Day 6: Comfort/Evil (Attzi)
Warnings: vomiting, injury
Summary: Attzi wakes up not feeling quite herself.
@daily-writing-challenge
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“Attzi, hon.” A hand rested on her shoulder as the voice continued, very softly: “Ya gotta wake up. Th’ doctor’s here.”
Everything, briefly, felt warm and fuzzy. Attzi could tell just by the way it rested beneath her that she was in her own bed, under her covers. Her blankets had always been thick and fluffy to help protect against the chill of Everlook winters. She was about to roll over and go back to sleep, despite being vaguely aware that her ma was talking to her, when the second she moved a searing pain rocketed through her head. When she groaned and opened her eyes, the light in the room made the pain worse.
Immediately, her ma’s hand pressed gently over the upper half of her face, blocking the worst of it and making the pain fade a bit. “Keep those eyes closed, baby.”
Her voice was oddly muted, but Attzi gave a small, very careful nod. When her ma’s hand pulled away, she felt at her left ear with her fingers, discovering the cause of the muffled words: her ear was packed and bandaged against the side of her head. She wanted to open her eyes again, because there was a worried little creep in the pit of her stomach that was demanding she get as much information as possible, immediately, about what had happened.
“Hello, Miss Attzi,” came a low voice with a light Darnassian tint to it. “How are you feeling?”
“Uh….” It took her a few moments to find the word she wanted. “Confused. Kinda pretty, pretty confused. What happened t’my ear?”
Her ma spoke again. “Th’ accident, Atz. Th’ lab’s made its own constellation, it blew so high.” Her voice was light, but there was something in the phrasing that made Attzi’s growing nervousness worse.
“Lab? I–” She cut herself off as she remembered: walking through the snow from her house, carrying lunch. Feeling the greasy electric tingle in the air. And then seeing–
“Fyx!” Attzi sat up abruptly, ignoring the way the sudden motion made her feel like gelatin. “Ma, where’s Fyx?” She opened her eyes, also ignoring the way the light was still weaponizing itself against her, and stared at the strange man and her mother both.
“He didn’t make it, hon.” Ma’s voice was cracked, but patient, as she reached for Attzi’s hand.
Fyx was dead? That feeling in the pit of her stomach came surging up full force, and she retched, folding over the side of the bed. The doctor was there with a bucket before she could spoil the rug. While she gagged up bile hard enough to make her bandaged ear ring dully, she was vaguely aware of her mother speaking again.
“She asks this every time she wakes up, doc. It’s been a whole week. We’re usually ones t’ just let things heal on their own, but this ain’t right.”
A week? Attzi felt her stomach go again, leaving her gagging violently over the bucket.
The doctor’s voice remained low and calm. Once Attzi was done with the last round of dry heaving, he began guiding her back onto the bed with gentle hands. “Mrs. Managear, would you be so kind as to get Attzi fresh water for her mouth? I’ll examine her while you’re out, so there is no need to rush.”
“Y-yeah, sure,” her ma said. Attzi closed her eyes and sank back into the bedding, listening hard for the click of her bedroom door. She heard it, but barely.
“Did she say a week, doc?” she asked dully.
“She did, Miss Attzi. Now, I’m going to undo these bandages and give you a once-over. While I do, please tell me everything you can remember that happened before waking up in the room with us just now.”
She did as he asked. While she replayed the memory of bringing lunch back for her and her cousin, he unwrapped her ear and her head and asked the occasional leading question. By the time she got to being blasted into the wall of the building across from the lab, he changed tactics again.
Did she remember the last thing she ate before going to sleep yesterday? No.
Did she remember being brought back to her home after her family found her? No.
Did she remember how many times she had been told about the death of her cousin?
No. No, no. Each question made her slightly more frantic, until she felt on the edge of a panic attack.
As soon as she began breathing heavily, the doctor stopped his questioning. “I’m sorry, Miss Attzi. I just wanted to verify that you’d formed no long-term memories since the accident. We don’t need to continue with that any longer.” He paused, and she nodded. “Now, with your permission, may I heal your ear and head? There, ah. May be some permanent damage to your ear, I’m afraid. It has had an entire week to begin healing incorrectly.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
A faint green light surrounded her head, and soon the pain and the light sensitivity faded. Attzi breathed a sigh of relief… and then realized that the room still sounded lopsided.
“I can’t hear nothin’ from my left ear, still.”
“I was afraid of that. Ears are very delicate, especially on the insides, and taking an explosion to one often leaves healing iffy at best.”
“Ya heal a lotta us goblins here in Everlook, huh? Plenty a’ practice with explosions, sounds like.” She looked up at him and grinned. Her eyes actually focused on him this time, so she was able to see him blink in surprise, and then smile back.
Night Elves always reminded her of cats in the dark when they blinked. It was something in the eyes. There was a word for the part that made cat eyes reflective in the dark. What… what was it? She stared at the doctor, absently taking a cup of water from her ma as she came back into the room.
“Huh?” She looked at him, then her mother, and then at the water in her hand. Right. She swished her mouth out and then leaned over to spit into the bucket.
“I asked you a question. Will you mind if I come back tomorrow, to check and see how your memory is?”
“You don’t think the healin’ fixed that, either?” Once she realized how that sounded, she hurriedly added, “I didn’t mean it like that. I feel a lot better, I do.”
He chuckled softly. “It never hurts to be thorough. And if you are having memory difficulties, we can discuss options for mitigating them. But for now, I’ll leave you two be.” The doctor rested a hand on her mother’s shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze, before he rose as best he could in the low room and ducked through the door. When it closed behind him, Attzi held out her hand for her mother.
“Ma… did I miss th’ funeral?”
Her mother raised a hand to her eyes and burst into tears, which, Attzi realized, was answer enough. She realized how many times she must have asked that question already, and felt utterly evil.
It took several months to sort out just what was going on with her memory. The doctor healed her multiple times before progress stalled, leaving her damaged… but functional, at least. Big events seemed to stick in her mind better; when she accepted a job in Booty Bay, she didn’t have any problems forgetting that, for example.
But the little things? New people’s names, what food she bought at the market, where she got the clothes in her closet. All of that had a high chance of just poofing away into the ether rather than finding a place to rest in her brain. She took to writing down the little details in a notebook (in a shorthand she’d created for her and Fyx’s experiments, which only the two of them could read) and starting her morning by flipping through it and reading over the past few days, gently herding new facts back into her head over a cup of coffee.
If she read something enough, it would eventually stick. New people didn’t remain strangers forever. She was still able to learn and improve when it came to fixing watches and other mechanical devices. It was all just… slower.
There was one side-effect of this that Attzi was completely unaware of, though her family noticed: she became a lot more social and cheerful. They assumed it was mild brain damage, which wasn’t incorrect. Specifically, though, it was simple bias: Attzi was more likely to write down good things and interesting things about the people she met than she was things she didn’t like. Some negativity certainly made it into her notebooks (hence the shorthand), but her bias to all things good meant that she often didn’t remember bad experiences.
As time went on, she learned how to manage her memory issues well enough that most people just assumed she was a little spacey. Which, as it turned out, made her better at her job under Baron Revilgaz, because she was less likely to be suspected of ulterior motive by her marks. Attzi made sure to keep her notebooks hidden so that nobody would have the chance to decode her shorthand even still. And so far –to her knowledge, at least– nobody has.
