It was impossible to sleep well that night.

She couldn't remember exactly when Dawson had finally left, because she'd been trying to sleep. His presence (and whatever they kept pumping into her arm) had been the only thing that kept her sedated enough to lie there in hazy bouts of murky consciousness. At some point, deep in the middle of the night, she roused enough to whisper out his name. When there was no one to respond, she reached out towards his chair, and found it empty. She realized he'd left, sat up with a start, and childishly began to cry.

She did not sob with the contempt and strength of her normal tears, or the quiet solitude that sometimes came from an inexplicable bout of sadness. She wailed a pathetic little sound out, and turned to face her pillow, crying into it the way a teenager would the day her first boyfriend broke up with her over text. She didn't cry because Dawson had left her - she cried because she was alone, finally alone, and there was nothing stopping her from mourning. Nothing keeping her mask on. Nothing to stop her from responding honestly to her loss.

She cried because she was sure she'd never see anything, ever again, and she'd taken her sight for granted so long that the memory of the things she'd seen were hazy at best, and horrifying at worst. Everything she could remember, she didn't want to. Her uncle's face in the dark. Soiled, bloody hotel bedsheets. The color of the chains Lawr twisted around her wrists and the brown leather around her neck. Otto's bloody knuckles coming for her, again and again and again. She remembered the things she hated most in the world, and when she tried to replace them with something better, she couldn't reach the memories that mattered. She couldn't see the sunset color of Cami's hair. She couldn't remember what color Shiloh's eyes were. She couldn't remember the last hat she'd ever seen Dawson wear.

She cried, because her mind taunted her time and again, in constant reminders that she never focused on the good when she had eyesight. Appreciation only came for the things that hurt the most. And all the things she loved..

They were fuzzy, out of sync pictures, constantly interrupted by static.

She cried herself to sleep, and only in the exhaustion of her painful sobs, did she finally dream. Those, too, came in the form of static. For the brief few hours her fatigue granted her, she couldn't remember a single thing she'd dreamed. She couldn't remember what dreams looked like, anymore.

The sun came up over the horizon, and she was completely unaware. When someone put a hand on her shoulder, it was to shake her awake, and finally talk to her about the results of her scans. She turned around, groggy and out of touch, only to wipe the tears from her eyes and keep wiping in the hopes she could tear away the black veil from them as well. They stopped her, and she felt the inevitable haze of drugs calm her down. After several minutes, someone reached down and pulled her eyelids open, checking the eyes for response one last time. When they were done, they asked her to sit up, and she complied.

They were terribly clinical. The good news came first - they were sure that there was a chance for normal eyesight to return, but not on it's own. This was the bad news - the MRI Scan showed a very large, intrusive blood clot had hardened in some part of her brain that she would never be able to remember, even if he'd said the word a thousand times. It didn't matter. There was something in her brain that needed to be removed surgically, and that was a dangerous procedure.

He sounded confident that they had the facilities and tools to get the job done without issue. He sounded like it would only take a few days for her advanced healing to correct the issue once the clot was removed, and her eyesight would return, barring any unforeseen problems. He sounded like she had every reason in the world to presume she would be back to normal, within days.

He sounded so far away.

She wasn't sure exactly when he left, but his urgency concerning needing to have the procedure done immediately meant she didn't have to worry about one thing. There would be no one to explain this to. She laid back on the pillow, closed her useless eyes, and just breathed.

She would go in to this alone. She would come out of it with her eyesight, or she wouldn't come out of it at all.

Funny, how the thought of death scared her less than being blind for life.

How terribly funny.