room.

John Doe abruptly awoke in the night to the sound of inhuman screaming filling his ears. His mouth felt dry, almost as if it were stuffed with cotton, and when he opened it to cry out in anguish, no noise escaped. His dark chocolate eyes flew open, not recognizing a thing in the dim, "night-time" hospital lighting. He jolted into a sitting position in a panic, but black quickly encroached his vision and he fell backwards, into his creaky bed.

A nurse walking down the hallway seemed to have spotted movement from his room. She poked her head into his room curiously to investigate.

"Hello?"

He peeled open his eyes, which felt as if they were covered in a crusty substance, and briefly examined her soft face. Despite his head feeling as if a sledgehammer were pounding the back of it, he managed to crack a thin smile. Her eyes widened in what he presumed to be excitement, and a bright smile seemed to light up her features as she took two steps out of the room, darting around the corner.

I hope she's getting a doctor. I really hope she's getting a doctor...

His eyelids were falling shut again when a short, stout, and balding man bustled into the room, dragged by the cuff of his lab coat by the same nurse. She gestured toward him and he managed to keep one eyelid from falling, awkwardly peering at the medical staff through his left eye.

"Well?" The doctor looked down at the nurse. "Have you given him anything to drink, Gemma?"

Her eyes may as well have popped out of her head in shock. She dashed out of the room again, and the doctor chuckled, moving to stand just to the left of his bed.

"Now, since I doubt you can talk yet, I'm going to ask a few yes or no questions. Blink once for no, twice for yes. Understand?"

The man blinked once, by mere coincidence, but the doctor seemed to misconstrue this as an affirmative answer.

"Okay. Fir—"

He was cut off by the nurse barreling through the door, a tray ladened with a pitcher of water and a plastic cup in her arms. She fixed a sort of rack for the tray next to his bed and poured one cup full of water before handing it over to the man, who was still watching them out of one eye with the utmost curiosity. He grabbed it hastily in shaking hands and gulped it down thirstily, dropping the empty cup on the floor. The doctor sighed and bent over to pick it up, and the man finally read his nametag.

"Dr. Thomas Coup," it read.

The man coughed, airy choking noises filling the room. After a moment, he rasped, "Doctor... Coup?"

The doctor looked up at the crippled man in surprise, delight spreading across his face. "Ah, so you can talk?"

The man blinked in confusion. This time, his words were almost a shout. He took a deep breath and wheezed, "I can't hear anything!"

The doctor's expression turned solemn, and he took a step back. He exited the room, and the man gawked after him looking baffled. The nurse offered him more water and he swallowed approximately half of the pitcher before the doctor scuttled back into the room, a sly grin playing his face and a clipboard clutched in his grasp. He scribbled something on the top page before revealing what he had written to the man.

"Can you remember your name?"

The doctor's face pulled itself into an easy, patient smile. The man nodded sluggishly in response before raising his voice.

"Ethan. Ethan Moiety."

Coup's face shone in delight as he scrawled what was presumably Ethan's name in blue ink on his clipboard. He flipped the piece of corkboard around to reveal question after question, all as Ethan stared on in bewilderment.

"Have you ever been near an active radiation site?"

"When was the last time you were sunburnt?"

"Have you ever worked in a lab handling aviary genes?"

"Has anyone you know done any of the above?"

Ethan's brow furrowed more in both confusion and worry with each passing question. He slowly shook his head "no," to every question the doctor inquired, trying to process what might've prompted such ridiculous questioning.

Eventually the doctor abruptly wobbled to his feet and ambled out of the room without murmuring a word.

His mind was wandering so much that he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, yet there seemed to be something nagging at the back of his consciousness. In time, the nurse wandered back into his room with an IV bag and connected it.

His mind fogged over, dragging him down impetuously into the black abyss of sleep.

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He awoke to the feeling of someone persistently tapping the back of his hand. He lifted his head groggily and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, snatching it away from the person waking him.

"Mister Moiety?" An unfamiliar voice asked. He could hear again, though muffled. Ethan blinked in the direction of the voice, attempting to clear his vision. He beheld a group of three doctors, Coup among them. The others were a brunette, Amazonian woman, and a rather short middle-eastern man.

The woman cleared her throat, stepping in front of the other three. "Mister Moiety? Can you hear me?"

Ethan nodded twice, slowly. She scribbled something down on her clipboard before raising her face to address him again.

"Your condition is quite serious. You not only had some form of concussion and the effects of brain trauma, but you have a growth on your spine causing paraplegia from the trunk downwards..." Her eyes pored over his face as to observe some sort of reaction. He, however, didn't absorb a single word that she had said, and looked at her with a vacant expression. She continued, nonetheless.

"Of course, there are a few—expensive, but existing—treatments for your diagnosis. We can put you on painkillers, and discuss options, hm?"

Although he still wasn't comprehending her utterances, he did recognize the word "painkillers." After a moment of screwing up his battered face in thought, he shook his head "no."

"No drugs."

Her mouth set into a firm line and she inclined her head, in a sort of "as you wish".

"Right, then. Doctor Hamad, would you like to," she paused, as if trying to form the correct verbiage, "Tell it to him as it is?"

The short man let out a sigh and peered directly into Ethan's baffled, innocent brown eyes.

"Of course you're going to make me the 'bad news doctor,'" he chuckled offhandedly before returning his attention to the man in the hospital bed, "but Ethan... Your condition is, well, rather serious."

Ethan spoke up for the first time that morning, muddled thoughts arising, forming themselves into coherent thoughts that pushed their way through his mouth in a panic. "Am I dying?"

Hamad shook his head, an unsolicited smile quirking the corners of his mouth upward. "No. Not dying, no."

"Do I have cancer?"

"No again."

"Diabetes?"

"Definitely not. You're extremely healthy."

"Am I about to be amputated?"

The doctor didn't reply right away, and Ethan's eyes went wide in shock.

"You're cutting my legs off, aren't you." It wasn't a question; it was a statement.

Hamad frowned. "No Ethan, we aren't cutting your legs off."

"Do I have some crazy foreign viral disease?"

"No."

"Then... Then what's wrong with me?" His voice cracked on the last word.

"Ethan, you aren't going to die. You're just going to have to... adapt." The doctor set his hand down on Ethan's leg.

"I CAN'T FEEL MY LEG WHY CAN'T I FEEL MY LEG WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!" He words were a blur, ringing helplessly around the room for a moment. Hamad blanched and took a step back and picked up his clipboard to occupy his now-shaking hands.

"Well, you see," he rushed, finally breaking the silence. He seemed as though he was making a mountainous effort to offer a defensible explanation, "We need to take more x-rays... We think that the impact from the car accident caused the misalignment of your spine and crushed the nerves in your legs and, well..."

"Say it."

"Well, you see..."

"SPIT IT OUT, THEN!"

"Mister Moiety," he spoke harshly, quelling Ethan's outburst. He took time with his words, speaking cautiously, "according to history..."

"History?"

"Well, it's never been done before..."

"What hasn't?"

And, as if his filter had been broken, Hamad spoke bluntly, "Your legs will never work again."

Ethan's head fell back on the pillow, his eyes now closed.

"I'm having a fever dream," he stated, a tear falling from the corner of his left eye. "Give me something to sleep."

The doctors hurried out of the room. Gemma the nurse came into the room a few moments later, carrying a hypodermic needle. Her pitying eyes brushed over Ethan's resting form as she injected morphine into his IV and left him to sleep.