Before the Battle

Reckoning 17/20

--Taira--

The outside world slowly crept back in as dreams and reality merged, and I groped fruitlessly in the void.

Once, when I was about seven, I fell off my bike at full speed and hurt myself badly. I blacked out and woke up in bed at home with Dr Soichiro bending over me. I couldn't remember how I had fallen over the handlebars and landed hard on the gravel road. The last thing I recalled was geting on my bike. And then nothing. Blank.

Now I felt the same way.

Weak and disoriented, I couldn't tell dreams from reality. Everything blended together in my confused mind. The stone walls of the ancient shrine, the gunfire, the noise and the strikes of Shira's katana. The blood was everywhere, on my hands, my chest, in my mouth... choking me.

Exhausted, I fell back into a restless sleep.

I was awakened a second time by soft voices.

"Shouldn't he be awake by now?"

The words were spoken by the man I loved most and I clung to that voice with all my strength. I tried to move, to speak, to let him know in some way that I was there, that I could hear him.

Unfortunately, my limbs refused to cooperate and I was unable to force a sound out of my stiff throat or at least move my eyelids.

"He woke up briefly from the anaesthetic after the operation, but now he needs to sleep and regain his strength. Give him time."

This voice also matched its owner in my head. Maya.

She went on saying something, it was difficult to follow the conversation, I felt terribly tired. Only fragments of sentences came to me, like faint sounds from somewhere far away.

"...they don't have the equipment here like in the hospitals in Kashima, but I operated..."

A hospital.  

Then I began to notice the little details that should have indicated where I was: the overpowering smell of disinfectant, the beeping of monitors, the footsteps of staff in the corridor.

I was in a hospital.

But why?

I remembered the shooting. I remembered the stone shrine. I remembered Shira's blue-grey eyes.

His voice.

His words.

They must have shot me. But no matter how hard I tried, the memories slipped through my fingers like grains of sand.

"I heard you left for a few hours during the operation," I heard Maya saying. "You were resting like I told you?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"You're still pale. You need to drink a lot, not overexert yourself, and..."

Maya was just being Maya. She kept talking to Shira, but he didn't respond to all the young doctor's well-meaning advice.

"...that you have finally washed and changed. The hospital staff have already complained about a bloodied maniac running around with a katana."

Maya's monologue would have put me to sleep under normal circumstances. And now, exhausted and sedated, I slowly slipped into dreamland at the unstoppable flow of her words.

"Taira saved me," Shira's voice brought me back to the reality of the hospital. "If it wasn't for him, I would have been shot. He saved my life."

There was a moment of silence, finally broken by my boyfriend. "You're not surprised?"