Chapter 25
(Includes medical mumbo jumbo (not actually Mumbo Jumbo) and injuries, death, blah blah, big sad.)
Jimmy felt self conscious as people watched him limp, one arm around Scott and the other around Grian.
Server members wouldn't look him in the eyes as they made their way to the portal, one achingly step at a time. Half of them weren't there anyway.
Skizz was in the crowd. He didn't look hurt at all, only slightly pale but it was a side affect of being on the last life. It would go away once he left the server.
The dizziness of the portal took Jimmy by surprise but the arms holding him up helped him to keep stable. He had to go through that one more time before he felt the arms let go slightly.
Blinking his eyes open, he could make out the fuzzy shapes of people and the murmur that came across them.
And for some reason, Scar was wearing a purple clown costume?
Almost instantly, he was brought through more doorways. It felt fast but then again, most of his senses were gone. The only one that he could tell at the moment was touch and smell. It smelled of antisceptics and he could feel Scott's hands comfortably on his shoulder and arm. They barely had to go anywhere yet Jimmy felt tired.
"Hi, my..... I will help you out.... figure out...." Jimmy squinted at the green blob. The person looked like a creeper would. They looked nervous and... uncomfortable.
Jimmy was getting used to that. People were uncomfortable about his new appearance. He could understand the reasoning, he looked like he went through a meat grinder but it didn't help but hurt. Scott was the only one that looked at him without pity and disgust.
He looked to Scott.
"Doc will.... doctor..... help....." Paired with the previous conversation, Jimmy could vaguely get the idea.
"Your name is Doc?" He watched the green blob nod their head. It was a slow movement. Jimmy felt like he was being babyied.
He felt rising anger at everything but knew it wasn't anyone's faults. He couldn't blame them for treating him like glass. For some reason, he felt like he was always treated like that. When? He has no clue.
Scott stayed by his side as Doc did his work. Vaguely, he could see a red blob in the corner, Grian. This was one of his friends.
"Read.... tell me.... can see." A chart was in front of his face and everything looked like waves. Even the letters he could see moved by and he struggled not letting his eyes drift. It felt impossible to even read the biggest letters from close.
Are those even letter?
He felt like he could recognize some of the shapes but... he couldn't match a letter to them. A letter with a line and a dot over top seemed familiar but he couldn't name it. He even hummed the alphabet to try and recall but none matched.
"A-Are these letters?" He asked, unsure of himself.
Everyone else in the room gave each other a look. One that Jimmy could barely see.
He looked to Scott when he felt his hand clench his own. His eyes were glistening. Oh, those were tears.
He remembers Doc doing the motion for sleep and Scott lifted the blanket up to cover him. Grian had left sometime during the whole chart fiasco.
He remembers drifting, hearing a broken melody being hummed to him right next to his ear.
---
Doc huffed.
What the hell was he supposed to do? Sure, he made people cyber wear but this seemed almost impossible. The seeing would be hard to fix, especially considering the kid's eyes were already so damaged and fragile from the explosions. The hear could be a bit fixed but nothing that could solve it all.
Plus, he really didn't feel comfortable with the idea of surgically modifying the blond.
He already looked so tired and Doc could see the way he carried himself. The kid was hating the unessesary attention anyways, being a cyborg would be ten times worse. All of his clients were at least thirty when they came to him. This kid? Nobody could find a damn file on him.
"Ugh," Stress grumbled, stomping into the room with piles of folders and papers. The other medic of the server took to researching anything and everything.
"Still can't find anything?" He asked, twisting in his office chair to look at her. She looked annoyed.
"No! Absolutely no citizen files anywhere! I have looked in every kingdom for a missing sign or wanted poster but there is nothing! I recognize his face but I don't know from where, this is so frustrating!" She said, crossing her arms.
Doc scratched his chin. He also had recognized the kid when he first arrived. Even though his face was mangled and destroyed, absolutely nothing could be found. "Not even a name?"
Stress faltered at that before spinning in her own chair. "There is something."
Doc raised an eyebrow.
"I found this kid, Jimmy. Uh, the last king of the Ocean Empire."
Doc paused at that. He remembered seeing that video a while ago of a young boy crying for his family when he was put on the spot as King. He doesn't know how it turned out in the end but it was hard to forget watching that.
"The ages don't match up, sure, he looks in his twenties right now but in my calculations, he would only be seventeen or eighteen. It doesn't make any sense and nobody has had contact with the empires. Not since-" Stress stopped talking immediately. They both knew what she meant.
"Even if, this guy would be Grian's kid brother, he should recognize him. It wouldn't make any sense if they didn't recognize each other for it to be the same people." Doc thought outloud. "It could always be the work of... them."
Stress gravely nodded her head. She was afraid of that but didn't want to make a theory outloud. "If so, maybe Lizzie would recognize him?"
Doc's eye widened. "Joel, the Mazelean Prince."
"What does he have to do with anything?" Stress asked, turning back to her files to look through them.
"Lizzie and Joel have courted together. Maybe Joel has recognized Jimmy, they are playing the same game afterall."
Stress paused. It was an alright theory but they had no proof at all. This could be just a random Jimmy that just appeared. Maybe his old server crashed and burned, every file of the citizens being lost. Regardless, this had to be the work of a higher power. She didn't know if she had the heart to tell Grian what they were thinking of. Maybe one day but people's feelings were still sore. Plus, it wasn't that important compared to their job of healing Jimmy. The only reason they went into that rabbit hole was to find a previous photo and description of what he looked like to reconstruct as much as they could and look through old medical files for anything they might need to know. They didn't really have anything.
"What are those files for?" Doc asked Stress, breaking her out of her thoughts.
"Oh, I was going to see if anything has happened like this before. It is very uncommon for broken regeneration to occur. I was trying to see if anyone had tips for treatment so I sent messages to medical facilities worldwide." She had been asking around since Grian put them on the task two weeks ago. However, Jimmy had only just arrived just to see if regeneration would start back up again.
"Do they have tips?" Doc asked, standing up and walking over. He gingerly picked up a file.
Stress sighed. They did have tips but they weren't pretty.
Doc's face twisted in horror and disgust as he read the treatment plans. "Rebreaking bone, muscle and tissue? That should be illegal unless absolutely necessary! This patient didn't even break their bones but they still had to be surgically broken. I can get breaking a bone when it healed improperly but not so it could regenerate a part of the body." He picked up another file, flipping through it quickly. His cybernetic eye took the information in quickly.
Stress, having already read all the files from top to bottom, just watched as her partner went through stages of shock and grief. Half of the time, the regeneration process stopped in total so the patient never self healed again. They were left injured and sometimes permanently died even if they were on an infinite lives server. It was horrifying to say the least.
"This..." Doc faltered, setting down another file, "this is horrible. They even say to try killing the patient for forced regeneration even though it might be permadeath."
Stress nodded her head, looking back to the files. They didn't have many options with helping the kid.
"Even though I didn't want to do a cybernetic surgery in the first place, that is completely out of the question now. He might never heal from that and there is always a risk of losing a patient." Doc mumbled to himself quietly.
Stress sighed. "What could we do then? We are practically sitting ducks at the moment."
They both sat in silence, thinking hard for a solution.
"Hearing aids are best. I would have suggested Cochlear implants since his hearing is severely damaged but that requires surgery. The best it can do is give him a bit more of a basis for hearing." Doc suggested quietly. Stress pulled out a notebook and started jotting down ideas and reasoning.
"Unfortunately, I do not think we are able to even fix his eyesight at the moment." Stress said, looking up at Doc.
Doc nodded his head. "There is definitely... something hindering his eyesight but I have a feeling it has to do with his brain. I don't think it is connected in a way for him to even understand mostly what he is seeing. He could recognize people and animals from what I could tell but language is out of the question."
Stress agreed, leaning back in her chair slightly, tapping the pen against the paper idly. "The next question then is how to have communication. Regardless, he will still have trouble hearing and reading so it would be hard to do something around that."
"Well, if he ever wants to read again, he is going to have to learn braille. If he can't connect letters now, he will probably never connect them by seeing them. That is a given."
Stress clicked her pen and jotted it down. "How about his own talking?"
"His talking is great, no slurs or stutters at all." Doc noted, going back to his desk to take a seat. "The only thing is that he allegedly talks a bit louder but that is expected from someone with hearing loss."
"I guess his vocal cords didn't get affected severly then. At least he could communicate with us." She wrote it down neatly.
Communication with him would be more tricky. "I saw that whenever he was talking with the other person who came with, they were using hand motions along with what they were saying. I even used the basic motion for 'sleep' and Jimmy recognized immediately what I was intending."
Stress nodded her head. Charades might be a bit tricky but sign language wasn't as hard to accurate communicate. Even just knowing the basics would help in the long run. Charades weren't an accurate method to communication, many different signals meant more than one thing.
"Sign language?" She suggested outloud. Doc nodded his head.
"Although he will gain some of his hearing back, not everything will be able to be replaced. I would suggest reading lips for hard of hearing people but his eye sight is already really bad, exaggerated signals would be the best way to go."
The two of them then went on to do their own research. They split the work up so Stress would research everything about hearing aids and sign language while Doc looked for any solutions for the sight problems and braille.
They even went through the night, ignoring the sunlight filtering in the room at the start of a new day.
---
Joe Hills looked over the brief file that Grian gave to him.
"Hearing loss, eyesight loss and decreased mobility?" He asked, watching the red sweater wearing man nodded his head. Joe had worked will many clients before but never someone with combined difficulties.
"I was wondering if there was anything you could do for this." Grian looked deshelved, his hair a mess and bags under his eyes. He looked like he blamed himself.
Joe nodded his head. "Yeah, I should be able to come up with something. It would take awhile for it to be done though. I also need to consult Doc and Stress about it."
Grian nodded his head in understanding, standing up and saying goodbye before walking out the door. Joe looked to his side, seeing his faithful dog next to him. He was going to have to choose a dog perfectly able to become a service dog to assist the man. The training would have to be long and there was no telling when it would be completed. He just knew that he was determined.
It felt like years later, in a shed of a marsh, a man walked with a dog at his side, blue shirt with an @ symbol on. Knocking on the door, it opened, a king with a cod mask on opened it. There had to be a long winded explanation and soon, the dog was given to the young king. If he had smiled for the first time in forever, nobody would know.
Authors Note
I wanted to include a happy little moment on the end and include my idea at Joe's dogs becoming service dogs if needed. I had the idea before and decided to add it here. Also its 4 am lol I woke up at 2:30 for some reason and started writing this at 3. I keep whispering "its three am, I should be sleeping," from 3 O'clock Things by AJR. I didn't realize an hour has gone by, oops, time flies when you are researching medical and surgeries lol, the work I do for a fanfic
Also I did not realize that 3rd life was happening during Season 7 until now????? When did that happen????
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