The Phoenix

Lucy (I can't even be bothered to come up with a good title)

 The next four days were probably the most boring of her life. It was the same routine, she would wake up around noon because she'd requested the doctors to make her daily schedule according to EST so her body didn't have to adjust once she got home, she would have breakfast at 1, the doctors would change her bags and saline drip at 2, eat "lunch" at 5, have her saline and bags changed at 6, do a medical examination at 8, eat dinner at 10, have everything changed at 11, have her sleep aid administered at midnight, and repeat.

She was so glad when they took out her chest tube, and despite the pain. The doctors expected that she would have a concave scar for a while, but it would fill back in and return to normal over time. You would've thought breathing on her own would be the hardest thing to get used to, but it was actually walking. She'd been confined to the bed for the past five days, so her legs weren't just asleep, they'd practically gone into hibernation. It took her over an hour, but she finally got it back.

Now, to focus on the final, scariest, most difficult, most painful challenges of them all. Going home.

It was all she'd wanted since she woke up in that cellar, but now, she wasn't so sure. People were going to have questions, questions she didn't think she could answer. Lucy wasn't sure she was ready to face everyone after what had happened to her.

She wasn't the same person who stepped on that plane at Ronald Reagan Airport a week ago. She was a whole other person, and she had no idea how people would react to that.

Upon landing in DC, Lucy was handed a baseball cap and a two-sizes-too-big hoodie in an attempt to cover up the wounds from the hoard of cameras awaiting them. She was encouraged by the Secret Service to keep her head down and to not respond to the reporters. Of course, being her, that wasn't at all what ended up happening.

She was doing fine at first. Her pink hair acting as a curtain for her face, keeping her chin angled down to hide the bruises around her throat, and the hoodie covering up the rest. Lucy was approximately halfway through the crowd of people, followed by Aaron, Hannah, and Emily, and surrounded by over 10 Secret Service agents, the reporters screaming her name, yelling questions for her. Then came the one that set her off.

"Why are you hiding?"

That question hit her like a ton of bricks to the chest. She wasn't someone who hid. Lucy was meant to be noticed from day one, and she wasn't going to let some reporter make her seem like a hermit.

She stopped dead in her tracks, snatched the hat and pulled the hoodie off, throwing them both on the ground and pushing her hair back.

"There! Is this what you want to see?" she exclaimed, tilting her head up and holding her arms out, almost every injury in full view. The entire crowd fell silent.

"I. Am. Not. Hiding." she snarled at them.

The reporters snapped out of their states of shock and cameras began flashing even more.

"You want the truth?" she asked hoarsely, tears beginning to form in her eyes. "Here it is. Big, blue, and ugly,"

Lucy grabbed the hem of her shirt and pulled it up just below her bra, revealing her sutures and black bruises.

"Happy?" she demanded.

"Alright, that's enough," Emily hissed at the crowd, pulling Lucy to her and marching forward to the small motorcade awaiting them on the tarmac.

Lucy got in first, Hannah sitting with her in the very back, while Emily and Aaron took the two seats in the front.

"Lucy, why did you do that?" Emily sighed, putting her head in her hands.