Lazarus ━━ Sense8 [Discontinued]

| 03: MORE THAN JUST A NAME

CHAPTER THREE:
MORE THAN JUST A NAME

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NO MATTER HOW HARD she scrubbed the wet rag against her face, the blood was still not coming off. Small droplets of crimson were scattered across her face, constantly being smeared across her cheekbones with every swipe of the towel. With shaking hands, she twisted the knob again until a gush of water streamed out of the tap. The cloth was practically drenched in freezing water, but it never stopped her from harshly wiping down his face. Her skin stretched under the harsh touch of the dripping fabric, accompanied by painful rubs of irritation and a swift burning sensation. It was the panic soaring through her body that made her so jittery, so anxious to rid herself of the hateful color, so determined to get the mysterious splatter off of her face.

There was still the cruel echoing of multiple gun shots in her head, bouncing off of the walls of her cranium and taunting her with images she had never seen before. There was some sort of conflict involving drugs which ended up with four men shooting at each other and seemingly ending up dead in a apartment condo. A woman was in the center of this shoot-out, a frightened girl with cropped white hair and melancholy hazel eyes. The accent attached to her words was thick and European, though her English was pretty coherent. She desperately wanted to stop whatever was going on, but Alana could feel that she was slowly coming off from some drug high.

Alana didn't know this woman or the four guys that were involved with the shoot-out, but she did know she woke up on the floor with sweat coating her skin and cherry ink painted on her face. It made her sick to her stomach for some reason. Being a nurse, she had no problem being around blood and she had treated victims of gunshot wounds, but after everything that's been happening (the suicidal angle, the rain, the funeral, the cop), the nightmare had sent her into a spiral of ultimate panic.

Perhaps the reason why she was so affected by the dream was, because it was realistic. It didn't feel like she was a fly on the wall or just some third point of view. It was as if she was standing in the middle of that apartment, watching the events play out. There were even times where her eyes were the same pair of eyes that belonged to the powder-haired female. It was an out-of-body experience and it was that specific thought that made Alana somehow believe that her dream wasn't just some made-up dream. It couldn't be, not when she was practically scrubbing her skin off in attempt to wipe away blood. A dream wouldn't churn her stomach so much, a nightmare wouldn't cause her to question everything that's been happening to her, a fantasy wouldn't splatter blood on her face.

"Sofðu, unga ástin mín,- úti regnið grætur." Under her breath, in a delicate and quiet voice, Alana began to sing a foreign song that even to her own ears, she couldn't understand. The logical part of her brain told her to stop, that muttering Icelandic words (how the hell did she know it was Icelandic?) wasn't going to help the situation. Despite that area of her brain knocking her around, telling her to listen, the lullaby's lyrics flowing out of her mouth was surprisingly soothing. "Mamma geymir gullin þín, gamla leggi og völuskrín. Við skulum ekki vaka um dimmar nætur."

The bathroom door slowly creaked open, grabbing the woman's attention quickly. When she turned around, she saw her daughter's tiny head peeking around the edge of the door, her eyes filled with sleep though there were dazed hints of confusion. "Mommy, are you okay?"

Why was she freaking out? Why wasn't she seeing the blood? Any normal seven year old child would look at blood and freak out. Alana turned her head back at the mirror and immediately became even more puzzled than she was before. The crimson paint that was once smeared across her cheeks and smudged on her temples were gone. All that was on her face was the left-over mascara under her eyelids from the previous night and the underlying blanket of sweat that was sticking to her skin. Little bits of her conscious was relieved that the horrifying imprint of the shoot-out was gone, but another part, a much larger part, was terrified that she had made everything up.