One Shots [discontinued]

IASWAA | Without Her

“Dannon?”

I continued to stare straight forward, my hands curled into tight fists as they rested on my legs.  I’d been sitting here for what felt like forever.  Had it been hours, minutes, days?  How long had I been in this chair, in this room?  How long had I been staring unseeingly in the direction of the bed in front of me?

How long had it been since this unending torture began?

“Dannon, how long have you been here?”

I felt myself shrug, but my mind didn’t actually register me doing so.  It seemed like all I could do was stare, stare, stare.  I wasn’t even quite sure that I blinked.  “I don’t know,” I whispered, my voice rusty with disuse.  It’d been so long since I talked.  It took all the strength I had to talk now.

“Did you go home last night?”

With more energy than I honestly had, I blinked and craned my head in the direction of the voice.  Oliver stood there, his thumbs hooked in his jeans as he stared at me with deep concern clear in his eyes.  He was beyond the sympathetic glances.  No, now he was scared for me.  And who could blame him?  I was kind of scared for me, too.  “No,” I mumbled before twisting back to face the bed.

“This isn’t healthy, Dannon,” Oliver told me, hitching his foot around one of the hospital chairs and pulling it toward him, falling into it.  I could see the dismay on his face without even looking at him.  “This isn’t what Brianne would want and you know it.”

I felt my eyes burn with tears.  I blinked them away, and suddenly my gaze wasn’t unseeing anymore.  I could see the scene in front of me, could see it perfectly.  Brianne was in the hospital bed, tubes in her nose and around her face.  There was an IV in her arm, but she didn’t seem to notice.  Brianne, the girl who would squirm and yelp at the sight of a needle didn’t notice an IV in her arm.  That all in itself made my stomach tighten.  She was completely oblivious to what was going on around her.  And why?

Because she was in a coma.

“Please,” I whispered, my voice thick with the tears I was trying so hard to keep away.  “Please don’t do that to me.”

Oliver placed a hand on my shoulder.  It was meant to comfort me, but it didn’t.  Not really.  Nothing seemed to be able to comfort me anymore.  Not for over three months.  Not since the car crash ruined everything.  Everything.  “You remember what you told her after you went into a coma, don’t you?  What you felt when you woke up and found out she wouldn’t smile?”

I frowned.  At the time I’d felt guilty that I’d brought so much pain, so much agony to the people that I loved.  But now I knew what it felt like.  I couldn’t smile.  I couldn’t laugh.  I couldn’t really do anything.  All I could do was stare and feel dead inside.  “I know what I said,” I muttered, a tear slipping down my cheek.  “But now I get it.  I really get it.”

Oliver was silent for a moment.  He was trying to think of something to say, of something that could possibly pull me out of this state of utter nothingness that I seemed to be trapped in.  But he wouldn’t find anything.  Because there was nothing—nothing—that could make me happy anymore.  Well, unless there was some magical way to bring Brianne back to life.

I knew better than anyone that Brianne was gone.  She may have been breathing like she was here, but she was gone.  I could feel it deep inside.  And it killed me to know that—to know that she wasn’t coming back no matter how long I sat here and waited for her.  I knew that Brianne had felt this way to an extent when I was in a coma.  But this feeling was so deep, so utterly heart wrenching, that I knew there was absolutely no hope.  Brianne wasn’t coming back.  The only reason she was still breathing at all was because of the machines keeping her heart going.