Snippet #2108248

She did not want to wake. She could hear their voices. His shadow, His shadow. Always his shadow. She did not want to wake into the dream that she knew it had been. It had to have been. She could not bear that crushing disappointment of remembering and realizing all at once that none of it was real, none of it had been real. She could not give herself permission to believe it, to allow herself pleasure in the dream. If she did, they would know, and they would punish her. She did not know how much longer she could survive them, but the dream was too strong a temptation. She could not allow herself to escape to it, to escape to a world in which she was free of them. Waking into the dream could prove too dangerous to be worth the experience.

But she woke. Her eyes slid open, staring blankly at the unadorned ceiling. It smelled of antiseptic and air freshener, all combined together in a sickening cocktail. She could hear voices from the hallway, though she did not understand them. She hadn't understood any of the dream-people in a while. They spoke that strange, voweled language, the one that sounded like Japanese and reminded her of Anime shows. She had tried to speak to them, tried to form words, to at least say something, anything. But they hadn't understood her, or else they were ignoring her, and they hurried past her room, leaving her alone in the bed with the white sheets. There was a monotone cushioned chair pushed against the wall, presumably for visitors or a medical resident accompanying a physician. Her icon of Saint Sava was missing. Her fingers fluttered for the thousandth time toward her neck only to find herself reminded of its absence. She was a stranger in her own body. Her hair was missing, replaced with short stubble in some places around her head, and her cheeks had hollowed to the point where she had taken one look in the mirror on the opposite wall and had not recognized the stranger staring back at her.

She slipped from the sheets of the bed with obvious effort, leaning on trembling arms as she let her feet hit the floor, and shuffled toward the chair, which had been conveniently placed by the window. Through the cleaned glass, she could see Niihama's skyline. The buildings were pristine, glinting in the sun, with hardly any hint of the damage done them by Hataf. She was not sure when the dream was supposed to be and no one could tell her. She was not sure what they would think, the Terran authority, when asked to explain her absence from the office in Government Center. And they would ask. They always asked. Her feet were almost silent over the tiled floor of the hospital room. Her arms and legs were wan and frail, thin to the bone as they poked awkwardly from the sleeves and hem of her light-colored hospital gown. She stared through the window as she lowered herself into the chair, her arms and legs alike trembling with the exertion, and pulled the hem of her hospital gown lower to cover her knees. It draped shapelessly over her thin shoulders, hiding her stomach where her ribs were visible beneath the skin, but not the numbers cruelly tattooed on the flesh on the back of her neck.

She did not understand the dream, why her movements were sluggish and exerted, why she looked a stranger to herself, why she was in a Taiyou hospital surrounded by strangers who would not or could not speak to her. But at least they were no longer there, not while she was awake in the dream. For all its inexplicable flaws, she was free of them. And so she sat in the chair by the window, leaning on the windowsill as she watched Niihama’s sun peep its first rays over the horizon of the Taiyou homeworld. She hadn’t watched a sunrise in a long time, either in the dream or on her ravaged Terra where every move she made and every word she spoke was carefully monitored and recorded to craft a list of her transgressions against the absolute state. But even a dreamed sunrise was beautiful. It reminded her of Priština on a September morning.