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The first sense to return was always smell.
Dexter had expected it to have the metallic, coppery tang of freshly spilt blood, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the damp, salty breeze of the marina at midnight, a smell that Dexter loved, a smell of victory, success. Neither was it the smell of the sterile heavy-duty plastic sheets that he unrolled across a kill room floor.
It was something like… not like, it was bleach. Iodine. Other chemicals wafted in the air.
Dexter Morgan opened his eyes to the blinding, harsh fluorescent lights that felt like they pierced straight through his pupils and drove a spike of pure agony deep into his skull. He blinked, but that didn’t resolve his swimming vision, as he tried to piece together the fractured mosaic of his memory.
He had been driving, that was for certain. He remembered he was tracking a target – a particular nasty human trafficker who had slipped through Miami Metro’s fingers on a technicality, or more accurately, because of Quinn and his stupid antiques. That was beyond the point right now.
He remembered that the weather had been shit – rain coming down in sheets, a bout of hail at the beginning, before it tapered off.
He’d gotten off the highway, keeping a distance behind the van when a horn blared, flashlights blinding him from a car travelling the wrong way, before his head whipped to the side, the last thing he heard being the agonising crunch of metal folding by paper before the darkness consumed him.
My trunk, Dexter thought, a sudden icy spike of adrenaline piercing through the fog in his mind.
My kill kit. The knives, the M-99, the plastic wrap. His entire kit was all there in his trunk. He needed to get out of here before some over-diligent EMT or police officer decided to inventory the contents of his no doubt shattered car. Anyone who opened that trunk would end him.
And potentially Deb too.
She’d already taken it better than he’d expected once she found out about his hobby, and he wasn’t about to let his choices affect his family, not anymore.
He tried to sit up, but the wave of nausea hit him so hard, it felt like he’d run into a concrete wall at full speed, without a helmet. The room spun, and he keeled over, spotting the faded, oversized hospital gown he was dressed in, the wires from the pads stuck to his chest trailing off to a monitor beside the bed that betrayed his distress at the current situation.
He would have been able to slip away more or less without too much of a headache, after he acclimatised to said nausea, but there was an IV line buried deep in the crook of his left arm.
He reached over with his right hand, intending to delicately pull the IV out and scamper out of the hospital before anyone noticed, but three of his fingers were stuck in a splint, and so his intended delicate removal resulted in a yank of the plastic tubing instead, the needle tearing free and taking a chunk of skin with it. A bright ribbon of crimson welled up immediately and began to trickle down his forearm, staining the pristine white hospital sheets, and then the floor as he swung his feet over, noting the mottled skin of his legs, bruises overlapping over other bruises, cuts, and bumps.
At least nothing’s broken, right? Would have been in a cast otherwise.
He’d just managed to get to his feet and reach for the bag with his personal belongings when a nurse rushed into the room, eyes wide with alarm.
“Sir, Sir, you need to lie back down.”
She reached for him, and he instinctively pushed her back, making slow progress to the chair across the room.
“I need some help in here!” the nurse stuck her head out of the door, yelling something else that Morgan didn’t quite bother to compute.
Two orderlies appeared in the doorway, quickly moving to his side. Dexter stupidly tried to fight his way past him, but it was like his limbs were jellified, and his muscles refused to listen to his brain. His head continued to throb, and it didn’t take a genius to realise he must have seriously bashed his head in the crash.
Hands grabbed his shoulder, forcing him back onto the bed, his wild, instinctive thrashing no use.
“Let me leave,” Dexter got out, but the orderlies didn’t even react, keeping him pinned to the bed as someone else in scrubs appeared, feeling the sharp pinch of the needle in his arm.
No… No, no, no, no, no.
Whatever sedative the doc gave him acted fast; the fight drained out of him almost instantaneously. The lights above him dimmed and blurred at the edges, until he room dissolved into absolute nothingness.
*
When he woke for a second time, his panic was subdued, replaced by a heavy dose of lethargy. The drugs coursing in his system were doing their job, keeping him pliant, his mind numb.
He took as deep a breath as he could, his chest aching. Broken ribs, maybe? Adrenaline must have still been coursing through him when he tried to get away the first time. His head still felt like a drill hammer was trying to take samples from his brain, but at least the nausea was now gone.
What else is wrong with me?
He attempted to bring his right hand to his face, remembering that some of his digits had been splinted, but his arm didn’t move. He tried again, but his wrist remained firmly by his side. A sharper tug produced the distinct friction of thick nylon webbing against his wrist.
Oh?
He tested his left arm. Anchored. Both his ankles. Anchored too.
He opened his eyes, the light bugging him still, confirming that what he felt was what he saw. The doctors and nurses evidently didn’t want a repeat of his attempted escape and decided that restraining him would be the best way to go.
Oh, the sweet irony.
How many times had he stood over someone bound to a table? How many killers, rapists, and monsters had woken up to find themselves completely immobilised, their frantic struggles merely bringing satisfaction to his eyes and ears.
He analysed the bindings with his professional eye. If he tried, and by that decided that dislocating his thumbs would be the way to go ahead, he could get out of these easily.
That was settled then.
Just as he was about to manoeuvre himself out of them, further injuries be dammed, his hurricane of a sister stormed in.
“Holy fucking shit, Dex!” She marched up to the side of the bed, eyes sweeping over his injuries, and then to the restraints holding him down.
“What the absolute fuck is going on?” she asked louder, ducking her head out of his room and catching a passing nurse by, demanding she come in and free her brother.
He didn’t catch many of the words, just a back and forth between Deb and the nurse, one talking in a louder tone than the other.
“Doc’s coming over to clear you to have these taken off Dex. Shit, after I saw the state of your car I –”
“My car, Deb, did you?”
“It’s clear, don’t you worry about that. Your bowling equipment is back at your apartment. Now, why don’t you take this time to explain to me who the fuck you were after in such a rush that your car is a total write off, and you look like you were close to being roadkill too?”