1107. About woe, 7
(Armylè)
At first, Prume was near the top of Glasgow’s ladder.
It was a light coma, just as if she was deeply asleep and nothing else. She could still react to most stimuli, her pupils adjusting to light. She might somewhat have been hearing what we were saying next to her.
Elyne’s shock has also broken her. She was awake, but didn’t react, contemplating how this sadder time was at hand again. She couldn’t face it yet. She remained in a corner of the hospital room completely absent from herself, until I arrived.
I had pain, but still some resolve as well. I walked through and recovered Elyne at least. My daughter was still sobbing, under the shock. This would be another lingering scar never quite leaving her.
She had the pains inside of her fusing into something nastier, and added the guilt of hurting someone innocent on top of it. Elyne was a wreck for now and I had to hold onto her so she could walk anywhere for now.
This was painful. She bore sorrow and disgust on her face.
I dragged her as I was on my way to check on Prume as well, even though I knew what to expect.
Prume was alive. She leaned over the edge again, risking her life, repeating her story apparently. One day wouldn’t suffice for her to return clearly.
Her medical file was weird, and in doubt the doctor now in charge of her preferred to put her in the isolated white room of the past. At least for a while. Again...
This was where there had been an electrical incident before, switching off the lights. Where they felt the odd presences closer to them. My...
I felt nauseous too seeing Prume set there again. My nastiest dream had returned. It was hard to bear.
This wait. This absence of knowing. It was unbearable for both of us. Even if it was the last time and even if she would again miraculously return fine, it was awful.
And realistically, I could not be optimistic. That would have been insane again.
For Elyne, this was even worse to bear. She was trembling next to me, crumbling down. She suffered more than I or her.
We left this place, time spent there was hurting us more than anything else.
~
Elyne eventually ran out of tears and some of her lucidity returned.
At home, in a more soothing environment, she told me everything. She eluded to the snakes, but I could read through the spoken lines...
The childish fantasy had never faded. And something different than usual this time had happened. What had they done? Elyne wouldn’t tell me just yet.
We still didn’t know what they were...
Another day, Elyne returned to check on Prume. The doctor was moderately optimistic speaking to me meanwhile.
The airlock checked Elyne and admitted her without causes for concern. A gust of air cleansed her from most dusts and she was let in.
She got closer to her sleeping sister, again on this bed that wasn’t parallel to the wall. She had no nostalgia relieving this moment. She was living again in that awful time when she returned every day to ask her to come back.
Standing there and lying there again. As if all had been for nothing. Had it all been vain? Elyne was nauseous. She had loved these few years spent together, she did not regret them... She just wasn’t ready to face the upcoming new years of wait ahead of her if it all was to return in a cycle.
Two more years of coma and another four years of freedom? That had no reason to be such clockwork, but it gave her a goal and a line to hold onto. It was mildly reassuring to have that experience. Just two years of waiting, enduring, before being granted a few more years with her beloved sister...
It remained torture for her, with this hypothesis she wasn’t sure where to place between pessimism and optimism.
For this visit however, Elyne had another thing to check.
She slid a hand below Prume’s right shoulder, and lifted her up to check her back.
Below the shoulder blade, the pale skin had three darker dots, like early carcinomas, a few fingers apart from one another, following the bone.
The eyes of the snakes she thought. These dots imprinted like tattoos or birthmarks were maybe a little smaller but about the same size as their eyes.
Elyne intuited that these things would not be seen as relevant by the medical team. Only she could tell how much importance they could have. But even she could not say how this would end for her sister.
She was rightfully worried. Prume’s body had been wounded again.
Elyne thought about these things further. She realised something was missing in her perspective.
Something worrying possibly...
Some of the emissaries were missing. She had seen more in the past. She had seen up to six of them at times. And she realised with renewed fright what that might imply that three only were attached to Prume’s back now. The others were maybe for Elyne.
She shivered, anxious. What were these aliens in the end? Anything really alien from outside, the city would have noticed otherwise. But just illusions? She had touched one this time. And the marks were there now. Were they ghosts of something? But what then? Elyne could flail, she would not find the truth just yet.
They had some reality to them, but Elyne was just as lost as I was, and this would sadly continue in ignorance until a better way to communicate would open like an embassy.
Elyne couldn’t achieve anything meaningful on this day. She set her sister back to proper sleep on her bed and left, worried for the two of them.
As much as it would also hurt her, she would restart this routine of checking nearly daily on her.
Seeing her gave some comfort each time, but always nuanced by how far this was taking them back and how shrouded the horizon was once more.
Not quite a progress, more like a repeated regression...
~
Elyne went to high school with even less will for it, and mostly gave up fitting socially.
She was not worried just for her sister’s fate, but her own as well more generally. What were these things planning to do to her? They were waiting for the right time to enter her back as well, if not worse.
The more she thought about it, the more she panicked. The unknown was terrifying. The places and things she thought safe were crumbling. Elyne was terrified for a while.
Had they helped Prume? She thought so for a while, but she could never really know for sure. She hurt herself imagining what might have been the price to pay. Did they eat her brain, or did more nefarious things even?
Elyne was panicking regularly for a while.
And what if the other threat came out looming? Prume had had another crisis. Of what, was the question. At least she didn’t bleed halfway to death this time. But what if the hospital now began realising odd things about her?
Elyne had been shocked by the experience of feeling Prume dying between her arms. But now she was just as scared of one day reaching her room and finding it empty, Prume taken away in a deeper cell never to return.
Elyne was alone with too much fears to swallow, and was acting erratic, or panicked. She insisted especially in the first times to check daily on her, to make sure she was still there at the very least.
And unfortunately for every other fear brought by this event, she would find no answer in the dark. And anxiety, paranoia even, had the troublesome faculty to easily self-reinforce, growing even on nothing and absence of anything.
It was a difficult time for Elyne to swim through. Facing that perhaps Prume might never wake up again. And what might also happen to either of them otherwise...
~
Prume on her side, was feeling trapped into an unresponsive body. Most things were hazy at first, but she was still close by in consciousness and some perceptions of reality.
But being locked there, as if tied down tightly, blindfolded and gagged, she was feeling awful. Her mind was in pain because she was partially aware of her own condition.
Her memory was in a fog, but the sensation of a hole opening in her tummy, swallowing everything about her, she remembered it. The sensation of disappearing body and soul, shredded into a singularity, dissolving into the darkest of seas, she recalled that and shivered. The nothingness, the void caressing her mind and nearly swallowing all of her in a sudden collapse, it had felt like death.
Was she dead? She felt still somewhat alive. But something else had happened after she had lost consciousness.
She was unclear as to what however.
She had felt herself falling and dying, and then...
Then something. And now she was still here? Just not quite completely alive again?
Stuck between being awoken and lost inside a dream. Unaware of what had appeared onto her skin. She had limited awareness and intelligence available in that slumber, and no access to her lips nor limbs.
Prume was stuck balancing herself between unsteady aspects of dream and coma. She realised she could handle some things around, but it was not very intuitive when it was detached from bodily sensations.
She was trying to find her way around in this seemingly buried grave.
In her world without light, Prume was trying to move the walls and understand where she was and what she could do.
She was trapped inside her body, trying whatever she could do to free herself from that broken fate.
~
