requested starter for @enviral.
↳ 2011, russia, hospital room.
our salvation is death, but not this one. voices on loop in her mind, the overseer's, taunting, toying and moira's - the perforation of her eardrums beneath the rubble, the scream, the roar of flame. another fucking island. another person she'd sworn to protect, gone. she has remembered steve longer than she knew him, and now, she supposes, it will be the same for the girl she'd failed. if she could move, she'd curl up in her bed, sob and wail and scream because it isn't fair - how could it be? she should be the corpse, and moira the survivor. instead she lies there, infuriatingly helpless, bolts through her legs, her pelvis, a brace on her back and a ventilation mask strung around her neck that hangs limply on her chest.
she should have died, and it is only thanks to the virus that isn't. the fucking irony. still, she hasn't mutated - yet - that's a good sign, she hopes, she prays. sunlight streams through the window, what little of it there is, the world cast in shades of blue and grey like a bleak soviet movie where there are no happy endings. she loathes hospitals, their sterility a vast empty thing she has never found comfort in, ever since she'd sat all night in a waiting room that stunk of blood and piss with her brother for the inevitable bad news that no, their parents didn't survive the crash. then umbrella, halogen lights and reflective tile, the taste of chemicals that lingered in the back of her throat. the world outside may be dreary, but she's tired of this bed.
it's a prison as much as the island she just escaped from and the one that haunts her nightmares still, thirteen years later. trapped in a miserable little room that she has counted every spot of the ceiling of, freckled skin mottled with deep violets and yellows between sutures where they've cut her open, unable to stomach another visitor - she's only had one, but she has no more words for barry. what could she say? i tried my best. it should have been me. i promised you i'd keep her safe. all these years, it has never gotten any easier, but all of a sudden it seems to futile. she had done better barely nineteen and witnessing the apocalypse - she was supposed to be stronger than this. better than this. she thinks of them, their rag-tag team, the blastwave of the train and the heat against her skin. they're going to be so disappointed in her.