The Unknown Enemy ∘ Marvel [3]

Chapter 38: After An Emergence

Sienna feels something loom over her and she cannot decide in an incoherent state of mind if it is a cloaked grim reaper finally coming to collect after years of evading such an end or what must be the nurses trying to understand why veins under her bloodshot eyes aren't a normal color. She decides on the latter when their conversation about how odd it appears registers into the tapestry of her wayward thoughts.

Not much else does.

The sharp outlines of the world abandon her vision as the fatigued agent perceived it all in softened smudges of luminance. She balanced on the brink of conscious and not, finding her lips forming around words but never vocalizing much of anything. Tired- she was so tired.

The pinch of the needle in her arm causes her awareness to be obscured more so and it's sharp. Sharp like the same long spindle armored men shoved into her neck at nine a.m. for fifty-seven days. Like the one Bradley lodged in her twice before she inadvertently snapped his spine. She doesn't remember remembering one of those things- too many slow words in her head.

Her stomach wretched into swirls. Her thoughts descended right along with it. It all becomes one long, drug-induced blur that escapes out a time to become an infinity between the hours she was mostly unresponsive.

Muddled images of the dead body of a teenager girl sewn together with brief bouts of nausea. The Soldier's darkened eyes being the only feature illuminated in the darkness of furlong memories. Red. Lots of red snaking through the corners of a disjointed mind already utterly confused. Needles, scalpels, and a treasure trove of utensils sharpened and ready to dig deep into her organs. Aliens made into somewhere into the mix, the grey and peeling faces of the unmasked Chituari peered down at her with inhuman indifference. The blue glow of a cube and being buried by the remnants of what might've been the Rabat facility, she couldn't tell.

Steve, where is Steve? All Sienna could conjure is his battered form lying against the edge of a limitless blue. Unintelligible dreams flooded freely in a dazed mind. Her stomach distorted itself again. Her arm- what had happened to her arm? Her shoulder? Somewhere in the hysteria, she had to remind herself it was still attached and she wasn't the one bearing the metal appendage.

Someone is asking her what day it is. Her gut is coiling tightly like a loose wire and the back of her throat is scorching. She's not knee deep in damp sand anymore. She's warm and then hot and then her insides are searing with pain and someone is asking her what day it is again. She remembers it was the twenty-first of August when her father died in 1997.

It has been a long, hard fight and she decides to rest now.

~~~~~~~

First all I feel is aching, then soreness, then every sluggish ailment in between. Right after realizing I'd regained consciousness, I understood I had the instant urge to vomit.

Then I did.

My gut lurched as whatever was left in the contents of my stomach came right back up. I was suddenly upright and a bag was placed in front of me and I realized a few other things while barfing. Everything was hot; my skin was coated in a thick sheen of sickly sweat and every bit of me was burning. Not like fire devouring me physically, but an inferno lighting me up from the inside.

Talking, so much talking. Hurried voices exchanging fragments of sentences around me and it's all so loud, like a white noise machine playing every available option at once. I'm in a bed. I'm in a hospital. My mind swings with nausea and dizziness and I need to get out. I don't remember a hospital.