Author's Note: Warning: character introspection dealing with PTSD. See End Notes for more.
Death is loud and red and oppressively close here.
It is strange that it feels so familiar.
The disease she is hunting now presents itself in a dozen ways, but it hasn't halted her from pulling at its threads, the frayed ends that only she seems to see. Those portions of the virus that thinks it is smarter, that thing that makes it so deadly; she has plucked at it tirelessly until she finally found footing in its domain. Now, she wades deep into its realm, careful this time not to go under with the fervor of heroic, godly acts.
But Christ, it is hard.
This Death, it does not come quiet, and she can feel it plucking back at her own frayed ends, the ends she cannot seem to fix.
The waking dreams of fear, and the nightly dreams of failure.
They are constant reminders that she didn't wake up a whole person, at least not in her opinion. She is fractured and chipped, cracked in tenuous shards that she worries one day will come apart completely. Her therapist talks about more therapy, and her colleagues tell her to simply take time for herself. But she doesn't have that time, can't they see? She doesn't have the time to talk about her feelings, or open up about the fragile thing in her chest she once called a heart. There is only the disease and the stricken and the Death surrounding them all.
She doesn't have time to fall to pieces.
That doesn't stop her from jolting away at a loud noise, or shrinking back when someone pressures her personal space. There are memories she cannot remember, memories she feels in her bones, and they are the memories that plague her in the small hours of the night. Her body moves without her consent at times, cowering at the drop of a book or the shattering of a glass, sounds she would once pay no mind to, but now crack loudly in her mind, spurring on her muscles to act.
It is in those moments she remembers him.
His stern face and kind words, the feel of his calloused hands and the heat in his fingertips. She remembers those memories, remembers what it was like to feel safe from the world, if only for a moment. She holds tightly to those moments, clutching them close to that fragile thing in her chest, feeling it fill a few small cracks, like smooth molten glass pouring over imperfect planes. She isn't healed by the memories, but they are warm when she is cold, comforting when she is afraid.
And she is so afraid.
She has an excellent front built around her, but it only holds so long as her mind is focused on real things, grounded things: her work, the virus, those she saves and those she loses, his smile. But otherwise, she is shaking and tired, too tired to build her wall and too afraid to think of what happens next. The small fears she once had - failure, misunderstanding, saving the world - are all but gone now, replaced with the fear of unknown things, and that fact is more grim than anythings she classifies as a "passing worry" from her prior life. She is surround by helpful acquaintances and collaborators, and not one seems to grasp the terrors of her fractured, cobbled-together life.
But then she holds him close to that fragile thing in her chest.
And for a brief moment, she isn't a cracked, broken thing.
Author's End Note: I cannot pretend to know what it is like to live with Post Traumatic Stress, but I do understand what it is like to live with bipolar and anxiety, and I have been told they are similar in some (but certainly not all) regards. A colleague handles their own PTSD with one-on-one and group therapy, and they say it helps more than any medication, so I thought I would focus more on that method than just drugs. That, and doctors make the worse patients.