Little Moments

Paralyzed From the Beginning

Paralyzed From the Beginning

SAO in a way had been a blessing to Asuna, her life had essentially fallen apart last year after an attempt on her life due to her being the daughter of a CEO, and now everything had changed. Her sister Kizmel had taken her from her parents for a little while as she adjusted. Adjusted to having her entire world turned upside down and her parents' hopes and dreams for her crushed like a tiny bug.

Asuna could hardly breathe, she was trembling in fear, her amber eyes were wide, scared and full of tears, and she wanted to believe it was all a dream. But it wasn't, being forced to stand there with her wrists tied, a gag in her mouth that was making her throat and mouth itch, and with the tip of a knife poking at her spine made the fourteen-year-old want to cry and hope desperately that it was just a dream.

Seconds later it was confirmed that it wasn't a dream when her body went rigid, she screamed through the cloth in her mouth and she arched her back, pain riddling her entire body in that one action from the man behind her. She heard the gunshot but saw nothing as her knees buckled and she kept screaming, wanting the pain to go away, to leave her alone, in peace.

She could hear a man yelling something about not letting her fall, but it was too late as her shoulder came in contact with hard cement and the rest of her body followed suit. Asuna nearly blacked out when her head hit the pavement, but was rudely kept awake by the sudden massive spike of pain in her back. It felt like each nerve was on fire, like she was hyper-aware of the area directly around the injury and the way her upper part of her spine was slowly growing with pain.

"Asuna! You'll be okay, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry pumpkin!"

Asuna vaguely heard her father practically sobbing and felt his tears dripping onto her face, the liquid causing even more pain to riddle her small body, but couldn't respond, sobbing herself and screaming while her back made the teenager want to die just to take the pain away, it hurt... it hurt like she was on fire...

Suddenly the pain around the injury and anywhere lower vanished, leaving Asuna with relief but blurry confusion.

"W-What do you mean she won't walk again?" Those were the last words Asuna heard, the words sounded slurred and confused in her brain, but the message rang clear. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

After that point, living in a wheelchair and more than mildly depressed, Asuna lived on autopilot, doing what she was told and throwing herself into forgetting what happened to her. Soon she became the top student at her school despite not physically going to school almost at all and went to therapy after therapy to try and fix her back. She wasn't paralyzed, cause she could bend her knees, wiggle her toes, get her legs to stretch out in front of her, but she couldn't consciously move them amongst the other problem. Every day more than a few times a day she would get these excruciating fits of pain at the messed up area of her spine, the pain was bad enough that she usually couldn't do much other than groan and or cry, and had to be lying down on her stomach or sitting slumped in something during them. The last issue was the biggest problem, Asuna couldn't walk. She couldn't handle her own body weight on top of her back screaming at her and flaring up badly at the added pressure, so she was confined to a wheelchair, and her mother was unforgiving about it. Her father was more guilty than anything, her brother tried to take care of her and help when he could, and her older sister Kizmel took her away for six months, home to Kizmel's house and away from her controlling and always disappointed mother.

However, it was SAO that gave Asuna ironically, the will to live again. At first it had been hard to get used to, being able to run, jump, sprint around, and move without confinements was hard but enthralling. For a while she had forgotten that she and ten-thousands other players were trapped in the game as she got used to her freedom and giddily defeated monster after monster, met other players, and only Argo, the first person Asuna had met in the game, knew about how Asuna, Aincrad's Princess and the Lightning Flash wasn't able to walk IRL. Argo comforted her like a big sister through the still painful bouts she got in her back that were a lot more sparse and could usually escape them for days at a time, and eventually, even Kirito helped her through them too. The sweet Black Swordsman found out about the bouts of pain the hard way when they had been working together to solve a murder mystery only to had Asuna collapse on the way back from talking to a player named Yoroko, her face whiter than a sheet and would've been sweating if it had been the real world.