Chapter 529: The Usual Alarm

I didn’t feel alive anymore.

Like at sea, limbs spread-eagled, floating in serene inches just above the surface. A lullaby adrift gently whisking my soul to another place, another realm... hopefully heaven.

Then I woke up, and felt the poundings of a giant hangover in my head, the soreness of a million pushups in my arms, the agony of an infinite toe-stubbings against the edge of a desk in my legs.

Suddenly, I’ve never felt more alive... while also simultaneously wishing I kinda wasn’t.

“You idiot.”

I heard someone somewhere say the precise moment I managed to flutter my seemingly tape-sealed eyelids open... like they’ve been waiting this whole time to say it.

In the almost blinding shimmers and rims of my blurred vision, I instantly recognized the musty white of my bedroom ceiling, and I could also quickly recognize this hard softness of my least favorite pillow against my head, which could mean only one thing...

.....

I was bedridden again.

And there, standing at the foot of the bed in a familiar blur of brown and blue, Sammy held a firm grip on the bedpost that threatened to snap them in two.

“Idiot,” She repeated, a little louder now. “You complete idiot.”

Said it so many times now I was beginning to think she was referring to me.

“You want to take a guess what day it is?” She asked, empty of all sympathy, and before I could even manage to blind myself from the rays shining out my window, I was instead deafened by an unprompted answer. “It’s Tuesday! Can you believe that? Time sure flies when you’re knocking on death’s door, doesn’t it?”

Tuesday... I think, the last I had my eyes open this long, it was a chilly Sunday night. Oh, man... out that long?

Sammy hastily released her grip, and even quicker began rumbling my floorboards with thundering stomps, her furious expression getting nearer as I only hopelessly watch in fear and brace myself for impact.

“If you really do just want to die, then why don’t you just come out already and say so?” She chided, a bitter twang of resentment flying from her lips. “That way at least I don’t have to waste all my time and worry to someone who obviously won’t appreciate it.”

Again, before I even had a chance to try and plead my defense, Sammy went on with expelling two days’ worth of bottled-up anger, and I just laid and listened.

“And not just mine either – I had to set your phone on silent, care to wonder why? I feel like some kind of customer service hotline, and you’re the faulty product I have to continue referring back to. Do you even think about these things? Has it ever crossed your mind that your heroics scare people to death? Or is the taste of noble self-sacrifice just too irresistible to pass off? Well? What do you have to say for yourself?!”

historical

Now that she wasn’t yelling at me from a distance, I could see her clearer than ever, my eye lens focusing, unblurring enough to notice the wrinkled bags under her bright blue eyes, how her hair looked to have never met a brush for quite some time... clear signs of devoting more time to me than to herself.

“And don’t you dare start apologizing to me now!” She said, violently thrusting a finger between my eyes. “You chose this, own up to it, you aren’t sorry you did it – otherwise you wouldn’t have ever done it in the first place.”

If I had to pick anything she said as the truest truth, it’d have to be that. She’s right, I wasn’t sorry I did it. I was not going to apologize for it.

Instead...

“Thank you... Sammy... for everything,” I uttered, my shallow breathing carrying the words in a faint, feeble whisper. “I love you...”

For a good long while, she stayed her glare piercing through my skull like some sort of telepathic lobotomy, then, in a spontaneous second after, she quickly relieved the pressure with a loud groan and a roll of her eyes.

“You’re pathetic.”

I just nodded, agreeing wholeheartedly. “I’m... with you there...”

After that, she seemed to have exhausted her entire rage-filled sermon for me because now she didn’t look as enraged as she did before – walking back to the foot of my bed, her folded arms the only thing maintaining the pretense of her irritated demeanor.

“Before you ask and waste your breath, Mom is just fine,” She said, huffing and puffing vexed breaths. “Better now, actually. She’s making lunch. She’s why I’m even up here... said that you’d be waking up any second now, not sure how she knew that though,”

True, that was one of the things rousing in my still waking mind, but that’s not what was pressing me the most, still hearing that, if I could raise a brow, I would have right there and then.

“You’re talking to... Mom now?” I asked.

“Kinda,” Sammy paused. “ish...”

“Ish?”

“Ish,” She repeated sternly before throwing me a warning look. I got the message loud and clear and simply left it there.

“Secondly, about Harry, that man you’ve been trying to save,” Sammy slowly began, and my hearing instantly sharpened by ten. “Well, you’ve done it, you saved him. You’ve proven yourself a hero now – so can you please not try and prove yourself that fact anymore?”

I ignored that. “Where is he?”

“Downstairs, somewhere,” She shrugged halfheartedly. “He likes hanging by the porch, he’s probably there... and yes, he’s recovering, he’s clean, Dad let him borrow some new clothes. If anything – he’s eating us out of house and home. Mom mentioned is a side effect or something... something about a weak soul translating as hunger, I don’t know – I wasn’t listening.”

Then, as if timed on cue, my stomach roared and groaned beneath the layers of blankets that kept me mummified to bed. I think my internal organs have achieved sentience, maybe.

“Speaking of weak souls,” Sammy muttered with a sigh, turning away towards my bedroom door. “I’ll go see if Mom’s done with lunch yet, she has to be.”

“Oh, in that case, I’ll just – ”

I barely even began to wriggle out of my soft confines, impel my body upright in place, before I was suddenly blown back into place against the hard lumpy pillow – reeling, staring dazed at my ceiling tiles once more.

Like a gust of wind, like a whirlwind... like magic.

My eyes shifted forward, and I caught Sammy beneath the now open doorway, hastily dropping an outstretched arm back at her side.

“You don’t move an inch! Not after the last time I let you,” She hissed through pursed lips. “You hear me? Don’t move. or so help me I’ll...”

Sammy didn’t have to finish, her cold-blooded stare pretty much froze me stiff as a statue here. I wasn’t even going to risk breathing too hard. I ain’t moving.

But that just leaves a whole lot of mystery in the air. I’m missing two days. So many hours gone. So many things to know, so many things to resolve. Not to mention, my most pressing question, – where was...?

“Don’t worry,” Sammy called out, somehow reading my thoughts with uncanny accuracy. “I’ll be sure to send one of the other nurses up with your meal.”