Starry Eyed

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

"You're awake."

My eyes felt sewn shut as I tried to unstitch them to look at Star. I sluggishly attempted to peel them open, struggling to stay conscious for more than a few seconds at a time. It felt like I was drifting off every few seconds. Star's fingertips brushed mine, warm and familiar, and the heat seemed to ease my carousel head. I gazed up through my lashes with half-open eyes.

"Hey," I smiled. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't know." Even though her face was grim, there was some sense of laughter in her voice. "What are you doing here?"

I glanced upwards to the ceiling. Baby blue. This couldn't be my dormitory. Dazed and alarmed, I snapped my head back to Star. "I... I don't know. Where am I?"

"The sick bay, stupid." She smiled faintly at me, faded and torn, but it was something. The warmth seemed to heat up the cold air in the room. 

"I'm not sick."

"You, uh..." I seemed to have knocked the warmth right out of her. Star's smile split open and gave way to that same grave expression she'd had before, and I knew something was wrong. I tried to pull the jigsaw pieces out from the corners of my mind, but it felt like every crevice was lost in fog. I couldn't fight it. I couldn't remember anything. "You fainted," she confessed, as if she was admitting a crime to her parents. "The nurse says it was smoke inhalation, and also shock."

The dust and clouds popped like pinned bubbles in my mind, and my memories came rushing back in one big gasping breath. They splashed through me like the sky after you've been underwater, when the blue seems to burst back above you like a million exploding stars. A sharp injection of pain vibrated in my skull, pulsing and pounding. I remembered. Smoking skin, melting flesh, sizzling bones. All of the images played back in technicolour, to a chorus of fizzling flames and bodies, like a barbeque cooking up the Grim Reaper's dinner. Agonising pain burst inside my head and I let out a moan, my hand flying to my forehead under the force of remembering.

"Where's the nurse?" 

"She's out." Star's voice warned me that the case was not open for discussion. With a dizzy head, I slowly sat up. 

"Oh, God. I need a Panadol or something. They thought I inhaled too much smoke?"

"Well, you ran right up into the fire," she replied bluntly. I couldn't bring myself to meet her gaze. "You realize how dumb that was, right?"

"Give me a break."

"I would any other time, but you could have gotten yourself killed. You don't need to try and be the hero."

I wasn't trying to be the hero. I was just scared. But I didn't know if it was worth it- the curiousity would never have hurt me as much as the look Star gave me then. I felt her eyes burning into me, into every scrap of skin on my body, and it felt like she was giving me worse burns than the fire itself could have even tried to. 

I was still curious, too, about fatalities. That smoking wreck of a body... was that person still alive? I didn't even know who they were. Not that I could have recognised them in that situation, of course. I just wanted to know if I'd seen tragedy for a reason. No, that's not true. I just wanted to know. 

"I wouldn't have gotten myself killed," I said quietly, almost in a whisper. 

"You would have if Finn hadn't stopped you," Star retorted. And suddenly all the sense inside of me just snapped. 

"Well, Finn shouldn't have stopped me. Finn doesn't control my life. And neither do you, Star. Maybe I don't want to be your little puppy dog any more! Did you ever stop and think about that? This is my body, my life, and I'm sick of you leading the way. I like you, but I don't think it's right that I feel so lost when you're not there. I can't keep trotting after you like your slave anymore, and you can't force me to do your shit either."