Ashes in the Darkness

Goodbyes

    My head hurt, like someone had taken a hammer and was pounding it against the place where my neck and my skull met. I groaned as I looked into the sky as it turned from blue, to smoke, to light, to blue again. There was someone on my side, but it hurt my head to move my eyes, so I tried to listen to the voices around me.

"Her eyes are red," said a thick Scottish accent.

"Why isn't she talking?" a Londoner said. I was lifted from the ground onto something that squeaked far too much for my liking. But I said nothing, just let the voices around me take me where they were going. "You think there is brain damage?"

"No," I whisper. It was amazing how difficult it was to get the words from my lungs to my mouth. I coughed gently and my vision went dark, little balls of black bouncing around in the back of my head. "Ow."

"It's a concussion, you just had one so you should know," a familiar Manchester accent said.

"I wasn't like that, she's barely lucid," Gaz said.

"I'm...." I whispered, but no one seemed to register that I was actually speaking. There was something bright above me. "Fine."

No one was listening to me, no one was hearing me. As badly as I wanted to sleep, I knew that I couldn't. Sleeping on a concussion was a surefire way to land me in memory therapy until the lord came back, so I kept my eyes on the sky above me as I was carried some more.

"What happened out there, Soap?" Ghost asked as I tried to squirm on the stretcher that I was being carried on.

"Graves pulled up in a damned tank, we threw a bunch of C4 on it and took out the rest of the shadows. Blew the tank..." he grunted and for the first time I let my eyes swing to the mohawked man that was on my left, holding onto the handle of the stretcher.

"Did he scream?" I asked through rasped, pained, breaths that made my eyes roll.

"What did ya-?" His Scottish accent caught, and I allowed my head to pain just a little when I saw his face. There was a smirk there, a smirk that made me believe that the animosity that was between the two of us over Ghost was something that we could work through. "Your morality is more cracked than your skull, Phoenix."

"He got blown up, I'm sure it wasn't pretty inside the tank," Rudy's sweet voice said from somewhere beyond where I could see him, and I allowed another pained smile to leave my face.

"Proud," I said lightly. Obviously, my concussion was the reason for my softness, wasn't it? My brain matter had jiggled around in my head and that set off the neurotransmitters to release oxytocin that made me happy and a big softy. "My boys."

"Oh man..." Price said as the shadow of a building filtered into my vision and the darkness took over me once again.

Time went by but I didn't register it, I was kept awake even though I wanted to just close my eyes and slip into oblivion. But bodies filtered around me, a straw and ice water were given to me, I ate something although I forgot what it tasted like almost immediately.

"It's a grade two concussion, she'll need weeks to be back to normal," I hear a feminine voice say and for a moment I think it's Maria, her sweet yet stern tone. But when I open my eyes just enough to see who is talking, I don't recognize the medical personnel. There are no nurses strutting around or beeping machines, which I was actually thankful for. It was nighttime now. "We don't have weeks."

"Give her a few days, no screen time, darkness, rest, she might be able to get up and walk around, there is no way she can operate with her brain still healing," I saw the dark figure in the doorway that the new medical sergeant was talking to, hulking and for once... casual.