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+25 Bonus
My brother sat motionless by my hospital bed for almost three hours, saying absolutely nothing. He just stared at my pale face, at the machines keeping me alive, his eyes hollow with something deeper than exhaustion.
A nurse came in to change my IV. “Alpha Ethan, you should get some rest. We’ll call if there’s any change.”
He didn’t even acknowledge her presence. His fingers remained curled around my limp hand, his thumb absently tracing the scars on my wrist -scars I’d hidden from him since returning home.
It seemed as though the shock of my situation affected him only briefly before he slipped into this vacant state. When he finally stood, his movements were mechanical, devoid of his usual confident grace.
“If she wakes up,” he told the nurse in a voice I barely recognized, “call me immediately. Even if it’s the middle of the night.”
“Of course, Alpha,” she replied with a sympathetic nod.
He drove home in silence, the radio off, the only sound the rhythmic swish of windshield wipers fighting against the rain. Upon arriving, he didn’t go to his bedroom or even to the kitchen despite not having eaten all day. Instead, he climbed the narrow stairs to my tiny attic space and stood in the doorway, surveying the spartan room I’d been given.
The bare bulb cast harsh shadows as he slowly entered, touching the thin mattress, the rickety desk, running his fingers along the sloped ceiling that forced me to hunch over when standing.
“This isn’t a room,” he whispered to himself. “It’s another cell.”
I hadn’t brought much back with me from the rehabilitation center–just a few changes of worn clothes and a somewhat dirty little teddy bear with one eye missing and stuffing poking through a seam.
He picked it up with reverence, as if it were made of glass rather than cheap carnival plush.
It was a birthday gift from my brother when I turned ten, just months before our parents died.
Not an expensive present–nothing like the custom leather jacket or silver–plated watch he’d given me on later birthdays when he had money -just a stuffed bear I’d spotted in a claw machine when Mom took us to the Pack Arcade after school.
I’d tried several times to win it, feeding quarter after quarter into the machine, groaning in frustration each time the metal claw dropped my prize. Mom had checked her watch, said it was getting late, and pulled me away despite my tears.
