Warning. Emotional Chapter. Have tissue on hand.
Chapter 19: The truth
Hiccup's POV
I have been in the hospital for about two days and I am already itching to get out of this place. Even though I am suppose to be here for the next week or two to recover from the surgery. As for the idea of going back to my everyday life. That is going to depend on how bad my injuries are and how well I recover from it in the first place. At best, it will be a few months. Worse case, it will be years or permanent.
I never did like hospitals. It has been ingrained into my head the whole idea of being in a place that serves bad food and the antiseptic smell that waves in the air. The only good thing though is that I have been moved out of the ICU today into a regular hospital room. Which means I am not being constantly checked over by probing nurses.
My dad hasn't really talked to me ever since I yelled at him to leave me alone. He still refuses to leave my bedside, but it's more restraint. He talks to me whenever he wants to make sure I'm alright or if I needed anything. Even Gobber can detect this restraint.
The doctor has examined eye and my eardrum that been damaged by the repeated blows to my head. She says that I'm lucky enough that the damage to them will not be permanent and should be fine eventually.
My leg is different story though. It hurts. A lot. It's also in this contraption with pins sticking out from the calf and foot cast in various areas. My leg has something that is called a compound fracture where it has broken through the skin and exposed to extreme possibilities of infection. As if it can't get bad enough.
My father and Dr. Arnold are talking to each other while I listen in on what the plans are going to be in terms of my leg and how they are going to approach this.
" The surgery we previously done on your daughter has shone she has multiple microfractures in her tibia. She will need reconstructive surgery in order to make those mends." Dr. Arnold explains
" I see." My father says with his brow furrowed.
She continues, " A surgery like this is no small task. It's a risky procedure. It can result in blood clots. Nerve and blood vessel injuries. Scarring and especially infection. Infection is the big one we have to look out for in these cases."
" What happens if I don't receive surgery?" I ask her as I am still processing the whole idea of going under the knife.
" Your leg will most likely have permanent damage." She tells me.
" She will have the surgery." My father deems. Again. I don't like that he is making the calls in front of me. Though I was going to say that I was going to have the surgery.
" Alright. We scheduled her for surgery in about a month or two. I want her to be as strong as possible in the window of opportunity we have. I will see you later." She says before she walks out of my room. Leaving me alone once again with my dad and this silent room.
It wasn't at an hour later that I hear a knock on my room door to find standing in the doorway. What is she doing here?
" Hello. May I come in?" She asks in a friendly manner.
" Um...yeah.." I say.
" Who are you?" My father asks her.
" I'm Ms. Briggs. I'm a school counselor. I have been working with your daughter for the past couple of weeks. I wanted to see if I can talk to her." She says to my father. Hopefully he will send her away. I don't want to talk to her.
" Very well, but don't upset her. She's been through a lot." He warns her. She nods as she comes in and sits on the chair beside my bed.
" Um… I'm going.. to get something. Do you need anything? Anything at all?" My dad asks once again.
I was going to say nothing, but a thought came to my mind suddenly and I say to him, "Toothless."
" Well…. I can try." He says before he leaves.
Me and Ms. Briggs say nothing at first. I don't know how to feel about her being here in my hospital and she probably feels the same way. Yet, here we are.
Finally she says something, " How are you?" She asks.
All I can say is, " I feel like crap."
" That's understandable."
" I deserved it." I say the first thing that comes to my head. I thought she was going to tell me that it wasn't my fault like the rest of them.
However, I got this instead, " What did you do to make yourself feel like you deserved it?"
I don't know how to handle this question. I never thought about that before, yet I have so many times. I don't know how to feel about this.
All I respond was," I… I… I made the biggest mistake of my life."
" We all made mistakes." She tells me.
" But nothing like this." I say to her out of emotion. " No one knows how I feel. No gets what I go through."
" Well I want to know." She says.
" You shouldn't." I tell her.
" Tell me anyway." She calmly says.
" All I was suppose to do was keep my head down and pretend that I'm nothing. That I'm just someone that isn't looking for trouble. I've done that my whole life. Yet people keep telling me to come out of my shell. It's ok. We don't bite. I finally do it and I screwed everything up in one night!" I say as I feel myself tear up.
" What did you do that made you feel like you screwed up?" She asks me in a hush.
I thought about when I told off Dagny, but that was only part of what led up to what did happen to me. The real truth was harder.
" Being myself." I say.
" Being yourself isn't a bad thing." She tells me.
" It is if you're me." I tell her.
" Henrietta. I need to know what you mean. You can tell me."
I blink tears out my eyes and I shake my head. She can't know. My heart is pounding intensely with what I feel is my secret. I can't let her know.
" I can't." I respond.
" It's ok."
" It's not ok if you're trans!" I scream. Then everything is halted to a silence. I breath heavily through my tears as I felt like I have screwed myself over once again to the world. She knows! She knows!
But when I look at Ms. Briggs. She wasn't mad. Not even shock. Not in the way that she was expecting it, but in the way that news like this didn't affect her.
" That still doesn't give anyone the right to do what they did to you." She tells me.
" It does!" I scream. " My mother knew and said that everything was going to be alright! That things were going to get better now that I told her! We were going to tell Dad together when she got back from her business trip and you know what?! Her plane crashed the next day and she died! She left me alone to deal with it! You say that I don't deserve it! When everything bad seems to happen every time I thought was safe to be myself. Being myself has done nothing, but got me into trouble along with everyone else!"
" You've been in so much pain haven't you?" She starts. " You try to keep things inside you and think that the only solution to your whole life is to not let people in and know who are. I know how that feels."
" No you don't." I tell her.
She sighs, " Not exactly but, when I was your age I had struggles with parental alcohol abuse. Everyday it was coming home to my father screaming at my mother. And her screaming back. If I got one thing wrong, I was told that I was nothing but trouble. The worst one is being the idea that I was going to end up like them. The emotion abuse made me hostile to my peers and made me feel unwanted to the world. I would look in the mirror and feel like I shouldn't be alive. It was a childhood that I never wanted to have."
I never thought of her like that. I thought she was someone who had it easy and only wanted to help people because it was her job. But all along she was doing it because she too had felt emotional pain and burden in her life.
She continues, " The reason why I wanted to work with all of my students, especially you, is because everyone of you deserves to be heard. Deserves a life and deserves to be happy. The violence that is inflicted on you by someone else is sometimes hard. Sometimes petty. You know that. But the real pain. The pain that destroys is the one that the one we do to ourselves."
I never thought about that before. I thought the worst pain that I was suffering was what Dagny had done to me and the evidence is obviously shone by my current physical state. However, what Ms. Briggs has just said made me realize that I was inflicting the true pain onto myself.
" Whether you are a boy or a girl is up to you. No one else. You didn't deserve the attack. You never did and your mom would want you to be happy instead of making yourself hurt." She says as she takes my hand and grips it in an understanding way.
I say nothing as I look towards the window to see the clear blue sky and suddenly realize how much lighter I feel without the burden of my secret to trap me anymore.
I am not Henrietta. I might be a Henry, but I don't know. But I do know is that I can't pretend that I am girl. I have be the man that I know I have always been
Very emotional chapter. I have just written this all of a sudden and now I am still recovering from this tearful experience. This is just far too much like the time I had a breakdown with my therapist. Well more than once. Just the feeling of letting go such a big burden of pain is bad, but afterward I feel stronger than ever. I took a bit out of a good show called Sense8 when Nomi explains the true meaning of violence to her friend.
Please don't hate me for making you cry. It was hard writing this chapter and I know it has to be now or never with this one.
Please Review and see you next chapter.
