She wiggled her fingers below the tightly wrapped bandages and winced at the dull pain of it, healing skin protesting. Through the open doorway, a young woman slept peacefully, at least to an unknowing eye. Orah worried her lower lip with her teeth before she screwed up her resolve and entered, her sneakers silent on the clean, vaguely cream colored floor of the hospital room.
Across the way, an earnest beep beep beep reassured that the heart beat was steady, normal. It’s owner still lived, that beep said. The rise and fall of her chest was even and regular. As Orah stood at the foot of the bed, her fingers reaching by rote for the chart kept there, she knew it for a lie.
The body might live, whole and unmarked, but the person inside was gone.
There had been an up swing in the number of people admitted to the hospital this summer like this girl. Like Nora. Orah made herself think the name, put it to the face. The clipboard felt cool and impersonal in her hands. The machines beeped on.
Nora had been brought to the hospital unconscious and disheveled, looking like she’d been in a struggle but otherwise uninjured. They thought she might have been struck or drugged, but tests turned up no chemicals in her blood, no trauma to any part of her. Orah has been working that day, had watched quietly as the doctors had looked at each other with worried, but resigned faces, and quietly had her moved to a room with a young man in a similar condition.
No one could explain why these people, people like Nora, wouldn’t wake up. Some were more injured than others, but the strange epidemic was always the same… coma, followed by decline, until the body finally just… gave up. No one liked to talk about it at the hospital, and then only in hushed voices. Orah saw them, heard it, and could only feel frustration as she kept her mouth firmly shut.
These were starseed victims, she was sure of it. The people the Negaverse had pulled the soul from and left the body to slowly die without the life inside of it to keep it going. She knew the director had contacted the government, quietly, about the possible mysterious contagen, but even if she hadn’t heard the result, she knew somewhere along the way it was being swept under the rug. People quietly looking the other way with a “it’s not my problem”.
Orah’s fingers tightened till she felt the dull pain again from where Titan’s youma had ripped open her arms with its jaws. Quickly healing wounds, but even her transcendence couldn’t fix things instantly. The bruises around her neck had, thankfully, not lasted long. It wasn’t the first time, or the worst, but it was a reminder of what she was fighting, when she wasn’t Orah.
As hard as I try, it’s never enough. It never ends. There are so many of them stronger than I am. Faster. Better equipped. Maybe we’re holding our own, but it’s not GOOD ENOUGH. She looked at Nora’s body and felt it burning in her chest, that desperate sort of futile feeling. I want to do more. I need to do more. I just don’t know how. I feel so… weak. I can’t even protect myself.
And she hated that. The way so many of them walked right over her, even as strong as an eternal senshi was. She wanted strength to protect people like Nora, but she’d wanted that from the start. She’d made a vow for them, devoted herself… but it wasn’t enough lately.
Orah straightened the blankets on the bed and dutifully wrote down the readings she took, her hands gentle now and her eyes dark. Light streamed in through the window to paint the foot of the bed, rich and golden with late summer afternoon. She brushed Nora’s hair back gently from her face, fingertips light as feather brushes.
This would probably never be her, this slow, gentle death. The light kept her starseed firmly in her chest, but there were so many mundane ways to kill a body. She probably wouldn’t even make it to a hospital… and then who would do the little she did do? It left her feeling restless and dissatisfied, disquiet in a way that she wasn’t used to.
The young nurse would probably be Nora’s only visitor today. Her family couldn’t be there every day, not when her coma stretched from days into weeks. Orah came as often as she could, she visited all of them, but she wasn’t sure who she was trying to help with it all. None of them showed any sign her visits mattered, and for herself, there was never any peace to be found here. Only a nagging sense of duty and frustration.
