Dreams of Angels, and the Falling Thereof

Ministration 2.8

When I awoke, it was a quiet affair. I did not rush to the bathroom, nor did I empty the contents of my stomach onto the floor. Rather, I lied there in the near-darkness, completely still for what felt like hours. The ceiling fan above me was spinning slowly.

I felt a distant kinship with it.

Though the nightmares had come again, just as they had at the motel, I could not work up the energy to be horrified by them this time. Lackadaisical, almost numb, I watched the fan in silence, losing myself in its near-silent, doubtless ineffective rotations.

I could not tell you how long I remained on that bed before forcing myself to rise. My bones were stiff, muscles aching with the pain of their earlier exertion. I could not discern, for the life of me, how long I had been unconscious in this room. The sole window's curtains were drawn, and I did not feel, in that moment, like pulling them open. A brief examination of the room revealed no clocks to me, but it did, perhaps humorously, reveal the phone Poppy had given me at the motel, sitting on the bedside table. I reached out for it with an arm that was not there.

My power would not manifest. When I tried, and God knows I tried, a handful of colourless strands fell from me, disconnecting at their bases to fall to the ground, whereupon they promptly curled up, like worms in the sun, and dissolved.

It said something that I had gone, in just a few days, from struggling to find times I could safely use my power to using it so much that I'd completely overloaded it.

I forced my real arm to move toward the phone, and though a dull pain shot upward from my elbow in response, it seemed far more functional than it had when I was last awake. It was good to have full motor control back, and a further relief to know that it wasn't broken, as I had feared when I lost my ability to move it.

The flip phone's dimly lit screen read 10:42 pm, which would mean that I had been asleep for fourteen hours since that morning. I couldn't help but laugh at the prospect: that was more sleep than I'd gotten the past week put together. Though I might have been more sore and stiff than the human body should reasonably have been capable of being, my mind felt clear for the first time since Daerksider had kidnapped me. There was something nice in that, at least.

Just as I was about to stand from the edge of the bed, the door creaked open. Angela stood behind it, silhouetted by the light from the hall beyond, and the look of relief on her face was enough to leave me feeling horribly guilty. For all the pain I'd been through, it was the worry that bit the most.

Wordlessly, she moved to the bedside and swept me up in a hug before I could so much as speak. I sat there for a moment, rigid, arm pinned against my side, entirely uncertain how to reciprocate or properly react to the small kindness. She pulled back after a moment, and began to speak.

"I can't even say how good it is to see you awake and moving, Kilian. I sat with you for a while, but you kept muttering in your sleep, and it felt... horribly rude to eavesdrop on that. How's the arm? And your head? Vivian and I did what we could to patch you up, but we weren't certain how the fracture would heal. Can you move it without pain? Everything working okay?"

The bombardment of attention was far more than I was used to, and far more than I desired. I couldn't help but recoil from her, only to find myself pinned between the overbearing mother and the bed behind me. Some feral and overeager part of my brain was already planning escape routes.

To hopefully satisfy her question, however, I flexed my arm, and found myself disconcertingly able to feel the bones, stiff from hours of bedrest, grinding against the skin.

"Yeah. Sure. Working just fine." I tapped the tip of my foot against the ground, averting my eyes. "Could you, like, give me some space here?" I tried to laugh, though the sound came out more like a choked hiss. "Kinda suffocating me, here."