Third Person. P.O.V

The hero's teacher had been at the hospital for three days.

The doctors and nurses had barely stopped working on the boy at all the entire time, after the first surgery they'd managed to just about save his lungs. It had been touch and go for a while during that op and they'd almost lost him more than once, his heart was too weak after the trauma, and the operations, although necessary, were not helping.

After that they'd spent hours upon hours trying to stitch the larger wounds (they needed to make sure he didn't die of blood loss) they sewed his back together as best they could, the whipping had left his skin hanging off in blood covered strips, revealing muscle, sinew and bone. They'd has to carefully hold it together and then sew it; his back looked like a patchwork between the stitches and bandages.It was even worse where they'd had to carefully extract fragments of bone where the whip's metal had caught on his skeleton, it had been a struggle to close even the smaller (in comparison, they were still ghastly) wounds, the doctors had been forced to disregard any fear of scarring to ensure that the teen lived. They didn't have time to worry about what his back would look like afterwards.

Doing all that took one day and one night. One day and one night of pure fear and stress for the poor teacher in the waiting room and all the people from Goode, when a nurse had finally came in and told the teacher that they'd managed to re-inflate his lung (although they still ad a tube going to it to make sure it stayed that way) and sew up his back and how now been forced to let him rest, though, ideally, they'd be working on a more permanent treatment for his horrific injuries on his front and the rest of his body, he just wouldn't've been able to survive it so soon.

In addition to this, his preexisting scars (and there were a LOT of them) made it hard for the doctors to work, to distinguish old stitch lines form new and to see what they were doing clearly. They also ran the risk of aggravating old injuries, Percy had said that he used a painkiller on his arms, but they had no idea what for and therefor no idea what to be careful of. It was vicious.

By midday the next day they were able to start again, they carefully unwound his bandages and started soaking his burns and the brands along his chest and back, there was a grotesque 'P' burned into his right shoulder blade, now black against his ruined skin, and the words 'hero', 'war' and 'sacrifice' along his pecs and abdominal muscles. It was.....terrifying.

They carefully soaked these brands and the burns along the top half of his arm, where the sick terrorist had gotten tired of cutting zigzags into the other. Cuts which were now neatly stitches and wrapped in medicine-soaked bandages. Then they rubbed a special paste onto the burns and wrapped them as best they could; the deep burns had killed some nerves and Percy would forever have spots with no feeling and discolouring. The teacher's tired mind had barely followed the explanation as the nurse described the procedures. Apparently, the acid from the knife used to carve into the broken boy had caused complications, meaning they had to carefully treat the wound before stitching it, further increasing his already dangerous levels of blood loss.

It wasn't looking good.

Once they'd done as much as they could for the burns the doctors had moved onto the cuts on his chest. That was where the problems had started. Two of the deeper cuts had gotten infected, it wasn't as bad an infection as it could have been considering the circumstances, but with so many more wounds to treat, it was a complication the young hero couldn't afford.

Due to the antibiotics required to fight the infection, the doctors couldn't do anything too invasive for fear of putting too much stress on the poor boy's body, so they were restricted to making his unconscious body drink mixtures and tonics to soothe his throat and organs from when the torturer had forced him to swallow acid and rubbing slaves into his shallower cuts to counteract the poison used to wash them. These poisons had to be dealt with soon, they were making his fever even worse. They needed his body strong. And soon.

The stab wound by his stomach had caused even more problems, they'd stitched and bound it early on but they had to constantly be careful while treating his other wounds so as to make sure they didn't make it worse.

The countless doctors and nurses who'd come to update the teacher during his stay had frankly been astounded: by all intents and purses the boy on their operating table should be dead, he'd been beaten, bludgeoned and burned, and yet he was still fighting. So they'd told him, late on the second night, as he was still fighting, every member of staff in the hospital had sworn to do so as well. They were all determined to save the brave hero bleeding in their beds.

So here they were, Percy unconscious on one of the hospital beds, waiting for the antibiotics to take effect so the doctor, constantly monitoring him, could do more. They planned to start on his legs once he was strong enough, set them, sew where they had to and, horrifically, insert temporary metal rods to keep them in place and make sure the bones healed properly....it was......bad...really, really bad. The hammer used by 'Picasso' had shattered most the bones in his upper legs and caused severe damage to his skin and muscle. They didn't know what condition his legs would be in once he healed...if he healed at all. They didn't know if he'd ever be able to walk again. Or even if he'd survive their procedures, or the infection, or the blood loss, or the trauma, or the poison or countless other things and it hurt. It hurt the teacher to see his student, the young boy so selfless and brave, lying there fighting for his life as his friends and family sat holding their breathe. Unable to do anything to help him.

He purposefully forced himself to think about something else to prevent a break down. He couldn't handle this.

They still needed to set the bones in Percy's hand the sick, b****** had snapped all the fingers on his left hand, leaving them all at horrid angles.

The teacher still couldn't get over it, couldn't process it, the doctors; the medical experts; had flat out admitted that the boy should be dead. Should be dead! It just....it just wasn't right. In all his life he'd never been truly helpless, there was always something he could do to fix his problems, but now, slouching on the cheep, plastic chair in the tilled waiting room, there wasn't anything he could do. There was nothing the teacher could do as his student somehow defied death, survived on borrowed time, in the hospital room just up the hall.

He was utterly helpless.

And as of right then......

So was Percy.