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Eighty Six

Harry Styles

Aubrey hasn't given herself a second to breathe since we arrived at the hospital hours ago.

I forced her to let the doctors check her out, watching as she flinched with every touch as they asked her question after question about what happened to her and how she got each injury she had so they could know how to properly treat it. She had to explain being punched and slapped in the face, burnt with cigarettes, manhandled every time she had to go to the bathroom, grazed with a bullet, poorly fed for over a week, and passing out nearly every day from stress or malnutrition.

Hearing about all that she went through out loud made me sick. Genuinely sick. I had to hurry and slip out while she wasn't paying attention and find the nearest bathroom to take care of that, wiping my face and making it back to her room before she noticed my exit.

She's scheduled to go into surgery for her broken nose tomorrow morning since she isn't breathing as well as she should be because of the impact of the hit she took for it to break in the first place. The breakage of her nose is what caused some of the stainings of blood on her face that she refused to let anybody wash off. She said she'd do it herself and that she didn't want anybody wasting their time on that. I offered to do it for her, and she still said no.

She said no to any sort of shower or bathing situation just yet, too. Nobody is sure why, and I feel like there's a deeper reason I'm not entirely grasping.

She's on a good amount of medication for pain, her tattoo infection, her malnutrition, and her other injuries. She declined the IV offered to her to grant her some easy access to more fluid, promising to drink water herself once she did everything she needed to do.

She has ointment and bandages on her infected tattoo, cigarette burn scars, and the bullet graze on the back of her shoulder.

The bullet graze she shouldn't have to begin with, given the fact that the gun was pointed at me.

It was bound to hit my upper back if she wouldn't have pushed me to the ground like she did. It would've most definitely rendered me immobile, paralyzing me from the bullet entrance down. I was supposed to be the one doing the saving, but the second Thomas entered the picture, before I even knew it, I became helpless.

Aubrey has not only saved me from my addiction, but also losing my life at the hands of the one who made me want to give up on it as a child in the first place. She quite literally took a bullet for me, the attempted self-sacrifice thankfully ending with nothing but some bleeding and precautionary antibiotics.

I wish the same went for Louis.

He's currently in emergency surgery due to the location of the bullet, it more likely than not severing his spinal cord and resulting in paralyzation. This means if he does miraculously make it out alive despite his rapid bleeding the whole ride here, he won't be able to feel anything from the waist down. That essentially jeopardizes his career, preventing him from being cast in any movies that don't already have a paralyzed character written into the plot.

I feel absolutely terrible for hesitating to help him after everything he informed me of before going to the warehouse in the first place. Despite what he did, he is my friend and he was trying to help. He got shot in order to save Zayn and Elora, and I should be grateful for that. I am grateful for that, I was just so angry about what he told me earlier tonight when everything happened. I panicked. My anxiety with shooting at and missing Thomas along with finding Aubrey at all made my mind go blank when I saw him lying in the grass the same way Ian was on the concrete flooring of the basement after Aubrey surprisingly took his life.

That's another issue Aubrey has yet to allow herself to confront. I can sense the impending meltdown about all of it, her still depending on the adrenaline high of it all as her only source of fuel while running around this random hospital like a madwoman.