The Battle For Blogland Pt. 2 - Chapter 1: Moment

Yeah, so, it's been 6 months, I know. I probably should have been a bit more productive with my time, but meh.
Theme: "Constellations" by Jack Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AOQ9jXC6iE

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1

MOMENT

There were times when I could block out the nightmares. If the night was warm, and my stomach was full, and the others were in good spirits, and the painkillers were working – I could block them out. Actually, it was less a matter of being able to block them out, than them simply not coming at all. They were rare nights, admittedly, but they gave me something semi-realistic to hope for each time I turned to rest. They also encouraged me to attempt to be happier myself, when possible, which was something I really needed in light of the dominating events in my head.

Sometimes the tracks we were latched to would rock gently, and ease away the monsters in my head. At other times, they would shake and sway, and provide a terrible crevice in which the nightmares would thrive. On these bad nights – when the air was icy cold, and the food was off, and conflict was rife, and my side was ablaze with agony – I had no choice but to submit to the horrors of the night and ride them out until morning. If things just simply weren’t in my favour (and they tended not to be), there was little I was able to do myself. I was still barely able to walk properly; so much of my time was spent in relative seclusion anyway. Once, I may have argued that dealing with nightmares and recovering from physical trauma would differ in range of difficulty. But I realised that now – after all I’d been through; suffered as much as I had – I realised I was able to dictate properly just how difficult one thing from another was.

Of course, this in no way is supposed to suggest that I had suffered to any greater extent than any of the others. Every single one of the few friends I had left had been through their own specially engineered hell – and none of us had quite managed to make it out the other side yet. We had simply seen the storm pass. But that happened to be one of many yet to follow. We sat in a halted state; where we had drifted so far down into the depths of hopelessness that there was actually a flicker of false hope, wrapped in layers of its own unique complex of despair. It was a delicate thing, and a fragile thing – and also a limited thing. Measured in its life – just waiting for the time to run out. Like the rest of us, in a way.

I did my best not to think about the Town. Again and again I would find myself using the excuse of elapsed time to force myself to stop acknowledging it. I would tell myself just how long it had been since that had all happened – as if it was a viable excuse to ignore it all. It felt long ago. It felt as though it had been years. But even if this were a viable excuse, the fact of the matter was that it had not been very long at all. Certainly not years – not even one year. Not even half a year. But I had more than enough reasons to try not to think about it. For a long time, I thought that what had happened there was the direct cause of all my nightmares. Of course, this turned out not to be the case at all; I never once had a nightmare concerning the events of the Town. But it had seemed reasonable at the time.

The main reason I avoided thoughts of that night, though, was because of the grief. From the moment Flame fell; from the moment Sparky turned her back; from the moment we fled; a multitude of emotions finally managed to resurface beneath blatant pain. Desperation intertwined with panic ran parallel with exhaustion, shot across fury. Eventually, grief took over completely. Grief is an incredibly powerful emotion. It hurts more than you would expect – especially if you completely unprepared for it. And while I was completely aware that nothing was certain, completely aware that there was a very real possibility Sparky and Death were alive, I could be fairly certain they were both still trapped inside the Town. Which meant that they were cold and broken; either insane, or descending into it; locked in a crumbling building; and the vampires screaming every night, fighting to break inside. But I couldn’t be sure – I would never know for certain if they were dead or alive. And so it wasn’t just the grief that got to me. It was that as well. Not knowing; never knowing. Not knowing was worse than having confirmation.  I dared not get my hopes up of seeing them alive again, for the fear of then finding their cold, dead bodies. I dared not move on with the assumption that they had been killed, for fear of later discovering that they had been left behind – for months, or years.

It was the uncertainty of their state of being. None of us had been able to determine if Death’s injuries were severe enough to kill her, and by extension whether she would have bled out quickly or slowly. In relation, there was no telling if Sparky would have been in any fit state to treat her. It was nearly an ocean of uncertainty and cold, sunken perception. Always pulling me under; clouding my vision, clouding my thoughts. It was the need for them to be alive. It was the images that clawed their way into my head – seeing them ripped apart, torn limb from limb. Shredded bodies and rivers of blood and blank, unseeing eyes. It made me sick. It made me want to run, or to lash out, to scream, to rip away my hair – if it would make it stop. But I knew it wouldn’t.

And then there was everyone else who hadn’t made off with us. Thrust and Lorelei and that final image I had of them splitting off to the side, running from the flames and from the battle, and the vampire belting after them. Two more friends that we’d lost over time. I would never know what had happened to them after that – of that I was convinced. And I still had no idea what had happened to Lavender Hope. No idea what had happened to Star Inkbright, Gabriel, Johanna. All the others we’d lost track of months and months and months ago. Luciana, Helena, Eve, Rimini, Robin, Dau – I’d not seen any of them as far back as the Invasion. Every time any of them entered my mind, I would fold back into my state of continued isolation all over again.

I sat tenderly on my bed, feet hanging over the side, face in my hands. The walls around me held an actively stale smell to them. By now, I’d grown accustom to it. I had not been allowed to leave that bed for two whole weeks after finally being patched up properly; so I had had a lot of time to adjust. Admittedly, the smell hadn’t ever actually bothered me, but should that ever have been the case, I had plenty of things to distract me from it. Constant pain proved to be a good one. The side effect of mass consumption of leaves was another.

The train swayed violently as it took a turn on the rails, and I clutched to the bedpost while the room rocked around me. My eyes screwed shut for a few brief moments, while I waited for the sudden pain in my still-very-tender-wound to subside. Once it had, and the muscles in my back and side had relaxed, I opened my eyes. I was breathing heavily again. It seemed I spent half my time doing that these days. It wasn’t intentional, of course – it was just part of the pain. Despite this, breathing was something I had actually been finding difficult, of late. The others kept telling me that my stamina would return with time. But patience was a virtue of mine that had long since been discarded. The train rocking, just as it had, every few minutes was not helping either.

A clap of thunder echoed from outside, and the rain pounded harder against the window and ceiling. As it had been some hours now since I had been woken by another nightmare, I figured it was about time I got up properly. My hand moved from the bedpost to the shabby walking stick Nixion had fashioned for me out of a sturdy stick he’d found. I hated that walking stick. It symbolised my being weak and crippled. My fingers closed around it tightly, and I slowly rose to my feet, half my weight on the stick. It was still testing for me to stand up and sit down, but it was harder still to walk properly. Two weeks had elapsed since I had been granted permission to leave the compartment, and I still had not mastered walking. It would take time, I knew, as prior to that, I had not actually put any weight on my legs for over a month. I almost collapsed the first time I tried standing – and would have, had the others not been there to help me keep upright. Again, the constant rocking of the train did not help matters. That said, I was almost there. I had almost mastered walking again. But I was growing impatient at my own incompetence. Of course, being healed at all was something of a miracle, and I very much appreciated being alive. But not being able to walk made me feel far too vulnerable – as if the slit in my side wasn’t enough. Everyone else was still risking their lives almost every day, and I spent most of my time in bed.

With half my weight shifted onto the walking stick, I turned my attention to the door on my right, and took a tentative step towards it, hoping against hope the train didn’t begin swaying again. Thankfully, it didn’t, and I made it to the door with slow, steady steps. The corridor outside smelt considerably less stale than my compartment did. Above, I could hear the rain continue to pound against the ceiling. I let the door slide shut behind me, and slowly began to walk down the length of the corridor. There was no real reason for this other than exercise and practice. Occasionally, I would go and visit Nixion in his compartment, but he was usually the one to come and see me. Not to mention, he was most likely still sleeping at the moment. I would have dropped in on Ivy as well, of course, but I had not seen her since we were first brought onto the train. She spent her days secluded in her compartment; not speaking and refusing to come out. I did not know, but I would assume there had been food given to her each day. Whether or not she ate it, I also did not know.

In the past two weeks, I had set myself the goal of walking up and down the length of the corridor at least three times a day to keep myself somewhat fit and somewhat healthy. I had not managed it all days, and the others had not been particularly happy when they found out I’d been doing this without anyone helping me, but I did what I could. Of course, they had a point. Taking the walks without the help of anyone else had resulted in some pretty nasty moments when the train decided to take one of its spontaneous sways. It had allowed me to perfect my skill of keeping quiet throughout intense pain, though admittedly I was not entirely sure if I could call this a good thing. I had made it as far as the end of the corridor with no disruptions on the train’s part. I had even turned around, to begin my way back, when it swayed again, with such force that I was taken both off guard, and off my feet. The walking stick rolled away from my fingertips as I hit the ground, and gritted my teeth against the sudden pain that flared across my side. At that exact moment, the door to Nixion’s compartment slid open and he stepped outside. Just my luck. Immediately, he made his way over to me, looking not displeased, but not entirely happy either.

“This didn’t go nearly as bad as it looks,” I assured him in a voice that sounded warped, as a result of extreme discomfort.

“Of course it isn’t,” he sighed. Slowly and painfully, he helped me to my feet, and handed me back my stupid walking stick. “I know what you’re doing, and I understand it. But it’s going to get you seriously injured if you keep doing this without getting help.”

I remember being really annoyed at that. Not at Nixion, of course. He was just trying to help, as he always was, and I appreciated his efforts more than anything. I was annoyed at how true he was, and how weak I still was. We were not fighting anymore, that was true. We’d found temporary refuge, and so I was not as much a hinder on the others as I could have been. Even so, walking by myself had been the first step to becoming independent again – in my head, anyway. I hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but I think it was really just because if I could walk again, I knew I’d be able to help out in one way or another. I’d be able to do more than I had been, in any case.

My reply to Nixion was to simply nod and, after a short pause, ask him to help me back to my compartment. He did so by walking alongside me as I made the painstakingly slow walk back up the corridor. But as it turned out, the train behaved itself, and I completed the journey without falling over for a second time. The walking stick was set back against the table and I sat down on my bed again.

“Thanks,” I grunted, as Nixion entered behind me.

“Not a problem,” he nodded in response. “You know I’m happy to help, right?”

“I know,” I assured him. “That’s not it, I just… Want to be able to do a few things for myself.”

“I get it,” he told me. “It’ll come. You’ve just got to give it some time.”

I nodded, and silence fell between us. I had just opened my mouth to say something else, when Miss Cain appeared next to Nixion in the doorframe. “Breakfast’s ready,” she said to him before turning to me. “We’ll send a plate over for you in a second.”

“Don’t worry,” I muttered, getting to my feet again. “I’m coming out today.”

She frowned. “I’m not sure Adra wants that just yet. You’re still recovering.”

“I want to go,” I told her. She frowned a little longer, and then shrugged.

“Alright, but don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”