Chapter Text
"You are a very, very lucky young lady."
The hospital blanket that Penny runs her fingers like an arpeggio over the creases in the fabric again and again to ground herself — cotton. The hospital band that Penny flicks and fiddles with, with DOE, JANE emblazoned on it shamefully, cradling her bony wrist, it's obviously plastic. The cold legs of the hospital bed that Penny flinches at the touch of but grabs at anyway to feel something other than her gaping decapitation wound, it's made of steel. It's almost funny to her that she knows all of these materials but she doesn't even know her first name. It's comical that she can't remember the colour of her eyes unless she looks in the reflection of her hospital room's window. It's like being reborn in the body of an adult as a toddler, forced to walk when all you know is how to crawl and put things in your mouth.
"Open your mouth and say ah," The doctor instructs, and Penny analyses him for a second before doing as he says, staring at him like a deer stares at its shooter, as if he's got her answers, her reassurance. He's not too old and not too young, but can't have been a doctor for more than a year. His round, dirty spectacles droop from his eyes and are neglected to be pushed back up his nose, which oddly doesn't seem bothersome to him. He looks at her with such a peculiar expression, looking at her like his lab rat, but with a hint of fear from her eyes, as if she's Frankenstein's monster. She certainly feels revived, like her expended heart has been held in the hand of a surgeon, a necromancer, and pumped with blood and fluids and raw energy until it finally had the courage to re-thump. She feels jitters with every beat, feverish jolts as if she's on some sort of constant edge.
The doctor nods as if pushing Penny along, and she collects herself from her thoughts and sticks her tongue out. "Ah." The roof of her mouth is barren, but she doesn't feel thirst or as if she's been dehydrated at all. Her voice is raspy and hoarse like she's swallowed a live frog who's doing the talking for her; it's hard to tell if she's been screaming for ages or hasn't used her voice in days. It could've been both, if you thought about it, but it also felt like some sort of damage to her vocal chords.
"Marvellous, marvellous! Absolutely thrilling, I tell you…" he mutters under his breath to himself, all mad-scientist like. He seems unfazed when Penny looks at him strangely, focused on the medical miracle unravelling in front of him like a child's fortune teller unfolded into pieces, and the outcome is right in front of them: good luck, too good.
She looks down again, studying her brittle fingers and her open palm; her eyes move over a little and go to her hospital bracelet — DOE, JANE.
At first, her heart leaps at the sight of her name, her identification, her (the doctor panic and blubbers a little at the sudden arrhythmia on the pulse monitor, as if he's worried sick over making a mistake), and then reinterprets what she's read and remembers Jane and John Doe is what they call unidentified people.
Unidentified bodies.
What she could've been, but she isn't.
Because of some act of God that left a girl that should have been decapitated and dead on impact with killer neck pain, a shallow scar crossing her throat and a decreased sense of the ability to sense anything at all. All of this was strange and peculiar and wrong, even though Penny has no experience to even know what's strange and peculiar and wrong. Acts of God and medical miracles are for women who pray humbly in their home altars, stay modest and prideful and keep to themselves. Acts of God and medical miracles are for sickly little babies with young and Christian mothers and fathers with worrisome lines in their faces and clean money to leave a doctor at their best. Acts of God and medical miracles are not for teenage Jane Does with no parents to identify, a weird feeling that God has not and will not be with them and eyes that are brown or blue or green or hazel but probably not all at the same time.
"Doctor."
"Marvellous, absolutely… y-yes?" he stammers. It's the first proper word she's spoken since she woke up from her trance, still rough from the unusual use, but confident and unwaveringly strong, despite the pain. Her tone of voice is calm with a strange hint of carelessness to it, as if she has no attention or even concern over what she says; a Canadian accent mildly traces her words, her pitch is slightly higher than she thought it would be, only based on her own assessments. She looks back up at the doctor with an owlish, curious gaze. "A-and I don't think you've been— been informed, but it would be best for you to try to use your voice as little as possible for the next few days. Just as a precaution, we need to be as careful as we can with an injury like this. Especially in your, um… situation."
"I was..." Penny clears her throat, "I was wondering if you could remind me again about the, er— accident. And if you could tell me how long I'm going to be staying here, and… what happens next."
"Why?" the doctor says a bit too fast, with no success in his attempt to hide his desperate worries. "Are you having memory problems? Is your head okay?" The answer was clearly yes — for a girl who hesitates when you ask for her name, memory problems didn't cover it nearly enough. Amnesia. Loss of memory altogether. Loss of all that matters, all that breathes and feels, loss of all depth and build and what's left is the construction, the rough draft, the sketch.
"No, everything's fine. I just want a refresher… the incident is a little hazy for me, um, doctor."
"Oh. Well, yes, that's normal with stress and trauma and— and all you've been through. I suppose I can give you a refresher." The doctor sighs as if the story he's going to tell is his own; he cleans his spectacles with the hem of his white lab coat, and coughs into his fist. "You were at Uranium City's, (that's where you are), Fall Fair performing with your school choir. You and your classmates rode one of the roller-coasters, the uh, the Cyclone. It's right there if you squint." He points to the window. "And, well—"
"Ow!" Penny cries, voice quiet but aching with the same message as she leans forward to look out of the glass, and the doctor lets out a yelp upon hearing her shriek; a sharp pain attacks her spine like little daggers crawling up her back and using her vertebrae as a ladder. She grimaces and immediately leans back to rest against the bed-frame, tears pooling in her eyes but never spilling as the doctor rushes around in a frenzy.
"Are you okay?! You shouldn't do that, it's not safe with your injury! Are you okay?!"
"Yes, yes, I'm fine! Really!" Penny shouted over his anxiety, unsettled by the fact that she was almost decapitated and was comforting her own doctor about what happened to her. She sniffed, mild pains still shooting down her neck. The doctor composed himself, wiping his hands on his coat and taking a couple of deep breaths, and what was left for Penny to see was her, the doctor, the white walls and the ghost of the Cyclone, her place of death. "What's important is…" she shifted uncomfortably, "you finish the story."
"Ah, y-yes, alright," he said uncertainly. "Well, where was I? You, you and your classmates rode the Cyclone together and something broke and it derailed. I hope that, er, clears everything up." Penny unconsciously touched her neck, caressing her bandage but never blinking or even averting her stare from the doctor. The tilted view of her window bothers her, but she can't tell if she wants to have a view of her own grave site right outside her hospital window or not. Something aches in her to see it, just like she wants to claw at her wound, but compulsion doesn't prevent catastrophe, and curiosity killed the cat years before it even knew of its urge.
"And," he continued, "to answer your, er, other questions, we'll be keeping you here for at least two weeks for observation — with an injury like this, you never know — but really it is a miracle and you should consider yourself extremely lucky. You are, I mean, extremely lucky, and—"
"I'm sorry to interrupt, doctor…" Penny cuts in ruthlessly, a wave of realisation washing over her, "but I don't think I can stay for two whole weeks, I have other things to do, I have—" she exhales a shaky breath, "I just can't. I'm sorry. And you— uh, doctor, you said that it's a medical miracle and that I'm lucky, but I can't stay lucky if I'm stuck in a bed like this. And it doesn't even hurt, so…"
"I'm sorry, I think you misunderstood me," he repeats, harsher. "I said ar least two weeks. I don't think you seem to understand that you have been beheaded, this is much more serious than a cut on the neck or a concussion. You are at risk for paralysis, massive blood loss, and especially death, and as a minor with no legal guardian present, if you leave I will be forced to detain you."
Well, that's great. He smiles awkwardly and adjusts her head pillow as a buffer. "I guess you understand our terms, then, Miss…?" He tries to usher her along, as if he's fixing the needle of a broken record player. The quiet air is supposed to be cut through by Penny finishing his sentence for him, aiding and telling him her name, but she's just as clueless. He mumbles the next bit to himself, "I guess even this medical wonder has its setbacks, I suppose I can always ask her later."
"Where are they?"
"S-sorry?"
"My other classmates… who were on the Cyclone with me. Where are they now?"
"Ah, yes, well, I'm not sure I'm allowed to disclose patient information."
"OK. Um, can I see them, then?"
"No, no! Well, not now at least. The police still have to take your statements, and obviously you all have to recover physically and mentally from all that's happened, so err… but I'll give you a little bit of time before your next round of tests. The police will come and speak to you soon, as well." He gives a sheepish grin and backs out of the room, leaving Penny to think.
Every movement she takes is slow and dragged out, as if the ends of her nerves have been burned off and this is the only pace they manage at. She raises her arm, name tag etching paper-cuts into her flesh and hesitates for a moment before she weakly pokes her neck bandage. Not enough to touch the wound, not even enough to touch any bit of skin with how tightly and thickly the tissue is wrapped, but she feels something wet and squishy, like how a crumpled up piece of paper would feel if you threw it into the sea. Once she removes her hand, the tip of her index finger is a quiet red.
Suddenly, she sobs.
Penny's bottom lip quivers as her gaze fills up to her eyelids with tears; once her great, big doe eyes take a slow blink, eyelashes batting like a doll's, they come streaming down her face from both eyes like they're racing to cross her cheeks. Once they pass by her freckles and her stuffy, pink nose, they soak her jawline and from there, they drip down onto her wound dressing. She covers her mouth to stifle her incoming cries, squinting her eyes shut so hard it feels like her blood vessels are severing. It's odd, it's all odd.
Crying because of something you don't remember and people you don't know is odd. Crying because something bad happened to you is odd, only when you don't know what happened and it doesn't feel like it affects your state of mind at all, only your neck and nerves. Crying because you have a reason to cry, but not crying because of that reason. She wails as quietly as she can, almost like a banshee in her depressed rage, and almost as if someone else was doing it for her, she reached her shaking free hand out to the nightstand, gripping instinctively onto everything that comes into contact with the skin of her palm until she feels what she's looking for, and then takes it and holds it up above her dramatically, like the skull in Macbeth.
She has to rotate the glass cup around a bit, and begrudgingly let the ice chips that were inside of it melt in her mouth, but she finally gets at an angle where she can see her face. Amidst her tears, bad eyesight and the reflection of the cup, it's hard to see, but her face is swollen and ghostly pale, red and black bruises invading, her braids have escaped their enclosure, but she looks deep into her own eyes.
They're green, like she imagined they were, and like she wanted them to be when she couldn't remember what colour they were, and now there's one thing she for her to know about herself — green eyes. Penny sniffs, wiping her nose with her arm feebly, the green glistening as she looks up to the ceiling. Some loose wind is knocked out of her throat with another warning sob, which seems to be the last and loudest, but she still manages to pucker herself up and sort herself out.
When she hears the shrill, creaky song of the door being pushed on and swinging open, Penny shuts her eyes and prays. Of course, in the split second between it being closed and it being open, there was no time, (if anyone didn't have the decency to knock, which they usually didn't), for her to clasp her hands together and mutter Hail Mary like a martyr until she forgets the words, but either way, she can't. The nerves in her hands are stiff, almost dried up, and the urge she has to drum her fingers against the duvet can't be quenched when she can only move with one sly joint at a time.
Still, Penny wonders if she got that urge often, if she tapped her fingers over and over before she had to rediscover that she knew how. She wonders if she liked music or rhythm or percussion, she recalls songs and bands softly but can't fathom having a favourite; she wonders if she will ever remember her favourite songs, her favourite things, ever again.
In her head, her hands are crossed and sweaty in desperation, rosary beads leaking from the crevices in her palms, and though she has only met God in the fresh breeze of tree branches stuck in her hair and screaming neck wounds and upside down rollercoaster carts, she still find herself praying at all. When she opens her eyes and her birthday — or death day, rather — wish has not come true, her face falters.
A nurse enters the room, clipboard at her chest and some strained sympathy on her face. Something's dislodged in Penny's contentedness, like she's choking on her food and the remains are coughed out in a hazy, distant Heimlich; her wish is almost written on her forehead in permanent marker, of course it couldn't have come true. She hoped — or deluded herself into thinking — that a mother, a father, a sister, a brother or family member or friend was a door (and many universes) away shrieking her name and tackling her in a hug.
"I just have to take your blood," the nurse explains easily, her ponytail swishing against her floral cardigan. "Shouldn't be too hard, right?"
"T-take my blood?" Penny coughs before she speaks, as always, and is fairly startled at the sound of her own voice. Her own stutter, her hesitance: the flimsiness of her words that can be bent or broken every time her tongue hits the roof of her mouth, it takes her aback — certainly, she wonders if it is something everlasting, from before the accident, but it feels new and unprecedented from instinct, like a roadblock in the way between her brain and her mouth. "That sounds… vampirical."
The floral nurse laughs. "We're not drinking it, just looking at it and putting stuff in it. Ready to tell us your name, then? You can't be Jane Doe forever." What seems, in her lens, a joke, is something that fills Penny with some sort of uncertain dread, and she tenses up like a hedgehog, leaning a little further back into her pillow no matter how painful the movements are. She manages to hold onto a jagged half-smile and reply.
"Not… today." She says quietly, as if she's ashamed, grabbing at the cold, metal legs of the hospital bed with one hand like a sticky-pawed gecko: over and over again to remind herself of her presence here. Stimulating her, keeping her addiction to thinking about the past in check. Penny spreads her free arm out and the nurse wraps the tourniquet around it, tightening it with such a strange force that it feels like her blood vessels are popping out of her skin.
"This is going to sting." Penny knows the nature of blood tests, knows the routine and the needle slitting through her flesh and the timid weakness from the moments after, and she dwells again, like she always is, on how she can remember things that happen but not things that happen to her, like mistaking a lucid dream for reality; remembering dipping your toes in the deep end as a young child but not recognising that you've been swallowed by the technical depth and height of the water until it's been spit out of your mouth once reaching the surface. The needle stings with such little relevance compared to her neck and back that she almost feels some sort of twisted relief, a feeling that dissipates as quickly as it arrives once the nurse pulls the syringe out of her arm. "All done."
Penny looks away despite the pain not being as bad as expected, once the nurse starts messing with the vials: looking at a sample of her own blood felt too dehumanising, something that was extremely ironic considering that something even more dehumanising than looking at your blood is amnesia. "This," the nurse begins, "is going to aid to testing your head a little, but it's mainly for looking at things like your blood type to help identify who you are. Your DNA test, since you won't tell us your name, cheeky girl."
She grins, but both of them feel disheartened with Penny's dishonesty. "I-I would say, but I'm just…" she looks up thoughtfully, trying to find the right way to word her sentence without hinting to hiding her name or hinting to hiding her memory loss, "…not sure. I'm not sure." The nurse writes some things down on the label of the test tube, her gaze fixated on the task at hand expertly. Penny shifts in her spot.
"…I, um—"
"Yes?"
"Where… my classmates. I know you're not allowed t-to tell me about other patients and… but could I just see them? Even once? You— I don't think you understand how worried I am." The nurse looks up, head facing the wall and her eyebrows furrowed in a mysterious knot, nose scrunching up as she's deep in thought.
"Stand up for me."
"…What?"
"Stand up," the nurse says, ushering her along with a wave of the hand. Penny stares at her with a peculiar expression, as if trying to speak through her eyes that she can not stand — but she does, though crookedly.
Her body shifts with her entire weight, as if she's carrying a boulder on her neck — everything hurts, but her wound, her spine, her head: they ache with a pain so unimaginable it lingers on not feeling real at all. Her teeth are chattering into her skull, scarring her tongue as she tries to hold back an undistinguished scream. Penny's back shuffles forward slowly, knees rusty like an old lady's, bare feet hitting the floor numbly — her spine feels almost severed from her head, only united in their damage; it feels like poison darts have been stuck into her, shooting sudden bullets of pain up her vertebrae. Penny's eyes almost feel like they're rolling up into her head when she tries to stand, biting onto her lip so hard to suppress her scream, only ending up with a silent cry and a bloody mouth as the nurse puts a supportive hand on her lower back.
She blubbers out a few words incoherently, "I— I can't, I really… can't," but the nurse shushes her, pushing her palm against the young girl until she manages to stand to some degree: at this point, her spine was about as usable for a human as the spine of a school library book. She stands, her upper body rolled forward in a slouch, and she has to bend her knees to sit down in the wheelchair, eyes glassy with something to match the cracks in her porcelain skin. The nurse grips the handles with one hand, stroking the younger girl's cheek with the other.
It's Penny's first time outside of her hospital room, certainly a memory to put a stamp on or place inside of an intricate gold frame in her mind; the funny thing is that it's not even her first time out consciously — she remembers waking up on a stretcher, and a kind woman washing her back and watching the clock tick with it's impending imminence that she couldn't escape and yet refused to tear her eyes from. Her fingers curl themselves up into meek fists as her heart thumps against her chest like a bodybuilder pushing his entire weight against a door he aims to break down.
Penny can feel the nurse drum her fingers impatiently against the handlebar of her wheelchair as they stride down the hallway, moving past a few desks and corridors until the elevator is finally in sight. Penny sticks her hand out to the rail, soothing her shaky hands even as she realises how much this cramped metal shaft is teeming with germs and awakening claustrophobia in her that she didn't know she had.
"Floor one," the nurse murmurs to herself with a nervous sense to her voice, as if she could flinch at anything outside of her inner calendar, her little world of expectancy from a hospital so small she can count the floors on one hand. All the bustling noise awakens a mild migraine in Penny, the flurries of light and sound so overwhelming that she can only extrapolate little pieces from the whole of it, chunks of intrigue. "It's not usually this busy, it's pretty quiet, but then, you know— you and your classmates arrived."
Her head buzzes like TV static, eyes straining to see anything through all of the activity; they fake a sharp turn towards a ward that blasts Penny's senses until she can feel her nervous system explode, and the nurse swipes a card against a scanner, and they go in. "We don't have many critical care patients, it's just the two of your classmates and a geriatric patient in the other room. This place is small." Her voice stays low.
They wander into the first room on the left, and Penny's heart skips so many beats it's like someone else is pumping her heart for her; the nurse wheels her closer, so her strained eyes can focus on the girl lying spread-eagle on the bed, eyes closed as if she's in an extravagant beauty slumber. "She's in a coma."
Penny can't hear a thing, her green stare focused directly on the girl with eyes that won't open like hers once did, but she imagines, with a quiet hum, if they could be blue or brown or hazel, and the worrying over someone else gives Penny a weird jolt down her spine. The girl's hair is red, splayed over the pillow, (straight with a weak curl to it and spaghetti thin, as if she had combed her hair with a lint roller every morning for her whole life) — some stray tendrils tickle her face with a hauntingly childish charm, and Penny, who was hunched over in a wheelchair, felt like an old lady compared to this girl. A little girl.
Her skin is as pale as a ghost's, only inferior to the red freckles crawling up her upturned nose and her pink-frosted cheeks. She's peaceful in a way that is completely panicked, subconsciously erratic and yet dreamy. Penny grabs the sleeping girl's hand desperately and almost jumps at how cold her hands are, like a corpse's.
Like a corpse's she has to identify.
She cups the girl's palms in hers, tracing her icy palm lines and shaping out her freezing, slender fingers with her own hands. A tear catches in her eye but it subsides against the unnerving stare of the Jane Doe looking down with such close unfamiliarity, a form of recycled fear as she stares her own death into her eyes. She never stops gazing at the other girl's eyelids, fluttering lightly with the motion of her coma, ginger lashes warmly batting against her stone-cold skin.
"Come on, honey, let's go now," the nurse says, gently putting a hand on Penny's shoulder with a sting that she barely even notices.
At night, Penny has dreams of red-haired girls with dead-cold hands and roller-coasters that never stop spinning.