FINGERS CROSSED, yuzuha usagi

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"It has been two days since a meteorite exploded over Tokyo..." The voice of a reporter was the first thing she heard as her eyes fluttered open, studying her surroundings until her sight cleared and she realized she had been hospitalized, "Structural damage is centered around a 10km radius from Shibuya Park Street..."

Yasuko brought a hand up to her face, itching to rub the daze off her, but no other than a bandage's cotton fabric and an strangely shorter, distorted and awaking painfulness part of her arm came into contact with her eyelids. What the fuck, she thought, moving her limb far enough to understand what was wrong with it, What the actual fu—

"...has extended its condolences to the following families: some names are Kairi Nakamura, Daikichi Karube, Kihiro Sato, Chota Segawa, Kodai Tatta, Saori Shibuki, Ikehara Akio..."

The heart rate monitor next to her bed spiked up. She looked over her amputated member and caught the view of the hospital TV hanging from a corner of the room showing all types of photographs and videos taken of the remains of the incident that had gotten her in that state, inside of a tidy, little critical care unit, chained to a respiratory ventilator and some pumps she was making the hardest effort known in earth to not look at in order to avoid the sudden feeling of nausea finally get all the way up to her mouth.

A knock on the door got her attention for a moment. Yasuko waited patiently in silence, but the shadow on the other side of it hesitated for too long for her tired mind to care completely about the doorknob barely twisting and the silent creek that carried it open as she used her other hand to free herself from the respiratory mask covering half her face. Once she let it fall onto the space next to her pillow, she gazed back at the figure that had stepped into the room.

"Mom?" She mumbled, though the raspy and hoarse sound that was voiced out of her lips almost couldn't be comprehended as it mixed up with all the noise traveling inside along the woman that gaped at her as if she was the total opposite of what she remembered of her.

Regaining her consciousness slowly by the sedatives drifting away, she coughed a few times before trying again, hoping that time she would have an answer, hoping that time she wouldn't leave her alone.

"Hi, mommy," Yasuko lifted up her arm, tightly wrapped in bandages, weirded out by the ghost feeling of fingers waving at her just as her grin grew wider, "I'm missing a hand now." Her humorous tone, still recovering from the shock of the situation itself sinking in, wavered slightly as her mother's eyes filled with tears and her knuckles turned white from how hard she was gripping her purse.

Since she didn't move an inch away from the opened door at her back, Yasuko took the initiative, sitting up with shaky arms until she caught a pair of snooping eyes peeking at her from the door frame for what could've been ten seconds before slowly rolling down the hallway in a wheelchair after gifting her a shy smile Yasuko hadn't been quick enough to return back. Her mother's sudden outburst almost made her jump.

"How dare you wake up and start cracking jokes?" She got a wild look, the one she had feared facing when she was a kid and asked too much about her dad and why the sea had been the one he had chosen first instead of them, "Do you know how worried I've been, how worried your grandma has been?"

She talked as if she was angry, Yasuko could see it all over the way she gesticulated and breathed out every syllable like she was getting out of oxygen. But she wasn't, she was only full of unsaid apologies and guilt. She was only scared of losing someone she loved, again.

"A whole minute, your heart had completely stopped," from her seat on the bed, Yasuko couldn't help but bite her tongue as hard as she was able to not start crying, "For a whole minute, the borderlands had taken you and I couldn't think of anything else than what was I going to do if you didn't came back to me, why had I been so selfish, why couldn't I just accept your choices as you had accepted mines."