On Wounds by Zero

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On Wounds

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Hey, everyone, Zero here. Back on my usual hurt/comfort to stretch my hand. Some dubious medical practices and heavy family issues in this one (health professionals reading are free and welcome to lecture and educate me, really!). This one is on One by U2, Brother by Gerard Way and Manic Memories by Des Rocs.




Prologue




"Send a picture. Come on" he hears the voice message as he marches.

Always impatient, thunderous, he isn’t one to speak on that, but the urgency, the need to know, in his voice is sharp and hard to ignore.

"Jude. You’re going to see it in like two minutes" he reassures him as their house comes into view, he thinks he can almost see him through the door’s peephole, if he looks hard enough.

Even through the rain and pitch-black night he swears he could still make him out from afar.

He is always unprepared for rain. It’s sheer luck he had a hoodie and a baseball cap on him today, not that it has made much of a difference, since he’s still cold and soaked.

"Okay, fine" a second voice message comes through with a pause as he digs for his keys inside his pocket and keeps moving forward "… I’ll be waiting for you here with my dad".

His dad. Jude’s f***ing dad. His blood runs cold.

His feet almost retreat over his own steps on their own accord.

"Wait…! Your dad is…? Why didn’t you tell me that…?" he can hear the movement behind the door as he wrestles the key and his phone, and then, finally, as he shoves the door and senses the other hand on the other side catching it, he sees them "Hey, Jude... Cedric".

Cedric. Jude’s dad. His stepfather.

"Logan" he says his name, in a dry, percussive tone that seems to count and measure every breath it takes to pronounce it.
He acknowledges him with a counterfeit smile "Hey".

The man doesn’t say anything else. Not that he would need to. The sight of him speaks loud enough for both of them.

Logan can almost see himself through his stepfather’s eyes and he knows what he’s staring at: His wife’s son, with a trace of poorly washed, dried blood in a stream that comes from somewhere in his head, running down the front of his right ear, and down to his neck.

"Come in. And take off the cap, will you?" his stepfather just walks back in.
Jude comes to his side and starts asking questions "Okay, what happened!? How did you get that!? You said you were just bleeding a little!".

This is exactly the part he was trying to avoid.




One


"To be frank, I’m just passing by…".

Logan starts talking, maybe only to keep himself distracted from the fact that he is sitting in the kitchen while his stepfather’s fingers are digging through bloodied locks of his hair.

"Just passing by" Cedric repeats after him, his tone is hard for him to read, it’s so flat, he can’t tell if it’s sarcastic or not.

He grips his baseball cap and his hoodie tighter on his lap. Just recently, he has realized that the shirt he has underneath is also stained with blood near the collar.

He feels his hair strands get moved in one direction and the opposite one. His hair feels heavy, his whole head feels so heavy. He tilts it downwards and his gaze falls on the kitchen floor.

"Listen, I just came to get a change of clothes and…" he hisses when his stepfather soaks the wound with a gauze and a liquid that stings.

He can feel and smell the antiseptic sliding down towards his brow.

Logan wipes it off with the back of his hand softly, then he blinks and looks up.

Jude is standing right beside them, he has his arms crossed and his face furrowed in attention. His stepbrother towers over him. His jet-black hair is always neatly buzzed down to a two, sometimes it’s a three, but it’s never long enough to lay down or comb it. His dark eyes are alert and awake behind silver rimmed glasses.

His stepfather is right in front of him. The same black hair, only longer, with scattered grey and white with a face covered with a thick five o’ clock shadow. What the man lacks in height, he makes up in mass, wide-shouldered and arms that have stretch marks from former heavy lifting muscles.

It usually takes just a passing glance at him, at his leaner frame and lighter hair to know they aren’t related by blood.

"Should I go get something from the pharmacy? Or from your office?" Jude asks his dad.
"No. I’ve got everything I need here…" Cedric answers sternly.

Always the resourceful, neurotic, end-of-the-world-ready man he has to be.

There goes an opportunity for him to go for a late-night errand with Jude and escape.

"Okay. I’m going to study at Samira’s place" Jude looks at both of them "So, text or call me if you need to, okay?"
"Wait! You’re leaving?" Logan raises his eyes to meet his stepbrother’s "To study? On a Friday night?".
"Well, how else am I supposed to pass med school?" the other rolls his eyes.
Logan is about to suggest cheating, until he remembers the presence of his stepfather "Okay. Fair"
"Hey, like I said, just text or call me and I’ll be here" Jude reassures him.
"That won’t be necessary, you go study with your friends" his stepfather tilts his head down and keeps cleaning the wound "We’ll be finished in less than an hour here".

Less than an hour. Okay. He runs calculations inside his mind.

He can get changed and then leave the house again and not come back until the next day when the wound has probably sorted itself out better and he can go on like nothing has happened.

He sees their house cat scurry underneath the table with her tail straight up and tries to reach and pet her. He hears her chirp and go past his legs.

"Okay, see you then" his stepbrother heads out.

He hears the door close wishing he was at the other side of it.

Now it’s just him, their cat, Frida, and Cedric. He wishes Jude had stayed, even if just for moral support. But of course, with the actual medical doctor in the house, he isn’t needed.

Why isn’t Cedric on the hospital graveyard shift tonight?

His stepfather hums thoughtfully and stops picking at his wound with gauze after a minute. Logan sees the man get away from him and wash his hands on the kitchen sink with relief.

"Are you done?" Logan picks up a paper towel and rubs his face in it, carefully around his hairline, it comes off pale pink and sharper red in places.
"Afraid not" he can hear the water running "You need stitches".
"Stitches?" their cat jumps on his lap, Logan scratches her face, she sniffs his fingers with heightened attentiveness "I feel fine, I’m sure it’s not that bad".
"I’m shaving you and stitching you up" Cedric states, completely ignoring everything he said.

His stepfather said he is going to what?

"I’m not passed out or even light-headed or anything like that, I’m sure this is…" he argues with him.
"Logan, I’m a surgeon. If there’s one thing I know about it’s wounds" Cedric dries his hands and stares daggers at him "Now go get a shower. I’ll be waiting here when you’re ready".

Of course, he would play the I’m-a-surgeon card on him with this one. His mom always plays the same I’m-an-anesthesiologist one all the time.

Logan huffs "Whatever".



He dries his hair, carefully, with the towel, trying not to rub too hard on the wound. His hair always looks darker when it’s wet. He isn’t bleeding that much anymore and all in all the gash looks clean and he thinks that Cedric is frankly exaggerating.

Logan assesses the situation, he gets his mom’s hair dryer from the cabinet, figuring it will be less abrasive to get rid of the humidity in his hair with it.

He sees his color reemerge as the strands dry. Dark blond, inherited from his mom. His hair covers his entire neck in the back, it’s close to grazing his collarbones.

Cedric said he had to shave him. He tries to measure with his fingers how many centimeters he’s going to lose of his hairline. Tries to figure out if there is anything he could do with, a way he could style his hair to cover it up.

His bangs are going to be a pain when they start growing back, his hair is going to stick out everywhere. He has months of awkward growth ahead of him.

He looks closer at his reflection. He can see the redness extending below his hairline. The wound is two or three fingers from the center of his forehead. It’s right on his scalp. It is going to leave a scar.

Logan is fine with that. Thinks he is fine with the aftermath of a jagged dent inside his hairline. He imagines the scar will fade in time, maybe by the time he’s in college it won’t be noticeable.

He goes back downstairs with the towel around his neck and his bloodied t-shirt and hoodie over his arm. Their cat squeezes herself between his legs, and Logan propels himself up against a wall and freezes while she rubs her face against his calves.

"Frida, you’re going to make me fall and split my head open again, come on, girl" he gets her out of the way and gets back to the kitchen "I looked in the mirror, it’s not that bad".
"What’s not that bad? That your skull isn’t cracked? That your brains aren’t spilling out?" his stepfather extends the hair clippers’ cable.
"See?" Logan throws his clothes in the washing machine "I’m right".
"Why didn’t you go to ER?" the man asks him.
"And have my mom’s colleagues call her and make her fly back here from the symposium?" he sets the washing machine and starts it.
"Sit down" Cedric orders him "She would have called me and I would have been there in five minutes".
"Well, you are here, I am here, so it’s the same, isn’t it?" Logan sits in the chair at the corner of the table, he sees his stepfather has also brough his medical supplies, he can see the pack of stitches.

It’s not that he hates Cedric. It’s just that the man has come into the middle of something that he didn’t need him to come into.

Maybe if his mom and Cedric had married earlier, when he would have been too young to know he wasn’t actually his dad or later, after he had moved out for college, he wouldn’t care.

Again, it isn’t that he cares. It’s that he’s sixteen and Cedric’s been orbiting his life since he was thirteen and now he’s living with them and it’s just…

"I’m not going to give you an answer to that, Logan" Cedric tells him, offhandedly.

He feels him section the area of his bangs near the wound and wrap his fingers around it. He lifts the locks back, upwards.

He sees him grasp the cordless hair clippers. Logan thinks they’re Jude’s. He believes his stepbrother has mentioned learning to buzz his own head a couple years back out of necessity back when everything was in lockdown.

The clippers touch his forehead, angled right in front of the wound. He tries to measure their width and calculate how much of his scalp will be bare adding up the depth of the laceration inside his hairline.

Then, they come alive with a rumbling and he feels Cedric start pushing the teeth inside his bangs slowly, carefully pulling the locks away with his other hand.

"Let me know if I hurt you, okay?" his stepfather tells him with a deep breath.

He doesn’t answer. Logan just braces himself silently.

He feels the first strands detach when the clippers bite inside his bangs.

Then, he feels the machine going past them, diving beyond them, deeper inside his hair, farther away from the wound with his heartbeat jumping.

"What are you doing!?" he raises his voice at his stepfather.
"F***" the man retreats his entire body away from him "Did I hurt you?".
"No! Not that! My hair! What the f*** are you doing…!?" Logan traces the closely-shaven patch inside his hair in shock.

It goes back almost the entire length of his fingers. It’s not a dent, it’s an entire stripe of grainy, raspy skin in the middle of his hair.

F***.

"I told you I needed to shave you, didn’t I?" Cedric turns off the machine with a flick of the switch.
"I thought you meant only around the wound!" Logan protests.
His mom’s husband shrugs "What? You’d rather have a bald patch in your hairline and the rest long?".
"I…" Logan is at loss for words "F***, Cedric. Nothing, thanks for the warning beforehand or for asking me about it. Really appreciate it" he adds sarcastically.
"I don’t get why you’re…" he bites his tongue "Okay, let me stitch this and put a gauze on it, then we’ll see about the rest of your hair, okay?" his stepfather holds his hands up in the air, as if he was handing himself over or something "Maybe we can figure something out".

Logan sees the hair clippers being placed on top of the kitchen counter quietly. Cedric´s hands then move then in a route he’s also seen his mother’s do over the years.

First, under soap and warm water on the sink, onto a paper towel, then to the box of gloves and finally to the disinfectant and the gauze and a pack of stitches.

"Okay, I need you to hold your head steady" he feels the gloved hand press a damp gauze against the wound to clean it.

He grasps the chair’s seat with his hands and feels the needle going inside his skin with the first stitch. Logan can’t recall the last time he needed stitches, must have been a long time ago when he was a kid.

His mom had done it for him back then.

"I don’t think I can salvage your hair in any way…" Cedric gives him his thoughts "I’m taking a closer look and…".
"Okay, fine, shave it all off, then" Logan sighs in annoyance "I don’t care".

They both remain quiet for a second.

He wonders idly if they would have cut off so much of his hair in the ER, or if they had left it intact.

Great Friday night so far. Getting injured like this and getting all his hair buzzed off by his stepfather. It’s going to be the talk of family reunions for years to come.

The story to top all his other episodes of lack of judgement so far.

"So, how did you get your head torn open?" the man asks him.
"With a wall".
"With a wall" Cedric echoes his own words, says them back and aloud, as if he wanted him to actually get an idea of how stupid everything that comes out of his mouth actually sounds.

That is a cue for him to actually tell him the truth.

And Logan knows from experience that whatever he tries to keep from Cedric, his mom will get involved and she will pry him and end up telling Cedric as well.

There is a shortcut to save him from all of that, and that is telling his stepfather and Logan hates taking it but...

"Fine" he sighs, he almost swallows his entire breath "He got out of jail".
"Who?" Cedric takes a pair of surgical scissors from the table and cuts the filament of the suture close to his head "Can you please actually speak in whole sentences, I can’t keep guessing what you’re referring to or read your mind, Logan".
He keeps his gaze on the floor "My dad".
His stepfather remains quiet for a while, he looks for the adhesive and cuts another strip of gauze "How did you…?".
"Did you know!?" Logan confronts Cedric in a thunder, then he calms down "My uncle made a post about it, celebrating he got him out of jail. I… I passed by his old office and I just… I don’t know, something just overcame me and…".

Cedric finishes attaching the clean strip of gauze over the wound, the scissors snap shut at the end of the adhesive, over his head.

"Logan, are you f***ing serious!?"
"Okay, so, he called the cops, fine!?" Logan skips over most of the parts "Stupid friends of my uncle, who is f***ing moron can’t believe his precious, baby brother would do anything to me" he pauses "Unless I deserved it, that is".
"How could have you deserved it, Logan? You were a child!".

He ignores the rage in the man’s voice and avoids meeting his gaze.

His stepfather gathers his medical supplies from over the table and gives him space while he walks towards the counter.

"Anyway, they had to hold me down and they me put up against a wall and…" Logan continues, his hand goes around the edges of the wound "Well, that’s pretty much it".

Cedric crosses his arms over the kitchen table, standing across him, he places two glasses full of water over it. He slides one in his direction.

"And what for?"
"I don’t know. I saw the light on and…" Logan feels his head spinning, he gathers what remains of his bangs between his fingers and pulls them back away from his face "Maybe I want to give him a reason to actually… Maybe, I just don’t want him to know peace, okay?".
"If he’s at peace or not, that’s his problem" his stepfather’s voice hardens "Your problem is your own peace of mind".
"I don’t care he doesn’t care, okay?" he hears himself and wonders why he can’t seem to string two thoughts together in a single sentence but he can’t stop it "I mean, he doesn’t care, it’s fine! I still want it to at least make sure he doesn’t forget about it, even if he doesn’t care… Maybe I wanted to show me I’m not afraid anymore".

Logan moves the glass of water closer to him, he does feel thirsty, maybe he is dehydrated and he needs the water to clear his head.

If it works that way or not, he doesn’t know it, but he thinks he can command and trick his body and his brain into thinking things are better if he drinks some of it.

"Pfft" Cedric drinks a sip of water "Come on, I know you took up martial arts because of how terrified you were of your dad, you think I don’t know that, Logan?".

He feels his blood turn to ice.

Logan wraps his hand around the glass of water and feels a tremor, he becomes aware that his hands are shaking.

"I…" he feels his throat tied up in knots.
His stepfather’s expression changes right away when he notices it.
"I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry".
"No, well, you’re not lying…".
"No, that doesn’t make it okay" Cedric moves forward a questioning, careful hand towards his forearm "I’m sorry".

Logan takes a deep breath and rubs his eyelids. He lowers his head and sees the stray locks of shorn hair on the floor. He’s tired.

"Whatever, just finish shaving my head and let’s get this over with" he drinks the whole glass of water in one motion and runs his hand across his treasured shoulder-length mane, about to be devastated.
"Alright" Cedric retrieves the hair clippers.

Logan comes face to face again with the consequences of his actions.

A scar on his head and a full clipper shave. He has truly outdone himself tonight.

His stepfather tells him to sit still as he angles the clippers towards his forehead.

He sees the bare steel at the end of it start whirring in blurring motions as he turns it on.

They buzz loudly, deafening, he’s never heard them this loud as when they’re approaching his head and not as some passing background noise in a barbershop.

He shuts his eyes and feels the locks coming off slowly, caressing his face as they fall. He can hardly feel anything remaining on his head when the clippers make a second pass.

Even without a mirror, Logan knows what his head is starting to look like buzzed at zero length, just a grainy, pale, slightly greyish hint of his hair left.

His stepfather is being really careful around the wound, he can tell, he runs the clippers in many different directions around it’s borders, but never too close to it.

Cedric moves the clippers to the front of his ear; he tilts his head softly to the side and slides them up his sideburn all the way to the top.

He feels the weight of a clump of hair landing on his shoulder as he starts shaving the side and becomes aware of how much hair he’s actually losing.

"You have a scar" Cedric observes his temple.
"I know" he answers dryly.

Logan thinks he would be far more distressed about having to shave all his head if he wasn’t so exhausted.

"You know what?" he tells Cedric, as he listens to the clippers going over the opposite side of his head, as he feels him fold his ear and shave around it "When he got sent to jail, I thought that it would be it. That it was how it ended, but now that he’s out, I feel like it’s not over and…".
"Of course, you still feel like it’s not over! Because, it never ends, Logan!" his stepfather cuts him short "Not until you decide it ends! Not until you say enough is enough".

Of course, Cedric isn’t one for half-things or middle-grounds. He sees something that has to be extirpated and he doesn’t do it halfway. It doesn’t work like that in his mindscape.

Logan wishes his mindscape was that sharp and had such clear and clean-cut lines. Things inside his head at times feel all over the place and where they shouldn’t be.

Where should he even be now?

He takes a deep breath.

He doesn’t know if it will end or how but he knows that he is tired.

There’s a place where he is right now, at this very moment and that is being shorn down to nothing with hair clippers by his stepfather.

His head recently cleaned and closed with stitches and the wound protected with gauze and disinfectants by him.

All things considered, it isn’t a terrible place to be in, he concedes.

"Bend your head forward, I’ll do the back and we’ll be done" Cedric sighs and moves behind him, he sees the cable of the clippers follow his steps.

He feels the gentle nudge on his crown, his chin rests upon his chest.

Logan can’t stop the shiver down his spine when he feels his stepfather lift the hair at the back of his head and then the clippers follow his hand and his nape getting buzzed down to nothing as the rest of his head.

He feels supernaturally aware of the mass of hair falling down his back, like his proprioception (is that what that is called, that thing the body does that identifies it’s own parts like parts of, well itself? Logan doesn’t know) is overdeveloped and he can also feel the moment it touches the floor.

There’s an airy breeze on the back of his head, of his neck that feels very alien and unnatural and he finds himself crossing his arms tightly over his chest to try to get rid of the sensation.

F***, this is going to get forever to get used to. He is going to miss his long hair so much. Logan already knows it.

"You know, my dad always had this weird obsession with the way I wore my hair…" he reminisces as he feels the last remains of his hair getting shorn down to skin "He had these old-fashioned rules like it couldn’t touch my collar and all that, but was also oddly specific that they never cut it too short"

Logan thinks he would be laughing at the irony, or at the absurdity of it all if it didn’t hit so close to home.

"I believe it was four fingers length on top minimum and no longer than six for him to be presentable".

He can remember the monthly trips with his father to the barbershop if he tries.

"The f***ing control freak" he adds.

Not that he wants to try to remember.

He would rather remember this, he thinks, as the sound of the clippers get less harsh on his ears, as he gets used to having the man maneuver his head gently.

The buzzing noise almost starts to lull him. He find the vibration relaxing once it’s done removing his hair. Pleasant, almost.

"Just a reminder, you know I don’t care how you wear your hair" Cedric slides the clippers perpendicular to his nape, slides them down his neck while holding his head forward "And I know my opinion doesn’t matter, nor do I think it should but…" then he turns the machine off "…I think being buzzed suits you".
"Thanks, Cedric" Logan shakes off the hair that’s still clinging to his shoulders with a smile.

The sight of all his healthy, long and thick hair on the floor still weights on his stomach.

But he can tell that his stepfather is being honest and that doesn’t make it easier but Logan thinks that despite what he believes, it does matter.

Yes, his words mean something for him, after all these years.

"I’m thinking about how we’re going to tell your mom without scaring her".

Oh yeah, that too.

"I can tell her and deal with her fit, it wouldn’t be the first time I scare her" Logan yawns "But, tomorrow".
"In defense of your mom, being a parent is terrifying, Logan" the man unplugs the hair clippers and makes loops with the cord to put it away back wherever he got it from.
"Says the man who cuts people open and puts them back together" he says playfully, while trying to shake the shorn hair off the back of his neck "That sounds horrifying".
"I…" Cedric rolls his eyes "I’ll let you have this one, just this once".
"So, it’s going to hurt, for long?" he asks him.
"It’s a wound, of course it’s going to hurt" his stepfather says matter-of-factly, in his lecturer voice "But it’s also going to get better in time" his hand caresses the back of his head "Now go get some rest. You need it".

He touches his head, almost bare except for the sandpaper, rough, cut at skin-length stubble he has left.

A couple weeks and he’ll look like Jude, he tries to anticipate that. He thinks once he has reached that length it won’t be so bad.

He can maybe look forward to that.

It’s going to get better.

It’s going to stop hurting.

Logan doesn’t take his stepfather’s word for a lot of things, but this once, he decides he’s going to.

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