Two weeks, five days, seven hours, forty four  minutes and twenty one seconds.

"Twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.." Mumbled Eddy under his breath, counting how long he had been at the compound since he came to. He remembered very little as to what transpired to wind him up at the strange compound, he remembered looking down at his legs, pins screwed into his bones to hold them in place, then a pretty nurse came in with a tray of medicine, a small green bottle that looked to be one of those droppers. She sat by his bed side and stroked his hair, father having fallen asleep in a chair nearby and not giving him much attention. 

They talked for a few minutes, the nurse and Eddy, the woman putting him at ease with her gentle voice. Eddy had never had a mother, she had passed away soon after giving birth to him, and the sound of a woman's voice was completely alien to him; in the books he had read (the numbers too numerous to recall), he always fantasized what a woman's voice must have sounded like, when a female character spoke he relied on the description his father gave him, a higher pitch to men and much smoother but every time he interpreted it in his head they just sounded like men with higher voices.

The nurse told him to open his mouth and lift his tongue, when he did so she pulled the dropper off the top of the bottle and squeezed a single drop of the sweet liquid into the soft base of his tongues. At the touch of the medicine he grew drowsy and the last thing he remembered was the fading voice of the nurse, "Sweet dreams.." She crooned. 

Then he fluttered his eyes open and he was looking at a ceiling not at all like the one of the hospital, he called for his father, nothing. He called for the nurse, nothing. Ed slipped out of bed and looked down at his legs anticipating screws but found his legs devoid of metal, the only clue that he had steel pins in his bones being small dot-shaped scars around his leg. He ran, bare foot, bolting out of the apartment building shirtless, wearing nothing but grey track pants and blue socks. Eventually he found himself in the library, lost in the maze of books, but soon he settled in, finding sleeping amongst books more comfortable then sleeping in a foreign bed, he essentially moved in, building a book fort in the far corner to call home.

"Twenty five, twenty six.." He continued to count under his breath, as he flipped the page of the book he was reading, his eyes rolling over the printed ink with a practiced ease, as all he did back home was read and there, it helped him get his mind off being parted from his old life. Ed's reading was interrupted by the sound of a woman over the intercom, Miss Dawson he learned she was called, her voice wasn't like the nurse's bird song, he didn't like it, she told of breakfast at the mall. He took the woman up on her offer. Puffing out of the fort and into the hallway outside of it, he made way to the mall, still shirtless but otherwise clean (why did the library have a shower?). He plodded into the food court, looking around at all the people, 'so many people' he ported to the back of a distant line and waited to get to the front. His body buzzing and letting off a faint static hum, his energy finding nowhere to go but into the air around him because he wasn't teleporting.