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“Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, a touch that never hurts.” --Charles Dickens
Lisbeth Salander
Fandom: Millennium Trilogy
Word Count: 953
Notes: Possible Spoilers for The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest
Everything on me hurts. Even with the heavy blanket of sedation and pain medication that they've got me on I can still feel it every time I breath in deep or I try and shift on the hard hospital mattress they have me on.
Where am I?
What happened?
There is a momentary panic the first time I open my eyes and I am not in that little hell hole farm in Gosseberga. At least that was familiar, at least there I knew my place and my mission but here? What am I doing here? Why am I here? Things come back in what I believe are dreams, a half lucid state between wake and deep, deep sleep. My dreams are rarely pleasant by they have been rather mild at least the first one I remember. It is like the start of a movie of my life every time I close my eyes.
He shot me. My father shot me in the head. He shot me in the shoulder and in the hip and if had been with one of his monster guns I would be dead. Fortunately it was just with a 22 and so I am some sort of alive that feels more like hell then living.
I can hear the beep of the heart monitor, I can hear people moving around me, doctors, nurses. It's the smell of the hospital that gives it away, who else would be in a hospital besides those people? They talk about me, my heart rate, my blood pressure, am I stable am I not. They list what's wrong with me in the most technical ways possible in soft voices and when they try and talk to me they do it in loud voices. I'm dying, not deaf. These words are absorbed but not fully understood I think. Like when you are drunk and listening to a person talk, the words are easy to hear but not always to understand.
Even among the pain there is the sting and cold of the saline solution mixed with the powerful sedative and a mask moving over my face.
Count backwards from ten.
I'm just trying to breathe, counting seems like a massive undertaking at the moment. After a few breaths I don't have to worry about counting, I don't have to worry about anything.
The first dream is more like memories in fog. I hear voices, I smell smells from every part of my life from when I was very little to just a few months ago. I smell my mama's perfume. I hear Camilla laugh and hear her whisper in my ear late at night when we are supposed to be asleep. I see dark hair and I see eyes and hear laughter. The dark hair belongs to different people, they flash across my eyes in a disjointed, patternless way that I don't care to try and understand. There are cobble stone streets slick and wet with rain. There are white sheets and a big form with hands I've felt before, with wrists and arms. His elbows on the table so his suit jacket and shirt cuffs slip down to reveal his wrists. He's talking but I hear nothing, then something, and then nothing like a TV with bad reception. I hear ticking. I feel odd seeing these things I have seen a million times before and the emotions do not correspond with what I am seeing. Sadness, happiness, anger don't go with the right pictures; they are feelings for the sake of feelings.
They are taking the bullet out of my brain. The bullet has pierced my frontal and temporal lobe, each parts responsible for different things. Frontal is for reasoning, planning, speech and emotions. The temporal lobe is responsible for perception, auditory stimuli recognition, memory and speech. This is what I know of the brain, this is what I piece together when I am not so stoned. What I saw when the mask was pressed to my face and I went under for the first time in the surgery is easy to explain away. The brain works when it seemingly shouldn't, the body continues even though it seemingly shouldn't.
I am a creature with no heart, with no conscious, with no feeling except for rage. I am a creature with one purpose, who continues on when it seems impossible. My sole purpose is to see him dead to take his life in exchange from the life he took away from me. It is a poor exchange. He could die a thousand death's, my papa and it would not make up for him taking her away from me.
A doctor asks me to count to twenty when I open my eyes. His face is pale, his beard and hair is blond and red in the way American's think all Scandinavian people look. He is telling me what I already know and some what I don't know.
I don't care about counting to twenty. I don't care about him. Where I am is just an after thought, I am where I am, and where I am also happens to be in police custody.
Zala, where's Zala? He looks puzzled for a second and it takes a lot of work to get my mouth to move in a way that will explain who he is. Why doesn't he just know? The man that was brought in with me, is he still alive? Is he dead? He's alive a nurse smile down at me, he's just down the hall a bit.
He's alive.
My hope. My temper all dissolves and fades away with another hit of whatever they put in my IV. I slip in, I slip out and consciousness fades but hurt remains.