salute ➳ 〚h.s.〛 〚a.u.〛

chapter 14 - volatile visitors & relevant revelations

She woke with a mouth full of cotton and a head full of absolutely nothing. She wasn't used to that sensation. Her brain was active almost 24/7 thinking about something or other. But when she woke up, there was nothing in there and it took a while of mindlessly rolling her head back and forth on the pillow before the first coherent thought crawled in.

God, her arse hurt like a motherfucker.

She managed to crack her eyes open after being awake for a couple of moments. Running her hands along the soft cotton sheets beneath her, she let her head drop to the side and opened her eyes, taking her first look at wherever she was.

She remembered vaguely the events of the night before, the morphine making it a little tricky to connect the dots in her head. Something about an attacker, she got shot, and now her hip hurt like nobody's business. When she got her hands on that knob that had tried to abduct her, she was going to kill him. Very, very slowly.

For now, she needed the bathroom and she needed food in her rumbling tummy. It took a substantial effort to roll onto her uninjured side and pull herself up. Not only was her hip flaring in pain but all the muscles in her arms and legs seemed to hurt as well. And then she remembered – Liam fucking Payne. She was going to have to kill him too.

She got to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, leaning heavily on her left side to keep from agitating her injury, and had to take a break before she took the final step to standing. She took that moment to look around. She was in an absolutely gorgeous bedroom and she had no idea who it belonged to, although if she had to guess it was probably Harry's. And she only guessed that based on the worn Bukowski sitting on the night table and the flannel shirt draped over a chair beside the bed.

It was a lavish sized room. The walls were a deep beige, like the crust of fresh baked bread, and it was comforting. She was sitting on a plush king sized bed with white linens. At the foot of the bed was a couch and across from that were two armchairs that were nestled in a half-moon shaped alcove filled with floor to ceiling windows that had a perfect view of the expansive acreage behind the house. Piper remembered Eleanor mentioning that they lived in Wimbledon and wondered if she was looking out onto rare green space in London, or if One Direction HQ was actually somewhere entirely different. Either way, it was quite a view to wake up to.

There was an open door that led into a bathroom by the looks of it and that was Piper's first destination. It took her a couple minutes to get upright, using the bed as a support and balancing on her left foot, but she made it there which was triumphant in her mind. Crossing the room didn't fare as well because she could barely put weight on her right side without wanting to scream. She just pressed her lips tightly shut, ignoring the throbbing in her jaw, and held it in until she could lean heavily on the door frame to the bathroom.

The bathroom was like something out of a movie with a double sink vanity and a standing glass shower and a massive tub. Piper could have fit about six of her little bathrooms into this one bathroom. She could probably fit her whole flat into the bedroom. Considering that Harry had this waiting for him back here, Piper couldn't fathom why he seemed to spend so much time in her shoebox flat instead.

Turned out that going to bathroom was not going to be a simple thing to do. She managed to get the joggers she had been dressed in (most likely Harry's based on the length) down around her knees and discovered that her hips from near her waist to about an inch above her lady parts were wrapped with about an inch of bandaging. It made it pretty difficult to sit on a toilet, that was for sure. She didn't even want to talk about the way she'd had to squat to be able to take a piss without wanting to cry from the pain.