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"He missed your heart,” Olivia says. “Just barely, but it was enough.”
The words feel hollow, as a cool hand presses against Marcy’s bare back.
A flaming sword plunged straight through the chest, a bit too far right. It punctured her lung and severed her spine, but not her heart. Marcy can’t be sure if that was on purpose or not.
He missed my heart, her thoughts echo.
It didn’t feel as though he’d missed. Not then, not now.
Her mind is clouded by a fog as she desperately tries to still the tremors that ravage her body. She flinches at every gentle touch, as Olivia cleans and bandages the half-healed wound. Plates of armor sit discarded in a pile. The strange wetsuit thing she’d been dressed in is drilled into her skin - it creates a barrier across her body, one that causes the current treatment of her injuries a great strife.
Marcy feels sick when she thinks too much about it. Metal appliances hook onto her bones. They'd been connected to her body to allow fluids and nutrients into her blood while she was in that tank.
The fabric of the wetsuit is pulled up again to cover her back. It tugs on the ports in her skin, the painful pressure sending waves of nausea through her body. Marcy chokes back the panicked sob before it can escape.
They’d drilled metal ports into her. Hooked her to strange, green fluids and tried to press the undo button on all of her previous injuries.
He missed my heart.
A blanket is draped back over her shoulders - the same “I ♡ Newtopia” one she’s been wearing since their initial escape.
“You should be good on bandage changes for another day or so,” Olivia says. “We’ll find you proper clothing soon, I promise. We just need to get a bit further from Newtopia. There’s no telling who’s following us.”
Soon isn’t enough. She needs it off now. She needs the metal to be ripped from under her skin and flung into the jaws of some terrifying bug-monster to be incinerated by time and stomach acid.
Marcy pushes away the overwhelming discomfort, and simply nods alongside Olivia’s words.
The building they’re hiding in is abandoned. The entire village they’re hiding in is abandoned, covered in the splintering wood of decimated houses and half-crushed buildings. It’d been too close to Newtopia during… recent events. The area around them looks similar to a medical clinic, which is why Marcy assumes they’d chosen this place specifically - stealing bandages and medications from the dwindling remnants of stock.
“Yunan should be back with food soon,” Olivia says. “In the meantime, how’s your head?”
It takes Marcy too long to reply, her thoughts buffering as she processes Olivia’s simple question.
“Fuzzy,” she says, eventually, because she can’t think of a better word. Everything is sluggish, dreamlike.
Her throat burns when she speaks.
“That should hopefully fade with time,” Olivia assures her. “You were unconscious for over a month, your body’s still adjusting.”
A month.
Marcy isn’t sure if Olivia is aware of how much of a bombshell that simple word is.
Soft fabric curls around her fingers, and Marcy pulls the blanket a bit closer to her burning chest. She can feel every bone - every healed fracture and reconnected nerve. People aren’t supposed to heal from spinal injuries that severe. People aren’t supposed to heal from chest injuries that large.
This isn’t some Shonen anime from the 90s, where an enemy could slice away half of the hero’s torso for the emotional shock factor before they inevitably reappeared a few episodes later without any ill effects.
Yet here she is, alive.
It hurts to breathe too deeply. It’s difficult to breathe at all.
She isn’t supposed to be alive.
He missed my heart.
“It hurts,” Marcy says, “a lot.”
And it does. It’s a sensation that’s been steadily growing as time passes. Marcy doesn’t know whether it’s the last remnants of whatever fluids the tank had filled her with fading, or simply her mind becoming clear enough to process the pain.
Olivia’s expression twists to one of sadness, and she reaches up to brush a piece of tangled, dark hair out of Marcy’s face.
“I know, Marcy,” she says. Her touch is gentle, despite it all. “I know.”
But the painkillers have to be rationed. Because there isn’t enough in this small abandoned clinic in this small abandoned village. Because if Marcy doesn’t want to be writhing in the full, undiluted pain of a raw and half-healed chest wound during their journey she needs to let the drugs in her system fully fade before taking more.
Wartwood is a world away, in Frog Valley. They don’t have a snail, they don’t have a bird.
(Olivia tells her that Joe Sparrow fled alongside Sasha and Grime; Marcy is just glad that her companion is safe. Olivia tells her that they’ve sent a messenger mosquito to Wartwood, with coded coordinates dictating their path - to where someone hopefully will find it, where rumors of a resistance have been budding.)
Yunan returns half an hour later, carrying the carcasses of several dead bugs that she promptly begins to fire and cook on a makeshift grill just outside their temporary shelter.
Later, Marcy finds that anything she tries to eat is promptly expelled. They drag in dust-covered pillows and blankets from the clinic’s closet, and Marcy falls asleep to a sharp pain in her stomach to accompany the ache in her chest.
Just her chest. Not her heart.
He missed my heart.
-
They plan to leave the moment the sun begins to rise.
Sleep comes sparingly, despite the exhaustion still lingering deep in her bones. It’s a vicious cycle, drifting off only to awaken an hour later to a stabbing pain, or the vivid image of fire peeking up and out of her chest.
It’s a relief when Yunan calls for them to wake, when Olivia gently helps her stand and collect their scarce amount of supplies.
The pain is worse now. It’s enough to confirm that, yes, there had definitely been some sort of numbing chemical pumped into her blood while she was in the tank. It’s sudden and overwhelming as she pulls herself into a sitting position. The ports drilled into her skin feel like raw wounds, the scar in her chest deep and pulsing.
“Can you stand on your own?”
It’s Yunan who asks.
Marcy’s throat is sore, dry from misuse. She doesn’t know the answer to the question, but tries to pull herself up regardless. Her legs are quick to give way - a deep, unsettling exhaustion plagues her.
Her body won’t work the way it’s supposed to.
Pain clouds her thoughts and her legs are numb and there’s metal in her bones and her chest has a large, gaping hole in it.
Placed there by fire and steel and malicious intent.
Yunan’s arms wrap around her, preventing her body from hitting the dust-covered floor. The hard metal of her armor presses harshly into Marcy's skin, but she doesn’t complain. Yunan lifts her, and Marcy can only cling to the armor plates on the newt's shoulders as the set up is deemed appropriate for a day’s travel.
Marcy wants to protest. She wants Yunan to set her down, so that cold metal isn't pressing through the cloth on her chest and into the scarred tissue, so that she doesn’t inconvenience one of the newts that’d been kind enough to risk everything in order to save her.
Exhaustion pulls at her limbs, and Marcy finds she can’t even muster the energy to do just that.
“I’m sorry,” she says, instead. She’s been saying sorry a lot.
“Don’t worry. Why, this is nothing in comparison to my time as General Yunan, Scourge of the Sand Wars - “
“That's enough, dear,” Olivia says. “We don’t have the time for this.”
And they don’t. Because Andrias was going to use Marcy for something, and they’d stolen her from right beneath his watchful gaze. He’d gone through the trouble of not-quite killing her and then reviving her with age-old technology. She was kept alive for a reason.
Marcy doesn’t like to think about that.
For once, there’s a piece of knowledge about this world that she doesn’t wish to know.
-
It’s nearing twilight when they come across the ruins they decide to rest within.
Their route is deliberate, Yunan says. Carefully composed of long-abandoned villages and paths clear of ancient technology.
It reminds her of Breath of the Wild, her favorite Zelda game. She starts pretending she’s simply one of Link’s companions to distract herself, traveling alongside him as they sneak past the roadside monster camps and find shelter in the stone ruins of Hyrule Field.
She ignores the fact that all of his once-companions are long dead - souls trapped alongside the very monsters that’d killed them.
Olivia and Yunan fall into a mundane routine around her. A simple push-and-pull of words and actions that compliment each other. Maybe it’s new, maybe it’s different. Marcy isn’t able to tell - she hasn’t spent enough time around the two together to determine that.
There’s a closet full of soft, clean clothes in the house they settle at, and so Olivia decides it’s as good a time as any to remove the god-awful wetsuit that clings to her skin.
They don’t have any scissors, so they have to use one of Yunan’s many knives. A sharp blade meant for battle, for maiming.
Marcy wonders if it had been used to kill anyone, before.
Yunan leaves to survey the perimeter, to hunt for more food.
It’s somewhat terrifying to have a blade that sharp so close to her skin, so close to a still-healing chest wound and paper-thin scabs. But Marcy trusts Olivia. She trusts her careful, deliberate motions.
The metal of the knife grows dangerously close as Olivia maneuvers around the metal ports and slides the fabric downwards. It takes everything in her not to flinch at the feather-light feeling. The way the fabric tugs at the ports makes her cringe.
The wetsuit is pooling in tatters around her waist when Olivia pauses to treat the hole in her chest. The newt hisses when she unwraps the wound.
“We might have to change bandages more often,” she says.
Marcy knows what her words mean; it’s not getting any better.
Marcy has a clear view of it when she looks down, now. There’s no awkward, bunched-up fabric to work around. No hazy half-conscious vision to filter through.
Red, irritated, raw skin. Risen and lumpy and lined perfectly along the center of her chest. It looks vaguely like an eye.
Marcy feels sick.
She’s used to being hurt. She’s used to tripping over nothing and spraining her ankle on slightly uneven sidewalk tiles. She’s used to being bit up by fire ants after stumbling atop a grassy field. She’s used to skinning her knees and falling from tree branches and breaking various bones and being covered in various scrapes and bruises that were a byproduct of just existing.
What she is not used to is being stabbed in the heart chest with a flaming sword.
She’s not used to third-degree burns - the uneven waves of numbness that wash over her legs. She’s not used to the heavy feeling of exhaustion that comes with every intake of air, chest heaving and never quite feeling full enough, forever struggling to simply catch her breath.
Marcy makes an effort to not look down again. Olivia doesn’t comment on her aversion, continuing to wipe along the raw skin in careful, delicate strokes.
It burns.
“Why did you save me?” Marcy asks.
Olivia stalls in her movements, before once again soaking a wad of cotton in the disinfectant and continuing her task of clearing out the red and raw skin on her back.
“Because we care about you,” she says.
It burns.
Olivia wraps the healing wound, and continues to cut away at the rest of the wetsuit.
The clothing she’s dressed in is soft. Marcy suspects it’s someone's old night shirt, long enough to be a dress. It's a meager attempt to let her injuries breathe, to avoid further irritation.
Olivia and Yunan sleep in shifts at night, though they don’t explicitly tell Marcy. They think she needs the extra rest, despite Yunan carrying her for long distances during the day and her every waking moment being spent on the sidelines. Her attempts to assist the two newts often end in a small wave of their hands and some conjured up lies about them being able to handle everything.
When Marcy wakes sometime in the night, finding Olivia resting beside her and Yunan seated at the window of their small sanctuary, she asks the same question.
“Olivia won’t tell me the truth,” Marcy says. “I was hoping you would.”
Yunan's face twists, an edge of something akin to guilt eating away at her expression.
“Well, uhm… you see…”
“Yunan.”
The ex-general sighs, her eyes flickering over to Marcy. She probably looks like a mess, she knows. They haven’t passed by any mirrors, so Marcy can’t say for certain, but with the way the makeshift blankets hang heavily off of her shoulders and the tired, puffy feeling surrounding her eyes, it isn’t a hard conclusion to come to.
Marcy doesn’t think Yunan is too comfortable with this entire situation.
“You’re smart,” she says eventually, “Olivia… she thought you’d be able to help. With resistance efforts and such.”
Oh.
That makes a lot of sense, actually. Though Marcy isn’t sure how much help she’ll be in her current state - the clouds fogging her mind still refuses to fade, though that could very easily be the painkillers, or the lingering exhaustion.
“Thank you,” Marcy says.
Yunan looks torn at Marcy’s words. Her gaze shifts to the window, then back to Marcy, the window, and Marcy again.
“Look, kid…” she starts.
Marcy pays close attention as Yunan speaks. There’s not much else for her to do. The ever-present ache and the whirlwind of thoughts keep her awake despite the fatigue.
“Olivia insisted that you were the best option, despite being the most difficult to obtain. Between you and me, I think she was just looking for an excuse to get you out of there.”
The words feel hollow, empty. A tiny voice seems to whisper at the back of Marcy’s mind.
Liar.
“Thank you,” she says again, and she means it.
In the morning, when Olivia wakes, Yunan doesn't mention their conversation.
-
The next day, after traveling for several hours through the warm, sticky humidity, they come across another village. Wood and stone pillars stand tall, and it’s in better shape than the previous ones they’d settled at.
Clean, running water is available. A bathroom is set up with a pump. It’s outdated - especially compared to what was available back in Newtopia - and the water is cold, but it’s clean. It’s loads better than the river water they’d been stuck boiling so far, following Yunan’s careful instructions on basic outdoor survival.
She can stand mostly on her own now, and the fog in her head has cleared a reasonable amount. They trust her to bathe alone, though she is unable to fully submerse herself in water due to the numerous open wounds and metal ports.
It’s strange, looking at her reflection again. Her hair is longer now, it’s draped in stringy clumps across her face, matted with oil and the sticky liquid that’d been suspending her in the tank. Dark circles paint the skin under her eyes. Her skin looks ghostly, bruise-like. Marcy drapes her tunic over the mirror as she undresses. She has no desire to see the damage done to her body, just yet. No desire to see the outline of her ribs against her skin, no desire to take in the consequences of her own, selfish actions.
She doesn’t remove the bandages binding her chest. Olivia had been cleaning the wound twice a day - she doesn’t want to unintentionally undo all of her careful, precise work.
The bathroom is in relatively good shape. The floor consists of stone tiles, though several are missing or broken, a side-effect of several neighboring rooms being collapsed and ruined. It’s still stocked with towels and soap, and despite her restriction to simply wiping away the sweat and grime that’d accumulated with an old, soapy rag, she’s finally free of the gunky residue of the rejuvenation tank. She can rinse her hair of grease and buildup, and she doesn’t feel quite so gross and ill anymore.
It’s only fitting that her relief of finally being clean is short-lived.
She trips - as she always does - partway through changing into a fresh set of clothes. Her knee lands on a piece of cracked tile, splitting the skin open and causing Marcy to choke back a cry of pain. She presses the corner of her towel against the scrape before blood can well up.
Something green peeks through the fabric.
“Marcy? Are you alright?”
Marcy can’t reply, because she’s too busy pressing the cloth against her knee and staring at the substance with a newly sparked horror.
The door opens, and Olivia rushes to her side. Her hands are cold against her skin, brushing damp locks of hair from Marcy’s face. Cold water droplets fall and sink into the fabric of her shirt, though she doesn’t really feel the uncomfortable sensation.
Her blood is green.
“Marcy, may I see your leg?”
Her thoughts are buffering with questions and theories, swirling relentlessly in her mind.
Green blood isn’t a thing. Not in humans, not in mammals.
Olivia’s hand rests atop her own, gently coaxing it away from her knee.
“My blood is green,” Marcy says, “blood isn’t supposed to be green.”
Olivia sucks in a gasp as she shifts the towel away from the small laceration.
“No,” she agrees, “it isn’t.”
-
Dreams aren’t painful.
At least, they shouldn’t be painful.
Marcy had always consumed books several reading levels above her class, though the YA novelizations that were recommended for middle schoolers often contained content that surprised her. The Young Adult and New Adult genres weren’t the censored, child-friendly stories her parents thought they were.
She’d read books with characters begging for unconsciousness, stories filled with children pleading for the sweet relief of the dream realm to grant them a brief sanctuary from whatever suffering the author had imposed upon them.
Sleep is meant to be peaceful, to allow rest without torment.
Marcy feels no relief in her dreams.
Familiar flashes of scenery flash before her. A detailed map of the throne room she’d spent so much time in is built up and surrounds her with bitter memories.
A blank, expressionless version of Anne watches.
I caused this and this is my fault I deserve this and I’m Sorry -
There’s a white-hot pain in her chest. It festers and splits and sears. It spreads through her body, illuminating her blood and scorching her internal organs.
The phantom thought of don’t leave me echos, her dream-eyes watching shadowy figures fade away into swirling portals to a home long lost.
Don’t leave me.
The ache in her chest grows, a sensation she’s been doing such a wonderful job of avoiding and forgetting ignites. Fire spews from the hole in her chest.
Not her heart. He missed her heart.
Despite it all, she can’t help but feel a bit smug at that fact. Andrias’ face is a blur in her memory.
You missed my heart.
She isn’t supposed to feel pain in dreams, everything is supposed to be purely psychological, whether it be the cut-off circulation of a limb seeping into their subconscious or an awkward sleeping position causing a mild enough ache that they don’t wake.
Marcy isn’t supposed to feel pain, here. So why does it hurt so much?
Everything is too hot, vision swimming with orange. Too warm and sticky and it burns.
Marcy wakes up to a face matted with a sticky layer of tears. Her blanket is stuck flush against her skin, damp with sweat.
She rolls over on her make-shift bed, and dry heaves onto the wooden floor of the house they’d taken shelter within.
Everything is too hot. Too stifling.
She’s going to have to see Sasha again, if they make it to Wartwood.
The sticky Amphibia humidity makes it worse, there’s no soft breeze to clear away the overwhelming presence of her own body heat.
Sasha, who hates her for the betrayal she so selfishly crafted.
Her head hurts, her chest hurts. Fire stabs through her torso in such a burning intensity that she almost prefers the relentless lukewarm cold of the rejuvenation tank.
Why is everything so hot?
“Marcy?”
There’s a hand on her back, and Marcy recognizes Yunan’s voice. Something shifts a few feet away, and Marcy is vaguely aware of Olivia’s voice calling out, asking what's wrong.
It's almost morning, then. Yunan has been taking the morning shifts.
A cold hand brushes the back of her neck, gathering up her too-long hair and pinning it out of her face. She leans into the touch. The cool, cold-blooded amphibian hand feels like ice against her skin.
“Olivia,” Yunan calls.
The other newt is beside her now, too.
Marcy doesn’t move, her body hunched in on itself as she chokes on her own bile.
“They hate me,” she chokes out, “it’s my fault and they hate me.”
I’m sorry.
“No one hates you,” Olivia says, though the words seem to fly over Marcy’s head because that can’t possibly be true.
“Why is she so warm?” Yunan asks.
“A fever,” Olivia says, “it’s something that happens with warm-blooded organisms.”
Yunan says something in response, but Marcy can’t understand her words through the insistent pounding in her head.
Olivia’s hand guides her back onto her pillow, and her voice is soft as she conveys simple, soft orders to Yunan. The pink newt is quick to move, shuffling through their meager collection of supplies for whatever Olivia had asked for.
“Marcy, I need to check the wound on your chest,” Olivia says.
Marcy nods, tiredness making her sluggish as she follows Olivia’s gentle motions and tries desperately to push back the nausea that arises with every small movement.
Bandages shift as Olivia unwraps her careful work from the day prior.
“It’s infected,” Marcy hears Olivia say, her words breathy and panicked.
Marcy supposes she’s been too full of pain-killers to notice this development.
“The message should’ve reached Wartwood by now. If we’re lucky and our suspicions were correct, someone should be on their way.”
“And if not?”
There’s no response, and even in her fever-induced haze Marcy can feel the unspoken fear that drifts through the air.
-
Sleep comes fitfully, and come morning Marcy is Aware enough to listen in on Olivia and Yunan’s careful conversations. They decide to wait a day or two at their current location.
She doesn’t understand those strange tropes in fan communities, where someone would use the guise of illness to make a character act super out-of-it and drunk. The closest Marcy has ever felt to that was when she’d gotten her wisdom teeth out, or when she’d initially been taken from the tank, when her body and mind had yet to fully wake from the medical-induced coma.
Perhaps that situation doesn’t really count. She was drugged up on chemicals and ancient amphibian medical technology.
Right now, her body is plagued with nausea and tiredness, and it takes far too long to process the words and actions of those around her, but she is Aware.
She sort of wishes she wasn’t. Maybe then it would hurt less.
There’s a wet cloth draped over her forehead, though the liquid has long since lost its cooling touch. Marcy moves it, the air around her latching onto the lingering liquid and providing a brief relief from the uncomfortable warmth.
She doesn’t recall falling asleep again, but she must’ve at some point, because the sky fades to darkness. Then, light.
Water is forced down her throat at various intervals, Marcy being coaxed awake in order for the liquid to be sent down her throat.
She doesn’t know how much time has passed, by the time excited shouts startle her from her feverish haze.
A voice that sounds eerily similar to Sasha’s calls out, asking questions. Marcy panics, trying desperately to force out some pleading form of an apology in her half-asleep state, but stumbling over her own words to the point that even she can’t comprehend them.
Her body is lifted, and she revels in the feeling of the icy metal of Yunan’s armor against her too-warm skin.
The last thing she remembers is the soft feeling of a sparrow’s feathers, before the world once again fades into nothingness.
-
Voices filter and fade around her, hushed arguing and a numb. Excruciating pressure pounds beneath her skin.
There is something very overwhelmingly orange in her dreams.
Consciousness comes slowly.
There's a ceiling, not far above her. It’s uneven and riddled with cracks. The room smells vaguely earthy, like freshly watered garden soil. The blankets draped over her are soft, warm in a way so overwhelmingly different from the heat that’d plagued her the last time she was Aware.
“You’re awake!”
Olivia sits by her bed. She looks slightly different, and Marcy realizes it’s because she’s no longer donning the many layers of petticoats and seashell-adorned jewelry that she had always favored in Newtopia. The dress she wears is simple, plain. It suits her.
“Where are we?”
“Wartwood. The resistance turned the Plantar’s basement into a base.”
Marcy pushes herself up, gaze drifting around the room she’s in. It’s small, and she realizes that the reason it smells so earthy is because it is earthy - compact dirt and roots tangle against the far wall, and the floor appears to be a mix of stone and flattened clay soil.
“I was supposed to give you this, when you woke,” Olivia says. Marcy is handed a small potion bottle. She can recognize the familiar shape of the vials Maddie always prefers to use. “It’s meant to speed up the healing process, and prevent infection.”
Frog knows she needs that.
“Maddie made this?” Marcy asks, though she already knows the answer.
“She’s the only curse user we have,” Olivia confirms.
Something burns, and Marcy moves to look at the source of the ache. Green blood speckles the bandages wrapped around her arms and legs, raw wounds dulled to a soft ache by magical medication. Marcy prefers the potions to the painkillers - her head isn’t as fuzzy.
“They have a large stash of medical supplies here, the doctors thought it’d be best to remove the ports sooner, rather than later.”
That’s important information, she knows, but Marcy can’t seem to focus too intently on the topic. The metal outlets that’d hooked her to the tank are gone. She’s safe, underground somewhere beneath the Plantar’s house and away from whatever horrors Andrias has planned for her.
Andrias. That's a topic she still has yet to address.
Marcy pushes the thought away and pulls the cork out of the bottle, downing the foul-tasting liquid in one go. The relief is almost immediate, a pleasant warmth washing over her limbs and dulling the bone-deep ache.
-
There’s a mirror in the “communal” bathroom, the room in reality being the size of some small closet. It’s made for a single person, at most, but there aren’t many other options available.
She’s slow to disrobe, the cold water from the pump filling the tub slowly. The bandages around her chest are tight, clean. She carefully studies the way they’re tied, pressed and deliberate, gentle hands having done the same knots time and time again.
The cloth peels back slowly, cotton sticking to the raw skin and sending pinpricks of pain as flesh is tugged and pulled.
Skin isn’t supposed to look like that. The color is off, the tissue mutilated beyond recognition.
It’s an ugly wound, and Marcy feels sick at the sight. Her body grows warm again, signaling that something is wrong - something needs to be fixed. Her heart rate seems to lull in her chest, and she feels faint. Her legs are weak, tears prick at the corners of her eyes.
Fire, relentless and searing against her internal organs and cauterizing her skin. The familiar scent of a backyard grill hitting her nose, though she’s Aware enough to realize that it isn’t some prepackaged meal on fire - it’s her.
Her arms can’t support her weight, barely able to slow her descent to the ground as her legs give way. She desperately tries to force back the gag that arises at the back of her throat.
Her blood is green and remnants of metal plugs are drilled into her bones and there is a hole in her chest - not her heart.
Marcy doesn’t feel like Marcy anymore, because her blood is green and this body is Not Hers and she should be dead but she isn’t.
She doesn't know how long she sits there, on the scum-covered floor of a tiny bathroom deep under the Plantar’s house. When someone knocks on the door, calling to see if the toilet is in use, Marcy forces herself to stand, re-adjusting the undone bandages. She bathes quickly, and uses the wall for support as she creeps back through the base and into her designated room.
-
Sasha is there, when she fully wakes next.
Her presence startles Marcy from her sleepy, post-fever haze.
The blonde doesn’t seem to notice her consciousness at first. She’s seated at a table in the corner of the room, focused intently on some sort of paper documents.
Her hair is down, draped over her shoulders. Sasha never wore her hair down, before. It's new, it’s different. She looks nice, without the ponytail. Older, prettier.
It’s cold, in the dimly lit room. They’re underground, in a maze of caverns and frog-made basements that’d been converted into a sort of military base. It makes sense that the air holds a chill. Goosebumps race across Marcy’s arms, but it’s preferable to the stifling heat of an infection-induced fever.
Marcy shifts under the layers of fur-lined blankets, and Sasha startles from where she’s seated, hunched over the important-looking documents.
“You’re awake,” she says, and if Marcy were any less awake she’d almost think Sasha’s words were tinted with relief.
They can’t be, though. Not after what Marcy had done.
Marcy nods in response, arms reaching to push herself into a seated position. A spike of pain shoots up her body from her sudden motion, actions tugging on her injuries.
Sasha pulls a chair up to her bedside, opening the drawer of her nightstand and handing Marcy a healing potion that’d been stored there. The medication is bitter against her tongue, simultaneously sickeningly sweet and rancid, but she revels in the way the sharp aches faded into a gentle thrum beneath her skin.
“How long…?”
“It’s been a couple of days since your fever broke,” Sasha explains, providing Marcy with a basic grasp of time, “the infection hasn’t returned, but we’re supposed to keep an eye on the injuries, just in case.”
Marcy nods, and Sasha carefully reaches up to brush a lock of hair from her face.
She’s suddenly aware of how awful she must look. All skin and bones and scar tissue, her blood staining her complexion an awkward purple hue.
“Is Anne…”
“She’s still in the human realm, I’m guessing,” Sasha says. “The portal closed when you… fell. Grime tossed me out the window, and Joe Sparrow saved us. We came back here, and now the resistance is a thing.”
A lot had happened, it would seem.
A lot that she’d missed.
“I don’t understand how you’re being so nice,” Marcy’s voice is soft. Her question is barely a whisper. “Why aren’t you mad?”
“Oh no, I’m mad. Super, supremely mad,” Sasha says. “You literally trapped us in a messed-up frog world - I was the prisoner of a bunch of talking toads for a month.” Her voice spikes, when talking about the toads, and Marcy can’t help but flinch. Sasha’s expression softens, slightly. “But I thought you were dead. Andrias mentioned a rejuvenation tank, but it was weeks before one of our spies confirmed your survival. For a while, I fully believed you were dead. I thought I watched you die, Marcy.”
“He missed my heart,” Marcy says, as though that explains everything.
He missed my heart. The sword had seared its way through tissue and bone and left a gaping, cauterized wound in her chest, but he missed her heart. It still continued to beat after the incision, blood still continued to flow through her veins. The organ had never stopped beating, and the rejuvenation tank had mended the other ailments. It’d stitched severed nerves and repaired the burns in her right lung.
“He missed your heart,” Sasha repeats with a bitter disdain. “He missed your heart. Just your heart.”
And Sasha is right.
Marcy can practically feel the mixed emotions radiating from the other girl. The anger at Marcy’s death, the rage at Marcy’s actions, the relief that she is alive.
“I’m sorry,” Marcy says, the words dull and templated into her voice.
Sasha’s arms are around her before she can say anything else. Her grip is strong, pressing against her back and pinning her arms to her sides. The bandaged parts of her body burn and Marcy is sure that, if not for the multiple healing potions Maddie had brewed up, she’d be in an even worse state.
It hurts, but Marcy doesn’t care because it’s Sasha, and for some reason she’s hugging her. For some reason - despite every awful and horrible and selfish thing she’s done up until this point.
Marcy’s hands shift, her fingertips brushing against the fur fabric of the cloak Sasha wears now.
He missed my heart.
“I’m sorry,” Marcy repeats.
There’s gaping, open wounds in her arms, barely scabbed over with thin layers of skin because of magical meddling. The hole in her chest still hasn’t fully closed, and the edge of hazy fog in her mind stubbornly refuses to completely fade.
But the people around her are suffering from her actions, and so she apologies.
It feels like the only thing she can do.