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Departed
It was hot and stuffy, Ruairi could feel beads of sweat running down his face. He sat in an upright position in a tight space with his knees squashed against a rough, hard and fluffy surface. He could tell that both of his arms were laying on armrests, his right arm was touching someone else's arm. He couldn't get over how hot and stuffy the air was, he was gasping for a drink because his throat was bone dry, he thought this was because he slept with his head tilted back and that his mouth open constantly sucking in the dry air. Suddenly he felt a sharp stinging pain in his right fore arm and seconds later his eyes were heavy and his body was limp. He had fallen back into a deep sleep.
His eyes cracked open and both of them were suddenly met by a bright light that blinded him for a moment. He closed his eyes until they were able to re adjust to the light. This reminded him of the incident with Jack and his thugs, how if the light had not blinded him before, he would have seen who it was and re-thought his actions. Now with his eyes fully open he looked around him and relaised that he was in a hospital bed.
'Hmmm must have been a dream' he said gently sitting up in his bed to watch Sky Sports on the television.
He pulled his eyes away from the television for a while to look at the white cast on his arm and carefully touch the bandage across the bridge of his nose with his one good arm. There was a small mirror on the bed side table, he reached over and plucked it off the flat surface and then gazed at his broken face in the mirror.
'This'll put a dampener on my pullin' girls for a couple months' he said sighing heavily and then quietly adding 'or even trying.'
He propped the mirror onto the small table and then he re-attached both of his eyes back onto the T.V screen. About half an hour later after having heard that Liverpool were beating Sunderland by two goals with twenty three minutes left, a nurse came into the room. She was in her early twenties, wearing teal nurse's scrubs with white trainers on and lastly she wore a smile on her face.
'Hello there! did you have a nice sleep?' she said cheerfully.
It took Ruairi a while to adjust to her happy mood because nurses in Derry never ever were happy in their line of work. Mostly because of the difficult challenges and sadness they faced everyday. This one was different somehow.
'I guess so.......I just had a really mad dream' Ruairi said slumping down under the warm covers, looking up at the cracked ceiling. 'Would you care to tell me about it?' she asked sitting herself down in a chair near his bed. 'Ummmm sure' Ruairi said with an obvious look of befuddlement on his face.
He explained to the nurse the strange feelings he had in the dream and told her how at the end he felt a sharp pain in his right arm and it felt like his eyes were so heavy and that his whole body went limp. Whilst he told the nurse all of this she sat there listening carefully with a fascinated look on her face that Ruairi could tell she was putting on for his benefit. When he had finished she only had four words to say that she had been dying to say throughout his entire story.
'Roll up your sleeve' she said looking at my right arm.
Ruairi was quite astonished that that is what she had to say but he was also curious, so he rolled up his sleeve to see a developing bruise and a red dot of blood on his fore arm. He automatically knew that this was left behind by an injection. His eyes widened fully and then he looked at a snickering nurse.
'What's so funny?!' he blurted out at her 'what is this?'
Ruairi was having an internal debate with himself. One side saying to 'it was a dream' another side saying 'it wasn't a dream' and the last side saying 'would the both of you shut up and listen to Nursey Mc Laugh Laugh!'
'Would you like me to explain young man?' she said. He looked at her and quickly nodded, his eyes still bulging from their sockets.
She spent twenty minutes explaining to him that once he was fixed up in the ambulance he was put on a plane and taken over to England and that stuffy and hot place he was in was the plane. More specifically he was taken to Cherub a secret organisation hidden somewhere in the English countryside. This organisation was made up of child spies who went on dangerous missions in order to do what the adults couldn't. After all what drug dealer would expect children were sent to spy on him. he also received some more shocking news when he was told that Steven was a Cherub agent and that he had recruited him into the organisation. He was the one who had deemed him fit to join Cherub. Finally she ended her explanation by giving him a choice.
'You have the rest of the day to decide whether or not you want to stay at Cherub, when you have your answer please go to the Chairman's Office and tell him. If it's a yes then he'll explain it to you a lot better than I have'
Once she had finished she dropped a key on his lap with a tag on it saying '4G'.
'That's your room key, your fit to go there now, the dorms are just across from here so it won't be a long walk' she finished, got up out of her chair and happily skipped off towards the door but not before calling back to him. 'Say hello to Steven for me! He's in 4E!'
Ruairi was still in awe as to what he had just been told, it was so difficult for him to grasp so he decided to go to his room and think it over. He slowly got out of the bed and grasped his room key tightly in his left hand before lazily walking out of the room towards the dormitories.
