Mansh stepped back from the counter as she spoke into the phone, murmuring quietly — too quietly for him to hear. He didn't need to hear. He could read the cadence of her voice, the rhythm of her disinterest. She wasn't panicked. She wasn't worried. To her, this was routine. To her, this was just another name on a file, another line in a logbook.
But to him, every second mattered. Every passing moment without an answer felt like stepping deeper into a chasm with no visible floor.
He found himself drifting toward the nearest wall, placing a hand against it as if to steady himself. His other hand tightened into a fist at his side. Not out of anger — no, not that — but out of helplessness. The kind that made you feel like a child again, lost in a mall, the world too large, your voice too small to matter.
The wall was cool beneath his palm. Smooth. Sterile. Unyielding.
He leaned into it slightly, closing his eyes for a fraction of a second.
His thoughts blurred at the edges now — not from disbelief, but from the sudden, creeping fear that maybe he had missed something. That there had been some sign, some quiet gesture, some flicker in Ankhush's expression that he had failed to see.
The phone was placed back into the receiver with a soft clack, drawing Mansh out of his spiraling thoughts.
"A ward boy's checking the floors," she said with the same bland professionalism, then turned back to her screen without another glance.
That was it. No reassurance. No urgency. No comfort. Just a cold process.
Mansh nodded faintly, more to himself than her, and turned away.
He didn't know what to do with his body. Standing still felt unbearable, like waiting for a verdict that would never come. So he began to move — slow, anxious steps across the floor. Each one echoed in the wide, impersonal space. A squeak from the soles of his shoes against the waxed tile. Then another. He turned at the end of the hallway and came back.
Back and forth.
Again.
And again.
The motion didn't calm him. It didn't ground him. But it gave his fear a place to go, somewhere to live that wasn't his lungs.
His pacing took him past empty chairs lined along the corridor — stiff, plastic things in faded colors. A few were cracked near the corners, bandaged with dull gray tape.
A sudden rush of warmth spread through his chest at the memory — followed immediately by a hollowness. An ache that started in his sternum and spread outward, as if someone had reached inside him and scooped something vital away.
He stopped near a vending machine tucked against the far wall. The buzzing of its motor filled the silence like static. Behind the glass, rows of snacks sat untouched — plastic-wrapped, forgotten, absurdly colorful against the white sterility of the hospital.
Mansh stared at them for a moment, not seeing them at all.
Instead, he saw Ankhush. Smirking. Tossing a bag of chips at him and saying something snide about how the hospital's vending machine was the only good thing about the place.
The phantom image vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and Mansh blinked, eyes suddenly stinging. He hadn't even noticed the tightness in his throat.
He sniffed once. Quietly. Glanced at the ceiling like maybe the tears would drain back upward if he just tilted his head the right way.
'Don't cry. Not here. Not now.'
But emotion didn't listen to logic. It never had.
He turned his face slightly away from the hallway, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his sleeve — not to wipe away tears, but to hide the evidence of their beginning. They hadn't fallen. Not yet. But they hovered dangerously, a fragile layer of glass in his eyes.
More time passed. Too much and not enough.
Still no sign of the ward boy. Still no news.
Still no Ankhush.
***
A/N: I was not able to upload yesterday but I will upload as much as chapters I can today.
Someone said that the memory that Mansh got is a little weird because Ankush was unconscious so how did he say that thing actually the thing is Ankush got in a fight so he got admitted in the hospital like a year before this story.
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