Our Heart - The Greatest Showman {Book 2 of "One Heart"}

Chapter 54

Elizabeth's POV 

I felt the air rush into my lungs.  

The burning. The pain that accompanied it. The relief that followed.  It was  as if my ribs were now steel traps, closing in on every breath causing pain to etch its way through me but I felt it. I could feel it once more. My breath seemed to stutter in my lungs before it was let go, feeling the tension drain from  my body...slightly. Breathing as if no air would ever be enough, as if  I were a drowning victim suddenly brought up from the depths. 

I could feel the jitter of something underneath me. Nothing to really be able to pick out what exactly it was but enough to know that something was happening. 

With my eyelids fluttering, the brightness of the area quickly flooded itself into my line of view, causing everything to become a single blur while I waited for my eyes to adjust. It was all a sort of faded picture that waited for the image to form.  Single shapes could be picked out. Outlines of things directly in front of me. Turning my head caused too much pain; it allowed it to shoot down the back of my neck into my shoulders. 

Finger flinched slightly at my will as I came to realize the intense bruises all along my arm. Not that I could see them very well but the traces of the outskirt yellowish colour and the soreness that evolved with it.

One by one things came into the few. 

A window. 

The interior of a carriage. 

Thomas Carter's bruised face and Cassie's terrified energy. 

Pushing through the blaring pain so I could tilt my head back, even just an inch, let me see Phillip's face. It wasn't bruised or cut (or I just couldn't make out any), but his icy blue eyes broke through the dirt and dust that lied on his face. Relief and joy, I think, was in his eyes and gone as quickly as they came.  

It was when I could see his lips moving that I felt sick. 

Silence gnawed at my insides. Silence hung in the air like the suspended moment before a falling glass shatters on the ground. Fragments of thought, splinters of words, and droplets of silence spun into a kaleidoscopic jumble, shifted infinitesimally, and fell into an incredible new pattern. The silence was eerily unnatural, like a dawn devoid of birdsong. Silence clung to them like a poisonous cloud that at any moment could choke the life from them.

All of them spoke. Spoke words that I could not hear. The carriage's movement I could sense but I couldn't hear what the surrounding's was like. 

The thoughts are accelerating inside my head. I want them to slow so I can breathe but they won't. My breaths come in gasps and I feel like I will black out. My heart is hammering inside my chest like it belongs to a rabbit running for its skin. The room spins and I squat on the floor, trying to make everything slow to something my brain and body can cope with. I feel so sick. An invisible hand clasps over my mouth; an equally ghostly hypodermic of adrenaline pierces my heart, unloading in an instant. I feel my ribs heaving as if bound by ropes, straining to inflate my lungs. My head is a carousel of fears spinning out of control, each one pushing my mind into blackness. 

But I don't want to go.  The sound of silence is just consuming me. Like a wave does a beach during a high tide.  I try to signal to Phillip but the sudden jolt of the carriage causes me to roll, making a small groan form in my throat but it never reached my lips.

I look up at Phillip trying to get some idea of what was going on but nothing. All I got were mouthed words to the others and two fingers gently closing my eyes, I tried to bat his hand away but he just held his hand over my eyes. Restraining me visually, while I moved around despite the pain, trying to understand why we were here, until my adrenaline finally gave out and I felt a narrow thread pull me into emptiness. 

A/N -> My New "The Greatest Showman" book "Casting Calls" is out. Please go and read it. :D