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Natalie isn’t sure if most of the blood is even hers or not. It probably is, but for her sanity, she's also saying it's probably less serious than it seems. Head wounds always bleed a lot, severe or not.
Never mind the fact that head wounds are always supposed to be treated as severe—she doesn't have the resources to deal with that by herself. Really, it doesn't matter how bad it actually is; her course of action will be the same. She'll wipe the blood away and disinfect the cuts, then slap a bandage on the worst of them and hope her enhanced healing is enough to keep her from dying in the middle of the night.
Sometimes, she wonders how long it would take her parents to notice that she'd died like that. If they'd notice her absence before the stench of her corpse.
Downstairs, she hears a clamor of voices rise—with her hearing, she should be able to make out their exact words, but she's already nursing enough of a headache without listening to her mother's latest report on the brother she doesn't have, or her father's desperate attempt to talk her down from the episode.
She supposes the good thing about it is that it means her parents are occupied for the time being. Not that they'd be paying attention to her, regardless.
Natalie bends down to fish the disinfectant out from under her bed; her head throbs as she does, but focuses instead on going through the motions, fixing what she can. She’s hardly an expert in medical care, but this has become somewhat routine. Clean up the mess. Cover up the wound. Keep a low profile.
A painful silver lining: she doesn’t have to try very hard for that last one.
As usual, Natalie begins by blotting at the wet spots blood with a tissue, if only to avoid getting stains on everything. She can feel the slick spot on the back of her skull where her head had hit the pavement during the fall, but it seems like her hair has caught most of the blood, at least.
She'll still have to change her shirt again, but that's fine. She has enough practice removing blood stains, anyway.
Her hands are shaking as she wets another tissue with disinfectant, balancing the bottle between her knees as she clicks the cap shut. This is going to hurt—but it has to be done.
Natalie sets the bottle to the side and stands, knees wobbling slightly as she forces herself to her feet so that she can properly see herself in the small mirror perched atop her desk. As expected, her fair hair is seeped in scarlet.
The cut is wider than she'd hoped, but she supposes it could be worse given how hard she’d hit the ground. If she hadn’t reacted when she had, she would’ve taken the full force of the hit to the face, and she doubts she would be standing here to clean the wound at all, in that case.
At the very least, the injury is shallow enough that she doesn't need to worry about figuring out how to give herself stitches the night before her big recital.
This is still going to hurt, though, she knows.
Her hands shake as she finds the edge of the torn flesh and begins dabbing at it. The disinfectant burns enough that she flinches despite expecting it, dropping the tissue.
She picks it up again with a sigh.
If only, she thinks, she had the luxury of someone else to patch her up. If only she had the luxury of someone else who knew and cared.
Her parents were off the table even before she'd shivered through that horrific transformation alone all those months ago. There's no world where telling them makes her life easier in the slightest, and she knows that. Henry would be her first pick for a confidant, but he's somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to the intentions of superheroes, and she can't afford to weather the consequences of misplacing her trust in him. She doesn't think she could bear it.
No, as far as she's concerned, this secret will live and die with her. And that's the best case scenario.
Natalie sighs and flexes her fingers in hopes that it'll stop them from shaking. She doesn't fully succeed, but she does manage to steady her hand enough that when she presses her fingers down, she makes contact with the edge of the wound that she'd been aiming for.
Again, she winces. It hurts, but she pushes through it. It hurts, but she has no choice—
Through squinted eyes, she sees herself in the mirror, a portrait of tension and pain, one twitch on a hairpin trigger from trembling apart on the ragged little rug shaped like a sun that she's had since she was four. She sees scarlet blood soaking into soft white tissue gripped tightly in white-knuckled hands. She sees—
She doesn't see him. She can't see him. But part of her is convinced, all the same, that when she blinks, she catches a glimpse of a boy with wide, wide eyes boring into the back of her bleeding skull. His hands fidget in front of him. He says nothing.
Natalie screws her eyes shut, but she can't shake the feeling that she's being watched—and yet, the disquieting part isn't the thought of being seen.
No, it's that despite that feeling, she is filled with a bone-deep certainty that she's safe.
(In the back of her mind, a memory of tonight's fight replays. Before the strike, she'd felt a twinge in the back of her brain, a twisting fear in response to a cry she couldn't quite hear from someone whose hands she can only imagine shifting in an anxious fidget. Because of it, she always knows when danger is coming. That's how she survives.)
Natalie forces herself through a shaky exhale. It's fine, she tells herself. All that matters is that she's alive, now, and she'll live to see another day.
After all, that’s more than she can say for some people.