Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Forty Two - Horonigai [ほろ苦い]

[Warning: This chapter has content that may be triggering to some people. Reader beware.]

If sleep could keep her safe from the heartache and fear that filled the waking world, then Amaya didn't know if she would ever want to wake up.

Callous words, gazes of fear and contempt; She was so tired of it all she just couldn't cope anymore. The world was a harsh place where presumptions and half-baked guesses were the defining principle between man and monster. And she were a monster for nothing more than circumstances half-read, half-validated and left as a final conclusion. The few that made the effort to "see" her with unclouded gazes were so few and far between, and not even the knowledge of their presence was enough to bite back against the corrosive pain.

She half wondered when this would all end, and whether if by her hand she should just hasten the prospect.

It wouldn't hurt her so much if she did.

Her even existing wouldn't harm the others she wished to keep safe, either.

The faint, monotonous chime sounded through the dark, louder and louder with every repetition. The comfort of darkness and isolation wavered as the starting spikes of pain made their way through the dark to grip her, pulling her out of the depths by force.

The air felt cold against her aching skin as she found herself awake, with little strength to pry open her eyes. The chill sunk into her body, as if her body struggled to even contain just the slightest shred of warmth. Feeling weak and feeble was not what she had initially expected upon awakening, but that was the way things were, and it was further compounded by the monotonous chime of a machine somewhere over towards her right.

With far more trouble than she'd expected, Amaya managed to open her eyes to find herself lying in a hospital bed within a dark room where the only source of light she could detect was emitted by a heart-rate monitor propped up on a stand and the overhead lights switched to its lowest setting overhead. A drip stood on the left side of the bed, with an empty bag hooked up, that of which she gathered to have contained either pain-killers or saline solution at some point.

The knowledge that she was in a hospital did not surprise her as she stared up at the ceiling and recounted the last she seemed to recall. A baseball bat aimed with an intent to kill, her attempts at shouldering the blows in Samuel's place, and the long, painful journey home. She gathered she was here because of the damage, and that she'd been unconscious for a while.

Her left arm lifted slowly in spite of the pain she could feel rising up to greet her, shifting so that she could carefully check over her current condition without having to turn her head or sit up.

She was dressed in a patients gown, she discovered, along with collar and cuff sling was in place, and a great mass of bandages were wound around her right shoulder down to past the elbow. As she checked further along, she found the bandages around her head had been redone with more padding, her neck itself was horribly stiff and hurt to even touch, and the gashes in her legs were stitched up.

She was a wreck, just as she'd felt.

Her only reprieve was the absence of a catheter bag and she at least had underwear, which meant that she hadn't been lying there unconscious for a multitude of days.

Amaya's eyes drooped shut as she carefully let her arm drop to rest over her stomach, where pain suddenly ricocheted up her body with such violence that she'd practically choked on the sudden gasp she instinctively took.

She couldn't inspect her body further, but the pain that ripped through her at that simple motion was sign enough that she'd sustained abdominal damage somewhere along the line, but for the life of her, Amaya couldn't recall where that could have been.