Present

Annie spent a long time in the hospital. After the initial commotion of her arrival, Annie was placed in a bed and issued a therapist, which she denied to talk to. Mainly she slept and the doctors, seeing no immediate trauma on her, let her. After a day of rest that closely resembled a coma to anyone who didn't know what she had been through, Annie was awoken by a nurse tugging at her arm.

Annie flicked around, darting from her light sleep, and grabbed the nurses wrist as it fiddled with the bandage on her forearm.

"No!" Annie cried out, unknowingly gripping the woman's arm so hard that she was leaving half moon nail prints in her skin.

The nurse, young, probably new in the building, laughed nervously. "Sorry for waking you miss but I just need to-"

"No," Annie repeated, her hair wild and her eyes staring, she feverishly shook her head "Not 'til I'm ready,"

The bandage was so grimy now that Annie could feel grains of sand scratching her, trapped underneath the bloody wrappings, but she wasn't ready to unearth what was under there just yet, she didn't know when she would be.

"Miss Gunner, I need to place your IV's," The nurses voice was quiet, not yet experienced enough to know that if she was forceful enough, she could easily get her way. It was one of those professions where the customer was rarely right.

"I ain't gonna let you do that," Annie told her, gently pushing the woman's hand away, "I'm sorry,"

The nurse nodded, obviously planning on leaving to grab a doctor, but instead re-filled Annie's water and allowed her to get to sleep.

An hour later the police came to question her on her abduction. Big men in big, black blazers who acted like it was her who was in the wrong.

Annie acted aloof, annoyed at their rude treatment of her plight. She told them she didn't remember anything. That all she could recall was getting into a car, though she said it was a white Volvo, and then nothing until her run in with the Blacks (her eventual rescuers). The police thanked her for her time and promised her they would get to the bottom of it, but she knew that they never would.

After two days in hospital, it was time for Annie to return home.


Two Years Later

The Blacks were kind enough to let Annie stay with them for a few months after the incident. They felt bad when she told them of her profession and the absence of a mother and father in her life. Jackie, a literature teacher, and Derrick, an IT technician, never asked her about what happened to her; they treated her like their own child. They found her a job as a waitress and once she had saved up enough money, she moved out to a place of her own. Annie didn't move to far away and the couple came to visit her often enough, bringing bottles of wine and wall hangings that they wanted her to have.

There was no way she could ever explain how grateful she was for them, for the contact that they continued to give her. It was a pure love, born probably out of guilt, but a love that she had never experienced before.

Annie was pretty broken for the first month of her returning home, there were multiple men, a incident with drugs and a pregnancy. Annie terminated it. She could never be sure who it belonged it.

But with the help of Jackie and Derrick, Annie repaired her life and she managed, slowly, to repair herself too. She had plans to move far away from Texas as soon as she could and had decided that she wanted to become a writer, find somewhere quiet to write her novel and potentially spend the rest of her life there, alone. All she wanted for the rest of her life was quiet, was nothing important, was banality.

It was rare that Annie thought about Otis, but she would be lying if she said he never crossed her mind. Sometimes, she would dream that he was next to her in her bed, her back pressed solidly against his chest, her paint on her face. Sometimes she would dream she was in his bed, back in the house, and she would wake up screaming.

In the shower, the bandage she had kept on her wrist came off. Annie had thrown up when she saw what was under it, fallen to the floor of the shower and sobbed, but now she realized it was a part of her.

She would never be able to clearly recollect what happened that day, and she tried to put it from her mind, but often it crept up from unlikely stimulus. Annie wondered, was it ever at all possible that Otis allowed her to escape? Or was it simply that she was too far away, the shot too risky to take and one day, he would come back for her? Annie often shuddered at the thought.

Two years after her original capture, in the month of July, Annie turned on her TV.

As she watched the news, the things that had been discovered she moved from her couch, to inches away from the television, aggressively biting her fingernails. She sat there for hours upon hours, drinking in everything that happened until the Firefly get away car came to a stop.

Annie continued to watch, Otis in the driver's seat, speeding down the road towards the blockade made by the police and she was crying. Not sobbing, not even moving, but she was still crying because she knew she would always be his and that she loved him; as much as she didn't want to.

Annie-Mae Gunner watched on live television as Otis B. Driftwood was shot to death. Then she lowered her head, wiped her tears, and switched off the television.

It took her a long time to move, to do anything, but when she did she looked down at her forearm. Annie gazed at what was written there, what had been gauged into her arm with an ice-pick while she was unconscious.

Annie would always be his, she would always belong to and be a part of the Firefly family. She read the word carved on her arm, each letter scratched out and healed in shaking, white, scar tissue. It read one word.

That word was: Otis.

The End.