This is legitimately one of the shortest things I've ever written, much less posted on this site. Ah, to write at four in the morning... I might expand on this later on, or I might just use it as fodder for some other story. Who knows. Anyway, you know the drill; read, review if you wanna, maybe profess your undying love for me if you're into that.
-Daka
Leaving that island was supposed to be the start of our healing. We were safe, so it could only get better from there. We spent a week on the cramped trawler, taking turns at the helm while the rest took shelter in the cabin. Well, Jonas and Reyes took turns. Reyes threatened to use "old school sedation" on me if I even tried to take a shift behind the wheel.
Sam, meanwhile, was tasked with tending to my wounds with what little medicine we had until we reached proper facilities. At the end of the sixth day on the small boat, three days after the tank had bottomed out and two since we had run out of fresh water, we were finally lucky enough to be picked up by a Japanese Coast Guard vessel. By that time, the holes in my abdomen had become pustulant and the fever had begun to tear at my sanity.
When I awoke in the hospital two weeks later, I saw the damage the island had wrought for the first time. Sam, the woman who had never held onto a somber mood for any length of time, was hunched over in her chair, clothes draped loosely over her body and skin stretched tight across her bones. Even in her sleep, she flinched at every sound that happened to leaked past the heavy door, and when the door eventually creaked open, I'd have to have been blind to miss the way her eyes sprung open and zeroed in on whatever possible threat had startled her awake.
From there, I was prescribed a dizzying list of painkillers, sedatives, and antibiotics that I needed a chart to keep straight. And Sam was there the whole time, leaning against me or holding my hand, rarely relinquishing physical contact and never out of sight longer than the few minutes it took to use the restroom. I was able to coax her into eating more and she started to gain the weight she'd lost since landing on Yamatai. The colour came back to her skin. The medications kept me from dreaming. For a moment, I was almost able to convince myself we would be fine.
Then we were questioned, separately, and with her out of my sight, the first ghost of unease was all it took.
"Can you state your name for the record?"
"'s Sam…"
"Ma'am, we need yo-"
"Where is Sam?"
"Miss Cr-"
"Tell me where she is!"
"Stop her!"
"SAM!"
The last thing I saw before the electricity began coursing through me was the fresh blood splashed across my knuckles. I think that was when I truly realized that those wounds in our souls, the ones we had so hurriedly bandaged without bothering to clean, had become septic from our neglect.