The Bright Colours of Misery [COMPLETED]

𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙿𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙵𝙸𝙵𝚃𝚈 -i've got you-

Frieda died shortly after being admitted to the hospital. A piece of debris from the blast had managed to get inside her skull, which the doctors failed to notice before it was too late. She suffered a seizure because of it on the night following the initial incident. Heidi wouldn't hear it, she even saw her, just as dead and cold as any other corpse, but she wouldn't hear any of it.

They say denial is the second stage of grief, the first one being shock. Heidi barely remembered the supposed shock. It surfaced in nightmares over the years or in small flashes, but the first hours and days following the explosion were blacked out in her mind. She remembered the rosary in her mother's hand, the feeling of being shaken around Herr Wolf's basement and the bodies, she remembered those vividly.

In truth, her stage of shock wasn't much to remember, for a week leading all the way up to her 16th birthday she stared aimlessly into the air. Her thoughts were far from empty and emotionless as the nurses and doctors seemed to think. She thought of many things, too many things. The shrieking, the screaming, the blast, the pain, at the very start she wasn't sure which was worse between the physical pain of being thrown around and crushed, or the emotional pain of all that had ensued, but her answer was quickly given, as the pain slowly faded and her physical wounds healed but the horrid nightmares and incessant longing for her siblings, mother and best friend remained.

"Happy birthday, Heidi," Hannelore, her nurse, said to her. My person's previously empty eyes focused on the young woman.

"Already?" She asked her softly. Hannelore didn't seem quite sure of what she was asking. Heidi had been all over the place recently, it must have been hard for her to deduce whether or not her question was even related to what she had just said. In doubt, she nodded slowly.

"How old am I?" Heidi asked right as the nurse was about to leave. Hannelore found it hard to believe she didn't know, she wasn't experiencing any unusual memory loss as far as her and the doctors knew. She turned around slowly.

"You're 16, Heidi." She answered, wary of what this apparent forgetfulness might reveal about her mental state.

"Both of us." She corrected swiftly. Hannelore only nodded before leaving to attend to her other patients. She had been sitting with the young red haired girl for longer than she had realised.

A few days later, the crying began. Heidi cried, she cried and sobbed after nightmares, after flashbacks and even the occasional happy dream about their last christmas. Her tears eventually seemed to have dried out, and she was left empty, searching for emotions guilty they were gone, even if they weren't. She was unconsciously pushing them all back so she could at least think of the next days ahead of her. She prayed with her mother's old rosary, exhausting each and every prayer on it. Hannelore would leave her in peace when she did that, but as the days went by, she would spend an increasing amount of time chatting to Heidi, relieved she actually seemed to still have her full wits about her. However, she knew just as well as I did, that Heidi was utterly devastated behind it all. Behind the face that chuckled at her jokes and behind all her interesting conversations, she was grieving and recovering slowly.

It has to be said that for Heidi, her days melted together, she had issues remembering the date and figuring out how many hours had passed between certain uneventful events such as lunch and dinner. In the haze that were the days of her stay at hospital failed to notice the absence of glasses. They had been crushed in the explosion as expected, but since she was used to her poor vision, she didn't notice until she was on a train with nothing but a bag with a ticket, a farewell card from Hannelore and a clean change of clothes. Where was she going you might ask?

Berlin, for the first time in her life she was leaving her hometown, knowing full well she would never return to the Apfelstraße she had once known. She noticed they were gone then, alone in her seat for at least three. She looked around and noticed the people opposite to her didn't seem to have faces. Panicked, her hands went into the pockets of her coat, searching for them frantically, as if she had simply forgotten to take them. Once the realisation hit, she burst into violent sobs for the first time in about a fortnight. The people around her gave her some strange glances. Heidi touched her face gently, she could feel the emptiness. She shook her head trying to stop this emotional outburst, out of all the things she could be crying about she was sobbing about a pair of glasses. It felt wrong in every way possible, but what Heidi didn't realise was that she wasn't just crying about her glasses, she was crying about everything, releasing it violently right there, while every single passenger on that train stared at her.