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Dani’s head hurts.
Every part of it, really: His temples, his crown, his forehead, his nose, his ears, his eyes, and his mouth.
Especially his mouth.
“You have a concussion,” Matías says after a comprehensive and exhausting examination (for Dani more so than him). “From when you were knocked out. Your nose isn’t broken, but the tissue inside and the skin are healing from when you were beaten. If at any point you can no longer breathe through it, tell me. I don’t think I have to tell you that your ears are ringing because a grenade went off five feet away from you, but just in case. Your eyes are still irritated from the smoke. And your mouth…”
Here, Matías grimaces.
Small wonder why: At least six of his teeth were ripped out, and Antón Castillo put his lit cigar out on Dani’s tongue.
“I am not a dentist,” Matías clarifies. “This is not my range of expertise. Your tongue doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would, and the damage is relatively contained. Barring any unforeseen complications, you should be able to use your tongue, although your sense of taste and texture might be affected. As for your teeth… Well, there is some good news: You had your wisdom teeth, and now you don’t, which is fine because you don’t need them. General Sánchez’s attempts to spread around the pain actually did you a favor, because you only lost two molars worth losing.”
Dani understands intellectually that from Matías’s perspective, that’s a plus; but only losing ‘two molars worth losing’ is very small comfort when every bit of his jaw feels like its been broken with a bat. General Sánchez isn’t (wasn’t, thank you Diego) a dentist either, and his desire was to cause as much pain and complication for Dani as possible, not prevent it.
“I’ll give you some antibiotics to keep any bacterial issues from your teeth and your tongue under control, and painkillers for the pain. Rest for a bit: Stay in bed, eat soft, non-acidic foods that don’t require much chewing- I recommend bananas- and don’t drink through a straw to avoid dry socket. Try to avoid talking unless necessary, too.”
Bold of him to assume that Dani can talk at all right now. It’s a wonder he was ever able to contact Juan and manage anything more coherent than a gurgling mumble.
“Hopefully things will heal up in short order; if they don’t, come see me and I’ll…” Matías shrugs in a way that conveys far less confidence than Dani would prefer. “…Figure something out.”
Dani raises a hand to indicate his thanks and understanding.
Then he sleeps.
[---]
Dani is on a strict regiment of antibiotics.
But it’s tricky, when one is so exhausted and sick, to remember when exactly one has last taken their dosage. The painkillers are easier because his body will happily remind him when he’s in need of something to numb the aggressive throbbing in his mouth (particularly after he eats and every nerve is screaming from the effort and friction), but antibiotics are not as easy to remember. More than once Dani wakes up and sees that the sun has changed position, and struggles to remember when he’d last dry-swallowed a chalky little pill.
At some point, Dani is aware that he’s becoming a little overheated. At some point, he dimly realizes that his mind is getting sluggish, but doesn’t have the wherewithal to do anything about it.
Matías has other problems, other patients who need his attention. So do Paolo, Talía, and Bi- Paz, he wants to be called Paz now.
They check in every now and then (Paz maybe more so than the others), but they cannot watch Dani all day, and they cannot make sure that he is taking his antibiotics when he’s supposed to, in the right quantities.
As such, Dani just sort of slips into this uncomfortable twilight state where he isn’t entirely sure what’s going on.
After a time Dani has to piss, and also feels compelled to eat and/or drink something. The antibiotics are hard on his stomach, and so however much he doesn’t want to put anything into his increasingly pained mouth and try to chew with his horribly stiff jaw, Dani needs to put something in his stomach before the situation deteriorates.
Reality becomes fluid. Dani vaguely suspects that he’s done that thing where he is now dreaming about what he wants to do instead of actually getting up and doing it. When he sways and wobbles and reaches out to catch himself on things (a counter, a doorframe, a tree, a railing) they don’t feel so solid beneath his hands. Time skips, too; one minute there’s the outhouse in front of him, the next he’s halfway across the camp, and then he’s not in the camp anymore- now Dani’s gliding through the trees, unable to feel his feet even though he’s still clearly moving.
This is a dream, he decides, and just settles into it.
It has to be a dream, because Dani is bumping into things, stumbling occasionally, and he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel the sting of branches breaking against his exposed skin, he doesn’t feel the discomfort or struggle of his shoes sticking in the soft mud, and he doesn’t feel the weight of the swamp’s humidity clinging to him.
Dani feels fine.
(Well… Maybe fine isn’t the right word to use.)
Eventually the forest disappears. All Dani sees are stars blinking across a black-blue swath of sky. The ground (his bed?) is soft and warm beneath his back. Maybe a little too warm, because Dani squirms a little and rolls around trying to cool the parts of his body that are too overheated. He doesn’t have to piss anymore, so he must have gotten up and done that at some point, but Dani’s still hungry and thirsty and his head hurts and his stomach is twisting painfully; he’s too tired to lift his head, though, so he sinks back into the dream.
Said dreams are invaded by sounds of chaos, loud snapping and screeching and cawing and other monstrous sounds. It makes Dani’s head pound even harder, and (maybe?) he says something, grumbles at whoever is making so much noise to quiet down. Máximas Matanzas has a bad habit of blasting their own music all over the camp at all hours of the day, though they’ve been a bit quieter since Talía popped María Marquessa a few dozen new holes on national television and Antón Castillo is screaming for their blood.
Dani rolls onto his side, pressing his hands to his eyes and trying to ignore the suddenly vicious pain in his jaw. He must have clenched his teeth or touched his cheek with his hand too hard.
The pain pushes Dani further and further from sleep. When he finally opens his eyes, he has enough clarity to know that he is awake this time.
The world around him is dark.
Chicharrón stands before him, staring silently.
Dani stares back in a fog, blinking slowly. There is some small part of him that is coherent enough to set off a tiny, blinking red light of alarm in his head: Of all the strange animals Dani has met since becoming a guerilla, Chicharrón the rooster is somehow more aggressively unstable than the crocodile and the fucking spirit-jaguar, and for him to be standing so curiously still whilst staring into Dani’s eyes is a sign that something isn’t right.
But at the moment, Dani is far too hot and sick to heed those warnings. If Chicharrón wants his blood, Dani will welcome the death by rooster-peck. There are certainly worse ways to go, and at least Chicharrón tends to take his prey down quickly.
Chicharrón gives a very deliberate cluck.
Dani makes a sound in return, something between a sigh and a grunt.
Chicharrón leans in, his beak far too close to Dani’s face for comfort- but the peck he delivers to his shoulder is far less violent than he’s capable of. It is exploratory, questioning, demanding an answer; but Dani is not coherent enough to offer such an answer, and so his eyes flutter shut again and he tries to go back to sleep. The pain is deeper and too easy to notice while conscious. The rooster is intelligent enough to understand that Dani is in no state to go attacking FND bases right now, and he’ll get the hint eventually.
Or, you know, maybe not.
Chicharrón hops onto Dani’s chest, talons digging into his skin through his shirt, and crows loudly.
It’s unbelievably grating, particularly when one has a raging headache, and Dani tries to push him off. “¡Váyase!”
Chicharrón rewards his defiance with a sharp peck to the hand and another obnoxiously loud crow.
Lacking the coordination or strength to do anything about it, Dani just decides to curl into a ball and wallow in his suffering until Chicharrón decides to put him out of his misery. He is not a rooster known for his mercy, but after everything they’ve been through together, Dani thinks he’s earned a little.
A voice, warped though recognizable, cuts through the air and says,
“-sure you want to go near that thing?”
“He’s not that bad so long as you don’t try to touch him, or get too close to him, or look him in the eye…”
I know those voices? Dani thinks as he tries and fails to lift his head. They sound familiar, but he just keeps hitting a roadblock as he tries to connect names to them.
“What’s that on the ground, there?”
“Hey, it’s Dani!”
[---]
Something cool is beneath his head.
Dani opens his eyes, feels the world vibrating and rumbling around him. “What?”
A blurry face turns towards him. “He’s awake!”
“Hey man, you alright?”
Dani has to put some significant effort into focusing on his surroundings. He pieces together that he is in a car. Paolo is driving; Paz is in the passenger’s seat. Chicharrón is in the backseat with Dani, staring at him with the same intense, unnerving gaze that he had before.
“He’s out of it,” Paolo mumbles when he doesn’t get a response from Dani. “We’ve got to get him to Matías.”
“He can’t be that out of it, if he killed all those crocodiles. Right Dani?”
“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t him.”
Dani frowns. “What?” he repeats.
“You wandered off into the swamp,” Paolo clarifies. “We found you passed out on the water’s edge, and there were a bunch of dead crocodiles lying around. They looked like they’d been torn apart.”
Dani is still pretty dazed, but somehow his brain manages to bridge the gap. He turns to look at Chicharrón, who is still staring at him. “Really?” Dani asks weakly.
“Really!” Paz says brightly, naturally assuming that Dani is speaking to him and not the homicidal rooster in the backseat.
Dani shuts his eyes and pushes his head against the window a little more insistently.
Back at camp, Matías doesn’t even bother hiding his concern. He also doesn’t bother being particularly gentle, prying open Dani’s mouth to look inside and groaning once he’s gotten a good look. “Coño. The gums in one spot look absolutely fucked. I’m out of my depth here- he needs to see a dentist.”
“Do we have one of those floating around here that I haven’t noticed?” Paolo asks with a snort.
“No, but I did make some inquiries about one with negative feelings towards Castillo living on the edge of Esperanza. He’s apparently been generous in examining those who’ve had their teeth smashed by checkpoint guards, and has supposedly passed along antibiotics and painkillers to Libertad. He will know how to treat this, because obviously whatever I gave Dani isn’t working.”
He lets go of Dani’s mouth, and Dani tips over onto the bed and curls up again. There’s no point in being ginger with his face and mouth, because everything hurts and nothing seems to be alleviating it.
“How the fuck are we supposed to get to Esperanza?” Paolo exclaims. “Have you not noticed that Castillo wants to use our skulls for fucking baseball practice?”
“I suggest someone figures it out,” Matías says pointedly as he yanks his gloves off and tosses them away. “Because the danger of having an infection in your mouth is that it’s right below the brain; a tooth you can pull out, but the infection is in the socket and gums. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this could kill him.”
That should be alarming.
That should be terrifying.
But Dani doesn’t have the energy to be frightened, and so he just settles back into the haze and lets the world drop away.
[---]
Dani comes to (a little, anyway) when he’s being shoved into the car.
“Sorry,” Paz apologizes when Dani’s head clips the frame.
A squawk alerts him to Chicharrón’s presence, and he sees a flash of colorful feathers as the rooster scurries about. “You can’t come with us,” Paolo tells him flatly.
Chicharrón caws.
“You aren’t coming with us. This will be hard enough without having to explain why we have a murder chicken in our car. Ow!” Paolo hops away, swearing furiously. Evidently Chicharrón does not like being referred to as a ‘murder chicken’. Or maybe it’s just the ‘chicken’ part, since murder is unquestionably part of his repertoire.
“Get in the car, get in the car!” Paz hisses, pulling the driver’s side door like a shield, as if he thinks Chicharrón intends to attack.
(It wouldn’t save him if he did.)
As the car pulls away, Dani sees Chicharrón scuttle quickly in an attempt to keep up, but eventually he falls behind.
Colors blur together. The world becomes gelatinous, wobbly and strange. It’s similar to how it looked when Dani was under the influence of the PG-240X, only he isn’t hallucinating now. His overcooked brain probably can’t find the right images and words to make a decent imitation of Lita or Alejo.
Dani is fine with that.
He doesn’t need to feel any worse than he already does.
He passes out again, slumped against the window.
[---]
A seventy-something year-old dentist grimacing when he looks into your mouth is a bad sign.
Not that Dani hasn’t already figured out that there’s something seriously wrong, his head fuzzy or not.
“Your tongue is actually healing quite nicely,” The man mumbles as he pushes Dani’s head back and forth, pulling his jaw open painfully wide. “You might just be able to taste things normally- or normally enough, but it’s better than nothing I suppose. The extractions on the left and top right side of your mouth are healing up nicely as well. But the bottom two wounds on the right are badly infected.”
You don’t say, Dani thinks wretchedly, recoiling reflexively when the dentist finally lets him go.
“I’ll have to clean out some of the infection, and then apply some antibiotics. Depending on what I see once I’m in there, I may set you up on an IV drip as well. If we play this right, you should be healed up soon enough.”
“Will the pain stop?” Dani manages through his wrecked mouth.
“Once the infection is treated, the inflammation will reduce. I’ll take a look for anything that might indicate further complications like permanent nerve damage, but I don’t see any reason why your pain shouldn’t reduce considerably once the infection has cleared up.”
That’s a nice thought, but Dani will believe it when his head isn’t a heavy ball of pain and suffering. “Alright,” he says wearily. “Do it. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold my mouth open for.”
“I have a bite block that will keep your mouth open, don’t worry.”
Dani grimaces when the guy preps a needle, knowing that it’s going into his face- it’s a surprise when it is instead slipped into the crook of his arm. “What?”
“This will put you out for a few minutes while I work.”
Dani sags with relief. “I don’t have to be awake for this?”
“Oh goodness no, I have sedatives and anesthetic. You’re barely lucid as it is, and the procedure will be quite uncomfortable otherwise.”
“Thank you,” Dani mumbles as his eyes grow heavy.
“Not a problem.”
[---]
Dani wakes up.
It feels fundamentally different from the fuzzy attempts at clinging to consciousness he’s made in recent days. Dani feels clearer, sharper, even before he’s fully awake. His jaw and skull aren’t aching nearly as fiercely as they were before, and he can already tell that he isn’t as hot either.
Curiously, however, there is a sharp pain in (on?) his legs, like something is digging into the skin through his jeans. It’s just intrusive enough that it drives Dani to wake up fully, to open his eyes and see what’s happening.
Dani finds himself face to face with Chicharrón.
“Fuck!” He yelps, trying to move away and failing. Dani is laid out on a couch, and there’s really nowhere to go.
Chicharrón clucks and delivers a light peck to the center of Dani’s chest. It stings a little, but isn’t enough to injure or even damage his shirt.
“What?” Dani slurs, grimacing a little. Talking is much easier than before, but it is still uncomfortable and sends little shocks of pain through his jaw. “What, Chicharrón?”
The rooster cocks his head, makes a strange sort of pre-clucking sound deep in his throat, and then plops down on Dani’s lap. The fact that Chicharrón has folded his legs beneath his fluffy black body suggests that he plans on sticking around for a while. He isn’t that much heavier than a cat or small dog, so it isn’t a horrible prospect.
Still, it’s bizarre. Chicharrón is hardly what one could refer to as a lap-rooster.
Dani is lying on a couch in the basement of the dentist’s office. He still has an IV attached to his arm, and a glass of water on a table beside him. Clarity is a strange beast to contend with after so many days of wading through hot, hazy incoherence, and Dani finds himself hyper-focusing on his surroundings.
There are footsteps on the stairs. Paz appears with a wide grin that falters when he sees Chicharrón. “Sorry Dani,” he says weakly. “He wanted to come, and I couldn’t, uh… He’s really, uh…”
Dani waves a hand. “No, I get it, it’s fine.” He frowns. “How long have I been out?”
“Oh, only a day and a half or so. You really conked out.”
Dani snorted. “First time I’ve been able to sleep normally in days, I think.”
Paz cringes. “Yeah, like, we’re really sorry about that, Dani. There’s so much going on around camp, we didn’t check in on you as much as we should have. In my defense, every time I checked on you, you were sleeping. I figured you were just mumbling and grumbling and shit because you were sleepy.”
Well, Paz and Máximas Matanzas aren’t doctors, are they? And the one doctor they have in the camp is constantly busy sewing up severed arteries and setting broken bones, so Dani gets why having a few teeth ripped out might not have put him at the top of the priority list.
“It’s alright,” Dani says, reaching up to rub his eyes. “I’m fine now. Or I will be. Fuck, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”
“Paolo’s talking to the dentist to see when we can take you back to camp. Probably whenever the IV can be taken out. So hang in there.”
Paz goes to pat Dani’s shoulder.
Chicharrón’s head darts out, offering a sharp peck that causes Paz to jump back with a squeal. “Murder chicken, murder chicken!”
Chicharrón caws furiously in response.
Dani shakes his head and covers his eyes.
What he wouldn’t give to be incoherent again.
-End