bringing lucy home

Chapter 10: Fragile Humanity

48 stitches. That's how many it took to fix Lucy's skin after that nasty slide tackle which broke her ankle.

6 months. That was how long it would be before Lucy could play again.

5 days. That's how long it had been since the day it happened. Since then, Lucy had been in bed, resting her foot, fading in and out of a pained sleep. All the medications she took relieved some of the physical pain in her ankle but nothing was strong enough to distract her from her thoughts and misery.

As if it wasn't bad enough that her entire life was falling apart, her old enemy Injury was back again. She knew that injury is just as hard to overcome mentally as it is physically but she wasn't in half the mental state she needed to be ok. So the medic lied, it wasn't going to be ok.

For all these days, Lucy hadn't been able to get up and walk, or speak, or anything. Again, she was forced to shut herself up away from the world. She hobbled into the kitchen and fell into a chair in front of the window. She sat there, numb, staring out at the rain that was slowly sliding down the glass. She felt like she was somewhat a raindrop herself, slow and blue. She wondered if she'd ever recover fully from this.

She knew it was true, now. She had made her biggest mistake in leaving City. The year-long ending of her and Keira's relationship, her loneliness in a new country, and now her injury...it was all over.

"You've done it again, Lucy," she whispered to herself.

She rested her face in her hands, her face contorting into a pained expression, an expression of all the misery a human can bear, as she fought the tears that inevitabley began pouring from her eyes. The physical pain her injury caused her didn't have a patch on the pain she carried inside. It was unbearable. Her whole body shook with sobs and there was no one to hold her.

She was filled with anger, mostly at herself. She wanted to tear out her hair, she was kicking herself for everything she had done which led up to this. She was blaming herself for all the inevitable circumstances she found herself in.

Stumbling into the kitchen, she grabbed the nearest thing she could get her hands on, an almost empty wine bottle, and threw it viciously at the wall. The bottle shattered into a million pieces, reflecting almost the state of her heart and mind. She screamed aloud but felt like no one could ever hear her. Lucy swept her strong arm across the counter and threw everything: glasses, spices, jars, silverware: to break on the floor with a deafening crash. Everything in her life was falling apart. She was at the point of sobbing where every breath caught in her throat, and her face was becoming blue with grief and anger.

She retreated to the bathroom again, where she pressed her palms against the bathroom counter, gripping the sink's edge till her knuckles showed white under the sun-tanned skin. She couldn't stop herself from shaking, her whole body quivering inside out. Her eyes snapped up as she made contact with her reflection. She couldn't even recognize herself.

Gasping for breath between the rattling sobs, she stared at herself for a few miserable seconds before throwing a punch at the girl looking back at her, shouting in rage. Her fist hit the mirror and instantly the pain of a thousand knives shot through her hand. She was thrown back by her force and slid down, against the wall, to her old position in a ball on the bathroom floor.

The poor mirror, cracked, inverted, and broken was beyond repair, like Lucy thought she herself was. Her knuckles, stuck with glass and bleeding, burned. She let her tears fall into her uncontrollably shaky hands as she collapsed in her deepest hurt. The sting of everything, her physical, mental and emotional pain was something she couldn't shake off, not this time. She was an absolute wreck. So she stayed there, miserable, gasping, bleeding, and pained on the floor like she was the only person in the world.