Welcome to the Scrapheap

11.

Jack snatched up the phone the second it rang.

"Hello, Jack Starbright here..."

"Hi, Miss Starbright, it's St Dominic's Hospital calling regarding Alex Rider?" a crisp female voice spoke.

Her heart clenched. "How... how is he?"

"Alex is doing well physically, but we're concerned for his mental health. We believe he is in worse condition than initially thought."

She knew.

She had her suspicions ever since seeing him. He couldn't be that normal, not after three weeks of torture and waking up without a leg. But she didn't want to ruin it. Him being okay was the only thing holding her together.

When she found him so distressed that he screamed and shrank back the second she looked through the door? That broke her.

It had hurt, so much. She wanted the little boy she had looked after back, but he was long gone, buried deep beneath the pain of a hundred lifetimes. Those weeks of waiting had been the worst of her life... to see him so desperately terrified and helpless, beyond her, was more than she could handle.

She had fled. She wasn't proud of it. She should have told someone but she couldn't think straight, didn't have a hope. She went home to cry for a while.

Obviously, it wasn't a one-off.

How he had deteriorated so quickly was alarming. He had seemed a bit depressed, not very talkative, but other than that he seemed to be doing okay...

But now she was being told things that she never dreamed would apply to Alex, even since his recruitment.

She had been researching non-stop how to care for an amputee. It would be challenging and painful but she thought that they could get through it.

Now she had to figure out what she was going to do with a mentally unstable teenager who had a trauma list worthy of a book series.

-------

Three long weeks at St Dominic's had passed.

Much of which had been spent trying to convince the many doctors that he'd amassed (Alex had given up keeping track) that he could handle and in fact wanted Jack's visits.

He was so lonely without her. Dr May was nice enough as one of the only people who didn't treat him like cracked glass but he needed Jack there, even if it hurt to know he was causing her so much anguish.

Self-hatred reared up, extending its tendrils into his thoughts, and he started agitatedly listing his surroundings. Somewhere in the 'talks' with Dr May he'd blurted out that he used it as a coping mechanism and she thought it was a good start.

He hadn't told her that he defaulted to that from the simple fact that, in his experiences, he was only alive because he noticed things.

Or that he was only sitting there halfway upright with one and a half legs because he hadn't noticed enough, and he was never, NEVER going to let his guard down again.

Of course he hadn't told her that.

He was not looking forward to the day she asked him to talk about his trauma. What was he supposed to say? She must know something, he was registered under MISO and his medical records were certainly unusual, but he was pretty certain Mrs Jones really wouldn't like people hearing all the details of his previous assignments.

It probably wouldn't help untie the horrid knot of anxiety that had been permanently squeezing his heart like a vice ever since he woke up back at the military hospital anyway. He hadn't noticed it before, but now he couldn't shake the enormous weight that settled at his chest and filled his whole body with alternate exhaustion and panic.