Page 20 of Declan's Hope

If he hadn’t respected the colonel so much, he’d have pulled a Callahan and left against medical advice days ago. But his boss—the one person, besides his family, who he hadn’t been able to drive away—had basically commanded him to follow his doctors’s orders. And he was nothing if still not a good Marine. So here he remained, wallowing in this damned hospital bed that had his back in a twist. If he had to wallow anywhere, he’d prefer to do it in his own bed, in his own house. At least there he could lock his doors to keep everyone out.

Although if any of the team wanted to get in, they’d find a way. He snorted. He wouldn’t put it past Garrett to have already installed cameras and sound equipment for when he—

Hmm…

He might have to do a sweep of his house once he got home. He loved that man like a brother, but not enough to let Garrett basically have his house rigged like a giant baby monitor so he could keep tabs on him. And he wasn’t going to even think about any truth in that analogy.

The only thing that had made the last few days slightly bearable had been him managing to finally get the team to agree to stay away. He’d been an asshole to them—he knew he had—but he didn’t need or want them hanging around and treating him like some kind of invalid.

Well, maybe they hadn’t treated him like one, so much as he’d felt like one with them around. They were all able-bodied and whole, while he…

Anyhow, no matter what they said about when he came back to work, what kind of contribution could he make? His specialty was munitions and sniping. Sure, he could still strategize when it came to planning. His brain still worked. Thank god. He could even learn to shoot with just the one eye. But with what kind of accuracy? He’d basically have to retrain himself and that could take months.

Months when the team would need to replace him with someone with his skillset. Although the colonel had been adamant Declan would have a place at the agency no matter how long it took for him to fully recover. But even if he felt fit enough to go on missions, he’d be a liability. His limited field of vision could mean the difference between life or death for one of his teammates. He couldn’t put them at risk like that.

Declan also didn’t want to have to force the colonel to tell him he had to be left behind on missions when the situation called for it. He didn’t think he could handle that.

Shit. He sounded like a big ol’ baby. So maybe he did need monitoring.

Haven and Destiny hadn’t been shy about telling him he was being childish. Hope’s two best friends had taken him to task—whether he was in a hospital bed or not—demanding to know what he’d done to hurt Hope. They’d informed him she was miserable, wasn’t coming back to the hospital, and she refused to tell them why. It hadn’t taken long for him to banish the twinge of regret he felt over that. All he had to do was remember the way she’d looked at him. But he had found it interesting she hadn’t shared what had happened early that first morning with them.

Their visit hadn’t been pleasant, but it had been honest. He’d appreciated that. He’d rather have their anger than platitudes and how great his future could still be. Of course he’d told them they could mind their own damned business too. Destiny had finally had enough and gotten in his face, giving him the parting shot of, "You’re a fool," before grabbing Haven’s hand and dragging her complaining from the room. Cal hadn’t brought it up at the team’s visit later that same day, but he had received a lot of disapproving looks from his friend.

He relaxed back into the pillow his sister had brought him from his home. At least he didn’t have to worry about any of that now. And honestly, it was a relief. Now he just had his family to deal with. They weren’t so easy to get rid of.

He fixed his gaze toward the window and did his best to turn a blind eye—talk about a turn of phrase—to what was going to be his new normal. He blinked several times and resisted the urge to rub over his socket. If only the same could be said for the damned silicone conformer they’d placed during his surgery.

The bandages had come off his eye four days ago. It had taken him two more days to finally work up the nerve to look at himself in a mirror.

What he’d forced himself to stare at for a long time hadn’t been pretty.

The left side of his face and head had still been swollen, with bruising in that yellowish/purple phase running down his cheek, up over his forehead, and across the bridge of his nose, while the shaved left side of his head had shown off in stark detail the area where he’d been shot. His doctor had explained the reconstruction done around his eye. What he’d called donor bone had been used to rebuild the blown out socket.

Declan had figured the surgeon had done a good enough job with what she’d had to work with. But the network of scarring surrounding his eyes, along with the patchwork stitching pulling his eyelid together, would have looked more at home on the Frankenstein monster.

Strangely enough, all of that he could live with. But the blank, dead, white, temporary prosthesis staring out at him wasn’t.

The doctor had warned him—in fact had told him in great, excruciatingly painful detail—exactly what had happened to him and the surgeries that had followed over the course of that first day after being shot.

Colonel Sheppard had called in every top surgeon in the fields of ophthalmology, bone reconstruction, and plastic surgery, as well as the country’s leading ocularist—someone who made ocular and orbital prostheses—to "fix" him. And, according to Dr. Hall, once the swelling had gone down and the healing process completed, his features might not be completely symmetrical, but they would be close—though the scarring would still be visible.

Even his prosthetic eye would match his existing eye perfectly—fitting over the ocular implant that had been permanently installed deep in his eye socket and wrapped with living tissue. And with the porous nature of the implant, it would eventually become permanent and allow his prosthesis to behave and move like a normal eye.

He frowned. Yeah. He couldn’t wait.

"Are you just going to sit there and scowl at the window all day?"

"I’m not sitting. You’re sitting. I’m lying in bed." He rolled over and grimaced at Mercy's narrowed glare, then indicated with his head at a point behind her. "Don’t you have witnesses to depose?"

"Not right now. And you know what I mean," she said, putting her paperwork on the side table. "And cut out the snarky comments."

"If I did, I’d have nothing to say."

"Look, brother dear, you might have managed to guilt or piss away everyone else in your life. Hell, you’ve just about got Mom and Dad ready to throw in the towel." That bit of news bothered him, but Mercy didn’t need to know that. Her frowning gaze went to the left side of his face and she let out a sigh. He forced himself not to turn away from her steadfast stare. "It’s ugly," she stated, matter of fact before focusing back on his right eye. "And right now you look like you could scare the hair clean off a cat."

"Thanks for sugar-coating it for me."

She leaned forward. "I think you’ve had enough of that from everyone else, don’t you? And I’m not finished. You’ve also been one grade-A asshole and it’s about time you stopped."

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