Random thoughts and ideas

Memory Chapter 10 Scrapped chapter

Kafka Pov

The sterile white of the recovery suite felt like a cage to Iska. Every sound the squeak of a nurse's shoe, the rhythmic hiss of the oxygen was an explosion in his ears. His brain, dormant for three years, was struggling to process the sheer sensory overload of being alive.

Kafka leaned over the bed, her face a mask of desperate, maternal longing that Iska didn't recognize. She reached for his hand, her fingers trembling. "Iska, look at me. It’s Mom. We’re in Boston. You were in an accident a truck but you’re back now. Do you remember the garden? The way you used to hide in the library?" Kafka desperately tried to make him remember even if it's a lie

Iska flinched, pulling his arm back with a clumsy, panicked jerk. The movement sent a bolt of white hot pain through his atrophied muscles. He pressed his back against the headboard, his breathing becoming shallow and jagged.

"I don't... I don't know a library," he rasped, his voice sounding like grinding gravel.

Scathach stepped forward, her eyes brimming with a decade’s worth of suppressed guilt.

 "Iska, it’s Scathach. Your sister. I know I was gone for a long time, but I came back for you. We’ve been here every day for three years. Look at my face look at the way I hold my pen, you used to tease me about it. Please, just give me something."

Iska’s gaze darted between the two women. Their insistence felt like a physical weight, a demand for a love he didn't possess. To him, they weren't family,they were two powerful, intense strangers claiming a piece of his soul.

"Stop," he whispered, his eyes widening in genuine fear. "Please, just... stay back. I don't know you. I don't know any of this."

The rejection hit Kafka like a physical blow. She stayed her hand, seeing the way his pupils dilated in terror at her touch. The boy she had burned the world to save was looking at her as if she were the monster in his nightmares.

As the doctors moved in to sedate his panic state, the true extent of his physical and mental complications began to surface. Three years of stasis and the trauma of the "truck accident" had left a devastating mark

His limbs, though maintained by physical therapy, lacked the neural connection to function. He couldn't even lift a glass of water without his arm collapsing under its own weight.

A massive "void" existed where his identity used to be. He remembered how to speak and basic concepts, but his personal history, his mother, his sister, and the school was a erased tape.

His brain lacked the filters to ignore background noise. The hum of the air conditioner felt like a jet engine, and the soft LED lights of the room caused him blinding migraines.

His nerves, recovering from the blunt-force trauma of the accident, fired randomly, making him feel as though his legs were still being crushed long after the wounds had healed.

Later that night, after Iska had drifted into a medicated exhaustion, Kafka and Scathach stood behind the observation glass.

"The doctor says the amnesia might be a defense mechanism," Scathach murmured, her forehead resting against the cool pane. 

"His brain is protecting itself from the trauma of the accident and the months of bullying he endured before it. He didn't just forget us, Mom. He forgot the pain. If we force him to remember us, we force him to remember everything."

Kafka watched the steady rise and fall of her son’s chest. Her livid, sadistic edge from the days of the school's destruction was gone, replaced by a hollow, quiet grief. She realized that in her quest to reclaim him, she had forgotten that the Iska who woke up wouldn't be the Iska she had lost.