OCTAVEUS
I OPENED my eyes to white. I took a deep breath, finding oxygen came easily through a slight burning sensation in my chest and throat. I closed my eyes, then opened them again, trying to refocus them. My vision slowly came into focus enough that I could see, and I looked around. I was lying in a twin bed with white sheets and white feather pillows. There was a white curtain suspended on a bar from the ceiling surrounding the small area around my bed, which was made up of a small white wooden nightstand with a roll of bandages sitting on the surface and a grey plastic chair next to the bed. A large mirror was positioned right at the foot of my bed, and guess what color the frame was? White. All of the bright colors started to make my eyes hurt. I tried to move my arms but I couldn't feel the rest of my body. It took me a second to realize that I wasn't alone in the small area behind the curtain.
    "Anna. . ." I said, my voice sounded hoarse and unusually quiet.
   Anna lifted her head from her arms and leapt up from her place in the chair. She immediately ran to me and threw her arms around me, her shoulders shaking. I didn't need to see her to know that she was crying. She finally pulled away from the hug and studied my face, her hands cradling my head. Her long golden-blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders. Her maroon eyes were teary with relief and fear.
   She stared at me for a moment before whispering, "I thought we lost you." I stared into her eyes, not knowing what to say. Luckily, I didn't have to say anything. She threw her arms around me again started crying. Feeling started to return to my arms and shoulders as I let her hug me and run her fingers through my hair. She pulled her face out of my shoulder and gently pulled her arms out from under my shoulders, then said, "Do you want to sit up?"
   I nodded and pushed myself into a sitting position (with Anna's help), but stopped dead when I saw my reflection in the mirror. I wasn't wearing a shirt, but that didn't matter; my chest was completely wrapped in white bandages, making up for my lack of a shirt. There wasn't anything covering my bare stomach, but I didn't care at the moment. My right shoulder was covered with white bandages as well, along with my neck and most of my left arm. But what scared me most was how sickly I looked. My black hair was messier than it's ever been before, and my eyes were dull and completely devoid of light. There were tons of new scars on my arms and a long scar running down the left side of my face from between my eyebrows on my forehead to just below my left eye. Despite all the bandages, my torso looked unnaturally thin, and I could see my ribs through them. (Or at least, unnaturally thin for me.)
   Anna saw me looking at myself in the mirror and laid her hand on my shoulder. "You've been half conscious for five days," she said to me quietly. I looked at her standing next to my bed. "We couldn't get you to eat anything, but we managed to get you to drink a little bit each day. When your dad first left the den and told us to wait for him in the infirmary, we'd suspected something had happened but we didn't know what. Then he came back with Theo, carrying you. . ." She paused to wipe tears from her eyes, then continued. "We could barely even recognize you. You were unconscious and covered in blood, and when Theo told us that you'd been attacked by a werewolf and gotten bitten in the neck, we all thought that you wouldn't survive. Callie and the other doctors and nurses had gotten your wounds bandaged, but you were still losing so much blood, she had to change the bandages almost as soon as she put them on. Eventually, she'd told us that she most likely would have to just end your misery or you'd die of blood loss anyway, but she'd tried everything they could to keep you alive and nothing seemed to be working. She could barely see your chest through the blood to stitch the wound shut, but after she'd done that and seen how deep the wound in your neck was, she said that she couldn't stitch it shut or she'd risk infection too deep in your body to fix. She and the other doctors that were there had told us to go back to the den and they'd try to keep you alive for as long as they could, but they couldn't make any promises on us ever seeing you healthy again. . ." She trailed off and started crying again.
   By now, the feeling had returned to my chest and neck, and pain throbbed through the wounds. I put my own pain aside and pulled Anna into a hug. She wrapped her arms around me and buried her face in my not-bandaged shoulder. I stroked her golden-blonde hair and whispered to her as she cried into my shoulder.
   Suddenly the white curtain around my bed opened and Mom walked in. Anna jumped and backed away from me, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. Dad walked in after Mom and went over to comfort Anna as Mom immediately said, "Oh, my baby!", hugged me, and started crying. What is with girls and being so emotional? I thought as my mother hugged me and cried into my hair. I could now feel my entire body, and I wished that I couldn't. The throb in my neck and chest now felt like someone was repeatedly stabbing me. I winced, holding back cries. Mom pulled back and studied my face.
   She must've seen the pain in my eyes, because she lightly touched my neck and said, "Does it hurt?"
   I nodded, clenching my jaw to refrain from crying, which only made the pain worse. Mom turned and looked back at Dad and, after a silent conversation, got up from my side and switched places with him. Mom and Anna walked out of the curtained area, Anna glancing back at me once before she closed the curtain behind her.
   As soon as Mom and Anna left, Dad knelt by my bed and gently pulled me into a hug, and this time it was my turn to cry. The pain in my neck and all the worry from Anna and Mom just overwhelmed me and I started to cry. (So much for girls being the most emotional beings on the planet.) Dad rubbed my back gently, comforting me in French as I cried silently into his shoulder. He didn't try to get me to stop or tell me to man up, just let me be upset and was there for me.
   As the pain-- both physical and mental-- began to decline, I tried to steady my breathing. I pulled away from him and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, my ears flicked back. I hate crying, even if I'm alone and no one notices, but especially when someone is there and sees. I sniffed and Dad stood on his knees on the floor.
   "Do you remember anything from that night?" He asked me quietly.
   "It's fuzzy, I can't remember everything," I said after pausing for a moment to think. I hated how raspy my voice sounded.
   "What do you remember?"
   I was silent for a second, then quietly said, "Pain."
   Dad sat back on his legs, a dark look replacing the normal cheerful light in his eyes. He sat like that for a few seconds, staring at the ground, then looked back at me, his eyes teary, and said, "I'm so sorry, Octaveus. No one your age should ever have to endure what you've gone through. I'm so sorry." He got up and walked through the curtain, leaving me to ponder alone.

The next five nights I spent in the infirmary, in the same bed. The nurse, Callie Mason, would stop in from time to time to check on me and change my bandages. Now that I was awake, she'd given me a pair of light sweatpants and a loose white T-shirt to wear during the day, even though I spent most of the time sleeping. The reason I slept so much was because whenever I was awake, pain racked my body.
   Callie told me that werewolf saliva is extremely harmful to Choronuses if it gets in their body, and since I'd been bitten by a werewolf, the saliva had gone straight from the wolf's mouth and into my veins, which also meant that I now had the correct disease to change me into a werewolf in my blood too. Hooray. Lycanthropy in a Choronus in most cases is deadly (and by "most" I mean all but mine). Fortunately for me, the werewolf that had attacked me (Seth) wasn't old enough to infect me with the right amount of lycanthropy to kill me with one bite, so I'll just be in excruciating pain and be unable to walk for a week or two. Yay me. I felt dizzy most of the time when I'm awake because my body was still on a serious blood shortage from the attack. My only relief from the pain and dizziness was sleep.
   My family stopped in to see me whenever they could, but I was usually asleep when they did. The only one that couldn't stop by when I was conscious was Gwen; she had to go to this retreat for the weekend, and had school meetings every day after school for two weeks that she had to attend if she wanted to stay on the yearbook committee. Jessie never came to see me either, but Anna told me that that was because he just couldn't bear to see me like this.
   Anna probably stayed with me the longest during those five nights. She'd always come back from school and head straight to the infirmary and hang out there with me (when I was awake, at least), and then spend basically the entire day with me on the weekend.
   Anna's dad came in to see me one night after he got back from work because Anna told him she would be hanging out with me for a little bit after she got back from school and found both of us sleeping-- Anna asleep in the chair, which she had moved so that it was right up against the bed, her head resting on my chest, and me sleeping on the bed as close to Anna as possible. How do I know this, you ask? Anna's dad insisted on taking a picture of it and showing it to us and my parents (without either of our knowledge, of course).

On my fourth night awake in the infirmary, I woke up at twelve at night, in pain as usual, but this time it was a different kind of pain. I sat up in my bed, my arms crossed over my stomach, and resisted the urge to puke. I knew that this was hunger, and that I should probably eat something, but the thing is, I couldn't. Whatever I ate just came right back up again.
   I hadn't eaten since lunch the day of the attack, and that was nine days ago. Callie told me that a depleted appetite is one of the side effects of lycanthropy in my body, but I hadn't expected this. Every day I woke up starving, every day Callie or the nurse that was on duty would try to get me to eat something, and every day I would throw it back up again, leaving me even hungrier than I was before. At first, it wasn't very obvious that I was starving; I was hungry all the time and slept more than usual. But now it's become noticable. My ribs were visible through the bandages that covered my chest and my cheekbones were starting to stick out of my face. My skin was starting to look greyer, the veins on my wrists and in my neck dark blue lines. I could feel the bottom of my ribcage if I crossed my arms over my chest. My six-pack was now always visible because of how much my stomach had shrunk. All that I'd been able to consume in the nine days was a single cup of water per day.
   I threw the light white blanket off of me. At night, the curtains around my bed were pulled back so that whoever was on the night shift could watch me to make sure I didn't stop breathing at any point while I was sleeping. (It happened once; they thought that I died, but I'd actually fallen asleep again.) Vivian Ferforum was on the night shift tonight; she is one of my favorite nurses, after Callie. She is the oldest and most experienced nurse in our choroni, so she's dealt with practically every type of injury or sickness possible for us to get. Except this. She's dealt with a thirty-year-old Choronus with a werewolf bite on her arm, but not a fourteen-year-old with a bite in the neck. She's helped me with my various injuries before, though; when I was younger, she was the one that always helped me when my legs were hurting really bad (or when I tripped and broke one of them).
   Vivian heard me throw the blanket off of myself and poked her head out of the little nurse's office in the corner of the infirmary-- the corner closest to my bed, coincidentally. She had greying dark brown hair and chocolate-colored skin, her large brown eyes always kind and comforting. She was wearing a cream-colored nurse's smock and a bracelet with a large blue stone interlaid in it-- her birthstone.
   She walked out of the nurse's office and toward me, her thin dark brown tail swaying behind her. "Are you alright?" She asked me when she reached the edge of my bed.
   "I'm hungry," I said as she took my wrist to check my pulse. The skin on my wrist looked unnaturally thin and grey, like if she put any pressure on the area the skin would break.
   "Do you want to try eating something?"
  I hesitated, debating whether I was hungry enough to try eating something, but the hunger won over me and I said, "Yeah."
   She nodded and disappeared back into the office, coming out seconds later with a small bag of crackers and another trash can (the one by my bed was "strictly for trash only"). She set the second trash can by my feet on the floor and the crackers on the little nightstand next to my bed. (Apparently crackers are the only things that I can at least partially digest right now.) She gave me a cracker and readied the trash can while I ate it.
   I hadn't eaten in such a long time, the normally blunt flavor of the cracker tasted like the best thing in the world. I tried to keep the flavor in my mouth as long as I could before it started to turn sour. Just when I thought I might be able to keep it down, my stomach lurched suddenly and I leaned forward. Vivian held the trash can under my face as I tried to keep the food down.
   "Don't force it down," She told me while I leaned over the trash can, but I still tried to force it down. Finally I couldn't keep it in any longer and I vomited into the trash can. I could hear Vivian's sigh behind my range of hearing as I lost the little water and partial cracker that was in my stomach. She pinned my hair away from my face with one hand and held the trash can closer to me with the other. Quickly I was only retching emptily and eventually I stopped retching and Vivian took the trash can and crackers back to wherever she'd gotten them. The hunger pains were about ten times worse now that my stomach was officially empty. Pain started coursing through my neck and chest as the pain medication wore off and Vivian returned with more in a syringe. (She always seemed to assume the correct time when the meds would wear off.)
   "I'm guessing you want this?" She joked as she put the medication into a needle. She gently unwrapped the bandages around my neck and stuck the needle into a vein close to the wound to inject the medication. (We found that they worked better if they were injected nearest to the worst wound.) Immediately the pain started to ebb away and I began to feel drowsy. (One side effect of all the pain-relievers they gave me reacting at once.) I sat up while Vivian rewrapped the  bandages, but then she helped me lie down before I passed out sitting up.

I woke up to my doctor, Talon Karou, leaning over me. His hazel eyes were filled with concern. "You're awake," he commented, helping me sit up. "How're you feeling?"
    "Fine, I guess," I mumbled groggily, pulling the blanket around my bare shoulders. He gently took my arm and checked my pulse, his latex-gloved hand looking sky blue compared to my dead greying complexion.
    "Well, your skin's not getting any darker, so that's good news." He said, but I could tell he was just trying to cheer me up; I looked like a decaying half-mummified body.
    "Alright," he took my silence as an I-don't-feel-like-speaking- right-now and grabbed a roll of fresh bandages from the tray on the nightstand beside him. "Try to stay still for a second, okay?" He carefully unwrapped the bandages around my neck to check the bite marks underneath them. In most cases, werewolves just leave puncture wounds when they bite somebody, but I got the "special" treatment. Instead of just biting me, Seth's teeth had ripped huge gashes in my neck that were much deeper and more prone to infection than a normal puncture wound. Yay me. I couldn't see the wounds, but I could feel Talon lightly touch the tender skin around them and I winced. He sighed empathetically.
    "They're infected," he said, a slight tone of worry in his voice. He turned around to relay the message to Callie, whom had returned to duty at dawn, and she went to get something from the nurse's room. She came back with more pain relievers-- great, this can't be good-- and handed them to Talon, who set the needles down on the tray next to him. I thought I saw a tinge of red on the tips of the fingers he'd used to touch the wound and vaguely wondered if I was bleeding again.
    "Save those for later," he muttered to himself. The pain medications still made most of my body-- including my head-- numb, so I didn't understand why I needed the extra pain relievers.
    Talon had just started unwrapping the bandages around my chest to check those wounds when the doors to the infirmary opened and Mom and Anna walked in. Mom was wearing her usual work clothes, while Anna was wearing her Twenty One Pilots T-shirt-- the not-baggy one-- and jeans, but her long golden-blonde hair was loose around her shoulders (and knees). I felt my face redden slightly as my numb mind registered that I was currently wearing nothing but light sweatpants that didn't do too well at hiding the form of my body, and Talon chuckled lightly.
    "Do you want me to check these wounds later?" He asked me, quietly enough that Anna and Mom couldn't hear. I considered it, but said no. They'd probably see me like this more than once, anyway. Talon shrugged, turning to Mom and Anna.
    "Hello Alice and Anna," he said to them before continuing to unwrap the bandages on my chest. These wounds had been stitched shut for a while after Theo had first carried me back to the infirmary, but there had been too much risk in stitching the wounds on my neck. The skin around the areas where the stitches were was slightly swollen and purple-looking, the wounds cutting diagonally across my chest. Talon again lightly touched the skin around the wounds, but this time I didn't wince as much. He muttered something to himself as he inspected the gashes, slipping on a new pair of latex gloves so that he didn't transfer bacteria into the wounds. Part of the problem was that the wounds were visibly deep; now that I had lost probably ten or more pounds due to starvation, there were these flaps of dead skin around the sides of the wounds that shouldn't be there where the stitches had first stretched the skin to close over the cuts.
    There were still bandages wrapped around my shoulder, a single strip of bandage around my chest holding them in place. Talon unwrapped my shoulder so that he could see the rest of the gashes on my chest. He went around to look at my back and touched the cuts on my shoulder, and I winced a little bit. Talon muttered something to himself, then rewrapped my shoulder.
   Before he rewrapped my chest he felt my rib cage and stomach; my ribs were visible on my sides and he could hook his fingers under the bottom of my rib cage I was so skinny. I wasn't sure what he was looking for on my stomach, but he seemed to notice whatever it was and rewrapped my chest. He took off his latex gloves and went to talk with Mom while Anna sat next to me.
   "Are you feeling okay?" Anna asked me lightly while Mom and Talon talked.
   "As okay as I can be feeling, I guess," I replied. I heard a part of Mom's and Talon's conversation.
   "He lost two more pounds since I last saw him," Talon was saying to Mom. "The good news is his stomach is accomodating for the lack of food. The bad news is it's eating up all his fat stores and he's running out of fat. Once all of his fat's gone, his body is going to start eating at his muscles. If that happens, we may have to take him back to the Main Hospital to see if there's a surgery to save him." He watched Mom's face for emotion.
   "How long until that happens?" She asked quietly.
   "I'm estimating one to two more weeks until his fat's gone," Talon said. "Unless his condition gets worse. Which brings me to the other bad news." He paused as Mom's face fell. "His neck wounds are infected. He may have to be moved into the Main Hospital for a couple days to extract the infection from his blood before it affects his senses. The only problem with doing that is he's already so short on blood, we'd need to do a pretty large blood transfusion after the infection is gone. Thankfully, he has a common blood type for Armaduri, so it shouldn't be too hard to find some donors. " He laid one hand on Mom's shoulder. "We're doing everything we can to save your son," he said quietly. "But there's much more we can do at the Main Hospital. I won't have him moved without your consent."
   Mom nodded slowly. "Do what you need," she said, sadness in her voice. "Just keep him alive."
   From there on I had blocked out their conversation, trying to keep tears out of my eyes. Anna watched my face and gently pulled me into a hug, stroking my hair.
   "It's okay," she reassured me, but it was more like she was reassuring herself. "You'll be fine, Vee."
   I wrapped my arms around her carefully while she ran her fingers through my bangs, making sure that her fingers didn't get too close to the open cuts on my neck. For some reason her playing with my hair was more comforting to me than her words. I closed my eyes and let her comfort me.
   It took me a moment to realize that Talon was rewrapping my neck as Anna and I were hugging. I stayed still until he'd finished, then pulled away from the hug. Talon injected the extra pain relievers in my elbow bend this time, plus a sedative. I fell asleep as soon as the sedative reached my bloodstream, before I'd even had time to lie down.