Amoro Revidi
Title: Restlessness [Part One]
Series: Vision of Escaflowne
Rating: PG-13 for some angst.
A/N: Part 1, enjoy... it will pick up, I promise.
***
The King of Fanelia shoots up in bed.
Something is wrong, are his immediate thoughts.
Looking around he gathers in his surroundings.
Nothing out of the ordinary… the window with the two moons, the dark hall leading to his dressing room with a pulsing glow, his desk…
Climbing swiftly from his bed, the young monarch heads down the short hall and comes upon his bureau. Hanging upon a small stand is a necklace with an achingly familiar pink stone, emitting a pulsating glow.
Hitomi? he thinks to himself, reaching out and lifting the necklace into one hand.
A sudden surge of pain and grief causes him to drop the pendant and chain to the floor, where it makes an inaudible thump and then goes dark.
“Hitomi?” he asks breathlessly into the moonlit darkness around him. “What’s happened to you?”
***
The nurse seated quietly in the room with a magazine hums
softly to herself before glancing over at the form lying in the bed. Such a
pity… so young. Gently she reaches over and brushes the sandy colored hair
from the patient’s pale forehead.
A low groan startles her into withdrawing her hand quickly, dropping her magazine in her chair as she gets quickly to her feet.
Slowly, a pair of pale jade eyes opens. A dry set of lips makes as if to speak.
“I… I wouldn’t try to speak miss, you’ve…”
The eyes turn to regard the nurse.
“You’ve had quite an ordeal,” the nurse says quietly, shirking from the desperate and accusingly open look coming from the pale face.
The lips are licked by a cautious tongue in the manner a small child might before attempting something unheard of or new to them. “Wa…” her voice breaks.
“Right here, miss, hold on just a moment.” The nurse, still somewhat shocked at the patient having woken up, moves gingerly to the pitcher of water on the bedside table and pours a glass. Before helping the patient to sit up in bed and sip the water she presses the call button on the side of the pillow, alerting the nurse’s station that the patient has regained consciousness.
Just as she is settling comfortably against the pillows, the door opens and a doctor enters. “Ah, Miss Kanzaki, I see you’ve woken up.”
“Who,” again the end of her question is choked off in a dry gurgle coming from her throat and she motions to the nurse for more water.
“I assure you that your condition is looking much better now that you’ve woken up, but you really shouldn’t try to speak just yet, Miss Kanzaki, you’ve had that little tube down your throat for almost a month now, and as you can obviously tell your throat is very dry.”
Slowly, as though afraid the motion itself will hurt her, she nods.
“I’d like to bring you up to speed on your current condition, if you feel up to it?” the doctor’s voice rises politely in question and she nods again, still a slow deliberate motion. “Both your arms were broken in the crash, as well as the femur in your left leg. All the bones were set while you were unconscious and have begun healing properly, but, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, you’re still in casts. We wanted to wait until you’d woken up to contemplate removing them, I’ll ask the doctor in charge of your case my recommendation, which is that you should be out of those thick things as soon as possible. Since you weren’t eating I was almost afraid…”
The voice slips from her hearing as a memory strikes her. “Mother!” her voice breaks again and the resultant cries of ‘Father!’ and ‘Brother!’ are lost to her audience.
“She’s going into shock,” the doctor says, setting his clipboard down quickly.
What… where are they?
“Her heart’s stopped.”
“Code blue!” A flurry of lab coats and nurses’ scrubs livens the air in the room as the medical staff begins their work.
Staring blankly at the ceiling she sees the faces of her family, rushing towards her and swirling around her.
“Doctor, we’re loosing her!”
A sudden image penetrates her mind, which is clouded over with images of her missing family. Van.
In the resultant silence of that declaration the heart monitors pick up a slow and steady pulse. The beat of it seems to calm the atmosphere of the room for a long moment and she continues to stare up at the speckled ceiling, the impression of a handsome and familiar visage imagined there.
And just as easily as it came, the images dissipates into a penlight as one of the doctors calls out, “Kanzaki? Kanzaki Hitomi? Miss Kanzaki, can you hear me?”
Numbly, she nods.
***