Let's Try The After

[MethodicalSlacker]

[Cybil Price: After Start.]

He hadn't stopped repeating it. Not since he came to in the helicopter. He hadn't stopped when they helped him clean the grime from his skin, from under his nails, from his hair. He hadn't stopped when they helped set his legs for a day so that they would heal better, or when they gave him crutches so that he could walk. Not when they told him the truth. Turned out he had broken a few things, after all. Just some minor fractures. Still repeating, endlessly. A phrase he could twirl around his finger, if it were longer. Two words.

I'm alive.

If not repeated by his voice, they were running on a loop in his mind. Like a stock trading ticker scrolling by. I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive.

What this meant to him, he had no idea, but it made everything he did feel just that much more meaningless. The two he had tried to kill—were they here too?

Let alone them, leave all that in the past. There was so much more to feel for. The fact that he was here meant that he had failed so many. His father had been failed chiefly at all. Wherever he stood now, wherever he sat, he'd go to bed knowing his son had survived a refugee instead of dying a patriot. Feeling disappointed, Cybil surmised, was the only thing he could feel. Not relief. He watched it every single year. He smiled at it, from time to time. How could his father have felt relief in knowing that his son left before he could finish what was started? The last he saw of his son was him giving up. Realizing that he didn't have it in him. Throwing in the towel. Not dying trying, not throwing himself at a giant, not at one with many names under their belt, in a last ditch effort at recognition, but instead plunging into a pool of blood and shit and water. Not even drowning there.

Now, Cybil was sitting upright in the bed they provided for him. It was not his. He took a sip of a glass of water that they had left for him, positioned on the table they left there adjacent. It was not his, it was not his.

The entire point of his life, it felt, was to go on stage and do well. He had under-performed, and the man with the cane had come by and grabbed him by the neck. Pulled him off stage. Cybil twitched, and knew he'd be doing that for the rest of his life. Twitching. Wondered how long that would be. Thumb on his left hand made a strange popping noise when he moved it back in its socket. Nose was held in place by bandages and tape and glue. Lacerated face, with stitches. Other scars were undiscovered, and other new notches in his figurative spine were waiting to be uncovered. He had yet to see Clay here.

I'm alive.

There was so much to face on the other side of these walls. Cybil ran a hand through his hair. Significantly less matted than it had felt the previous day, but still dirty. He didn't know where to begin with the classmates he had ran into. Nor did he know where to begin if he found the kid who was shooting at him. And that was just his world. Hardly the world at all. England, the enemy, was his guardian now. He was its ward, its charge, its protectorate. And he was sitting in one of its hospital beds, waiting for a doctor to come by and take another look at his nose. Maybe read him his charts. Or sheets. Whatever they called it here.

The light above him was harsh, but fair. It bled into his skin like ink into paper. It reminded him that he was a man. He heard noises, sometimes. Noises that sounded like they came from very, very far away. But the curtains around him prevented him from seeing much of anything. The gown they had given him to wear instead of his soiled clothing itched and irritated his skin ceaselessly. Crutches were propped up against some table with wheels on the bottom. An IV ran into his arm. He wasn't entirely sure what it was doing there. One of the things that the doctor told him was that he had lost "a bit" of blood, but not enough to do anything but make him weak for a bit. Felt that.

The accent was irreconcilable. No sense of patriotic sincerity that he associated with the people back in his hometown. The way the Indian doctor spoke to him sounded like a constant undersell of the gravitas of his situation. Cybil could not pronounce her name, and had not tried, but she was strangely familiar to him. He wondered if she was one of the people who carried him out of the arena. Holy hands. If he learned of this truth, he'd do a number of things. The first would be to bite her arm if it came anywhere close to his mouth.

But the worst of all was the food the English had given him. Dry, tasteless, unforgivable rations. She had offered to spoon feed him if he felt too weak to do it himself, and hadn't had the strength to say no.

"Here comes the aeroplane," she sing-songed to him, as she lifted the gunk to his lips.

Aeroplane.

It reminded him that he was far, far from home, and that this would never become his own. Cybil stared up into the light fixture. Tears came to his eyes, and he did not hold them back.

I'm alive, he thought, as he began to whimper.