Chapter Text
She woke under a crushing weight, the taste of blood thick on her tongue and agony screaming through her whole body. It was dark and silent, and it was hard to move. When she opened her eyes, it became less dark, but her vision was obscured and tinted an odd shade of blurry red.
Her head hurt.
Why did her head hurt? She blinked, and then winced when it made her head hurt worse. Her vision was still off. She tried to move her arm so she could wipe at her eyes, and keened in pain and frustration when it wouldn’t budge, a heavy weight pinning her wrist. She tried again, sobbing raggedly when she wrenched her hand loose with the grate of stone on stone and the wet sound of blood dripping. Her wrist hurt too, almost more than her head. She stubbornly wiped at her eyes anyway, and her hand came away with more blood than before. She wasn’t sure whether it came from the deep, jagged cuts on her hand and forearm, or from the steady rivulets she could feel drizzling down from her hairline.
God, why did her head hurt so much?
For a moment, she laid still, panting with pain and exhaustion and fear, and then she forced herself to wriggle towards the brighter bit in her field of vision. A kind of raw, slicing agony like she had never felt before shot through her leg, rendering her breathless with its intensity. She struggled for air, lungs suddenly on fire. Black spots danced hypnotically in front of her eyes. They steadily increased in size. Her head gave a particularly vicious throb.
For a moment, she was sure she saw white sparkles, and then she only saw black.
When she struggled back into consciousness, it was darker than before. The only sounds she could make out was the buzz of mosquitoes. Her wrist and her leg felt like they were on fire and about to fall off at the same time. Moving sounded like the hardest thing she had ever done.
Why wouldn’t her head stop hurting?
She woke for a third time a long, long while later.
Blood and tears had crusted her lashes together, and it took a few seconds before she was able to open her eyes. It was lighter now, and the bright spot she had tried to move to earlier was bright enough to send white-hot lances of agony into her eyes. Her mouth tasted like something died inside of it, like old blood and dirt. Her wrist and leg had settled into a steady, bone deep ache that was somehow scarier than the sharp, acute pains from earlier. She didn’t dare glance at her hand to see how bad it was.
The weight on top of her had not diminished, and she was starting to notice how hard it was to breathe when her ribcage was compressed like this. It made her all the more determined to reach the bright spot. Reaching out with her hand, and ignoring the disturbing way in which her wrist was swollen and coloured purple, the cuts already starting to ooze, she dragged herself forward with bullheaded determination.
The pain that tore through her leg and her other arm when it was wrenched loose from wherever it had been stuck was indescribable. She almost bit through her tongue, and the long, guttural noise of agony she made actually hurt her throat. Nevertheless, she swallowed a mouthful of coppery blood and wormed her other arm past her torso so she could pull herself forward with both hands.
Getting towards the bright spot took what felt like hours, and she was pretty sure she blacked out several times. For a long time, all she knew were intermittent periods of pain and bright, and numb darkness. She liked the darkness better. Her head was starting to hurt again.
She continued to claw herself to freedom, stubbornly struggling past the pain.
What seemed like another couple of hours later, she managed to push a piece of debris aside and tumbled into sunlight and fresh air. For the first time in far too long, her lungs had the space to expand properly, and the first full gulp of air had her sobbing with relief at the ease of it. It felt so, so good to breathe freely. To taste fresh air instead of dust and blood.
For a few minutes, she lay prone on the pile of debris she had just crawled out of, just breathing as deeply as she could and enjoying the sunshine. Then, once she’d caught her breath and her eyes had adjusted to the light, she struggled until she was sat upright and finally took a long look at her arms and leg. They were the worst injuries she had ever suffered in her short life. Her left wrist was swollen purple and blue, deep, jagged cuts separating puffed up skin, at some spots even deep enough to show flashes of white bone. Her right lower arm was not much better, though the cuts were not quite as deep. She glanced at her right leg, and felt tears well in her eyes. Near her ankle, there was an odd, unnatural bend. It was swollen enough to make her formerly loose pants tight. On her thigh, above her knee, was a long, deep cut that reached all the way up to her hip. The injuries were clotted and filled with dirt and grit and bits of gravel.
Back to taking deep breaths, this time to calm herself down, she looked around. It was carnage. Crumbled buildings, puddles of blood all over the place, bodies, already starting to decompose, strewn around carelessly. The worst? It was all completely unfamiliar to her.
Somewhere, deep down, she had the niggling feeling that she really should have recognized this place, even if it was trashed. Why didn’t this look as familiar as it felt? And why did her head hurt again? And why, for that matter, was it so hard to remember her name? She looked around, mind blank, and tried to remember her name, or something else, anything at all would do, no matter how small. After long, long minutes, all she could come up with was the letter ‘A’.
A.
Was that her name? It was a bit shorter than she had thought names were supposed to be.
A.
She thought it over for a bit more, but nothing else came to her. A. Maybe there was a… Y? No, she didn’t think she had a Y. An I? That didn’t really sound right either. She tested it a couple of times, placing the I in front of her A, and then behind it, but it just didn’t fit. She didn’t know why, it just didn’t.
After a while, she gave up, deciding to stick with just ‘A’ for now. She returned her attention to her injuries. A wasn’t sure how old she was, but she did know she was old enough to realize her leg should not bend that way. But she didn’t know how to fix it. She couldn’t remember ever having broken something before. She didn’t know how to deal with this. Maybe she could fix it if she got the bone straightened out? A stared at the unnatural crick in her leg and wondered how she was supposed to straighten it out. She was pretty sure that just yanking at it would land her in a world of pain. A did not like pain. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to straighten out her leg. It would probably hurt a lot. But she couldn’t exactly leave her leg as it was, now could she? Something had to be done.
Steeling herself, A forced her hands into motion, which already hurt quite a bit, and then made herself grab her ankle and wrench at it. The pain was indescribable. She yanked her hands away as if they were on fire, unable to stop the screams building in her throat as she withered in agony. When she finally managed to stop screaming, she just sobbed raggedly for long moments. Her leg felt like someone was hacking at it with an axe. She convinced herself to glance at her ankle. It still wasn’t straight.
Biting the inside of her cheek until she could taste blood, A tried again.
She passed out halfway through her third try.
It was night when she regained consciousness. It was cold, too. The debris around her did little to shield A from the wind. She was only wearing jeans and a thin shirt, too, her shoes having been lost when she’d fought her way out of the mound of crumbled building. She wasn’t sure if she had a jacket, but she wasn’t wearing one, so probably not.
A rolled onto her back and chanced a glance at her leg. It didn’t look any better, still cut up and swollen and shattered, but the unnatural bend was mostly taken care of. There was still a bit of an odd crick in it, but it was nowhere as bad as it had been earlier. Next she shifted her attention to her arms. Her left wrist was not much better off than her leg. In fact, it seemed to have gotten a little worse. The swollen, bruised skin radiated heat, and her nose told A that it was starting to get infected. There were hints of too-raw redness, too, and a thick, viscous but colourless stuff was starting to ooze from the cuts. Her right lower arm was in pretty much the same condition, only without the broken wrist. At least her headache had lessened. That was something, right?
Her stomach suddenly gave a ferocious growl. A placed her hands against her tummy, grimacing when hunger reared its ugly head. She looked around, hoping to spot something she could eat. Apart from bodies starting to rot, there was nothing as far as she could see. Her eyes fell on the other buildings. Most were damaged, but still standing. Maybe there would be food in there.
A attempted to stand, and immediately crumbled back down when her leg refused to support her weight. She anxiously scrabbled at her ankle and was relieved to see the slight crick hadn’t worsened again. It hurt like all hell, but at least it was still in the same position she had painstakingly forced it into. Maybe she should see if she could find something to make sure it would remain almost-but-not-quite-straight. But first, food.
With walking obviously not in the cards at the moment, A repeated her earlier technique of just dragging herself towards where she needed to be. It was hell on her arms, and the long cut on her thigh dragged against the ground in a very painful way, nor was it any less painful on her broken leg, but she was too hungry to care. She needed food, and she didn’t care how much it hurt to get it.
The remains of the fourth building she crawled into turned out to be a restaurant, still in relatively decent condition, and A made her way into the kitchen as fast as she was currently capable of. Food had been in the process of being cooked when whatever had happened had happened, leaving chopped vegetables and sliced meats on the counters and the cookers, and when A tried the taps, they gave water no problem.
The veggies were already dried out and starting to go bad, and the meat was raw and didn’t exactly smell fresh anymore, but A was too hungry to care about the condition of the food. She tore into it ravenously, washing down the taste with cold water she had poured from the tap into a large metal mixing bowl, and ate until she was so full it made her nauseous. Then she tore a handful of aprons from a hook near the back entrance of the kitchen, dropped them in a corner, and fell asleep on top of them with the remains of her meal piled next to her, utterly exhausted.
She woke up, hours after her meal, feeling stiflingly hot and freezing cold at the same time, body-shaking shivers racking her spine, sweat dripping down her forehead and her arms and leg absolutely on fire. Her lips were chapped and bleeding, her tongue bone dry and her throat felt like the inside was coated with sand.
She drank desperately from her mixing bowl of water, and then threw it all up again only a few minutes later. She couldn’t produce the saliva needed to chew food and swallow it without choking on the dry chunks, and when she tried to drink more water, her stomach cramped so badly she vomited pink.
She curled up in her aprons in the tiniest ball she could manage, drawing fabric over her shoulders to warm her, and then tossing it aside to cool down and repeating it almost constantly. Her body shook to the point her teeth chattered whenever she closed her mouth. Her face was slick with sweat, and her hair stuck to her forehead, damp and sticky and unbearably hot.
Eventually her mixing bowl was dry and her food torn and scattered around her, but the fever didn’t break and the pain didn’t stop, and A found herself seeing things that weren’t there and calling out for people she no longer knew. There were faces that looked familiar but whose names she couldn’t remember, and the notion of Daddy and Mommy, whose faces she didn’t know anymore, and the vague knowledge of someone called ‘Lex’, of whom she didn’t know what connection they had to her.
The fever rose and the pain was so deep in her bones she didn’t know where it ended anymore, and the images in her head were too bright, too vivid, and she screamed and screamed and screamed until her throat felt raw and she tasted copper and salt in her mouth. She clawed at her eyes and tore bloody gouges into her face, withering until her thigh started to bleed again and her leg cricked worse, and banged her head against the floor to just make it all stop.
Then, when the fever finally broke, she just slumped into her pile of aprons and wailed, deep, ragged sounds from deep in her chest that echoed around the kitchen, sobbed noises so full of pain and anger and fear she made herself cry, and then she cried until she fell asleep out of sheer overwhelming exhaustion and she didn’t wake up for a very long time.