A/N: Oneshot written post-Miracle Day. I thought it sucked that Rex got to live and Esther didn't, and so this was born. Obvious spoilers.
Esther comes to with a great gasp and a shudder as air tears back into her lungs. Almost instantly, she grits her teeth and winces at the stabbing pain in her chest; she remembers the bullet, and moves her hand instinctively to place her palm over the wound.
Only she finds that she is trapped. It comes to her that, although her eyes are open, she cannot see anything.
Her pulse quickens.
She runs her fingers along the edges of her prison, tapping gently and trying to keep her breathing in check as panic threatens to overcome her. She's in a wooden box.
Terror floods her mind as she suddenly realises exactly where she is and what is happening – or what has happened. It feels like acid has pooled in her stomach, burning her insides like liquid fire.
She beats her palms as hard as she can against the lid of the coffin, shrieking for help, desperately hoping that she isn't underground yet but in a morgue of some sort. Her voice is hoarse from lack of use and breaks too easily, slipping into a high-pitched squeak.
The air around her is stale, and tastes like the varnish from the box she is in. She pounds at the top of the coffin, trying to breathe evenly so that she doesn't waste the limited oxygen. The surface above her does not budge.
Holding back the dread, she focuses on a weak point in the wood just above her head and clenches her hand into a fist. She begins to slam it against the material, hard and solid. Sharp pain ripples through her knuckles with every motion, and her elbow bashes into the base every time she draws it back, but she keeps going.
The skin around her joints begins to split after a while, and she can feel herself running out of air. In frenzy, Esther cries out and punches the lid repeatedly with both hands, desperate to escape. She might be dead – God only knows what she is – but she is not suffocating in this tiny, cramped coffin. She screams until her voice is a painful croak, and the wood finally cracks under the assault. Breathing quickly, she searches blindly for the weakness with her fingertips, pressing up until it gives way. She hooks her nails under the tiny hole she has made, tearing viciously at it, ripping the board away. Earth pours into the box to join her, and she squeezes her eyes shut, pursing her lips tightly to stop it from entering her body.
Frantic now, she reaches up and out of the box, scrabbling like a caged animal to get out of her grave. The dirt is thick and tight, and it's like trying to tunnel through a wet brick wall. Her fingernails rip off as she fights to get out of the coffin. Soil invades her airways through her nose, and her fingers and hands are torn to shreds by the tiny splinters from the wood. She tries not to cough, tries not to blink when tiny particles invade her eyelashes and threaten to blind her. She claws upwards, praying that she isn't buried too deep, that she won't die (again) in an effort to reach the surface.
A fresh wave of panic rises over her when she can't break through the skin of the earth – she can't even reach it. She drags herself into a sitting position and pushes herself upwards, even despite the biting protest from her thighs as she propels herself up into the dirt. She uses the coffin as leverage, trying to stand, trying to climb up, her fingers raking to find purchase in the wet mud packed around her.
She can feel herself getting dizzy, and internally, she screams again. She will not be beaten by this. She will not die here. She reaches upwards again, stretching her arm as far as it will go. There is a little resistance at the top, and she forces past it. Cool air strokes the pads of her fingers – it is the outside.
She scrapes the surface of the earth with her raw fingers, trying to pull herself up and out. It feels softer than where she is – and hope blossoms terribly in her throat. She tries not to give in to the euphoria that threatens to overcome her, focusing on her task, focusing on hauling herself out.
She pulls her arm back down, eyeing the tiny hole that she can now see through and taking a long breath. She will get out of here.
Blood snakes down her arms from the cuts and open flesh as she drags herself up, moving great clods of dirt away until…
She breaks through. Her head and shoulders and arms first, and then her middle and hips and legs, her arms protesting against wrestling her full weight out of a hole in the ground.
She lies atop her own grave, the rain drenching her blood-and-mud clotted hair and cleansing the smudges off her face. Her hands feel like they've been cut off, and someone has stuck a pair of knives into her wrists to replace them.
It's quiet. There is nobody in the cemetery apart from Esther Drummond, a woman back from the dead. The pretty black dress she used to wear to work parties is apparently the one they chose to bury her in, and it is now ruined beyond repair. The rain makes her hair stick slickly to her skull and shoulders, and it isn't long until she is soaked to the bone. It is only then – when she shuts her eyes and realises that she has woken up after what seemed like a very long, deep sleep – that she begins to cry.