Flesh and Bone

Chapter 1: Emerging From The Wreckage Of Your Life

Pale white squares neatly and uniformly formed her sky as she reached consciousness, staring up at them and finally realizing herself at last. The sky was at first simplistic and dull, but soon it began to take shape with edges and cracks forming here and there. There was a vent that was almost clumsily shoved into a ceiling juncture overhead. The room was quiet, with neither a whisper nor a sound beyond the muffled passing of cars outside a large window to the right of the bed she was in.

It took a few moments to actualize that she was now awake. Everything seemed to move slow at first as she turned around to look, her eyes adjusting to the environment. Dream had given way to the corporeal and physical, the metaphysical and maleficent to the realm of senses. Sound and image and texture and smell and—

Overwhelming. Sensory overload. Stop. Give me a second. Closing her eyes, she brought her hands up to cover them even more as she winced as she became aware of an overwhelming pain in her head. It started as a whimper but escalated fast into a pitched scream every time she tried looking again. All she could do was moan as it washed over her.

Where even was she right now? This definitely wasn't her dorm room or her bedroom back at her parents' house, so something was obviously wrong here. Taking the chance to peek, she opened her left eye and let some light break through new cracks between her hands. It hurt like hell, but now she wasn't feeling so disorientated.

The pure-white blanket she was under felt almost plastic, washed and starched a thousand times. Everything around her was just as basic and undefined; a little black television sat on top of a platform raised in the corner of the room, two brown doors near each other in the other, light blue curtains pulled back letting in all that infernal light that blinded her with its catastrophic mild presence, and one thin little metal pole next to her that was dripping liquid into a little hanging bag.

Leading down to a tube jabbed into her arm.

I'm in a hospital? She tried again and again to remember why she was here, but it was all just a blur. A blank, a block of pain and haze that was draped over her minds' eye. Not knowing why she was here, what was wrong with her bugged her almost as much as the actual pain did; it wasn't her strong suit to be in the dark or out of control of things, least of all her own body and mind. Why?

It took her ten minutes to drop her hands from her face, her arms shaking from the exertion she had done to just keep them there. If the light was going to be this toxic to her, she could just blink through it if she really needed to see.

She was so weak right now, it was mortifying.

A new noise stirred her to attention. From one of the doors came a nurse, a middle-aged woman with fading orange hair and an entire outfit of baggy dark blue nurse scrubs not even really looking at the patient as they went about checking on the equipment plugged into her. Because of this auto-pilot behavior on their part, the nurse didn't notice that patient was actually fully awake now. So this meant when they locked eyes through the girl's thin fingers it took the attendee aback for a second.

"Oh!" The older woman gasped, recovering quick as they went to her side. "Are you feeling all right? Can you hear me?" The nurse picked up the patient's left arm carefully, being sure to not disturb the one that was being used to shield their face. Putting two fingers together onto the patient's wrist, the nurse began measuring the patient's vitals whilst staring at an old analogue clock as they wordlessly mouthed the numbers.

Trying to speak was a different matter for the newly-awakened. Her throat was dried out completely, so the words got choked on the way out by a desert. Licking her lips a bit, she succeeded on the second try, but only just barely. "Yes. Yes, I can hear you. Thirsty."