Your name is Kankri Vantas, and before you begin you would like to tag the main trigger of the current topic.
Trigger warning: Coma.
You see it as silly for you to be tagging your own coma; especially when no one else can possibly be listening to your mental dialogue. Nonetheless, you are still tagging any and all triggers. Why? Because it is the norm. At this point, there isn't much more to guide you than habits left from before the accident. Ah, yes, it always seems to come back to the accident with you. How can it not, though? It is not like there is much else to keep your mind entertained while lying, only mentally awake, in this hospital bed. Physically, you are entering your fourth month of your coma.
To keep your mind off the accide - To keep your mind occupied for just a bit longer, you review what you know so far about your location. On your left, you assume there is a window. This deduction has been made because the left half of your body feels warmer than the right (also, you can see slightly through your left eye lid, and have determined that it is due to the light shining upon it).
Your nurse has just left. You can hear the receding squeak of the "nurse's shoes" that you have grown accustomed to over the lengthy period. Time. You form, through the painful sobs of visitors and he hushed speeches of doctors, a realistic time frame for how long you've spent here. But no matter how long they say it's been, it always feels as though it has been much longer. More than months, more than years, and soaring past decades. You have decided to make a new name for these unrealistic time lapses, dubbing them sweeps. In every other sweep, you are granted the privilege of visitation. Sometimes it is your father or your younger brother, but most of the time it is him.
It makes you the saddest when he visits. As he cannot speak and you cannot open your eyes, you never know what he is saying. You know he cries sometimes. Not as much now as he cried before, but you know he still cries. You can feel silent tears falling onto your arm. You can, in fact, feel everything that touches you, though the sheets of the hospital bed feel like almost nothing under your hands at this point. They are nonexistent to you, almost as if they have become one with you.
When someone moves your hands, it feels invigorating. Anything outside the dull, flat norm of your comatose state feels like a rush. He often takes your hand in his and traces letters into your palm. You can feel them rather well, and often understand what he is trying to tell you ... or at least you hope that you do.
Often it's little things that hurt you. Most of them are along the lines of "Please wake up" or "We - I miss you." You are trying to wake up, really! It is just so much harder then doctors make it sound. When the accident first happened, they made it sound as if you would wake up after a few days. When the accident happened, he blamed himself. It wasn't his fault, though. You wish you could tell him that.
You can see why he believes that he is the one to blame. It is because he'd made a habit of taking you both to and from school. It started one morning when you had walked home from school. It was cold out, to say the least, but nothing you could not manage. When you returned to school, the small bits of snow that had settled on you were enough to raise a mountain of questions you had to, by moral dictate, answer truthfully. These questions largely involved how far from the school you lived. After large amounts of prying, you answered, "Just about a two hour walk…Two and one half if the weather is particularly upsetting." From then on, he took you to school and from school, despite much protest on your part about how he did not have to go out of his way and waste gas money in this economy just so you could sleep in.
You technically never agreed to this arrangement, now that you put more time into thinking it over. Really, he had just blocked your driveway with his car and refused to move until seven, almost three hours after you usually woke up.
Now you are straying from the topic, aren't you? Back to the matter at hand. On the day of the accident (and here you were trying not to think about it), his car had been broken down. You had told him that it was fine and that walking home was of no trouble to you. Actually, the two of you had had an outing planed for that evening. A shortcut seemed like the best option for getting home with enough time to complete the day's load of homework and to freshen up.
Here, now, is where you blame yourself for the accident. The shortcut was nothing too interesting. There was a cross walk from your school to the street where you lived, but it was about eight blocks away. From the crosswalk, you would loop around the neighborhood and the ones surrounding it before reaching your home. The shortcut was just to run across the street about three blocks from the school. This landed you an hour's walk closer to your house than the prior route did. You knew you shouldn't have been doing this - basic road safety spoke against it in numerous ways. Said road was never that busy, though, and you had done it before. So, you were halfway across, but then tires screeched. You didn't see the car skid around the corner, but before you knew it everything was dark and loud.
He really shouldn't blame himself, you think as a nurse flutters out of your hospital room calling out for someone. Who? You don't know. I want to wake up, you repeat over and over again.
Your hand is moving, but you do not feel anyone touching it. Odd. You hear a sound, but you are not sure where it is coming from. It is like someone speaking, but it is not visiting hours, and the nurse just left (in rather a hurry, you might add).
Suddenly, there is light. Light unlike the flashlights doctors tend to shine in your eyes whenever they run you through their tests. It is the light of florescent light bulbs; on the left side on your vision, it is light from a window. The nurse rushes back into the room and smiles at you, a doctor in tow.
Your name is Kankri Vantas and you are awake.
Hey! So I decided some time at 2 am to write a second part for Tag Your Sermons and well, here it is! Thanks again to my bomb editor Rika! Find her at So-very-clever at tumblr.
Thank you very much for reading! All Reviews will be welcomed and cherished!