The heat seemed to stick to her, a film of sweat covering her face, her breath short, fighting to suck in the air through the thickening smoke from the fire now wildly spreading through the trees. Her legs felt weighed down and the spines protruding from her body buzzed in anticipation like pins and needles across her body. She felt the tiredness threatening at the edge of her senses, but in front of her she saw her opponent and knew she could not rest.
He stood nonchalantly leaning against an already smoldering tree, barely seeming to register the exertion that the fight had so clearly taken out of her, but with some satisfaction she noticed a single thick spine digging deep in to his thigh its end jutting from the dark material of his suit. At least one had hit true and she hoped it would slow him...enough. But, as if reading her thoughts he reached down to the object, a large hand encircling its end and without any further fanfare drew it out in one clear motion with a sickening wrenching sound, she recognized.
She watched him bewildered as he brought the spine to his face its bone smooth surface still smeared with his blood and with a long tongue licked at its tip, his mouth curled sneeringly in a grin and eyes fixed on her. Is it possible to still feel a limb once its detached, she felt disgusted at his intimate gesture and as if seeing her shaken, his shoulders shrugged lightly as he began to laugh. The sound mingled into the cracking breaking sounds of the night, of the forest slowly being eaten away and the sound of his soft laugh suddenly made her angry.
Bending her legs, she felt the muscles tense and in a burst covered the distance between them. She knew he was injured in his right leg and shifted her weight to throw her next punch into his side, making him push the weight on to it, hoping to make him lose his balance. As she swung her arm, she pivoted; throwing bone, fist and shoulder all into the movement.
"CRACK..." the shoulder spines exploded in a shattering of pieces against his fist as he dodged to the side of her turn. Then suddenly in terror she felt a hot hand clasp tightly on the wrist of her swinging arm, encircling it whole, forcing her to twist too far. Fighting to keep her balance she saw too late his other hand coming toward her, pulling around her body still holding the solid spine, moving in a slow arch straight towards her face. Her eyes open wide, in disbelief, even as the sharp tip pierces the soft yielding membrane of her eye and she screams.
The sound echoes outwards shrill and deafening, crushing her lungs with its force. The scream floods across her mind smothering her every thought, yet even as her breath escapes her, nothing breaks into the deep claustrophobic pain that sits in the darkness now covering half her view of the world.
Later, the pain is there; surrounding her, holding her to the ground, her body limp as she blinks out with her remaining eye. She sees the spine still there, the familiar shape of it looking deformed from the corner of her vision and she struggles to focus. The blood running across her face dripping into her blinking eye, she makes out a figure looking at her squating down to meet her hazy gaze, but she can't see him clearly. The darkness seems to cloud not only her sight, but her voice, her hearing. Through a the fog of pain, she hears a mumbling voice and then again the soft callous laugh.
The shadowed form gets up turning on his heel and begins to walk away, the sound of his laughter lost as she finally closes her eye and lets the darkness engulf her.
To Be Continued...
* * *
The beeping sound pulses insistent and steady keeping her from the quiet oblivion she craves. Crisp sheets seem to touch upon her arms and a cold light slips in through the crack of her barely opened eye. Through misted vision she sees the outline of two figures and for a moment her heart jumps, the strong memory of the recent shadowed figure still seeming to hound her thoughts, but the voice that speaks out is old and familiar to her, a voice she hadn't heard in months.
"I don't care what facilities you have here Dr Greaves, our physician and his team have been treating her for years and we will be moving her tomorrow"
"Sir, your daughter has only just come out of surgery and moving her is totally unnecessary....we can restore her spine reflexes I'm sure with the right combination of simulators" the other voice replied, an edge of frustration showing clearly.
"You will certainly not be restoring anything..." was the languid reply from the older voice and she recognized the milder tone as forewarning that the young doctor was treading too closely to her father's legendary temper now.
"But Lord Farringdon, it would not be right for us to delay the healing process any longer"
"I will decide what is right for my daughter!" The voice broke in anger, shouting the last words and roughly clearing away the last of her fogginess.
"Perhaps I should decide what is best for me....don't you think father?" Her voice was raspy and she could feel the effects of the smoke still clogging her lungs and throat. She coughed loudly, the spasm lifting her head from the bed and the doctor moved to the side table taking a glass and jug to pour her a glass of water. She took the glass from him thankfully shifting to sit upright.
"Ms Farringdon, I'm sorry to have woken you, but it is perhaps apt. I was explaining to your father that we need to place you on a metabolism accelerator. We needed to suppress your healing while we operated to remove the eye, but your stats do not seem to be returning to their normal levels on their own. A small dose now would ensure we could run you through some tests and then...."
Removed....removed.... The word hurtled into the forefront of her thoughts and suddenly she become all too aware of the ache across the right side of her swollen face. Her eye. Of course it was gone, how could it not be, but somehow she had thought that deep down under that darkness something would still be there. She reached up now her hand touching upon the soft cotton pack and gauze covering where the spine had been. It shocked her for a moment, maybe she thought the hard surface of the spine would still be there somehow, but the sudden feel of soft emptiness instead shook her even more, as she imagined a gaping dark hole lying in its place.
She moved her hand away shaking and a blackness seemed to seep over her vision inking across the room in front of her, its shadow darkening the room like a fast setting sun. As the last of the light of the hospital room disappeared she felt the cloudy darkness pressed in around her and suddenly it seemed to be smoke filling her lungs again and the crackling of fire she could only hear. And she knew he was out there in that thickness somewhere, if she could only see him, ingrain that smile, that look on her memory, she needed to remember. She could feel the strain of searching, her face and body pressing hard against the smoke like wall and more than once she thought she could make out an outlined figure, a glint of dark metal occasionally blinking at her, there then not there.
"Felicity? My God Felicity, stop!..." her father's voice came from outside the fog and suddenly the room flooded back to her. In her hand she gripped broken glass, the water mixing with fresh blood coming from gorges of parted skin, making watery red droplets fall on the white bed sheets.
She looked down at her hand, confused at the the blood that was hers and the angry cuts across her palm. "Couldn't see him" she said defeated to herself and she let the last of the half remembered images drift back into the depths of her mind - seeming to sit stagnant like a shard of pain in her now empty socket.
"Here hold her arm here" the doctor leaned across and pulled her father's hand quickly and firmly placing it around her wrist "keep the pressure and the hand high, I'll get the nurse" and he turned and hurried out the the door. Her father obeyed caught off guard by the doctors movement and shifted uncomfortably in his position.
Felicity felt her father's strong fingers against her wrist and looked down to see the wrinkles across his pale skin contrasting so vastly against the blue elastic sheen of hers. And she thought, this was the first time he had touched her in years, since the last of the changes, long before she'd decided to go away on this mission. As she looked up and met his soft grey-blue eyes, he seemed to think the same thought and flinched as if to let go, then realised he couldn't.
She held his gaze, a fierceness and sadness filling her now as she stared at him, her one eye challenging him, demanding for some remembrance of the young laughing girl, the girl with pale skin and no diseases to cure,no oddities to hide from their relatives and high-class friends. He seemed flustered then, his own eyes only reflecting the changed girl before him and struggled with some internal thought before breaking away.
"I'll should call your mother...She'll be worried." He said, taking out his phone, not noticing her blood from his hand smearing onto its gleaming shell.
"I'm sure mother has more to worry about...like where her next scotch is" she blurted out and the harshness of her words filed away her sadness somewhere else, some other place and time to deal with.
She dutifully took up her wrist with the other hand and at that point the doctor blundered back into the room, a nurse following him carrying a suture tray and bandages. He took in the image of her now holding the injured hand and the man facing the windows of the hospital room with his phone to his ear and frowned openly. He moved as if to say something, but seemed to think better of it and turned his attention to Felicity bringing her hand to him and carefully began to pick his way around the glass cleaning the angry fissures of the wounds.
Her father's voice spoke loudly from his corner "Hello, hello...Peterson, yes its me, go get Lady Farringdon, tell her its urgent...."
And after a while, from the other end of the phone a groggy and slurred voice spoke "Hello....James?"
"Yes, its me dear...I've found her" he said
"oh thank goodness....and is she..."
"She's ok...she's" he hesitated ignoring what he thought were sounds of ice tinkling the inside of a glass in the background and looked into the reflected glass of the hospital windows, clearly seeing the reflection of Felicity on the bed. "she's....the same". he finally replied. Felicity snorted at this.
"But, that can't be.....this was the chance to change her back, reverse it, that can't be it...." The pitch in her voice heightened and there was no mistaking the gulp that followed as Lady Farringdon swallowed the pouring of whatever drink she had.
"It was meant to bring her back, James....it was everything we had." And the woman's voice broke an in-take of breath sharply holding her back from what sounded like tears.
"No, no...its not everything." He quickly replied "The doctor and his team will find something else, they'll do something"
"NO!" Felicity shouted from her bed, making the nurse jump back knocking the suture tray and its implements to the floor. She looked down embarrassed and mumbled something about getting another one, before quickly walking out. The doctor looked apologetically at Felicity, but continued to pick out the fragments of remaining glass from inside her hand. Whatever she had to say, she was not going to get a private audience to do it.
"No...." she repeated quietly "no more doctors" and to emphasise her point, she pulled her hand away closing her fist. The doctor looked up and caught the intensity of her gaze made more menacing from its singularity.
"You are coming back. You must. There's still other things we can try, do, we can still make it...right" her father said, momentarily forgetting the open line on the phone still in his hand. His words seemed desperate and feeble. Unable to convince even himself.
"No father, I don't think we can" she replied and her shoulders sagged "it was everything, this last shot. Making this all go away, like it never happened, but it didn't. And I am...the same. One eye down and none the better for it." she smiled manically at this "So I can't go home. Not to more tests or radiotherapy or growth inhibitors or pills or needles. Not to mother's drinking and your tip-toeing around like I don't exist. Just...just no more...ok?" The last of her words were quiet and in her mind she saw that same look he had had when he'd pulled away and she knew that the laughing girl was gone - to him and to her.
"But..." he started, but the muffled voice from the other side of the phone stopped him. He brought the phone back up to his ear and softly almost unable to hear her, the woman's voice spoke slowly.
"Come home James....Let her be....Its over." And then a dial tone click.
His face fell as he shoved the phone still covered in blood into his pocket.
"Dr Greaves, I hope you'll at least discharge my daughter and do what you can for her" he said gruffly, but his voice had lost all previous authority.
As he passed the front of her bed to leave he looked once more directly at her. His eyes unflinching this time, holding her gaze.
"Don't be angry at us Fil" He said, using her childhood nickname that suddenly caught her by surprise. "We did what we thought was best." and with that he turned and left, bristling past the returning nurse in the doorway.
Felicity felt his absence then as if he had never been in the room and with a crushing fear she remembered being little Fil lost in the garden after playing hide and seek, lost in the dark and crying. As she felt the droplet against her hand and looked down to see two small puddles of blood joining the others on the white sheet she realised the gauze over her empty eye was soaked in blood. Perfect red teardrops seeping from behind the material and falling to the already stained bedsheets, ruining them beyond repair.
This is my first fiction contribution to the forum, Filf is Lvl 10 mutant scrapper who's picture you can see here.
"She looks like a one-eyed drowned pirate...." was one comment I got from a passing stranger in Paragon, here is the actual beginning of her story. I hope you enjoy it.