By a bee, Gene wanted to say, but he couldn\'t make his lips move to properly shape the words. Maybe the doctor would hear it buzzing too, and they\'d do their very best to remove it from his head. Stupid bee.
The receptionist didn\'t take long at all to locate the doctor on duty, and in short order, they had taken Gene back to patch him up.
When a nurse entered the reception area nearly an hour later, she was stifling a laugh. "I can take you back if you\'d like to see him," she said, smiling and tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear.
The reason for her amusement was at the center of the room she led Orias to, attached to an IV and prodding suspiciously at the new stitches that adorned the inside of one of his wrists. He guiltily returned the bandage that had covered it when he spied the nurse, and then smiled brightly at Orias when he spotted the man behind her.
"I can\'t feel my face," he announced. "It\'s still there, though, right?" he asked, pinching at his cheeks.
Bridgette, according to her name badge, fought back a smile and turned to Orias. "He didn\'t lose enough blood to justify a transfusion, so we\'ve got him hooked up to a saline mixture and some pretty powerful pain meds," she said, hooking her thumbs in the pockets of her pants. "His arm was fractured in a few places, so we had to get a cast on it, and we had to stitch up his wrist and neck where the bites were the deepest, but beyond that, he\'s fine."
"Am not," Gene protested. "They took my clothes, Orias. They took them and then they put me in a dress. A dress! It doesn\'t even cover my ass." He glared at the nurse. "You just wanted to see it, didn\'t you?"
She half-turned to look at him, her mouth ajar.
"Yeah, I knew it," he crowed. "\'S fine, you can look, but only one touching it is him." He pointed at Orias, in case it wasn\'t clear who he was talking about.
"So... Yeah," she said, giving her attention to Orias again. "We\'d like to keep him on the IV overnight, replenish some of the fluid he lost."