You can all thank Vilbern for this back to back update...there were emails and conversations and then well we agreed, she posts a chapter of Painted Veil I post a chapter of Fire and Ice. :) So make sure to thank her. I can be cajoled to post more...
Achooesther247postanotherchapterofabysandi'llpostthenextchapterfaster sneeze...cough...cough...sorry...bug in my throat.
No review responses today my loves. FFN hasn't processed them since Tuesday and because of my other stories there's a lot to sift through. I think the biggest response from the last chapter was come on! Get it together you two! Well, let's see if they can.
Sesshomaru
Christmas is quiet in the rehab facility. Mother sends an Uber to me in the early morning hours. Just after I've finished wrapping a present for her. She's easy to shop for, pearls, flowers, something sweet like a box of chocolates and shells from the ocean. Shells are always harder to find. I went to a shop downtown after meeting with dear old dad. It was nestled in the corner of main street, obscured from view with a Wicca sales attendant.
Some people believe that shells have meanings. Personally, I like conch shells because you can hear the ocean the loudest.
Oddly, I've been careful with the $4,000 a month. Usually I spend what I get, but this time I have saved it diligently. Despite this, I now owe dad the money for the car, which he'll deduct from the monthly allotment. He wouldn't relent on the amount issued every month, wanting to ensure that the funds last as long as possible.
Driving has been interesting to say the least. The first two weeks, my hands felt sloppy against the push-pull rod. It took time to get used to the feel of acceleration in my hand instead of my feet.
The lessons come with a hefty price-tag that Band of Seven has promised me to chase down Medicaid to pay. I won't hold my breath though. Apparently being able to sit behind the wheel again, isn't considered "medically necessary", leaving me more to pay out of pocket.
It's mid-morning by the time I arrive at the rehab facility. Mother is waiting for me, wrapped in a black shawl, with her silver hair tied up tightly. She comes up to the door and opens it.
I wave her off. I'm not as helpless as I was before, except when I have to wait for my wheels.
Transferring, is so much easier now than it was in the past. My core muscles are stronger. I can hold myself up on my hands and knees for minutes, where before even getting up like that was painful and shaky. "You look good," she tells me. After a month apart, she looks better too.
Her teeth are still yellow from the poison she's filled her body with for so many years. Don't get me wrong, I'm fond of a good a drink every now and again, but when you drink it like water and your belly swells from the toxins, you can see it in their eyes. Hers are colored like mine, amber and light in the sun. Pulling my coat back on to avoid the biting cold, I start propelling myself forward. "I didn't think you'd come."
I would have preferred to spend the time repairing what I lost with Rin, chasing after her like in some pathetic love story, but I've too much pride for that. It's hard to explain why it hurt as much as it did, that she won't call our relationship what it is. We've communicated only when she's skating. We use facetime and recorded sessions. I give feedback and she makes the adjustments while she's on vacation with her family.
I've spent the drive here telling myself that it isn't worth it. That it's better if we remain friends, or professionals. I don't know what percentage I will fall into after surgery, the sixty that regain sensation, or the forty that feel no change at all. It is better this way.
If I can't walk again, if nothing changes, one day she'll see what Kagura did. That I'm a shell of what I was, that I can't give her the life that she deserves and as comfortable as I feel around her, I know it can't last. All it takes is one stomach flu, one admission to the hospital with a blood clot in my leg, or a bout of flu or pneumonia and she'll leave. Afterall, who wants a husband they look down on?
"You don't look happy Sesshomaru," mother says, when we get to the common room. Others are here with their family. Some without. It's sparsely populated. She goes to the tree and pulls out an envelope wrapped in blue paper. We exchange gifts. She smiles at the conch I got her and presses it to her ear. "I love this sound. What's wrong? Are you worried about the surgery?" I told her about it before I came.
"No," it's only a half-lie. There's nothing like knowing one wrong move by the surgeon and my life could be worse than it is right now. Yet, if all the right ones are made, in a year or more, I could be on my feet again. "I was seeing someone."
Her face brightens. "Not that adorable physical therapist that came to the house after the pneumonia? Don't look at me like that. I'm your mother. You think I didn't notice you checking her out? Or the change of voice when you spoke about her?"
"I didn't realize you were lucid enough to notice."
Her eyes change colors and she sets the conch down.
"I'm sorry," she says humbly.
I've heard this before. There's a difference between I'm sorry and changing. More than likely she'll relapse within days of returning home. "I mean it this time."
"Sure you do."
"Sesshomaru," she tries to get out.
Sitting back in my chair, I stare at the vaulted white tiled ceilings. "You don't expect me to believe you've turned a new leaf do you?"
"I'm trying—"
"You've been trying for decades—"
"I mean it this time!" she cries and her voice breaks. "You have no idea what it was like for me. Your father was so cold. I went along with what he had to say because he had money and prestige. Something I didn't know about before. When I had you everything changed. I wanted to be the perfect mother, to give you everything. The dreams never stopped. Your father and I were fighting all the time—"
"And after that?"
"I don't have an excuse!"
The admission stuns me into silence. There were always excuses before.
"I've spent years burying the pain. Each time I thought I moved passed it, something happened that made me go back to that place. The one thing I can control is how much I drink. I'm sorry. I should have been a better mother. If I had been, maybe I would have noticed you were too thin competing, or been there more after."
"You noticed that?" It's not common knowledge that I had an eating disorder. It's not something I shared with anyone but Inuyasha and Rin. Inuyasha by default. He nosed around in my medical documents after the injury.
"I notice everything."
Rubbing my eyes, I ask her, "Why didn't you say anything?"
"You told me you didn't need advice from a drunk remember? That you knew how to care for your body, unlike me."
I do remember. Mother came for dinner at my condo downtown. She brought a thick soup with beans and potatoes. Everything that I shouldn't eat. It was my childhood favorite. I refused to touch it. I was competing in Italy soon. I needed to be lean.
She mentioned I looked a bit thin, like I was losing muscle in my arms. I told her to mind her own business and haughtily reminded her that her best friend was Jack Daniels and neither she nor he had any business commenting on my physique. "You could at least open your present."
Nodding, I take it in my hands and start unwrapping it. Inside is a check for $5,000 dollars. "What is this?"
"Even before that comment when your nephew was at our house, I'd been saving it up. I thought maybe I would buy you a weight set or something. It's my contribution to your surgery. Your father shouldn't have to pay for all of it. $50,000 is a lot of money."
"Thank you," it comes out dryly, barely audible. I tuck the check away into my wallet. We drink coffee and eat cookies. She laughs when I tell her that I am coaching a figure skater.
"You aren't jealous it's not you competing?"
"Not really. More intrigued. I'm good at it. Granted I've had to spend hours investing myself into a sport I don't know much about and I can't model proper form for her. Her former coach allows us to train twice a week with her elite skaters, so they help her with that and we're pooling other resources to put on a good show."
"So you like her? You're turning red Sesshomaru, you like her a lot."
"Possibly."
"Is that why you're getting this surgery?"
The thought did occur to me that maybe I won't feel like a real man if I can't stand by her side. If she constantly has to look down on me and lower herself to be next to me, or if I can't give her the children she wants. I've never had my motility checked, because again it's unnecessary at the moment. Try getting Medicaid to pay for a fertility diagnosis when the closest thing to sex you've had in the last four years is your hand in the shower and no matter how you stimulate yourself, you rarely climax.
"No," I lie, "I want more than this chair mother. I always have."
"I always hoped you'd find peace with that chair."
"The way you did with the bottle?"
"I deserve that."
"Where do you think I learned self-pity from?"
"I don't deserve that," she points at me and sets her coffee down. "I never made you who you are. You chose to wallow and blame me for it. I don't want you getting your hopes up and being disappointed again. Not like last time."
"It's different this time."
"How?"
"These doctors are specialists. This surgery is different. I'm different." I tell her more about Rin, our time together and how it feels like the world has color again. The sky is more blue, the clouds higher, the air crisper. I leave out that we've had a falling out and I don't know where we hold now. "She makes me feel again."
"I just hope you're doing this for the right reasons. I…" she stammers through the sentence. "I'm going to come out to help you."
"No."
"Yes."
"No…you have two more months here."
"And who is going to take care of you for the first two weeks when you aren't supposed to lift more than five pounds? Who's going to stay in your room at night?"
I turn away from her.
"Are you going to let some candy striper into our home? You didn't the last three surgeries!"
I drop my mug and bury my face in my hands. I haven't planned that far ahead. I haven't asked Inuyasha or my father. Neither know that I can't even lift myself out of bed after the surgery. 5lb limit.
"Sesshomaru, I promise this time is different. I'm not going to drink again."
"Why should I believe it this time?"
"Because this time I'm not going to hide from the pain any longer. And neither should you."
Inuyasha drives me to the rink the day Rin gets back from vacation. It's one week to my surgery. The doctors have told me there is a fighting chance to reconnect the neural tissue in my spine with nerves from other areas of my body. I've had more sleepless nights as of late, filled with anticipation and worry. Mostly anticipation with the hope that I'll be able to walk again and fear that once again my body will let me down.
"Should I pick you up at seven?" he asks me.
"No I'm going to take an Uber home," I answer. "Inuyasha, did you apply for residencies outside of Denver?"
"We had a deal," he says with a forlorn look. "I said I would."
"When do you find out?"
"March 5th. Maybe you two can work it out before then? So I can feel like someone has your back if I leave."
"When you leave. A deals a deal," I remind him, closing the door behind me. He's given up enough of his life for me.
I'm here before Rin. Which is an odd feeling because usually we take the light rail together, with her eternally sitting in my lap like it's her royal thrown. My lap feels empty without her.
I go out on the ice and watch the skaters. They go up in smooth motions and land on the outside edge of their blades, spin without travelling and fluidly move from one move to the next. Gymnastics is much the same. Each technique leads to the next. The smoother the transitions the higher the scores.
I'm lost watching them, jotting down notes, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. "Hey," Rin says.
"Hey," I reach out and take her hand, squeezing her fingers, attempting to reconnect. "Ready?"
"I need to warm up still. Shippo and I worked on my routine." She hands me a stack of papers, a written routine for me to critique the techniques. "We calculated the points. We're going to try to break 170. That should put me in the top ten at least. If I'm lucky the top four."
The air is thick between us. I miss the naturalness of our relationship and how seamlessly we came together. "Go on then. Warm up."
She skates off, doing laps for ten minutes, then starts tracing lazy circles on the ice. Next comes spread eagles, flying camel, spins and then jumps. She lands a single, then a double and then pushes herself and lands a triple salchow, triple lutz and then a triple toe loop.
She's like a ballerina on ice. Poised and beautiful, skating circles around me. Her heart isn't in it. "Stop!" I call her after she nearly slides into the backboard doing a triple, double combination.
"What?"
"Where's the passion? Start again."
I count off the beginning for her. She moves forwards on the ice and then back. A flying camel sends her across the ice, dodging other skaters as she goes and then circular foot work until she sets up the first jump. She leaps into the air, missing the outside edge again and this time buckles, slamming her butt into the ice. "Ouch."
"Enough," I motion her over, waving my hand. "What's going on?"
"I don't know," she answers, shifting her weight. Her eyes are distant, staring off to the side. There are unshed tears in those eyes.
"Bad vacation?"
"No, it was fine. We had fun."
"Then what is it?" As if the tension in the air isn't a big enough indicator of what's wrong.
"Why am I doing this?" She motions at the ice.
"You tell me."
"I miss skating. I feel alive when I'm skating. Like I'm flying, but right now," she shifts her weight until her legs are draped over mine, "I feel like we've lost something. Like bringing you into my world stopped whatever was happening between us," the end comes out in a whisper. Brown eyes glaze over in tears.
"I don't think skating did that," I force honesty through my lips. If she only knew how she changed my world. If I felt more cruel in the moment, I'd remind her that she did that.
She nods, flicking a tear from her cheek. She takes a deep breath. "Either away, this isn't going to help me get where I want to go."
"And where's that?"
"The top four. The top four competitors get to go to sectionals, and if I score high enough there, I could go to US Championships, grand prix, Worlds next year."
"Is that what you want?"
"The more I talked with Shippo and Hak while we were on vacation, yeah. I let it go before. I didn't even try. It's taken me ten years to want it again, but I do. Do you think I have a shot?"
"I think you have a fighting chance but your score has to get closer to 230. You're going to have to take training more seriously."
"I am serious."
"Not if you can't think past what's happening between us."
"But you're having life altering surgery in a week."
"Life changing possibly." I take her hand again, massaging her knuckles, "but that doesn't change what you need to be doing right now."
"Is your family going to be there?" She cups my face. "I don't want you to be alone."
I hold her hand against my cheek, "I won't be. We're not dating Rin. I'm not you're responsibility anymore. Now go, we have a lot of work to do." Off she skates, taking my heart with her. That is the nature of competition, you have to want it more than anything, more than us.
The morning of the surgery comes faster than I expected. Mother came home the night before. She wakes me at five in the morning so we can at Denver Medical by seven. No matter how I tried to make her stay in rehab, she wouldn't hear it.
She slept in my room knowing how poorly I fast. Hunger makes me dizzy and inevitably gag. She was armed all night with emesis basins, leaving us both exhausted.
It doesn't help that I've been in pain for three days from pushing myself to get the final practices in with Rin. Rin knew, but this time I refused her offers to stay at Miroku and Sango's.
"Will the surgery do anything for the pain?" mother asks me while loading my chair into the trunk of the car.
"Hypothetically it will fix the misfiring between my brain and my body." I lean back in the passenger seat, resting my eyes.
I'm looking forward to being knocked out to keep my body from aching.
Rin texts me, Good luck, with a smiley face. I told her to sleep in today and take the day off.
Each light to the hospital feels like agony. Like we're going at a snail's pace. I want to walk again, to run, to feel my legs. A part of me wants to cancel it, to call it quits before it starts.
I've never been good at quitting. Mother used to brag to her friends when I first started Gymkhana that no matter how I hurt myself, I never gave up.
The first time I learned the horizontal bar I was six years old. We were learning to make what they call a window. You hang from the bar, raising your feet in a V, touching the balls on the bar. Other boys in the class struggled. I made the window on the first try but then slipped and landed on my back with a splat. It hurt. I brushed it off and did it again.
Each time I hurt myself, broke a bone, dislocated a shoulder, I went back and tried again. That's why I swallow the bile rising in my throat from not eating and drinking and focus on what could be.
What if I could walk again…
By the time I'm in the prep room, my skin is crawling with nerves. I ignore the nurse as she places the IV's in my arm.
I try to focus on what the doctor is saying. I'll be intubated after I'm put to sleep and then rolled onto my stomach, bare for the world to see. They'll make a three inch long incising just above my tailbone and another one in my chest, taking redundant nerves from there.
Reconnecting the surrounding tissue will take an extremely long time. The axons grow at 1mm a day. Patients begin to have sensation again at 6 weeks out, but most don't regain function until 6-18 months out.
They'll load me with steroids and antibiotics, followed by three months of immuno-suppressants.
"You ready?" Lindsay the nurse asks me.
"Sure." I give mom's hand a squeeze. She's taken out to the waiting room where Inuyasha, Kagome and my father wait. Surgery will take twelve hours, they'll be waiting a while.
In the operating room I'm stripped of my gown and laid back on the table. I've always hated these rooms. Their bright white with little life in them, increasing my anxiety.
At any moment my nerves are going to take over. I bury my head in my hands, attempting to take deep breaths. It doesn't help when the EKG picks up a high a heart-rate and the alerts start to blare. "Just relax," Nurse Lindsay tells me.
Relax…when my back is about to be cut into? "Lay back," the dark skinned anesthesiologist adjures me. Attempting to catch my breath, I slowly lay back and focus on the feeling of the operating bed beneath me. "Come on Sesshomaru, aren't you supposed to be the brave one?"
I see the door open and in walks my little brother in scrubs.
"How did you get in?"
"I pulled some strings with Dr. Okinawa. I promised him Kagome would make some stuffed mushrooms and bruschetta." He pulls a chair up next to me and takes my hand. "Remember that time we went camping in the mountains and we found that tree that had a limb on it that looked like a seat?" He nods at the anesthesiologist.
I laugh. "You were afraid to climb."
"Terrified." I start to feel drowsy. It's hard to open or close my mouth.
"You hefted me up on your knees. You were so strong because you had already been in gymnastics for so long. You said it was easier to lift me than…" I can't hear him. The world goes dark and I dream.
I dream of the home on the beach but this time a large willow grows in the front yard. She's dressed in white, sitting on the branch, but no matter how I climb, I can't reach her. "Rin…where are you?"
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Next Rin's POV :)