I swim to consciousness...the clock jumps several times before it finally settles on 1:29. I feel awful. My limbs are heavy and my mind threatens to slip back into sleep at any second.
This is the first time since I got here that they managed to drug me. They actually stuck needles in me. They left needles in me! I rip the needle out of my hand and try to shove the IV pole across the room (it only goes about three inches, but I feel like I've shoved it, and that's all that matters to me at the moment). I sit and stare at the blood running down my hand. Was that supposed to hurt? I don't feel anything. Ignoring pain. Is that part of being the Slayer, or am I just beyond caring?
Did I dream? There are images in my mind...a time when I was hurt like this, when it did hurt, when a blow that only left a bruise felt like it had broken my arm. It's like something's trying to tell me that my Slayer abilities are real. That vampires are real, that my destiny--no, my mission--is sealed, and that if I just keep walking ahead, somehow, I will find the strength to live it out.
But I can't do this. The Slayer thing, I mean, even the secret Slayer thing. It's a weight, a real weight heavier than my head and arms, and it's what's keeping me from sitting up, not the drugs. It's the weight of a destiny I didn't choose. If the way that the destiny came over me was the only thing...well, I could deal with that. It's heavier than that. The weight of a destiny that everyone around me says isn't destiny at all but self-centered delusion.
It was hard enough when my own senses told me I was right. When Merrick told me I wasn't crazy (as I recall, I told him he was crazy), and when I was out in the world using the Calling that not many would believe.
Now I don't even have that. My own senses were wrong.
Since I got here, everyone has jumped to lecturing me on how to fix my senses without proving that they were wrong at all, and that made me mad, but I realize now that they can't prove a reality. I wonder sometimes how tenuous my own hold to it has been.
All my supposed Slayer strength won't even let me sit up.
What if it doesn't matter whether I have it or not? There's no pressing need for me to stake vampires anymore, not since Lothos and that attack on the gym. There's no reason for me to keep on doing it, only the quiet truth that I'm the one who can, but I'm beginning to doubt that. Memory is one thing; seeing my own senses proven wrong in front of about fifty people who tell me I'm deluded is another.
So I won't be the Slayer anymore. I retire.
The thought vibrates through my heart with all the force of an oath. Something enters and something leaves. I'm unprepared for the grief that descends on me as the weight of destiny departs. Grief...it enfolds me, envelopes me until I cannot lift my eyelids, even to let out the tears that leak from the clenched lids.
It's the first time since I arrived here that I've cried. The first time in my life that I've ever cried like this. It's like a part of me is watching from the outside, waiting for the weight to lift and the pain to ease, just enough, but it never does.
To lift the weight, I think after almost an hour of hopeless sobbing, I'd need an outside connection...love, the kind of love that existed only in the dreams. They're only dreams.
No connection, not really. The nurses leave me alone, and I'm grateful for that, at least when I can feel at all outside of the cloud of grief, which is only in microseconds.
A doctor's face—not Dr. Taylor; younger and unfamiliar—appears and then vanishes in the crack where the door hangs ajar. "She's awake," I hear him say from the hallway. I force myself to stop crying just in time—and perhaps a bit of my ordinary human strength has returned, since I am capable of that—as Dawn flings the door open and rushes through the room to my bed.
Dawn's crying from hysteria, not grief. She lifts me right out of the bed, and I find the strength to wrap my arms around her. It's enough; the weight eases enough for me to move.
Mom's right behind Dawn. "Sweetie? Are you okay?" she asks over and over. I keep waiting for the what happened?, where I will either have to admit that I was wrong discerning a vampire or say that it was all unreal and I was sick—but the question never comes. She just asks if I'm all right and strokes my hair.
Dad's in the doorway. He's holding a funny cartoon pig balloon and another box of chocolates. The box is enormous, plenty for all four of us. I ask him to come join us with a trembling voice.
It's not a resolution, but it's an uneasy truce. Dad comes and sits on the bed on my other side from Mom and opens the candy. We talk about nothing. Strength slowly returns to my arms and legs. I can feel the tension leave Dawn with every ebb of strength in me, and when it's time to leave, she's sitting normally and not plastered to me.
They leave at seven, after an extra hour that the staff granted us. I don't want to know what Mom and Dad discuss with the doctors around their time with me. Dawn ties the balloon to the head of my bed, and curls the ribbon with one of her hair barrettes.
Ellen comes in, chattering, also about nothing. I make the right noises and try not to let her know there's only one thought in my head.
I'm not the Slayer. I'm going to go back and live like a person.
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