CHAPTER TWELVE — If This Isn't Love ..
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Everything that came after the first explosives went off in the arena was perceived by Coriolanus from an altered point of view, either of the boy who used to hide with his cousin and grandma beneath a marble table or of the young adult whose soul had been frightened out of the carcass of his body, shivering helpless in front of a final answer to his earlier in the day morbid realizations — of course the war had never really ended.
To say he was conscious to everything that happened to him and around him was to challenge what meant to be 'conscious' in the first place.
Yes, he had a basic understanding of it all, enough to even appreciate that these were no bombs being dropped on them as they had been during the war, but rather explosives planted in the arena and waiting for the Hunger Games to come around in order to claim victims in the name of the rebellion. However, his cognitive capabilities were by far the only sensibility he could still cling to, which is perhaps exactly why his instinctive reaction to get to the ground after the first blast was outshined by his immediate incapacity during the explosions to act on the appreciation that he was laying under parts of the roof that weren't going to hold.
So his consciousness was relative at best.
After all, what more could he expect from himself?
Adrenaline was rushing through his veins and soon, pain added into the mix because his inability to respond fast enough to the last explosions that went off had Coriolanus pinned under a burning piece of the roof. Smoke entered through his flaring nostrils and made his whole respiratory system sting in ashes and dust.
He observed much within his panic, but understood very little past his own fearful desperation to get away. Only one thing stuck with him from that arena, apart from a bitter resurfacing of childhood terrors he had no wish to ever recall again: Lucy Gray helped him up from beneath that fallen part of the roof and had it not been for her, he wouldn't have made it to the hospital.
It was in the hospital that Coriolanus finally begun cursing his apparent consciousness and its resilience to keep him awake — as awake as a man can be while his agony grows. His condition had worsened on the way to the hospital, having him reach that place of blindingly bright lights with begs on his parted lips. Adrenaline was abandoning him to the pain of his injuries.
"Let me through!"
Hearing Daphne's voice felt like a cold sheet had finally been placed over the burns on his chest that had until then only made everything, even breathing, hurt. If he had had only a gram more of strength to himself just then, Coriolanus would have demanded whoever doctor that was he saw blocking Daphne's path to just let her through. She was as much of a family to him as Tigris or Grandma'am.
"Miss, you can't be here," the doctor argued, pushing on Daphne's shoulders. "I assure you, the victims of the attack are all being taken care of and are our top priority."
"How much morphling did you administer him then?"
Coriolanus had never seen Daphne that angry before, and to witness her turn so incredibly confrontational as she existed at the very center of his blurred sight only growing more unclear the further he was taken from her, was challenging him to ask himself if he wasn't just imagining things at that point. If he was administered morphling, as she had assumed, who was to say what was real anymore?
"Miss Ravinstill," a second doctor stepped out of a saloon further down the hallway Coriolanus was being transferred on. Whoever he was, he seemed to know Daphne and she seemed to know him too. Given how fast that other doctor let her through, Coriolanus assumed this man was someone of importance. "What seems to be the problem?"
"My friend... He needs...," she hurried to say despite her breathlessness, only to find herself at a complete loss of words. Coriolanus caught a glimpse of her eyes then and was choked by the concern he saw reflected not only in their rapid gaze across his body, but in the whole of her expression, scrunched in what he could only describe as complete terror. Was he really wounded that badly? Or was her worry rooted in something other than plain facts?
Regardless of her loss of words, the doctor understood what she meant. "I see," he looked down upon Coriolanus briefly, before looking back in his saloon and making two quick gestures. One of the two younger doctors in there ran out of the salloon and grabbed hold of the bed. If Coriolanus had dared look at the fast passing image of the ceiling illuminated with rudely bright lights, he would have perhaps found the relief of passing out. Instead, his eyes remained glues, the best they could, on Daphne, who ran alongside the bed, with the two doctors, thanking the man in charge — she called him 'Dr. Cellgrey', which finally elucidated to Coriolanus the identity of the man as being the head of the hospital.
"How was he injured?"
"The bombing, at the arena," Daphne was having a hard time forming cohesive sentences while keeping up.
"Ah," Dr. Cellgrey looked back at Coriolanus, just then noticing the red of his uniform underneath a coating of ash. "One of the Mentors. I see. Name?"
"Coriolanus. Snow."
"Were you also there?"
"No, I came here first... I knew if he was alive, he'd have been brought here. And I knew the way the hospital operates. They drug up senseless any patient they don't have time for—"
"Ethan," Dr. Cellgrey snapped his fingers at his younger apprentice as soon as they reached a new, empty saloon. "Get Miss Ravinstill a glass of water so she may calm down. I assume you would like to remain in the room, yes, miss?"
"Please."
Coriolanus had never actually heard Daphne beg either, but there she was begging to stay there, with him.
The five other times he had 'woken up' to some form of lucidity after the small dose of anesthetics he received from Dr. Cellgrey started fading off only confirmed to him that nothing would remove her from that room, not even time, which passed around them in a convoluted and confusing way.
The first time he woke up, the room had been enveloped in a red light coming from the left side of his bed. The sunset seeped through and, since he was bound to gravitate his gaze to the right, towards her, he noticed it recognized the shade of Daphne's hair as belonging to its celestial display on their skies still yet to clear of smoke.
"Ma'am, I have to ask once again for confirmation," Thaddeus hesitated besides the wooden chair Daphne had sat down on, right next to Coriolanus' bed. "Are you certain you would not rather return home and let me watch over the boy?"
"I'm certain, Thaddeus," she answered with a bored sigh.
"Then allow me to stay with—"
"No," Daphne cut him off. "I need you to be my eyes and ears out there." She leant back and lifted to Thaddeus without even giving him the curtesy of looking at him a folded piece of paper. "Type this in to the others. They should know I won't be able to work for a while."
The second time Coriolanus caught the wiff of lucidity, the room itself was pitch black and the only light came from behind Daphne's chair, from the hallway outside, where the hospital spread infinitely. Daphne's eyes were exhausted and her wrist was probably hurting from the weight of her head being held so sturdily on the bridge of her palm — she refused to let her blinks lengthen.
"Showing your affections publicly is a dangerous gamble, Miss Ravinstill," an all too familiar voice mused from the doorway, blocking some of the light from coming in, by simply standing there, "even for you."
"Dr. Gaul," Daphne hesitated a moment before lifting her cheek from her palm and straightening up. "I think we can save each other some time by skipping past all the usual goading."
"Agreed," Dr. Gaul stepped inside the room, making Coriolanus wish, for even just a second, that he had had his mobility returned to him too, not just his lucidity. With only the latter, he was but a sitting duck.
A cold sweat overwhelmed Coriolanus when Dr. Gaul, standing next to Daphne's chair, looked down right at his eyes, hooded by his barely lifted eyelids.
Though he expected the woman to do only horrible things to him now that he was helpless in a bed, Daphne spoke and brushed his concerns aside, "Why are you here?"
"Checking in on the Mentors."
"Including Clemensia, I hope?"
"Careful, Miss Ravinstill," Dr. Gaul chuckled, and for the first time, Coriolanus most definitely knew he could attribute adverbs such as 'darkly' to that horrid sound of pure malice she made. "I allowed your comment in Congress, but now you're getting dangerously close to voicing an actual threat."
"It's always been a threat," Daphne answered with airy attitude that Coriolanus had almost felt form a scream in his throat, right beneath his Adam's apple. Neither of the women looked at each other, but only Daphne had the nerve of doing not even the bare minimum of getting up from her seat to talk to someone of Dr. Gaul's rank in their society.
"You think your status protects you from me," Dr. Gaul noted, bemused by her observation. "And you're wrong. You're not out of reach, little girl—"
"It's never been my father's name protecting me," Daphne brought the last affront, interrupting Dr. Gaul. "It's what I know." Finally, she looked up at the woman, "I know what you've done."
"Do you really think we cannot do without Dovecote's—"
"No," a second interruption brought Daphne to her feet now. "I don't mean what happened to Clemensia. Think further back. Say... the war, perhaps. A certain incident filed under Section Y-885? Did you really think no one will look that far into the archives?"
Dr. Gaul remained silent, but it was not the menacing silence she usually allowed to hover about herself. No, Coriolanus could swear she was at a true loss of words instead.
"What do you want?" She muttered once she finally found her voice again. Her hands joined in front of her, bracing for an answer, but when Daphne's reply was to sit back down, Dr. Gaul continued with a dangerous degree of annoyance hanging by her words, hardening them in accents, "Everybody wants something."
"You don't have what I want," Daphne sighed. "But don't worry, as long as you stay away from being a threat to me, I don't see a reason to slip another anonymous tip to my father. He was so very angry the last time I made him aware of an ugly rumor about his close entourage."
The sheer tension of the moment took Coriolanus' lucidity from him before he got the chance to see Dr. Gaul walk away from Daphne. By the time he regained some form consciousness again, the third time in a row, he was met with a room filled with bright golden light diffused by a faint blue. Morning, he thought. It's morning.
"I'm sorry, who are you, exactly?"
Coriolanus heard Grandma'am's voice and though he couldn't move his head to look away from the window to his left, he could tell she was at the door.
"I'm...," Daphne hesitated. He imagined she was debating in that break whether or not she should present herself by the status she held, the status Dr Gaul noted as being rather insignificant to the likes of her, or make something else up. "I'm just his friend. A good friend. And a friend of the doctor's too. I'll make sure Coryo gets everything you left for him the second he wakes up."
"Thank you," Tigris' soft voice was muffled by the much louder sound of a plastic bag being passed from her hands into Daphne's.
"He's never mentioned you before," Grandma'am argued mercilessly, awakening in Coriolanus such shame that he could almost blame himself for inducing the next loss of lucidity he fell victim to.
The fourth time he returned to some reduced consciousness, Coriolanus assimilated a red hued light seeping through the double window being cracked open by Dr. Cellgrey. Sunset, he tried to guess the time of the day as his senses were invaded by a gust of fresh air carried on a gentle wind.
"You can always leave the saloon if you wish to smoke," Dr. Cellgrey looked back over his shoulder, thus telling Coriolanus that Daphne was still in the same chair. "Some fresh air might do you good. Not to mention some sleep."
"The books will be enough to keep me entertained until he wakes up," Daphne dismissed with a cold nonchalance. There was a yawn somewhere inside her chest waiting for the right moment to get out.
"There's not any new titles in there for you," Dr. Cellgrey sighed. "My collection hasn't had the chance to grow. As for your friend... he's healing well. Apart from some scars, he should be returned to you just fine."
"It would be marvelous if he could wake up so he can tell me that himself."
Coriolanus' heart swelled in his chest with the desire to answer her wish. He tried as best he could to move at least a single finger, hoping that one controlled motion will get rid of his body-wide numbness, but instead, the very strain of it all managed to slip him back into slumber.
The fifth time he woke up, despite his eyes being met with the same auburn light and the same window cracked open, Coriolanus felt that everything was in fact different. The numbness had all been replaced with the strange sensation that could only reassemble having ants trapped beneath his skin. His senses have improved too, allowing him to understand several distinct sounds from his surroundings: diffused song of birds, distant murmur of traffic, the shuffle of pages turning and the sound of her breath.
It came as a true surprise to him when, having woken up with his face towards the window, Coriolanus willed himself to look back to his right, towards the chair, and actually succeed in moving his head to rest on the other side.
A vertigo may have grasped his perception momentarily after the movement, but he still rejoiced that he had regained his mobility after so very long. With iron patience and a gritting of his teeth, Coriolanus had to wait for his sight to adjust again; it helped knowing that the sight he was working towards was going to be worth it — and there she was.
With the sun's late afternoon light upon her, Daphne's red hair looked like it had caught on fire, its shades of chestnut auburn coming alive with a memory of gritty autumn, the sort that only untouched forests have the right to ever achieve on this earth. She was leant back in her chair, legs tucked beneath herself and some book rested in her lap. Coriolanus didn't recognize the hardcover of the book she was holding and could only really notice that whatever she was reading, she was doing so rather slowly. Only through such observations did he finally focus on her eyes to notice just how tired Daphne really looked — each blink she took ached to be but a second longer, yet with astonishing, downright masochistic resistance, she pried her eyes open and strained them over the lines of whatever book that was.
"Will you read to me?"
Though the unexpected amount of roughness in his voice had embarassed Coriolanus deeply, he was glad he didn't close his eyes for such a thing, because Daphne's reaction was not only priceless, but truly worth far more than having to deal with perhaps looking at her while he, himself, was blushing, self-conscious of his state.
She looked at him dumbfounded, blinking at a complete loss of words that parted her chapped lips.
She looked like she could cry and Daphne doesn't cry.
Knowing he could not survive such a heartbreaking sight, Coriolanus mustered himself to speak again, "Do I look as bad as I sound?" He wished he could chuckle, but the mere attempt at it gave him a reminder that those bandages wrapped around his chest, hidden underneath that hospital robe, were not there just for the show.
"You fucking idiot," Daphne puffed out and her head dropped. She leant forward until her elbows rested on the edge of his bed and, at the sight of her shoulders shivering, Coriolanus couldn't help but face the dreadful idea that instead of preventing her tears, he managed to make her cry.
With hope that he could still salvage this and with the idea that his last moment of lucidity couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes ago, he continued, "You said you'd find it marvelous if I could only wake up and tell you that I'm fine." His words had lifted Daphne's wide eyes to meet his and though the sight of tears waiting to fall as they gathered at the edge of her eyelashes felt like a thousand more ceiling pieces falling on top of him, Coriolanus forced himself to remain calm and even muster a smile. "I am fine, Daphne."
"You...," she ran out of breath before she finished what was meant to be a repetition of the very same curse she had exhaled before. Daphne shook her head and, as she stopped to look towards the window, she took his hand into her own, giving it that desperate squeeze with all the emotion her voice failed to show. To the best of his ability, Coriolanus held onto her hand a little tighter too, which was in fact a pretty good proof that he was not only awake, but far better than he had been when they brought him in. "I should call a nurse," Daphne finally exhaled, her gaze dropping on their hands which seemed, with a mind of their own, to be refusing to let go of each other.
"Please don't," Coriolanus responded and, with a determined, conscious refusal of his own to let go of her, he started to slowly gather his forces to sit up and prop himself back. "I got this," he hurried to reassure Daphne when he felt his groan of pain had almost made her jump from her seat.
He's never seen this side of her — the loyal one, the caring one, the one that felt indeed as so much more than merely a strategic friendship or a good ally for the future. Perhaps he's always seen her as too much of the latter to actually notice how much she cared about his wellbeing; then again, neither of them have been in danger quite to this extent before. "You just tell me about your day," he urged her next, as he still struggled to sit upright. "How did the Congress meeting go?"
"The Congress?" Daphne inquired, rather taken off guard, as if that was a thing of the faraway past. "Right, well... It went a little worse than I had expected it to, but I got what I wanted from it, so who really cares if the price I paid was rough on my confidence?"
"What happened?"
She hesitated. It had crossed her mind that she could have easily chosen to lie to him and walk away from this conversation with an unscarred ego. But then again, did she value her pride more than she valued the loyalty between them and her moral etiquette? — No.
"They just laughed at me," Daphne sighed out the truth, ready to brush it under the matt as soon as she was met his concerned eyes. "But it's alright. You can't expect inferiority to recognize superiority, much as you cannot delay your success for the sake of making sense to smaller minds."
"While that's true, it doesn't change the fact that they will come to regret treating you like that," he did not shy away from using blunt and cold seriousness upon that statement. It was, after all, a promise as much as it was a known fact. "There," Coriolanus sighed out immediately after, content with himself that he had managed to prop himself up comfortably. "Much better," he beamed at Daphne, a loud 'I am so glad you're here' hidden behind his smile. "I mean it, Daphne. They will regret the way they treat you."
"You don't even know what I talked with them about." Though appreciative of his support, she had to shake her head, uncertain.
"I don't have to," Coriolanus insisted with conviction. "Whatever you told them, I know you were in the right. Now, allow me to properly thank you for obviously staying the night with me," he lifted her hand into his off the bed for a good shake, since he had only just then realized, no matter how much his lips missed the sensation only her gentle skin had managed to leave him with, he had zero chance of bending over to kiss her knuckles while those bandages held him back and his pain was threatening to make a fool out of him should he dare to. "Thank you."
"Obviously?" She circled back with a raised eyebrow to his choice of words, grateful to leave the previous topic of dicussion behind.
It was hard to explain the states of almost-consciousness he had gone through, so Coriolanus resorted to a simpler explanation. "This is the first time in years that I see you wear the same dress two days in a row." Great, his thoughts scolded him even though he did not let that embarrassment get reflected on his face, now she knows that I care about how she dresses enough to note such things. "I believe this is a very obvious sign you stayed the night for me. Unless, of course, you keep a secret wardrobe in the hospital."
His attempt at a joke had turned out successful and he had earned not only Daphne's smile, but her laughter too, be that one subdued into a giggle. "Coryo dear, it's Tuesday."
"But...," his smile paled, at first into outraged confusion — but then again, what reason would Daphne have to play such a cruel joke on him? The funeral and the arena tour happened on Saturday. Tuesday? It can't be Tuesday.
"You've been out for three days," Daphne confirmed, slipping her hand out of his grip the second she was overwhelmed by a sensation that she had overstepped some self-made boundary between them.
Denial was written on Coriolanus' lips, though he dared not actually part them with a sound. It can't be, he thought, despite all that he recalled from his time in bed made far more sense on a scale of more than one day. But it can't be, he denied it all again, while his eyes looked down to Daphne's dress, which unmistakably was the same one she wore at the funeral.
"The dress was really the last worry on my mind," she justified herself with a sigh that could only be described as 'ashamed'. Before Coriolanus could take a good look at her flaming red cheeks, she got up from the chair and slid her shoes back on. "I'll get you that nurse, then get your food heated up. Your cousin and your grandma came by to bring it to you."
He was left speechless, watching her leave in a hurry. His mind was still frozen on a thought process leading him down treacherous waters that had him realizing strange things, like how his hand felt empty without hers to hold, or how his lips missing the touch of her skin was not something even a 'friend' should be thinking about, far less a humble 'ally'.
Goodness, three days, the reality sunk in on him all at once.
One night would have been the humane thing to do. One day would have been normal from a good friend. But for three days, Daphne Ravinstill did not let him out of her sight.
And if that's not love, then nothing can ever be called that anymore.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE :
Alright, I have noticed through y'all's comments that I have been mistyping Albert's name as "Alfred" from time to time and I wanna clarify, Daphne's brother is named Albert Ravinstill ( think Einstein, but annoying and not into physics or anything smart ) I will be going back to fix my typos, really sorryyy for the inconvenience and the confusion 😭😭 trust me, I am very embarrassed about this.
But on another, much more cheerful note — THE COIN DROPPED FOR SNOW 😩💖 HE FINALLY REALIZED, HE MADE THE MATH, HE ADDED TWO AND TWO TOGETHER !!