Ladybug - Hospital

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Hospital

Before I cross my heart and hope to die at all
Take off my mask and leave the lies to the liars
Before I close my eyes I'm going to give it up
Take off my mask and leave the lies to the liars

-The Used

She was fifteen when the doors reopened.

A strangled gasp escaped her lips; eyes fluttering like the wings of butterflies as she struggled to stay conscious. It took her a long moment to realize that there was an oxygen mask over her face and that she couldn’t move because there were hands and straps keeping her on the gurney. Her vision swam, ears deafened by the sound of wailing sirens. The world was spinning around her and her mind was moving at a sluggish pace, unable to keep up with the rush of motion around her. Her heart was pounding a million miles a minute, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she was dying.

She struggled to take another breath, and hoped it wouldn’t be her last.

She hated the idea that she would die at the hands of the bastards she’d been running from.

It seemed her entire life was spent hiding in darkened corners, her finger constantly on the trigger of a gun and wondering if this time would be the last. Angela and her brother were the last bits of evidence proving that a man named Evander Hunt ever existed, and he had left them years ago. Whether he was dead or just lost somewhere on the OtherSide she didn’t know or care anymore. He had abandoned his children, leaving them to fend for themselves, and she had done all she could to keep her brother and herself alive.

She had been living in her father’s shadow since she was six years old and had first seen the Daemonkin try and pull his wretched, mangled body out of her closet. She had always known about the monsters in the world’s darkened corners, but this was the first time one had ever come into the light. She could still remember the look of it, all sharp angles and fingers that looked as if they had been broken and reset a thousand times. It slithered out of the shadows, black eyes and sharp teeth glinting with malice. She screamed for her father then, the first and last time she would ever scream.

Her father had cut it down with glittering blades she’d never known he had.

But now he was gone, and there was no one to save her from the shadows but herself.

The feeling of a warm hand slipping into hers drew wild blue eyes away from the cold, spinning ceiling above her, and it seemed like so much effort just to twist her head and fixate on the figure next to her. The familiar crystalline gaze of her brother Colin met her in return, and she could see panic looking back at her. There was a gash over his eye, and someone unfamiliar and dressed in white was trying to clean the wound before it became infected. He didn’t seem to notice at all.

A chill was taking over her body, and she could not stop her eyes from drifting shut.

A thousand images and memories were washing through her mind now, and she felt the distant prick of a needle against her skin. She ignored it, awash in the same black cloud that had haunted her since that day nine years ago when she had first realized that the monsters were real. She had stopped trying to hide under the covers after that day, stopped trying to hide from a reality she knew she would never escape. Her only focus now was protecting the brother that was two years younger than her and couldn’t protect himself. Colin had taken it worse than her, more terrified of the monsters and haunted by the loss of their father.

The door had opened at midnight.

It had never happened before, not like this.

It started with a glimmer at the edge of the door to the abandoned apartment. She and Colin were sleeping on pallets on the floor, because they had been living like nomads ever since Evander had disappeared. At that first sign of light, Angela had been off the pallet with a gun in her hand, ripped from under her pillow. She didn’t sleep without one anymore. She expected the half-beasts; the Daemonkin that her father had told her once could never hold a candle to the true Daemons. She expected them and they concerned her, but she did not fear them. She could not afford fear because if she let herself fear then they would kill them both.

But it was not one of the Daemonkin that opened the door. It wasn’t her father, the only person she had ever seen with the power to open and close the barriers between worlds. It wasn’t one of the Fallen or anything else she might have expected or hoped for. No, the thing that walked through the door was something that could give her nightmares even though she wasn’t six anymore, and didn’t have a child’s fear. It was something her father had told her could never cross over into their world unless the barrier fell and the doors were reopened.

It was a true Daemon.

She was moving in a moment, already scrambling to her feet and firing the first of six shots at the Daemon in their doorway. She did not spare the time to look beyond it or to wonder how it was that such a thing was here now. Her only thoughts lay in escaping it because she knew already that she would not be able to kill it, and she couldn’t let anything happen to Colin. Her hand was grabbing his upper arm, trying to haul him to his feet and get him to the window because just outside that was the fire escape and safety.

But he pulled away.

He couldn’t seem to move. He was frozen to the spot the moment those red eyes had fixated on him with a faint, terrible smile that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Sharp teeth glinted in the pale moonlight streaming through the window, but nothing else on that darkened figure could be illuminated. It stood as tall as the door itself, the illusion of human hands distorted by the curving claws that stretched past its knees. It looked at Colin and it just smiled, not threatened by the revolver his sister held in his hand or the bullet she had fired at it. It was not threatened at all by these children, these pitiful, shaking children.

She fired the gun again, not pausing this time as she reached for her brother. She remembered the horrible thump as it hit the creature, and she remembered hearing not a grunt of pain, but another harsh laugh that seemed louder and more intense this time. She grabbed her brother brutally, dragging him forcibly to his feet and shoving him ahead of her. He stumbled, shaky on his feet and a confused and terrified look on his face, the face of a twelve year old that shouldn’t be facing the monsters of nightmare with only his sister for protection.

She pushed him towards the window, relieved when she heard the fire escape clatter.

It was gone in the next moment as claws sliced through her.

She remembered perfectly the look on her brother’s face, such a mix of fear and surprise and despair etched on his young features. She was falling forward, still staring at that face that was suddenly flecked with red, and she could hear her heart pounding in a desperate plea for life. There was so much pain shooting through her, her very nerves on fire because the Daemon behind her had just ripped his blades back out of her stomach. A tentative hand clenched over the wound, trying to keep her lifeblood from pouring out onto the floorboards. The other barely scraped the window as she tried to keep from falling.

And then it was Colin pulling the gun from her hand, Colin who shot at the Daemon.

It was Colin that saved her life.

She knew it should have been the other way around, but she felt so tired, so lost. There was blood pumping out of her stomach, red covering the rusted metal in a darkly glistening sheen. She didn’t remember what happened next, didn’t remember the process of getting her to the ground or her brother screaming down the darkened alleyway for help. Maybe she had passed out then, or maybe she had managed enough strength to stumble her broken body to the streetlights. She didn’t know where the Daemon was.

She wondered again if she was dying.

Once again, awareness of the sirens over her head sunk into her muddled mind. The feeling of Colin’s hand clenched tightly around hers pulled her back to reality, dragging her just as forcibly back to the fact that her heart still beat. She wondered if she was happy about this, wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be better to die, and she was disgusted at herself for thinking it. A black cloud of fear was squeezing its frozen fingers around her still beating heart and she felt it jump in her chest. Again, dimming eyes sought her brother’s desperately, and she saw him then, sitting at her side with a desperate look on his face that could possibly mean only one thing.

“Please don’t leave me alone.”

Her heart again slammed against her chest in a desperate plea for survival, and her vision swam, a whirl of color and light overtaking her senses. She tried to squeeze his hand back, tried to reassure him, but she couldn’t feel her fingers anymore, and she felt now maybe this was what dying was. It was a scary, lonely feeling, and something she had promised him she would never make him go through. Their father had left them; their mother had died when he was little. She couldn’t leave him as well, not when he needed her the most.

She wanted to say or do anything to reassure her little brother, to give him some sign that as long as she could pull air into her battered and bleeding lungs, she would stay with him, but she could not manage even that. With frozen fingers, she managed to give his hand a tiny squeeze in return, and she was grateful when she saw the smile that flitted briefly across his face. His eyes were so full of pain, and she would have done anything to take it away, but her eyes were fading again.

“I’ll come back,” she wanted to tell him, but the words never came.

She tried to stay conscious for him, but she felt herself drifting away, a calm darkness falling over her vision and her mind, and she was aware of nothing else. Whether it was into sleep or the sedatives finally taking hold she couldn’t be sure. She could have been dying and she wouldn’t have known. Nightmares and memories roiled through her mind for a while, and then even those faded and she sank into deeper oceans. The scenes that had haunted most of her life flitted away like ghosts and she was left alone in her own mind, with only her own darkness for company.

If this was what it was to die, it wasn’t so bad.

Slowly, she became aware of a new sound, the sound of a steady beeping in her ear. She tried to ignore it, but it only seemed to make it louder. Acknowledgement of the sound only seemed to make it worse, so she slid her eyes open, staring up at a sterile white ceiling. She was no longer in the ambulance, the sirens having faded into echoes a long time ago. She was in a warm, white hospital bed, her midsection wrapped in gauze and an IV in her arm. There was a part of her that was surprised she was still alive, and then the rest of her that was suddenly wondering where her brother was.

She took a shuddery breath, the oxygen mask still on her face. With slow, deliberate movements, she raised a steady hand to her face and pulled off the mask she had been wearing for too long now. Her arms felt far too weak, but she managed to push herself up on the bed, eyes searching for a figure she hoped would be waiting. Colin was sprawled in the chair, too tall and too haunted for twelve, his eyes shut and steady snoring coming from his lips. The gash over his eye was still red and oozing, black stitches in his skin.

Angela didn’t know that she was not the only one who’d been brought into the ER that night.

She was fifteen when the doors reopened, doors her father promised never would be.

She was fifteen on the last night of the world.

Subsequently... "Ladybug - Innocent"