Suri knew it the moment her parents arrived on the hospital floor. In the hours since the morphine had kicked in, she kept her mind occupied by memorizing the sound of the elevator doors sliding open, and she followed the rhythm of the usually soft thuds of shoes and equipment as people unloaded one by one. This time, however, the door whooshed and the hall experienced a small earthquake in the form of heavy footfalls that thundered to the front desk. Suri turned her head as she heard a man's angry roar and could almost imagine the way her father puffed up when he was frightened, his face beet red and the edges of his mouth frothed. There was a pause, presumably where her mother stepped in and actually smoothed over the encounter, and after a moment's silence the frantic tromping continued again at a crescendo until Suri's door flew open.

Ted Ellis was a big man, and he barely ducked through the door frame as he barreled inside, stumbling over himself to get to the bed. "SURI," the man yowled, the name battering around in her head until she felt like it was spinning. "Baby girl, I'm here, I'm here, it's gonna be okay." There was a certain comfort to the drawl in her father's face, his hand on her cheek, but when he pulled her out of bed to hug her in his Texas arms she let out a strangled cry of pain. Three out of four limbs had been bound as best as possible to keep them in place, but they were still tender, and when she pushed against his chest she nearly screamed.

"Ted, put her down," came her mother to the rescue, cold and terse as her father was hot-headed. She helped ease their daughter back to the hospital bed, sharp blue eyes scanning her body to assess the damage. "We were worried about you," Kerry added, though through her mother's thin lips it sounded more like an accusation than a greeting, and there were calculations in her eyes.

"You weren't textin' me back," said Ted, who was already wringing his hands. He was a tactile man, and needed something to do with his hands if he couldn't hug or batter a situation into submission. "And when you missed Taco Tuesday, I knew, I just knew--"

"...It's okay, Dad," Suri finally responded, blinking through the haze of her morphine. When had he earned so many frown lines, such dark bags under his eyes? "I'm...I'm sorry I missed Taco Tuesday, I know it's your favorite."

"Nevermind that," cut Kerry's voice, and she looked to the computer connected to Suri's bed, as if she could glean information from the lilting waves of the electrocardiogram attached to her daughter. "What happened? We don't hear from you for seven days, and then suddenly you just appear in a hospital room, carried in by some...terrorist." She spit out her final word like it might have been a curse, and Suri's eyes narrowed. Leave it to her mother to sour any touching moment she might have had, to ruin the pleasant buzz that her insurance was paying thousands of dollars for.

"It's not like I had a choice, Mom," Suri hissed, leaning towards her father who had taken to stroking her hair to prove that she still existed while choking out sobs. She bit down the images of her cell, of her captors, of Thraen, her feelings of desolation, if only to keep from joining her father in his grief. No, little Suri Ellis had always been the family rock, stoic and dependable and never overwhelmed, and she would not allow anything to ruin that.

"I..." She thought of the cold walls of her cell, of the chains that had torn and chafed the skin at her wrists, and she shuddered. She never wanted to explain any of this to her civilian ties, least of all her parents. She lowered her head and her voice, checking to see if any of the other nurses were peeking in. There was no lying to her mother, not in a way that was going to work for long, but she had to be careful with what she said. There was no knowing who might be listening, who might be looking for captives to reclaim.

"Close the door," Suri ordered, and her mother raised a single brow but complied. The blonde looked down at her hands, bent and bandage, her mind jumping through hoops to think of a suitable explanation. Why had they come now, and not after a Negaverse debriefing where everyone's stories had merit? "I was captured," she began slowly, taking notice in your mother's metered gaze, "By...terrorists, I guess. I don't know why."

"That's ridiculous," Kerry's voice cut in, and she frowned as she tucked a strand of white-gold hair into place. "Why would they want a high school teacher?"

Suri's vision went white, white like labcoats and the taste of energy and the bandages on her body. "I want you to listen to me," she rasped, and there was a savagery to it that put even her father at pause. "These people are...they're horrible, they will consume everything, and I stood in their way, so they tried to teach me a lesson." What followed was silence, save for the blips of machinery and the labored flutter of breaths coming from Suri's bruised lips. Her body shook as she forced down the panic, willed herself to breathe, but her composure had been rubbed raw in the past week, and there was little room for her mother's southern pleasantries.

"You're lucky I'm even alive, Mom," she whispered, looking down at the bitter consolation of her broken body. Did this even count?

"I'll kill'em," Suri's father growled, and she felt the mountain of muscle behind her tense. "We'll get you moved out to the lakehouse, we'll get yer name changed if we haveta, this is never gonna happen again, Darlin'." As if to assure her, he began to smooth over the tufts of Suri's disheveled hair, but she knew it was more for his comfort than hers. For once, she didn't mind.

"I can't," Suri protested, and she felt her father's weight shift again, looking down at her with confused amber eyes that sent her back twenty years. "I--I mean, the school year has just started," she fumbled, seeking the words to save him from the way his gaze made her melt with guilt. "And if I just...disappear like that, the terrorists win, don't they? They tried to make me a statement. I have to be a better one." These were her parents she was trying to convince--Fox News rhetoric was good enough for at least one of them.

But Kerry remained unconvinced, even if she pondered the statement with a thoughtful gaze. "Your safety is our first priority," she finally responded, a hand on her chin. "What if you're targeted again?"

"I won't be," Suri responded, shaking her head, "Not as long as this stays low. That means no talking to your friends about it, no press conferences," she glanced to her mother's hands, which were already clenched on her phone, "No one is allowed to know what this was. Tell them...I had a car accident or something."

"You could help a lot of people if you came forward with this information," Kerry said, but there was a curious spark of approval in her eyes that Suri couldn't quite decode. "Are you sure?"

"I help myself by staying silent," Suri corrected, leaning in to her father's chest. It was a small comfort, feeling him breathe, and it almost felt like she was being rocked to sleep. "And by staying the course. Running away is easy, living is harder." Something twisted in Suri's gut, and she looked down at her hands, the broken pieces of her left behind. What burbled forth from her lips started as a laugh, but quickly melted into ugly sobs that shook the entirety of her fragile body while her parents watched on in silent horror, missing the terrible punchline. What a turn of events, that she was quoting the man who had broken her.

"Nobody's gonna touch you again," Ted said darkly, holding her as if she might have been a porcelain doll. It was another lie, of course--big as he was, all Suri needed to do was be Zircon and she could suplex him into the next room, and that hadn't been enough to save her. But she lived in a world of little white lies, so what was one more? It's over, you're going to be okay, Nobody's gonna touch you again.

She let herself be lied to, just this once, in the warm arms of someone who wanted to protect her but couldn't. There was no service to knowing that she was defeated, that she was broken, that she would never again be whole, so for this moment, she allowed herself to pretend.

((1512 words))