Young Blood (PART ONE OF THREE)

Being Awake

16. Being Awake

It’s difficult to register the world around you when you’ve been asleep for so long, Blake told herself as her vision adjusted to the light and everything became clear. It’s odd, she thought, the bed was much more comfortable then she remembered. She groaned and turned on her side, and her eyes widened to find a sleeping boy’s head lying on the edge of her bed.

He looked oddly familiar, this boy. His hair was black and his jaw line was set firm, his head was twisted to the side. His mouth hung open and she could barely make out a set of tiny fangs, but this didn’t startle Blake. She’d seen hundreds of people with much scarier features. Bat wings, rotting flesh hanging from their face, exposed brains.

In a weird way, it was normal to her.

Oh but it was different with this boy, she thought. He was special to her, she knew that much. But his name…what was it?

“Vaan stayed up nearly the whole night, just for you,” A woman in scrubs said as she approached me with a bottle of water and a little cup with a few pills inside. She held the cup out to Blake and said, “I hate to force these on you without warning, but these will help you.”

Help? Blake looked around and realized she was not in the dead white room she’d spent months in anymore. She was in a much larger room, lined with beds and injured kids. She looked at her arm, where a bruise from the IV had formed and then she looked back up at the nurse and a tiny smile formed.

She remembered this place, the infirmary, and she remembered the nurse just barely. She grabbed the cup and asked, “What are they?” When she spoke her voice seemed distant, like it wasn’t hers, it was different, it was…scared and happy. All at the same time.

“Anti-bacterial and special vitamins to help getting anything bad they put inside you out,” The nurse said, and she smiled. She handed Blake the bottle of water and walked away.

Blake stared down at the pills. Perhaps this was a trick, a hallucination. The Agency had never hesitated into trying to coax answers out of her using hallucinogens before. They were always of Vaan.

Vaan!

Blake’s head whipped back to the boy and suddenly her mind was filled with joy, wonderful joy. Oh she’d almost forgotten what it was like to be around him. He was so kind to her, and she’d never been so grateful for him then at that moment.

Then she became very angry, and her head began to ache. Why hadn’t he come sooner? Was he even the one to save her?

Why was he not awake?!

Perhaps he gave up, her subconscious said, fueling her anger.

Perhaps he moved on and found someone else.

No, she shook her head and looked back at the pills in the tiny cup resting between her thumb and index finger. Vaan would never give up, she told herself. Vaan loved her and he would never give up and move on. He would fight for her. He would search.

Blake had spent a year moving from Agent base to Agent base, getting chemicals pumped in to her, as well as getting beat nearly to death for information.

But ah, this headache. She couldn’t shake it. It felt like someone was slowly driving a saw through her head.

Why wasn’t it stopping though? Oh goddess, she thought. She swallowed the pills, hoping they could help somehow, and she pressed her fingers to her temples and muttered unintelligible babble to herself.

Blake had been gifted with the power to create force fields; both physical and mental. She’d once had a friend try to read her mind, and another tried to control it, but neither could breach her barrier. And she wondered what kind of sorcery could lead to so much pain, pain she couldn’t protect herself from.

Had her powers been stolen from her?

Suddenly scared, Blake held out her hands in front of each other, a few inches apart and focused. A small bubble of energy formed there and she sighed. Her powers were still there. At least, the physical force fields were.

Well, you aren’t at a total loss, yet, said her subconscious.

“Yet,” she said aloud, and the word seemed to echo throughout the quiet infirmary. “Yet.”