Chapter 2

Sarah sat at the desk, her favourite crocheted blanket draped over her shoulders like a shawl, her fingers running slowly across the pages of the book in front of her. Dimly, she could hear the sounds of her step-mother pottering around the kitchen. Sarah had to give credit where it was due, Karen had been quick to suggest Sarah "come home" until she was back on her feet.

In fact, Sarah and Karen had never got on so well as they did now, since the accident.

It wasn't that they never fought. That would be ridiculous to even suggest. They were too fundamentally different people to never fight.

But Karen had been the only person to not treat Sarah differently since the accident, and Sarah was grateful enough for it to bite her tongue when Karen did or said things that were too small to bother arguing about.

The accident had forced Sarah to significantly reshape her priorities, and now small things like acting being a useless profession anyway just weren't worth arguing about. Sarah, now that she was pinned down with more time to think than she had ever wanted, now realised that those comments Karen made that could be taken as subtle insults against Sarah's mother Linda in fact actually were. The thing was though, Sarah had come to realise, Karen only tended to make those comments when Linda had done something worthy of censure.

Like not having time to see her daughter.

Even in the long months in hospital, Linda had only shown up once. She had turned up when Sarah had been asleep, and had woken her up with a horrified shriek.

That was the first time Sarah knew for sure that the car crash hadn't exactly left her looking pretty. She had been able to guess as much, since she could feel where the bandages and stitches were. She remembered the face-full of glass she had taken when the windscreen had shattered inwards.

But everyone else had been too polite, or too scared of her reaction to mention it.

Before Linda, who had screamed, and had then fallen into hysterics about her beautiful daughter being destroyed.

She had called Sarah later and apologised, but then immediately begun talking about plastic surgery.

Sarah though, knew that her family, middle-class though they were, didn't have that kind of money. Not when they had to pay off her hospital bills already. Not when she needed to visit specialists and needed special equipment. She didn't even bother asking Linda for any. Her mother was a feckless spendthrift, a magpie buying whatever shiny things that pleased her, without worrying about things like savings or rainy days.

Besides, Sarah found it increasingly hard to care about appearances these days.

Not being able to see them anyway put a particular damper on that.

"Sarah! Tell me a story!"

Sarah didn't jump. She'd heard Toby's clomping feet as he ran into the house, shaking the floorboards enough to make the cabinets rattle.

"Hey Toby," she replied. "School okay?"

"Yeah..." Toby drawled disinterestedly, before pestering her for a story again.

For the first month after the accident, Toby had been quiet. Far too quiet for an eight year old boy. Sarah, even in the midst of struggling to cope with her injuries had been appalled. One day, when they had been sitting in awkward silence, she had decided she'd had enough, and just to fill the silence, she began to tell him a story about goblins, and magic, and escaping oubliettes. Just like he used to when he was small, (once he was old enough to understand words, instead of just tone of voice,) he listened to her story with rapt attention.

When she was finished, he had bombarded her with questions, and then begged her for another.

Back before, Karen had always rolled her eyes at Sarah's storytelling, but since the first time she had seen Sarah telling a story since the accident, watching how the two half-siblings interacted with something resembling their old energy, instead of miserable strained politeness, she had even taken Toby aside and encouraged him to keep asking Sarah for stories. It had been an unnecessary action- Toby was a bright kid, but even if he'd been as dim as some of the goblins in Sarah's stories, he'd have noticed how Sarah just seemed more alive when she was storytelling.

Sarah knew what they were doing, and she was grateful for it.

Once again, Sarah found an escape.

So she told Toby stories, and learned to read Braille and listened to the radio, and to Karen, as she puttered about the house, working in her office in the mornings (Karen was a free-lance architect,) and then usually cleaning or gardening in the afternoons.

She interacted with her father too when he was home, but even more than she remembered, he was always at business meetings, or important functions with movers and shakers, or travelling to conventions. When he was home, the talk was small, and the conversation functional. She loved her father, but she knew that her injuries had shocked him, and that his time spent away throwing himself into his work was his attempt to come to grips with it.

Sometimes, she thought that maybe she hadn't inherited the running from just her mother after all.

If asked, Sarah would nominate the blindness as the worst of the outcomes from the accident. Not being able to see the sunset, or the mist in the park, or the lights in the city at night, or even the faces of her family was devastating.

But it was hardly the only effect of the accident.

She'd been told it was a miracle that she'd survived at all, and more of one that she'd suffered from no paralysis. She thanked the gods for small favours, as at least this way she didn't need a colostomy bag or a ventilator. She could move perfectly well...

In her wheelchair.

The Impact had crushed Sarah's legs almost to a bloody pulp. She was incredibly fortunate not to have died of blood-loss, but the ambulance and the fire department had been quick to respond to the crash reported on one of the major highways, and had got her out even quicker.

So she was told. She had been mercifully unconscious until almost a full day later, when she had awoken in the hospital to discover that her legs had both been amputated above the knee. Apparently the operation had taken hours, and she was lucky her blood-type wasn't rare. She had a cracked sternum and a few broken ribs as well, but even though they made it hard to breathe, or laugh for a while, eventually they healed up completely, albeit with pins in them. She had had it explained in more detail than that of course, but when you're in a fug of painkillers and shock, sometimes exact details escape you. When she was aware and alert enough to start processing things properly again, she decided that she had the most important details down anyway.

Blind. Crippled. Scarred.

Terrified.

Sarah could appreciate the sick irony of being a Runner without legs.

She had also had some minor damage to her hands, but once the scars healed over, she had engaged in hours of mindless physical therapy exercises to ensure that she lost no range of motion. It wasn't like there was anything better to do, and as she had snapped at one trainee nurse whispering too loudly from the doorway, this was something that she could fix herself.

The loss of the independence had hurt the most, but Sarah, having learnt her lesson the hard way, was determined not to complain.

If the Labyrinth had taught her anything, it was that life wasn't fair.

The accident had provided enough ammunition that no decent person would have blamed Sarah for complaining, but she had gotten out of that habit, and had instead developed a strategy not far from that of a cornered animal. If she could run, she would. If backed into a corner, she would fight until the obstacle moved.

She was now teaching herself the piano. She'd had lessons when she was younger, but had dropped them after practising became a chore. Now that she had nothing but time on her hands, she was playing again, and this time, she was appreciating the simple patterns of the different scales and arpeggios. She couldn't read her old sheet music, of course, but even if there hadn't been Braille music, Sarah had always had a fairly good ear for music. At first she had stumbled and driven Karen to politely go for long walks, or shopping for groceries whilst Sarah banged away at the piano, but now, a good year onward, Sarah could knock out enough decent tunes that sometimes, when her father was home, he asked if he could listen.

Sarah thought that now, her days of running were long behind her.

She thought wrong.

...

A/N: No, I don't have a weird thing about amputees. It's just that when I was picturing the crash, that's what part of Sarah got crushed. Also it fits with the runner theme, albeit in a League of Gentlemen (that's a very very dark British Comedy for those of you who want to scar yourselves) sense.

Let me know what you think- I'm going for realistically morbid.