Chapter 21—Purgatory
A/N: Remember this story?! If not, below is a brief synopsis. I know this long LONG overdue update is short, but it's short by design. Consider it a bonus chapter. I am currently working on the next, (probably) much longer, chapter and hope to get it finished, beta'd and posted in a few days to a week. First, I wanted your take on this update which is a bit of a departure for me. I so hope the wait was worth it. Thank you for your patience and I really appreciated all the words of concern and support. Anyway, I have the best readers, old & new. I am so happy to see I picked up lots of new readers, and followers in my 4 month sabbatical! You are all the best…Thank you! [And of course a HUGE thank you to my beta, cainc3 and to Bondopoulos who even offered to be my scribe, a very much appreciated offer that I considered taking her up on on more than one—or 4—occasion(s).] Oh, and Bond, one other thing-I ran with it...
Enjoy! (And as always, reviews, including concrit, are appreciated)...I don't own anything in the VM world, that honor is all RT & the gang. It's a fun playground to play in though. So thanks for indulging me!
Recap: After getting hit in the head with a baseball, Mac wakes up back in 2004 but this time, instead of being a Mackenzie, she finds herself living life as Madison Sinclair, as though she'd never been switched at birth at all. She tries to balance her new life as a '09'er with her own intrinsic Mac-ness. Slowly, but deftly, Dick Casablancas charms his way into her life. She becomes friends with Veronica in this dimension, too, merging the '02'ers and '09'ers. Things with Dick aren't all sunshine and roses though, she told him about Cassidy (using her unique lens into the "future" to try to save her classmates), he's understandably shocked by the truth about his screwed up little brother.
At the same time Mac is in 2004/2005 sampling life as Madison, she is also tethered to the present timeline of 2009 as Cindy Mackenzie, in a medically induced coma. All her friends and family gather in the waiting room as a week drags by, living in their own purgatory hell clinging to the tentative hope that they will get some positive news soon. Logan and Veronica try (not very successfully) to fight the ever-present attraction between them and Dick gets a bit jealous and he's not fully-ready to admit to himself how much he needs Mac in his life despite their unlabeled "pseudo" friendship.
Back in the 2005 dimension, an explosion rocks Neptune High and Mac is caught in that nether world between her past and her 'real life,' at the same time her team of doctors in the present time are weaning the medication to lift her out of the coma.
Purgatory—Chapter 21
How long she'd been out Mac didn't know. It could have been a minute or an hour, or anywhere in between.
She felt like a soul minus a body; lighter than she'd ever felt before. Nothing weighing her down, however, nothing seemed to tether her to life either.
She was in a game tug of war…
Then, suddenly, Mac seemed to be dropped into chaos… Sound was the first thing to permeate the thick gray nothingness surrounding her like a shroud. She heard the heavy thud of falling drywall, a backdrop against the wails and moans that formed the soundtrack of pain from other felled classmates.
Like static on an old radio, the voices drifted in and out.
Names were being shrieked in terror and she thought she heard her borrowed name among the splintered list.
Madison, come on damnit, don't leave me now…
Most names were met with eerie silence as the macabre attendance taking continued underlying the pandemonium.
Acrid smoke was filling her lungs, she tried to cough it out but no sound came out.
The smoke alarm was ringing, incessantly buzzing before echoing in her ears.
Distant buzzing of what she assumed were chainsaws reached her consciousness. At least someone was apparently aware something was amiss at Neptune High. Mac reached down inside her memories trying to suss out what was happening around her, but everything was hazy.
She was drowning in the gray misty nightmare of smoke and fear, which had become a living entity. It was hellishly hot; she didn't have to see to know there were flames licking the walls, trying to edge out deeper into what was once her safe place.
Mac felt something wet splash on her hand, tears raining down, she assumed. She moved her head slightly towards the source. It was a mistake she paid for in dividends. Pain broke through the invisible barrier that had been walling it in.
Another moan leaked through, this time she realized it was her own, merging with the symphony of surrounding whimpers, near her and across the crumbling remains of the hallway she'd known well in this dimension and the original one, too.
She heard the rise and fall of a voice in her ear. The words assimilated, blurring together—working in tandem with the pressure of something being pressed firmly, hard, against what Mac took to be the ground zero of pain.
Nausea waved up, trying to break though the barrier. She blinked—hard—several times in a row to clear out the fog.
That plan was unsuccessful, as the hazy smoke continued to envelope her—death's hug. That was how it felt to her in that brief atom of time, tendrils of pain curled up into and through her body. Her vision started going gray around the edges, the song of misery from other victims, the cacophonic chorus of chain saws and emergency alarms all merged together until the inky blackness swallowed her whole.
The game of tug of war continued…She once again felt that lighter than air sensation. She was a specter hovering over her physical body, then with a jerk she came in for another rough landing.
Mac once again was like a newborn baby leaving the womb—a safe haven—dropping into a different, this time cold, new existence.
She couldn't move, couldn't even open her eyes, it was as though they'd been weighted shut.
Sound trickled in, another channel trying to come through the static. Rhythmic, staccato beeps filtered through the darkness. It would've have been oddly soothing—a white noise effect—had she not been terrified by the paralysis.
Voices, far off and grainy though they were, sifted in and metastasized through her, she recognized the tone, the timbre more than the words themselves.
"…Fight, hon. You can do it…You're my girl, you always have been…I need you to stay with us, hon…"
The smell of Lavender seeped through her consciousness but it followed on the heels of smoke, as though the haze followed her into this dimension.
A deeper voice, a masculine one, followed. It was broken down, lots of stops and starts; typical for his methodical way of expressing himself, but it was what was in those pauses that was affecting her most. She was a daddy's girl, always and forever. His pain was bleeding through.
"…I love you, my precious girl…."
The door shut, she heard the lock click from her prison—her body. The beeping of the machines keeping her alive filled the empty space, punctuated by the occasional scrape of something being moved, and muffled sobbing.
Time passed…ten minutes…twenty…an hour perhaps, Mac wasn't sure. The door opened again, she wanted to let her presence be known, but she still wasn't able to move.
"….Where would I be without my Q?"
Bond, she tried to respond back, but of course no sound came out. She tried to follow the rest of the rise and fall of her best friend's plaintive pleas for her to come back. The tone was soothing, white noise for the soul.
"…Dick is waiting outside…Impatient…Don't know why….cares…just a surfer dude, but…"
Suddenly, Mac felt something on her hand, a slight pressure, nothing more than that, but it was like another sensation was breaking through the surface.
Before she could puzzle that out, another voice penetrated her darkness.
"…Come back to me Sleeping Beauty…lobby full of fans…Fight through…You survived a lot…I believe in you."
The pressure made a return visit, this time on her cheek.
The minutes, maybe even hours, ticked by. Doctors and nurses continued to populate her room, an endless parade of voices, spouting theories, recommendations and platitudes in equal measure. Mac regaled them to the background, honing instead in on the steady beeping as it tethered her to this reality.
In the ebb of time, sensation started to return in stronger waves—forceful, kinetic.
Light started seeping into the tunnel, beginning slowly, one pinprick at a time until shadows started appearing as Mac opened her eyes, in that moment she felt as though she were a newborn re-entering the world.
The added sensations came at a steep price.
Whereas the return of other sensations—sound, touch, sight—came slowly, doled out to her piecemeal, the sensation of pain rushed at her at once, pushing everything back out in the process. Pain had become her 6th sense, earning a zip code of its own.
As though the air mass shifted, she knew the exact millisecond her mom, the only mom that mattered, knew she was coming back.
"Cindy." Her name, though said as a gasp, was an entire paragraph in just one tiny word. Hope, love, pure joy clung to it, trying to mask the desperation and fear that hitchhiked along for the ride.
Mac slowly turned her head in the direction of her mom's voice, her eyes clinched shut as the pain ticked higher on the barometer. An explosion of red broke through, willowing out like fireworks, exploding through her body, settling in her toes. The beeping of the machine went from separate bursts of sound into one loud, continuous whine. Mac tried to moan from the violence of sensation, but the sound that escaped was rusty, more of a croak. Then before she could react anymore the darkness once more swallowed her whole.
TBC…
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