TOO YOUNG TO FALL ASLEEP
Adrenaline. A gunshot. The sound of silence.
And then, a couple of seconds later, sheer agony, blood, and fuzziness.
Her head hits the pavement hard and she's not sure how she's even conscious once that part is over. She tastes something metallic between her lips, and she can't swallow properly.
Fuck.
Realisation begins to kick in. The gunshot? It was aimed in her direction. Whether that had been intention or not, she doesn't know. She probably never will now, she figures as she listens thoughtfully to the muffled thuds of running feet on the ground, indecipherable yells, and strings of curse words falling out of someone with a very familiar voice. She can make out a figure crouched over her but her vision is so blurry... too blurry... and she cannot place a name to it however much she tries to squint.
Despite how her low level hearing makes her feel as if like she's underwater, she can make out that somebody is yelling at another to call someone. It's probably an ambulance or the police that they're after, considering the situation. She doesn't want them. She needs them, she knows that, but there's someone else she wants more. She's seen people die, being a serpent and all, and she she's seen people she knows and loves die, and in these last five years she's come to realise that if this just so happens to be the final hour of her short life, laid on the cold pavement on the southside in the middle of the night, she wants the person she loves the most here to witness her last verbal love letter in person.
She feels a wave of relief wash over her when somebody says the name she's been waiting to hear. She doesn't want the redhead to see her in this state, her own blood covering almost every part of her body, but she can't leave without a goodbye. She's missed out on goodbyes from the people she's loved the most and the idea of her missing another would be something which haunts her in her sleep.
More accurately, her death.
Someone rolls her on to her side and someone else presses tightly against her lower abdomen. She knows that she's screaming and crying in pain at this point, not because she can hear it but because her throat feels hoarse and pained. One voice is hushing her, telling her that she will be okay, but it's so hard to believe that when the tone is portraying the amount of panic it is right now. A different voice is telling her that help is on its way. Her eyelid threaten to close, eyes rolling in the back of her head, but she knows that she has to stay conscious. Somebody is telling her that too, she's pretty sure, but it's so hard to make out. Every inch of her body is throbbing, killing, begging for her to give in; to give up.
Four months ago, she probably would have. But today she doesn't want to give up. Today, she knows that she has to keep going. Because at home – man, she is so glad that she finally able to define a building as not only her house but her home – there is somebody who needs her, somebody she promised she'd come back to. She didn't have that source of motivation back then – hornless, essentially and orphan, and a gang member, life was as low as it was going to be.
"I'll be safe," she had reassured her a couple of hours before, grabbing her serpent jacket from its position left balanced over the stairwell from when they'd gone out for an Italian meal for lunch. She had told her that it would be nothing, because that was what this was supposed to had been – nothing but a little fist-fight if anything – but she didn't want her there because the redhead wasn't as experienced as her or the other serpents yet, and she couldn't risk that near-impossible.
Oh, how wrong she had been. Nothing? Say 'nothing' to the gaping hole in her body which blood was continuously escaping from.
She can only thank every deity up where that it's her own self who is injured rather than Cheryl.
Darkness begins to close in on her vision, like the massive amount vignette she'd edit onto photos when she first got into photography because back then she'd thought it was 'professional' when in actual fact she may as well have just grabbed a Sharpie and coloured in all edges and corners. She blinks continuously, but trying to keep her eyelids from closing, but it's inevitable. After so many seconds her eyelids glue together, and everything turns from blurry, to coral, to black.
The last thing she hears is a strangled 'no' which tears her heart into a million tiny pieces, and whirring sirens in the distance...
... unbeknownst to the brunette, pulse weakening with every second and completely unconscious from the unbearable pain at this point, a certain redhead is knelt over her, still dressed in her favourite floral pyjamas with long black hunting boots covering the wrong feet as a result of the the rush to leave the house at this mental hour.
She'd almost crashed the car to get here and she's definite that she didn't lock the front door, but she has no regrets. After all, what in that house is even a fraction as worthy as her girlfriend's fricking life?
Trying to keep her tears silent, she leans over and puts as much pressure on the wound as possible, ignoring the way her the cream silk becomes stained with her girlfriend's blood. The shorter of the two boys in their core serpent group is holding her wrist, searching for the pulse which is slowly exhausting. From the tense expression on his face alone she can tell that things are not looking good, and she can only pray wholeheartedly that the ambulance arrives before it's too late.
The worst part? 'Too late' seems to be approaching way too quickly, and time seems to be ticking by way too slowly.
The ambulance comes just as ultimate panic sets in, almost everybody breathing a sigh of relief that the service was actually reliable for once. She doesn't have to beg them too hard for them to let her ride to the hospital with them, the paramedics desperate to get the pink-haired girl into surgery as soon as and her girlfriend in too much of a state for them to leave behind to make her own way there. Maybe it was the amount of blood on her pyjamas which made them fear she was injured as well. Whatever it had been, she was so god damn grateful for it.
As she listens to the heart machine bleep at an unbearably uneven, constantly slowing pace, and notices the worried expressions of the paramedics and panicked voices telling the driver every thirty seconds to pick up the pace she can only fear the worst.
She concludes that if that were to happen she'd probably want to go down the same route. Life without her brother is hard enough. Life without Toni – her saviour, her guardian angel; etcetera – simply isn't a life worth living at all. The other girl had told her not to think like that before so many times, but right now she couldn't not.
When they rush her into emergency surgery, the redhead collapses on the pristine white hospital floor in floods of tears. The tallest of the two serpents finds her fifteen minutes later upon his won arrival and picks her up, passing over the triangular paper cup of iced water from the dispenser in the far corner for her to take sips from as he makes futile attempts to comfort her.
"She's going to make it," he tells her over and over in an anxious tone. The redhead knows that he's not telling the truth, because what even is the truth right now, but his eyes are so filled with fear and almost guilt that she cannot bring herself to protest against that.
Maybe she shouldn't be this pessimistic, but where exactly does realism stand right now?
Fangs is sat to her right, playing on his phone despite the receptionist's constant reminder of the 'no mobile devices' posters on every notice board around the room. He is jiggling his leg and in any other situation she would have found that annoying as hell, but right now she just can't .
He's scared too. They all are, she concludes.
She remembers how distraught Toni was when he was shot earlier this year. She remembers how many tears of grief she'd cried when the lie about his passing was released to he, held her those nights she needed her most of all, absolutely inconsolable. Right now, she needed Toni desperately. She needed her to kiss her forehead, stroke her hair and tell her that she was right there.
That was all she needed. But she couldn't have that right now, could she? Some selfish bastard had shot her, and now she might not come out of this the same – if at all, she thinks to herself as she feels herself break down all over again.
Another glance at the teary serpent boy to her side, and she remembered how many tears of happiness the pink-haired girl and herself had cried when she got off the phone with the most broad smile the redhead had never even thought to be possible to the news that it had been a ploy. All hope had been lost, yet it had happened. Now, she could only wish and wish and wish that this would be the sort of news she'd be receiving soon.
She'd been dozing off with her head resting upon the tallest serpent's shoulder, his head leant back with his eyes closed likewise, when a man in a doctor's uniform wandered over to where they had been sat. The waiting room clock read half past five in the morning and honestly she didn't know how long she'd been here, but the shredded blue fabric of the waiting room chairs underneath her acrylic nails had given a good indication of how she'd been anxiously passing that time.
He said words that she didn't understand, or at least by words that didn't make sense to her being this sleep-deprived and devastated state, but amongst them she heard 'alive' and 'room fourteen' and 'strong painkillers', and a second confirmation was the source of twenty solid minutes worth of wracking sobs of relief.
The brunette was out of it, to say the least. She looked bashed and bruised, a layer of bandage beneath the white and blue hospital shirt and in IV resting uncomfortably in the crook of her elbow, and she claimed to be done with bed rest by the fifth hour of consciousness (bearing in mind she was going to be stuck in this room for a good week, followed by yet another two in bed at the least with only light activity for one or two months after that, things were not looking great in on on that front). A text from receivedfrom
Kevin via Fangs confirming that, as assumed, the rival gang that had done this damage hadn't been caught, was what sent the taller girl over the edge. The brunette had rolled her eyes, claiming that it was "no big deal" and that "they'll get what they deserve in the end", too exhausted and nauseous from the wearing anaesthetic at that point to give two further shits, and regardless of however little the other girl agreed with that statement she couldn't do much about it.
"This could be worse," the shorter girl had winced into her chest on the fifth day of her stay when they'd lowered her pain medication to a barely bearable level, her apparently earning enough of the taller girl's sympathy to gain a box of chocolate and peanut butter cupcakes in her recently stitched-up stomach.
She trailed soft fingertips up her arm, manoeuvring around needles various machines were attached to. "However could it be, TT?"
She smirked, raising an eyebrow and grinning sleepily.
"I could be dead."
The redhead tutted, finding it hard to think of a reaction which fit nicely along the spectrum between laughing and crying. Eventually, she resolved to a marginally amused glare, punching her shoulder gently as she struggled to keep her laughter in. "Too soon."
OKIE DOKIE, SO I RANDOMLY WROTE THIS FIC BECAUSE (DRUM ROLL) WELL, I FELT LIKE IT! OKAY – IN ALL, I JUST WANTED TO WRITE A FIC TITLED TO A(NY) LYRIC IN HEAD ABOVE WATER, AND I GOT A WAVE OF INSPIRATION TO WRITE SOMETHING ELSE DEPRESSING AT ONE IN THE MORNING ON A SCHOOL NIGHT... SO ENJOY THIS! LMAO.