After and Under

Part 1

She had been awake for days before her body realized it.

To be aware and thinking – even in disjointed, tangled streams of thought more than real ideas... And yet, she was just a mind, housed in the flesh-prison of her body and completely disconnected, with no way to control that body.

It terrified her. But her heart didn't race and her lungs drew air in and out, her body oblivious to what the mind felt.

And the people around her didn't even seem to realize in those awful days.

There was always someone else in the room with her, every time she woke. When her naked body shivered and her hands only weakly grasped at empty air, someone reached out to cover her with a blanket. When she sweated, there was a cool damp cloth to wipe over her limbs.

They did not speak as they did this. The silence was almost as upsetting as her dead-weight body, and as impossible for her to break as it was for her to sit up and open her eyes.

When she did manage to move a twitching limb out of place, they picked it up and flexed it. Barely-felt massages to her muscles accompanied the occasional flip of her limp body to a new position. They cared that she didn't get bedsores, she thought, grateful, but they forgot to flip her pillows when she helplessly drooled and then had to feel the dampness dry crusty on her face.

And they cleaned her when she wet herself. Every time, she was horrified, through the fugue, feeling the impersonal hands tidy her up. Humiliated.

The owner of the hands didn't speak as they did this either, and that made it a little better, a little easier to slip back into the dark and forget.

Or maybe they did. She couldn't trust her ears any more than she could the rest of her flesh. Everything was numb. Unresponsive. She knew the muscles were there, but they were doing their own thing right now, and she hadn't been invited to share.

But it got better with time. How much time? She didn't know. Her head was in darkness, and sometimes she slept, but there was no way to count the days or minutes or months or hours– whatever it was – that she spent lying there.

She rolled back into consciousness once again, taking in the weight of her body. A spring dug into her hip; she was laid on her side this time. Her belly itched, and her fingers scratched the blanket, even if she couldn't quite bend the elbow.

She tried – monumental effort. But there was a reward; yes! She rolled to her side, and her arms flopped like a dead thing's, momentum dragging her off the cot and to the floor.

She was caught around the waist before she hit the ground.

Eyelids weren't in working order just yet but, apparently, they hadn't ever been completely shut because she saw the shape of the man that had saved her from her fall.

He was a long, angular figure with bony arms like steel rods around her waist as he hoisted her back on the bed.

There was no puff of effort, no sound of laboured breathing at all except the rattle-rasp coming from her own chest.

Oh. Her hearing was back. That was nice, she supposed.

But the eyes still didn't work properly - and wherever she was seemed gloomy anyhow – and she was still as weak as a fetus.

The hard hands gripped her wrists and ankles and laid her out straight and flat on her back. The bedsprings dug into her spine now. She sighed.

Her hand was grabbed, and she became aware of the itch in her wrist suddenly now the man's hard fingers were plucking at it. Did she have... a cannula? She felt the needle slide from her skin; yes, she did.

The dark respite of sleep called her again. But this time, she had a reason to resist. She remembered.