Elina surfaced slowly from the darkness, creeping forth by incremental threads of awareness.
The first thing that she noticed was the weight. It was heavy, although what exactly was heavy escaped her at the moment. Her blanket? Her body? Her eyelids?
She didn't know and after the briefest of seconds, she dismissed it as unimportant, pressing forward a hair more in the darkness. The next thing that she noticed was the struggle it was to breathe. Even though the air seemed to be clear, not bearing the chemical sanitized scent she was used to, it felt like a monumental task to draw in the thinnest thread of oxygen, her chest rising ever so slowly with the breath before it escaped her again in another agonizingly slow movement.
Next she became aware of her heartbeat. It was sluggish, slow, as if struggling to push her blood through her veins. Almost as if it was too tired to even beat. Which was, odd. Even when she was struggling with her disease and all of it's nasty side effects, her heartrate had always remained steady. A smooth, comforting thrum that she would use to distract her on the days when the pain was too much to endure by any other measure.
Finally, her consciousness slowly started to return. She struggled to understand why she was even waking up. She had been certain that she was dying, that she had taken her final breath, allowing herself to fall into the welcoming darkness. Why then, was she aware? Had they managed to resuscitate her tired body somehow? But no, that didn't make any sense either, because she couldn't hear the familiar beeping and thrum of the hospital machines.
She strained her ears, trying to see if maybe she had gone deaf. But no, she could hear sounds, other tiny, muted sounds that indicated that her hearing was working just fine. There was a slim chance that the doctor and nurses might have set the machines to silent, not wanting to disturb her. But the chances of that were slim, since all of them had noted how she drew comfort from the sound of the machines after a while. They had almost become her white noise machine, leaving her unable to sleep without their familiar rhythms.
A horrible possibility occurred to her. Surely they hadn't taken her to the morgue. Although, that would make sense. If she had actually died, then it was only logical to take her to the morgue. She mentally frowned as she tried to figure out why that sounded wrong to her. Then she suddenly remembered, panic surging slowly in her like the insidious creep of a lava flow. She had donated her body to science.
They were going to thoroughly dissect her, so they could get a full, hands-on look at what exactly the disease had done to her body. She hadn't cared at the time, after all, she was going to be gone and it wasn't like she was going to need her body after she died. If they could get information from it, that would be even better.
She hadn't expected to come back!
Surely, they hadn't already started examining her. She needed to do something, to let them know that she was still alive. Grabbing her increasing panic, she forced it into strands of strength, commanding her body to obey her like she had forced it dozens of times before. Even if she still had the incurable disease, even if she was inevitably dying, she was not going to go out like this!
Finally, she managed to pry open her eyes, each of her eyelids feeling as if they weighed ten pounds. However, the sight that met her eyes was not the one that she was expecting. Above her, instead of the sterile white ceiling and harsh florescent lights that she was expecting, was a soft green canopy for a four poster canopy bed. She had never seen one in real life but she'd seen enough illustrations and pictures to identify exactly what it was.
What?
She blinked a couple of times, her eyes watering in the light. However, it wasn't the harsh lights but rather a soft, natural light, almost like that of mid-morning on a spring or summer day. But it had been late autumn when she was dying. This didn't make any sense.
What in the world was going on?
X
She didn't know how long she lay there, staring blankly at the canopy as her mind whirled, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes.
In the end, there was absolutely no plausible explanation that she could come up with that explained anything. So, abandoning logic, she turned her head to see if she could gather any more clues from her surroundings. It took a massive effort to do that, one that left her nearly gasping with the effort. However, she ignored it, her eyes bouncing around the room as she tried to make sense of the situation.
It was a room straight out of one of her fantasy or historical stories. A wealthy lady's chamber, with rich furniture and fabrics. However... She frowned as she took in things a little bit closer. Yes, it looked luxurious at first glance. But only at first glance. Upon closer inspection, it showed that the room was, well, rather shabby. It was all rather worn and she could see signs of disrepair and lack of use. Not only that, but the whole room was in desperate need of a thorough cleaning.
Truthfully, the state of the room was rather shocking after all the years of sterile hospital rooms she had occupied, all of them thoroughly cleaned in order to prevent her illness from flaring up worse. And before that, even though the furniture of the orphanage had been worn and secondhand, the matrons and teachers had kept the rooms scrupulously clean.
So why then was she waking up in a room that she never would've occupied if she'd been given a choice. And if she had died, she should've been given to the Research Institute, not ending up in a room that had clearly seen better days and hadn't been occupied for ages before she was deposited there.
Had someone stolen her corpse for reasons unknown? Creepy. She needed to get out of here before anyone returned and realized that she was awake, wasn't dead.
She spotted an enormous, stand alone mirror at the far end of the room, determination filling her. She would go over there, use it to help give herself a good once over to make sure that there hadn't been any tracking devices on her. Then, if she was clean of trackers, she would slip out of this place, which hopefully wasn't an abandoned house in the middle of some countryside.
But first she would get out of here and then she would find a way to get help and get back to the hospital before they started freaking out about her disappearance. With a shaky plan of action laid out, she got to work.
The heavy sensation she had first felt was apparently the blanket, she struggled to push it off enough to free herself from it's weighted confines. Then when she tried to sit on the end of the bed, she ended up falling onto the floor. Wincing at the pain zipping through her nerves, she held her breath, anxiously listening for any footsteps that might be rushing toward her.
After several agonizingly long moments without any other sounds, she came to the conclusion that either they hadn't heard her or her captors were out and about on other nefarious business. She pushed slowly to her feet, cursing her body's increasing weakness lately. But she wasn't going down without a fight, no matter what the others might think.
She fell twice more on her way to the mirror but even with the racket she was making, no one came to check it out. It gave her more confidence that whoever was behind it must be out, so now would be her best chance to escape. She frowned as she swayed heavily, perilously close to falling a third time before she managed to regain her balance. Had they drugged her? Because even with her illness, she had at least been strong enough to get back and forth to the bathroom in her hospital room. It should be an impossible task for her to simply walk across a room.
With this grim possibility filling her mind, she finally reached the mirror and looked into it.
A complete stranger stared back at her, wide-eyed.