Transformers ( Bayverse ) - I Bleed Into Darkness

8 - Bitter

        Fay could feel every pulse of her spark as she ran across the track, making her way onto lap seven. ‘Just a little longer, just a little longer,’ she told herself as her breath heaved against her chest. Today’s run was harder than it should’ve been. ‘Damn painkillers,’ she thought angrily, cursing the added medication. Malakai had delivered on his promise for the small orange pills that edged her pain away until it ceased to exist.

        Something told her that if she got too at ease with it and they stopped giving her those pills, that would change very quickly. She would no longer be free of the pain. And of course, the nurses were wary of giving her any form of painkiller. It all had to do with the consequences of her arrival here, instead of a normal mental ward. It was the reason she was in a place that treated mental illness along with addiction.

        Because when she’d been taken to the hospital, they’d found prescription painkillers in her system. Far more than any normal person should have. What made it worse was the fact that they had access to her medical records, and knew that, at no point, had she been prescribed any sort of pain killer. Especially not the kinds they’d found coursing through her veins. Which meant she’d immediately been labeled not only as an addict, but one who knew where to find prescription strength drugs on the street.

        She’d overheard the conversations the doctors had while she drifted in and out of consciousness, though she could never pinpoint when they’d happened. She remembered the officer who’d tried to talk to her about where she’d gotten the drugs. She remembered everything as a blurry mess of light and shadows.

        ~~~

        “Do we have the necessary documents delivered to the legal offices? I know the most recent tests revealed a strong painkiller in her system.” Fay heard the voices ever-so-faintly, and wouldn’t remember them until well after she’d woken in the rehab center, mental clinic two-in-one. It was a horrible thing to overhear. Painkiller? She hadn’t taken anything. They had to be lying. It was all lies. It absolutely had to be lies.

        “I just sent out the latest results. They’ll have it in time for the judge to decide where to send her.”

        “Do you think she took it to carry out her suicide attempt?” Fay shifted slightly on the bed, whatever they’d pumped into her preventing much else. A brief silence followed, and when the pair, at least she thought it was two people, began speaking again, it was in softer voices.

        “It’s . . . not something I would rule out . . . She has a history of mental problems and keeping things bottled up. We got her psychiatric records after she was treated and patched up. She’s not normal, that’s for sure.” They knew. They knew her secrets. Her terrible, damning secrets. Her chest squeezed against itself when she recalled that she now had secrets worse than her ‘mental problems’.

        Did they know about those, too? Did they know she wasn’t of this Earth? Did they know how ‘not normal’ she really was? Did they know how to treat her? What if they did something critically wrong that would be acceptable for a human but not to . . . whatever she was. What if the fog never lifted from her mind? What if it only got thicker and denser until she . . . wasn’t around . . . ?

        She found out later that her half-sane, half-insane fears that she would only recall upon waking and actually thinking it through. But of course, she wouldn’t learn how she’d come to this place until after she’d woken.

        ~~~

        Waking up in a strange place wasn’t exactly her favorite thing to do, but it seemed to be kind of unavoidable.