𝒞𝒶𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒾𝒸 | ᴘᴇʀᴄʏ ᴊᴀᴄᴋꜱᴏɴ¹

13. A new player enters the game

❈ The first thing Helena could smell was salt. 

Lots and lots of salt. Was she near the ocean? The first thing she could feel was warmth and pain, lots of pain. She feels herself being shaken and groans out.

Her eyes flutter open only to find herself looking into the darkest and most rage filled eye she had ever seen. The boy grabbed her arm and yanked her up. Helena hisses as she stumbles along, her legs felt like jello. Fuck, what was happening? 

She planted her feet in the sand beneath her, trying and failing to fight the grip the boy had on her arm.

The sun beat down on her skin harshly and Helena tried quinting to get a better look at where the boy was taking her. A cruise ship? It was huge and glistened, rocking gently with the tides around it. She could make out blurry figures walking on the deck but there was something odd about it? 

It was quiet. Was it the boat that was silent? Or was it her own ears that failed to pick up any of the sounds around her? When one damages their ears weren't they supposed to ring? She couldn't hear ringing. She couldn't hear anything.

She could feel the wind, could see waves crashing onto the shoreline, could see birds circling overhead and could see the lips of the boy dragging her moving, but she couldn't hear anything. Was it because of the explosion or was this a dream? 

She felt herself fall backwards as the boy let go of her arm and grunted as she made contact with the ground. She takes a moment to look at her legs, blinking harshly to get her eyes to focus. She feels bile gather in her throat as soon as the fog in her eyes clear and quickly turns her head and empties the content of her stomach. 

The boy looks at her in disgust.

Her legs were...burnt. Was that the right was to describe it? Her clothes were soaked, she probably fell into the ocean and her legs... her legs were unrecognisable. Patches of her flesh had been burnt so severely that she knew that it was likely that no amount of healing could stop scarring. Were the nerves ends in her legs, okay? Or had they burnt away as well? Damaged nerves meant problems. Would she heal properly? Walk properly? Or would she be doomed to the pain of a permanent limp? 

Her arms were worse. Parts were burnt so severely that one could see parts of bone, and the parts that weren't burnt were broken. Shattered seemed like a better word. 

Helena knew enough to know that if she were mortal - if she hadn't died already - she would never be the same again. You see, that was the thing with studying forensic anthropology. You just couldn't help but notice the smallest of injuries, even the almost microscopic of scratches. 

She knew that the broken bones in her hands meant that she would likely have to live with a permanent shake in her hands. The burnt muscles of her lower right leg and foot meant severe scarring. The odd bend of her left leg meant she would likely live with a prominent limb and her ears.... 

The silence in her ears was more than just damage from an explosion. She had injured somehow them. Would she be forced to live the remainder of her life without being able to hear? She knew that logically, she probably would have. Her father had told her once, on the rare nights he spoke of her mother, had been born deaf. 

- Flashback - 

Ares vividly remembered the shocked faces of the nurses in the room when they realised that Helena could hear. They had said something about how Beatrice's gene should have made impossible for any of her children to be born with hearing, yet there was his girl. 

"Do you plan on standing here watching them all day?" 

The voice caused him to tense slightly.