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Koshka doesn’t remember when she lost her fear of hospitals.
She’d never liked them. The people, the places, the sights, sounds, smells.
It should feel like home. Like growing up. Chemical smells and faint mechanical buzzing, every wall the same blank white, every floor the same grey tile, always pristine, never unpolished. A convergent evolution to the factories of youth. Even the ones who found both unpleasant could at least bear to get it over with and leave for brighter pastures. She’d never been able to stomach it. Some primal, animal part of her that AOU’s countless genetic screenings hadn’t eliminated always shrieked danger in the back of her mind, warned that some unseen predator always lurked under waters that seemed too still to be real.
It was a silly thing to fear, what was essentially nothing. Perhaps even beyond that. Then again, maybe it was the beyond that had scared her at all, the things she couldn’t quite make sense of. Why it was all so clean. The source of the noises she couldn’t explain. Why she’d be told it wouldn’t hurt, yet hear screaming in a distant room.
It was a childish thing to fear.
But that was what she was once.
What she has to stare at her walking corpse of a body and remind herself she still is.
A child.
She figures it got scrambled in the swap between hands after her sentence; hundreds of Geroy documents with ‘AOU Heavy Military Equipment’ bolded and underlined means she isn’t really a child in their eyes anymore, huh?
Cog fitted in the machine, piece placed on the board, lamb in line for slaughter, all the same.
Guess that makes her the one screaming in the room over now.
Heh. Would be nice to scream. They’ve got her on too many muscle relaxants for that.
Still, there’s something to be said for exposure therapy in even the grimmest situations. She’s learned the slow painkiller drip-feed into her veins is the closest thing to mercy they’ll ever offer, but she’s not stupid enough to mistake it for genuine care—not when they only start to give a shit if the background noise skews her P3 levels. Needles in her wrists and hands, IV tubing, electrodes and tangled wiring fastened with foul-smelling adhesives, all are practically an extension of her own nervous system after so many times on that table.
There’s nothing left to fear. Nothing beyond the unknown she has yet to see. This is it—the worst there is. The panic has dried up. Her reserves are dead—they’re running on fumes.
It’s different now. Not easy, but different.
Every operation, every millimeter-precise incision is a stoked flame underfoot, kindling long-charred, instinctive terror and igniting a new flame—dull embers that smoulder into blood-boiling, blade-sharp hate.
Hate for the airtight suits and the sound of doctors breathing through gas masks, for bonesaw on synthetic calcium, stainless steel surgical tools marred bloody. For the glare of fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the beeping and droning of machines that flash with graphs of her vitals and P3 levels, the metal of restraints against her limbs, laid out like an anatomical model on the operating table to be dissected and stitched up again. Their perfect lab rat girl, precious grey matter cargo stuffed inside a taxidermy hackjob. The harsh sting of cleaning agents and disinfectants smell more like death to her than blood and rot ever will. No matter how much she bleeds on that table, there’s always something strong enough to wash every trace of her away. The same can’t be said for the chemical reek of sterile cleanliness.
It’s almost reassuring that her pain responses aren’t something she can curb as easily as her panic. The baser instincts to writhe against the operating table and thrash and claw out of her restraints even as her body fails her still live; she’s still fighting, still burning. The day she tips over the precipice of anger to crash land on the rocks of acceptance below would sooner be the death of her.
So she will rest. Content herself on bided time. Count up until the pain stops, and dream of burning futures.
When she’s done, it will start over again. They’ll stitch her up, repair and reprint her skull, ask her the same set of questions verbatim as they do after every operation before they clear her to fly. She’ll half-ass her simulator drills until Lilja pisses her off, which they’ll continue to argue about long after practice. She’ll run her daily Wanyadora dungeon and curate new additions to her cat video folder.
Over and over again, until it all ends.
Until she tears it down.
She’ll leave bloodstains they can never wash out. Smash the glaring, droning lights and beat the machines into sparking explosions of shrapnel. Tear down every sterile, bleach-white wall until the rotten, dying world they made for themselves is all that remains. She will take the truth and lay it bare.
She will fly for the hundreds of gauntlet knights who only wanted that much before they were thrown away. She will carve comet trails of defiance into smog-choked skies as their homing missiles nip the air at her heels.
She will fly until she crashes and burns. She will feel the cracked, barren earth under her hands as she crumples against the ground, letting the unfettered scent of ash and decay cloud her lungs, basking like a cat in the scorch of sunlight too hot to sustain life.
She will rip out the wires and needles. Shed her body like a cocoon of rotted flesh.
And she will laugh.
Harder than she ever has in her life. Until her whole body hurts. Until she chokes on the blanket-thick smoke that curls around her like a mother’s embrace.
It will feel like coming home.