When Demons Are Redeemed: The Dominant's Muse

One - Escape . . . And Again

ONE  

Escape. . . And Again

In a large cardboard box left in an alley, a young woman hides. She is bloodied,  expressionless, and motionless, with only her eyes occasionally on the move. She barely remembers her past, including her recent stay  in the hospital, where she did not speak a word, not even to reveal her name, after being found  terrified on a beach flanked by a vast forest.

Images of what she does remember come and go in her mind, and she therefore once again sees herself desperately navigating a forest, after her escape. She feels herself terrified that someone will jump out from behind one of the many trees that surround her as she runs, trees that do not allow her easy passage due to their proximity to one another. 

Heart pounding, breathing painful and shallow due to her running beyond her lungs' endurance, scratches and bruises everywhere upon her body, and scant clothing torn, she then sees herself running through the last line of trees to suddenly find herself in a wide-open area, on a beach, and  blinded there by the brightness of the day, as reflected upon water and sand. But she does not recall what happened before her escape into the forest, since a healing part of her is quick to stop those files from opening.

The young woman clears her mind, and, when her stomach once again sends an SOS, once again makes her pay attention to a most pressing need since she has not eaten in three days, not since her easy escape from the hospital, she finally decides that she has to leave the safety of her box.

Her muscles complain, as she exits, and dizziness grabs a hold of her when she first stands. She stretches out a hand to stabilize herself, but  the cardboard that it reaches cannot help her, and she almost crumbles to the ground. Once recovered, she tentatively places one foot before the other and walks, although unsteadily at first. And then, not.

She is not at all a pretty sight to behold, since her clothes are soaked right through with blood, but what the world sees and thinks does not matter to her, since she expects nothing from it. Not anymore. And so, she walks on, on automatic pilot, left, right, left,  ignoring everyone who speaks to her, without even a glance towards them when they do.

After a fifteen-minute march, her nose guides her to a dumpster behind a small Italian restaurant, and she finds that a partial memory is linked to the odour there of freshly discarded food.  Lasagna. Smells just like . . . She vaguely considers, but without conclusion. As she helps herself to a serving of “leftovers,” a nagging voice tells her that she should mind her manners.

Her mind immediately cycles up again in order to continue to fight her completely forgetting her past, but it does not seek to make her recall the maker of the lasagna, nor the owner of the nagging voice. "All her tests came back normal, including her CT scan,” the young woman instead remembers hearing, at the hospital, which she identifies by the scrubs that she sees people wearing in the images that accompany the words. “There’s no explaining why she’s unresponsive. Not unless we draw her out and she tells us." But no one did.

On her way back to her box one late night, after another walk to the restaurant dumpster, the skies open up on her and rain comes pouring down. After allowing water to embrace her upturned face for a moment, and very much enjoying the feel of it after not experiencing water’s touch in some time, the young woman wants to feel clean throughout, and so, she finds a secluded area, and, despite being in this very bad part of town, removes every article of clothing that she is wearing. Under the temporary outdoor showerhead, she then washes herself and the articles as best she can.

Once dressed again, with the rain still beating down on her, her feet then return her to her container, which, in this seedy part of town, will not be picked up by sanitation workers. She finds herself relieved to discover that the roof extension belonging to one of the buildings on one side of the alley is offering her “home” protection from the rain from above, but then dismayed to find that the water’s accumulation on the pavement, however, is  soaking its cardboard base. After a moment's thought, the young woman nevertheless crawls back into her shelter, since she is already soaked anyway. And then, she works at  letting go of  "relieved" and "dismayed," after blaming the rain, its touch, its cleansing,  for awakening feelings in her. She does not want them.

“We had the police run a check and she doesn't match any missing person case,” her mind plays back for her.

Since the young woman's wounded nature had not allowed her the ability to trust, offers of help at the hospital had not been accepted, and so,  after managing to escape the hospital during the night, she had found herself alone, and had stumbled upon this alley.

That was Catherine's past. Tristan would soon be her future.