Poker Face

Chapter 52 - Wandering Mind Syndrome

Aven lay in bed for a while in terrible pain, completely unrelated to her injury. She had searing abdominal cramps and a migraine headache, and her muscles all ached too much for her to get even remotely comfortable. Before the apocalypse, she had always been prone to having debilitating and irregular periods but she'd responded fairly well to medication and was therefore able to handle the symptoms.

But when she was kidnapped, she had no medication and all the pain came back when she suddenly stopped taking it. After escaping, she realized she was pregnant by her captor but ultimately lost the child. Thankfully or not, after that her periods came fewer and far between, but the symptoms were just as severe nonetheless, if not more so. Before meeting Negan, if she wasn't staying with a group when it happened, she would just find a safe place and ride it out, only moving to go to the bathroom or eat small rations of food. This was only the fourth time she'd gotten it after miscarrying.

The painkillers Dr. Carson had given her were weak and slow-acting because he was worried about giving her something too strong while she was still regenerating the blood she'd lost. They did dull her headache though, enough for her to drag herself to the bathroom, half-doubled over in pain, to run a hot bath which almost hurt when she first dipped into it.

Her body quickly adjusted and the heat gradually started to ease the sharp pains in her stomach, partially just because the pleasant sensation was a good distraction. She was careful to stay sitting up so the hot water didn't touch her wound. As she relaxed, her mind began to wander and it wasn't long before it went somewhere bad.

When she had been trapped for all those months in the home of a man whose name she never even learned, Aven had stayed almost impossibly lucid. She needed to be present so she never missed her opportunity for escape, even though it never came until after he had turned. On the other hand the other girls, Cindy and Melanie, had willfully given into a sort of absent state that seemed to help them ultimately keep their sanity. Aven always thought it was odd that she herself hadn't entirely broken from stubbornly bearing full witness to the man's atrocities again and again.

Not even the soothing hot water could keep her rooted in the moment as she slipped into memories of her bare shins pressing into the grated floor of her cage, being dressed in the same torn and dirty clothes she'd been taken in, a plain t-shirt and a pair of jean shorts. The biggest courtesy her captor gave her and the other girls was after he was done with them, he'd toss their clothes back in their cages with them. It was an afterthought that always puzzled Aven, and it was the only bit of humanity she saw save for the man's inability to kill them when he grew tired of abusing them.

Aven traced a long scar that stretched from under her right breast down to her hip from a superficial but painful wound the man had given her. It was about the same length as her Lucille tattoo on the other side of her torso, not by coincidence. Negan had noticed the unusually long scar and asked about it one night and she'd told him it was from falling out of a tree when she was a child. He knew the ordeal she'd been through but she still didn't want to talk about it or for him to worry. Though it felt like they'd known each other a lifetime, she still largely remained a mystery to him. She was a mystery to herself too, unsure of who she was in the new world, as well as who she was before. She felt like a ghost floating through life between moments of being beaten on, moments of being very tangible and very vulnerable.

With her eyes closed, she barely felt the water around her anymore. She soon began shivering, lost in a cold, dark, damp basement where the only thing she could see through the darkness was a pinprick-sized blinking light from the dehumidifier, which she often saw even when she was asleep and long after she escaped. She kept her eyes locked in the direction of the door that led to the basement stairs. Any moment, he might open it and come in to drag her out of her cage. But if he made a mistake, left an opening at any second for her to escape, she was going to see it and seize it.