And you're right there, but I can't see you

[guardiandevil]

WHO: Matt and anyone who is visiting him in the hospital
WHERE: A hospital...
WHEN: Backdated to Sunday night through Thursday afternoon. Please specify the time and date in your post! :)
WARNINGS: ???
SUMMARY: Matt is in the hospital and people visit him
FORMAT: Whatever you like.

Matt was pretty lousy at this sort of thing. The idea of lying still and letting people poke him and prod him and study his body never sat well with him. He didn't like having to explain away gunshot and stab wounds, or deal with the inevitable vision tests that doctors always seemed to want to perform on him. He especially didn't like that these doctors were strangers to him, people who didn't know him or know his history. He couldn't really trust these people to figure out what was wrong with him, why he'd lost his memories, or why his powers were gone.

But without his radar, he was useless. He felt so paralyzed without it, like he was broken and had no chance in the world of ever being fixed again. Now instead of being Hell's Kitchen's most feared defender he was some pitiful, strung out blind guy. It was quite a way to fall. Sure, he'd experienced a loss of his powers before, but this seemed so much more profound and terrifying. Maybe it was the not knowing how it had happened or who was responsible.

Someone had to be responsible, right? He didn't roofie himself. He didn't rough himself up. But he could remember anything since Tuesday. Whoever had done this had picked the perfect target: without his powers, he wouldn't be able to identify them anyway, with or without the drugs.

As it was now, he couldn't identify the visitors in his room, not without hearing their voices or being told they were there. He couldn't smell people, he couldn't hear their heartbeats. He could do nothing but lie in that bed and wait for some strange doctor to give approval for him to leave.

Matt was pretty sure he was going to go insane.

Comments

[guardiandevil]

"Zatanna." His heart almost skipped a beat when her reflection appeared on his radar. There she was, perfect silhouette standing out amongst the high walls and random architectural oddities of the maze. In this mess of uncertainty, it was comforting to hear a familiar voice echoing and surrounding him.

Matt reached out to her, unsure if physical contact was possible in this state, unsure if anything in this vision would feel at all tangible. If he touched her, would he feel the fabric of her coat? If he reached to the nearest wall, would it feel like ancient stone, or would it vanish into mist. He had so many questions about this, but in the grand scheme of things they didn't seem important enough to ask. If he needed to know something, he trusted that she would tell him. Otherwise, they had another goal at hand.

"What am I supposed to do now?"

[hexappeal]

"Matt," she responds, a smile in her voice. Here's where it got trickier. Each mind was different, each one with their own defense mechanisms. They were created by the subconscious and by the person themselves. How they defined themselves, how they thought others saw them. Like an abstract piece of art that looked normal, was only that way in explanation.

She shifts closer in an instant, faster than the blink of an eye. "We," Zatanna corrects him as she places a hand on his shoulder, as real as he can imagine it to be, "We're going to fix it." She doesn't mean to deliberately be obtuse, but there aren't words that can explain it, not really. She allows her hand to steadily move down his arm, tips of her gloved fingers occasionally flicking the fabric there until she reaches his hand. Palm lightly pressed against his own, eventually entwining her fingers as she pulls him toward her.

She's done this more times than she'd like to admit and this part is far too familiar, hauntingly so. A pathway lights up, full of twists and turns. It's much too plain, much too boring. A few steps forward and the rest is illuminated, perfectly cliché, M.C. Escher-esque foreground, morphing out of that beautiful landscape he'd created for himself earlier. One step at a time.

It seemed most people's minds went to Escher (though his was more Convex and Concave than Relativity), somehow. Like that was the limit of the normal human mind when it came to the impossible. She didn't want to think what it could do if it was capable of being stretched further past the limit. "For now? We climb." And like that, there are stairs.

[guardiandevil]

Climbing he could do. He'd lived in enough buildings without elevators that the idea of climbing staircase after staircase didn't quite faze him. Zatanna's hand securely in his, he had no hesitation in starting their ascent, though he couldn't help but be curious as to what would be waiting for them at the top. It was a world of his own making, sure, but he wasn't quite sure what darkness or light was lurking in the depths of his own mind. Matt had the sneaking suspicion that there was more broken in this world than just this lost weekend. He could only hold out hope that the most desperate and dangerous of his memories would stay safely hidden and not rear their heads during this journey.

"How will we know when we're in the right place?" The stairs seemed to lead to just more stairs. Perhaps if he'd studied more of Escher's work it would have seemed familiar to him, but for Matt this trek was completely genuine. The curving walls and unusually shaped archways that greeted them were really quite novel for him. Still, he expected their destination must lie somewhere beyond the staircases. He almost hoped that whatever it was that was broken or missing would stick out like a sore thumb, be painted with a radioactive X so that he and Zatanna could both see it. "What exactly are we looking for?"