Tapestry of Scars

Portrait of Strength

A/N: *slides tissues and emotional support animals over to everyone reading*

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Chapter 20:

Portrait of Strength

Emily had fought many battles in her life, but in the end she'd won the most important ones...the ones inside herself. She found a sense of peace as she lied on the ground dying. She couldn't see Alison, but she could feel her. And that was enough for her. She knew that she was dying surrounded by love, and that's all she could have ever hoped for.

She was clinically dead when she was hauled off in the ambulance. The paramedics were working hard to revive her. They wouldn't let Alison on the rig. She screamed when the door closed, an agonizing yell that echoed in the trees. The pain in her ankle was nothing compared to her heartache.

The firefighters had whisked them away so they could battle the blaze. The cabin was a total loss, but they had to work to prevent the fire from spreading to the trees. Alison watched the thick black smoke through the flashing red lights.

The police swarmed them. Shana had been conscious by that point. The first responders were trying to stabilize them on the scene while they waited for additional ambulatory services. Shana could barely speak a comprehensive sentence, and Alison had gone catatonic. So when the police officers asked them what happened, neither could answer. It was just like the night Alison had killed her parents and Darren, down to the eerie coincidence that she'd shot him in the kitchen.

By the time Alison got to the hospital she was pumped full of drugs. She could barely keep her eyes open. But she had enough fight in her to try and climb off of the stretcher to go find Emily.

"Whoa, whoa, there sweetheart." A young Middle Eastern doctor stopped her from falling to the ground. Alison tried to read his badge, but everything was spinning. "You've got enough narcotics in you to knock out a horse...or a Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Besides, you don't need to be up on that ankle. I can barely maneuver these halls on two good feet. Let's get you back to X-Ray."

He seemed nice enough. But Alison still wanted to bite him to get him to let go of her and make a run for wherever the hell Emily was. But she was defenseless because of the drugs, so she just fell back against the stretcher and let them take her to see how bad the break in her ankle looked.

She was nearly drunk out of her mind when the radiologist and orthopedic surgeon walked in and explained that because of the complexity of the break she was going to have to have surgery to place two corrective pins and a plate in her bone.

"Emily..." It was the first thing she'd said since Emily had been taken away from her. "Where is Emily?"

It was the first of many times that she asked, but no one would tell her anything. She was pissed off, scared, and alone.

It didn't dawn on her to reach out to anyone. It didn't even dawn on her that she wasn't really alone.

She felt like a jackass when she saw a nurse rolling Shana into her room in a wheelchair. After they'd been taken away by different ambulances she had completely forgotten to check on her friend.

The bruising on Shana's face looked terrible. Her right eye was nearly swollen shut. She had two stitches in her lip and several more closing up a gash near her temple. She had two butterfly bandages on a cut in her forehead. She'd taken a hell of a beating.

The nurse rolled her wheelchair over to Alison's bedside.

"Hey." Alison didn't recognize her own voice. The medication was making her head feel huge, like it was filling the room.