Kill the Feeling

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The last time you let someone touch you was when you were fifteen years old, the day before they released you from Site-17's medical wing. You'd been touched since then, by Dr. Ben Palmer when he had to take out your right eye every so often and perform standard physicals, but you did everything you could to minimize that. You spent hours researching how to perform as much of the examinations as you could on yourself, which was at least something to pass the time. You had nothing but time since Omega-7 was shuttered and everyone you spent time with left you one way or another. When the physicals did happen, you did your best to separate yourself from your body, which wasn't hard when the simple commands were all you had to worry about. //Arms up. Tongue out. Head back. Show me your wrists.//

Right when it all happens and you lose your eye, you are hauled over to a bed that hundreds of doctors had probably collaborated on to find exactly how uncomfortable it should be and spend several days hooked up to an IV. You don't remember much from the next few days but the //hands.// Grabbing your arm and shoving things into it and poking around your face so much it felt like they were trying to pull you into the ground. A small part of you was //acutely// aware of how it made you feel, but you couldn't stay awake enough to say anything. Once you're fully awake, they tell you about how lucky you were that the shrapnel had stopped before it hit your brain (debatable) and what a miracle it was that your brand-new right eye fully took to your damaged optic nerve.

You really feel like you should have missed your eye more than you did, what with it being your dominant one, but you'd stopped feeling particularly attached to your body some time ago. Whether or not you really had any meaningful level of ownership over it was up for debate. You feel similarly apathetic about your friends (or what you desperately want to call your friends), but their sudden disappearance just felt like a simple absence. You spent a lot of time alone even back when you were on Omega-7, and you delude yourself into thinking your memory of what Able did to them was fuzzy.

The day before you're released they confirmed you were whatever passed for stable, and a nurse gives you what the other members of Omega-7 had left behind for you. It isn't much, mostly old group photos, but the fact they'd left you anything at all means something. Even though you feel similarly numb about it as you had with everything else, you eventually become aware you were crying.

You feel a bit silly, sitting motionless as the tears stained the photographs, but eventually the nurse comes up and hugs you, and for the rest of your life you'll ask yourself why you didn't just push her off. Your steady breathing becomes shaky before it changes into a strange gagging noise as you find it hard to breathe. The nurse pulls you in closer as everything finally catches up to you and you feel yourself start to shake with wracking sobs. It is also the last time you will ever let anyone see you cry.

You should be thinking about your dead friends. You should not be thinking about the nurse's voice (calming) or how she feels (warm) or how she rubs your head (softly) or what she smells like (roses).

You tell yourself the reason you didn't tell anyone about it was that it was probably some kind of code violation. You've always had a great memory, so it made sense that you remember everything about her. She was the last person you let touch you, so it makes sense that when you're not thinking about Omega-7 you're thinking about her a lot of the time. Part of you knows it's wrong, though; you often remind yourself that you should be thinking about everyone who died because of you because that's what a Normal Girl would think about and except for the way you can reach through photographs you are a Normal Girl.

Some years pass and the memories of the task force become dull. The screams fade into background noise that permeates your dreams like the fan you keep on when you sleep, and you get used to it. Every time you think of the nurse, though, white-hot shame spikes through you. You never mention her in your routine psychological assessment interviews and continue to lie to yourself as to why.

One day, as you fill out a standard request form like you do every other week, you find yourself asking for rose-scented body soap. After sending the form in you feel anxious for days. You never change what you asked for, so surely //somebody// would notice and put everything together and then they'd know that even aside from your anomaly you weren't Normal like you should be. Three days later the maintenance person gives it to you without a word, though, nestled in between your shampoo and a new crossword book. You cannot meet his eyes as you take it from him.

It sits on the bathroom sink for three days as you use the last of your Normal body wash, the label turned to face the wall so you can't see the roses. You run out, though, so you take it into the shower, ears burning as though you're being watched (either by the Foundation or by that thing your mom and priest told you knew everything you thought about) and close the curtain behind yourself (like that would do anything to keep either of them out). It smells //exactly// like the nurse and you remember exactly what she smelled like after all those years so you turn the shower to as cold as it would go in hopes it would somehow douse the burning shame that you felt was going to immolate you. Sitting curled up on the floor of the shower, you once again felt detached from your body as all you could think about was how much warmer she was than the water.

You are twenty-one years old when you dream about her instead of Omega-7. You had a routine going, where you'd dream about them, and it would wake you up well before you could get breakfast so you had time to shower each morning. It kept you feeling just as guilty as you should be, as guilty as was right, considering the circumstances. But then one night you dream about the nurse, and her smile is the softest thing you've seen since you left your family and she's the warmest thing you've ever felt and you cry into her as she runs her fingers through your hair, completely failing to keep yourself acting Normal in your dream, a personal failing of will.

You jolt awake with tears in your eyes and you can feel the white-hot shame in your chest about to burst. You stumble over to the toilet and vomit into it so hard you need to place your hands on the rim so you don't fall into it. Once you're done, you curl up on the sterile tiles of your bathroom floor with your stomach sore from exertion and bile dripping out of your mouth, and a part of you is glad that you found some form of castigation. Like weeds pushing up through concrete, though, the memory of the dream forces its way into your head and you can't stop yourself from crying in front of whatever you know is watching you. You don't know how long you stay there but eventually you drag yourself across the bathroom to take a cold shower and //it does not help//.

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Kill the Feeling

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