Deckard

18.

Resilience

It took a few agonising years, but my recovery from the life-threatening fall was slow and testing. I'd broken nearly all my ribs, my arm and fractured my pelvis. After breaking my back in multiple places, I had to work hard to command my toes to even wiggling slightly. It took months of physiotherapy before I could rotate my ankles and flex my foot before working on my knees and re-learning how to walk. I was very fortunate that I hadn't permanently paralysed myself.

Deckard had arrived seven hours after I had called Hattie. Storming through the makeshift hospital and breaking down into heartbroken sobs when he realised I was in-fact alive. Broken, but alive.

We'd returned to England once it was safe for myself to travel. Plenty of bed rest and small exercises to complete in trying to regain my strength. It had been tedious. I was frustrated and angry at the fact that I was pulled from a plane and had almost made myself as useful as a mashed potato. I hated myself for being so weak and allowing the bítch to wreck my life once more as she snatched that parachute from my hands. That I allowed her to terrorise my dreams and give me frequent night terrors, my aching body thrashing as much as it could as the sheets would tangle around my limbs. The sweat would bead along my clammy skin, and my breath would burn in my throat as I failed to take in a breath. Trapping me down in the darkness as I repeatedly fell from the sky. I was repeatedly hitting the wall of water, frequently drowning. Repeatedly crushing my bones under my weight, and then darkness.

Deckard thought we were under attack the first night it happened. He'd sprung from the bed, gun drawn and eyes alert as he observed the room for danger. I scared the living daylights out of him. Even then, every night when I close my eyes, Deckard holds me close to try and ward off the terrors. Some nights, I could choke on the screams and my eyes would burst open with the effort of biting my lip. Desperate not to wake Deckard every night, but even then, his arms still hold me close as his fingers dance across my skin in a soothing motion. Even in those fewer violent nights, he comforts me as I fight against sleep. Against the darkness that will torment me further than my inability to run, jump and dance wherever I wish.

It was as I laid in bed, the white sheets tangled between our bodies, I sigh into the well-sculptured chest of my husband. An arm hung loosely over my slim waist as I look over his handsome face. Noticing all the small age lines that were forming from the stress I'd put him under the past few years and having to become my full-time carer when I couldn't even lift a cup of tea to my lips.

Amazingly, he'd pushed all his work aside, as he tenderly helped with every need. He had brought in a hospital bed downstairs so that I wouldn't be confined to the bedroom; where he could easily watch over me as he cooked us meals in the kitchen and read contently in the lounge. So I wouldn't have to battle the stairs until I had enough energy when the intense physiotherapy had rebuilt my liquified muscles enough to support myself on my shaking legs. That the constant ache and splintering pain in my bones had ceased sufficiently to allow for deep breathes of much-needed air.

"It's rude to stare," Deckard hums, keeping his eyes closed as we listen to the birds singing outside the grand windows to the east of the bed. A small, rare, smile graces my fatigued face as I take his hand in my own and squeeze it gently.

"Is it a crime to look at what is mine?" I whisper, closing my own eyes and tucking my head into the crook of his neck. My ribs and back were aching as I do so. Deckard was somehow sensing my pain and moving his body slightly so that he was able to support my shoulder and head beneath his chiselled chest. "Thank you," I whisper, ashamed that everything I do is still affected by that haunting event.

That I will never be free of those shadows that follow my every move,

"Oh, well stare away, my love," Deckard chuckled as he holds my body against his. His fingers were returning to their soothing pattern across my hip as we hold each other close. Neither of us willing to move from the comfortable tranquillity we were basking in.