An excruciating wait.
A wait made more painful and more tortuous when mixed with loneliness.
During these days I was only accompanied in my waking hours by the sobering beep of the complex ventilation device.
The ping that kept me alive, and a stark reminder that I was half of a body. Half a woman. Half alive. Wired up, laced and tied - gift wrapped by the State as I awaited my replacement.
The full cocktail of despair wasn't complete without a pinch of nostalgia. Swirled around and mixed with the loneliness, it created a blend which generated spontaneous sobs, cries and wails. Only when I closed my tear drenched eyes did I see a moment of rest. The decency of peace, the beep of the machine transferring into a hollow chirp of a seagull.
The bland white walls morphing into open space free of boundary. The constant stepping of the hospital staff washing away into a calming ebb and flow of an endless tide on a shallow shore. The bright, manufactured light of the bulb above becoming a midnight sun, replete with natural warmth, tingeing my pale face.
The faded chatters of the doctors becoming the sole voice of my father.
I could feel his hand on my shoulder, another muscular hand pointing towards the horizon.
The ocean, red, like cabernet sauvignon. It touched my toes, the gentle salts bristling against what in my dreams was pure, naive skin. Free of war, free of chaos. Free of the State.
This was a day long ago, before I saw the Corp. Before safety conquered freedom, before a Republic was simply a State.
I couldn't make out his face any more. Not after all these months. But I could hear his warm voice, his reassuring hand on my slender shoulder gently guiding me to see beyond just the reds of the tide.
"CC. You have to remember what the best thing is to fight for." He'd say. The exact same time, every time, wind would blow. It would kick up sands, orange mixing with a brilliant yellow. It'd blow past my eyes and cause me to wince and I'd say:
"What's that Dad?"
"This."
He'd say, knowingly, wisely. Though it was a nondescript and obtuse thing to say, it made all the sense in the world to me. He meant freedom. The momentary splendor of an unoccupied beach. The ability and means to walk where you want, when you want. To share and experience.
I remember in that moment all I wanted to do was wander. I wanted to find myself embraced by the waters, sitting in those shallow pools observing the life before me. The endlessness of time, the free air, salty and ripe with energy. My long, fuchsia hair fluttering in the enviable breeze of an infinite day.
Then, as my feet would step into the tide, the texture would always become that of blood. I'd turn back.
My father would disappear.
My legs would fade beneath me as I sunk into what was once shallow and friendly water. The sun would become unbearably hot, the sand, dark and hideous. My purple eyes would well as I sunk, I searched frantically for my father and his wisdom, but I was a lonesome woman in an ever sinking pool.
Bound fighting for a freedom in a pit of dark quicksand. I'd look down, no longer having legs. My upper torso would sink into the blood, tainting my beautiful sundress and my fuchsia hair. The unbearable heat combined to make the water more akin to lava. My arms would burn, my pale flesh rending upon itself and sinking.
Then the most horrific: my heart would float to the surface. It'd beat in front of me as I drown, looking for it, pleading, grasping, grabbing. Blood flooding my throat and suffocating me as it swallowed the remaining half of me. My breasts sinking into the bloody mixture, my lips being burned and singed by the impossibly hot water.
My purple eyes submerged. Somehow, some way, I'd palm for my heart, only to watch it be picked up by the very person in the blue scarf on that cold winter night. His blue scarf billowed in the sandy storm, his face unseen, his shape unknown.
All I could see was my heart in the palm of his hand.
Through the bloody water I could see my entire childhood fade. My innocence evacuate.
"Noooo!"
I'd scream, but it was futile. His grip crushed my heart. Vein, vessel. Each chamber collapsed upon itself within seconds, and I felt myself die.
Agent Dice.
Dice.
I flushed into the blood filled pool, my femininity washed away in a tide of hideous disgust. Dice faded, as did the once pure facade of the beach.
I'd awaken then, back in the cold, white room.
"Ms. Juventus."
I still had not fully awoke.
"Ms. Juventus!"
"AH!"
I startled up, my head drenched in sweat. A quick glance around showed that I had ripped out several of the wires connected to me. I was covered in tears and sweat, my purple hair a frazzled mess.
Next to me a fellow soldier looked up at me with judgemental eyes. Eyes I never expected to see from a comrade, if I could call him that. He looked at me as if I could control my nightmares, as if I shouldn't invade his privacy of suffering with my own.
In this world we didn't have any rights any more, he should know. We gave them up when we decided to help build this world.
We lived in the world of blood and sinking sands. Hot suns and empty streets. Torn down playgrounds and street skirmishes. There were no pepper-haired fathers and beaches.
"Fu...fuck…" I said, looking up to see Esternasia, the nurse.
She had called my name, her soft and gentle fingers shaking my rigid shoulder.
"Ester. I'm...I'm so sorry."
I said, trying to turn on my side painfully. I wanted to curl up and hide away, as I'd had this nightmare one million times the past few weeks, and the dirty and judgemental looks from the rest of the staff and patients slowly picked away at me. I felt alone, even in the midst of the few people who should be able to relate to me the most.
"It's fine. I've come to replenish your feeding tubes and clean you up."
Ester was beautiful. She possessed beautiful orange hair, not unlike the horizon in my dreams. She had delicate and slight features, much like myself, but she possessed a curvaceousness and healthy composition that far surpassed my best days. She was about five years my younger (no, I won't tell you my age.), with a smile and a bedside manner that made me pity her assignment to Mr. Emotionless.
Ester was missing her eye. In lieu of it, she wore a State-issued eyepatch, marked with the abstract and bizarre logo of our ever loving rulers. It was some sort of circle pierced with three spear-like objects, representing what they said was 'Unity over Fear'. Only a girl of her quality could make such a vomit-inducing logo palatable.
Her active eye was verdant - no, nearly coniferous like in its coloration and potency. Beautiful as it was, her pupil was unmistakably serpentine.
Fortunately she was naturally sweet by disposition, but one could only imagine what a steely glance from her snake-like eye would feel like. Luckily for me, it bore into my once purple glance with earnest compassion, the only real light that I had felt in this room for weeks.
As she pumped a tube into what remained of my stomach, I winced a bit. She placed a cold towel on my head and prepared to give me the news for the day. Her tongue flitted of the 's' sounds with a seductive, but genuine, grace.
"Miss Juventus, we've finally found a replacement for you. Fresh out of the war."
"Ah."
I attempted looking away, searching for the far distant window. Sadly it was blockaded by several curtains, so I simply turned back, sighing.
When I exhaled, the feeding container curdled, and I made a disgusting look at it before looking back to her.
Her orange hair bobbed in the vacant lighting of the hospital, and she continued on.
"It isn't the greatest, but it is fully formed. The DNA and RNA profiles are nearly a match, 75%."
She dabbed the cold rag on my head and I looked up to her singular eye with a skeptical glance.
"75%. So they tried their best."
She, unlike the other staff members, liked my snark. She laughed a bit, a short hiss following it up. She bore a venomous fang against her lip to stop the laugh and removed the towel, covering up the feeding tube and reaching under my blanket to politely remove it. She did this out of respect for me, as she knew the process itself was rather disgusting. She could, of course, withstand it. Military nurses were just as tough, if not tougher than Corpswomen.
"I don't know about all that."
She said innocently, readjusting some of my wires and crossing her legs. She moved herself swiftly, using another rag to gently wash the sweat and tears from my arms. She then dipped the rag into a small bucket and lifted my gown, lightly washing over my chest and my upper stomach, careful to avoid any stray wiring.
I winced, but the warmth of her upper hand lightly tracing me was definitely not unwelcome.
She quickly patted me with a dry towel, before setting it to the side and eyeing me for any other dirt or grime.
"But they did try. I realize it has been about four months since you initiated a search, but this might be the best match you get for quite some time."
She wasn't wrong. It was actually fairly miraculous that The State even could find something in four months. It made me feel as if my tenure in service to them actually meant something, but I knew that the truth was far separated from such a thought.
"Okay, so what's the matter with it?"
Feeling an ache in my right breast, I winced again and moved a bit, scooting myself upwards, adjusting my gown and letting my body dry.
I wanted to give the impression that I was dead serious, because as sweet as she was, this woman's job was to explicitly lie to me. Though some facet of her over the past few months had likely come to care of me, she was still a State-raised child, and she had codes and protocols to protect.
Political to the end. Perhaps.
"Surprisingly it is in near perfect condition." She said, darkness now coating her once maple sweet voice.
Near?
My heart jumped, and my eyes peered at her. I crossed my arms and looked over my beautiful psuedo-cyclopian caretaker.
"Well…."
She twirled at her orange locks, focusing on me intently with her lizard-like glance. The green hue of the orb locked into me and wouldn't allow for me to escape.
"It's just been a bit patched together itself. Everything is functional after all, tendons, muscles, the works. Things have been added and taken out, the result of war."
So, eight toes? Knee replacements? A child's hip and a mule's femur? I tried to search for any level of detail in her voice, but her hisses and slips evaded me. She wasn't going to give me the specifics.
"You make it sound take it or leave it."
I bit my lip, tightening my arms a bit as I did so. If I had my feet, I'd be tapping them on the edge of the hospital bed, pondering what she had said in some sort of upset half-pout. I knew what I was getting into with the military market.
It was insanely difficult to find a fully formed body - in fact, less than ten upper or lower bodies were given up on the market in a year. Upper being the most common. The stories of horror are well documented.
The soldier who underwent the grueling twenty-seven hour body reconstruction surgery, only to find this knees possessed no anterior cruciate, or medial collateral ligaments (ACL, MCL).
The young woman who had her left arm reconstructed, only to find the primate and human fingers mix and matched, her arm reformed but deformed. Ankles covered with bone spurs and contusions, benign tumors debilitating full recovery.
It was a risk. A risk all blamed on the soldier when the Government received a complaint. It was a essentially a open black market, one which the government used to enact fear, doubt, and horror among the population to keep us further divided. If only my youth hadn't given me the faithful illusion of immortality and a beauty.
I sighed and sunk down into the pillow as Ester flitted her tongue across her taut lips.
"It is, Miss Juventus."
She rubbed my stomach gently and rose up, taking the medical board in her hands and striking a feminine, serpentine pose. She rested her other arm on her thigh and smiled.
"This is the best chance you have, and I know from seeing many cases like this. There are only finite chances for a donor, and even higher risks in symbiosis and surgery. You must take what you can get. 75%."
I placed both my hands over my eyes as she spoke, my once finely done nails fragmented and chafed. My delicate and feminine hands worn by atrophy and stress, the bones of my fingers pressing against the remaining fat of my upper cheek.
"Get me the file and execute the debt. I'll take it."
Anything was better than laying in this bed, night after night, day after day, haunted by the visions of the woman I used to be. I'd do anything not to see beauty torn from my hands on countless dark nights, anything not to see Dice squeeze my heart in his hands and execute my dreams.
Anything not to hear the warm voice of my dead father.
I needed to use whatever inner strength I had left to rehabilitate myself. To use whatever legs they gave me to gain revenge, erase this flawed system, make myself whole again. Whatever hideous thing they turned me into, it couldn't change what I had become inside. I had to be strong to survive this long, to see this much, to mentally unravel yet never break.
I would fight and claw my way through this existence and out of this hospital. Out of the emotional vacation the State seemed to want to send me on.
I knew the situation was bleak when the highlight of the day was my feeding tube being emptied and cleaned by a serpentine shade raven. Even worse, she was about the only genuine person in this hospital, my only company. Serpents weren't exactly known for these qualities, which only exacerbated my desire to leave. I'd lost so much of myself, but there was still a gateway to climb out of.
Right through the damn route the government wanted me to take.
Moments passed, and she tapped the clipboard slowly.
"As you wish!"
She said, her enthusiasm clearing away the dark cloud of her serious statements. This nurse knew she was holding me over the barrel. The whole hospital was.
I never understood that phrase. As you wish.
No, I hadn't had anything the way I wished it for a long time.
Not since the Republic. Not since that warm auburn sunset.
Not since they were alive. And certainly not since the war.
I was volunteering by being voluntold.
I placed my hands back down at my side, letting the shame melt off me as I watched the nurses' curvaceous figure disappear into shadow. I found myself wondering if she indeed had some sort of affection for me, the first female patient in this block in quite some time. She probably found herself disgusted at the cat calls and comments of some of the less mentally stable patients, but I wasn't sure how much of an upgrade I was.
A little sarcasm didn't seem to hurt, a bit of color didn't seem to sting. My words must have seem familiar to a venomous woman like herself. Maybe in me she saw what others had before.
Or perhaps that was just the way a Serpent works.
"Can't wait." I said smugly, essentially to myself. I propped myself up on the bed and looked up near the top of the ceiling, where an old propaganda poster hung for The State. A dingy fan blew the remainders of the poster around, but one could still read the words if they peered closely enough.
"State. Government. Culture. Prosperity."
Words I had read, preached and said one thousand times. Only now did I sit back and reflect, realizing just how empty and fruitless they were. What once filled me with pride simply made me wish there was a machine to pump my memories from my skull.
Nowhere was family, friendship, loyalty or respect.
In this society, it didn't seem you needed them.