Prompt Fill: 342. lucid 1A
Her first lucid thought was that things had gone wrong. Then the pain pulled her down again and it was another two days before she regained consciousness. By then they’d already taken her right leg below the knee and her left leg at mid-thigh.
She was a huddle of blankets on the bed. Her body made small by stillness and the mass of bandages covering her face and arms, each of her fingers individually splinted and wrapped.
It was pain that woke her, then they had to knock her out again when she was unable to stop her panic.
She almost thought that waking was a dream–a nightmare–except she was still in the hospital when she woke up. Her legs were still ruined. Her arms and fingers were still broken messes of healing bone and flesh. She was still the only surviving victim of The Renaissance Mangler, a serial killer that had been preying on the city for the last four years. Men, women, children–the Mangler had no preference but to cause pain to his victims before killing them and dumping their bodies where they would be found.
It was the Mangler’s need for attention that saved her life. Through his interactions with the media, the FBI were able to find the warehouse where he tortured and murdered his victims. And though The Renaissance Mangler wasn’t caught, his latest victim was found alive.
Splayed out on the floor of a large metal cage, she’d looked dead. The Mangler must have known they were coming and killed her before he fled. It was grim work breaking into the cage, until someone shouted that her chest had moved–she was breathing!–and they burnt through the lock with heightened urgency. The EMTs streamed into the cage and she was bundled into an ambulance and away. All while cameras took pictures and recorded the moments.
She would see those pictures later–on the Internet, on the TV, in history books–and it never seemed like her. A pile of bloody limbs on a dirty floor and a mass of tangled hair sticking out from under an oxygen mask and blanket on a gurney. The words of pity and recrimination coming from reporters and pundits alike made her angry on principle at first, before she began associating that image of a broken body as being her. Then she was just angry.
Because the Mangler had hurt her, tried to kill her, but the media had torn her apart. And once she became a spectacle, everyone had an opinion about the “poor survivor”, the “broken angel”, the “lucky idiot” that had survived being “sliced and diced” by the Mangler.
Stephanie was glad for her uncle’s quick action to have her identity kept from the public. Citing the need to protect her from the Mangler and the detrimental psychological effects of media attention while she was trying to recover, he’d kept her identity quiet. He’d even convinced the judge to have all mentions of her name replaced with a code name in court documents.
So while everyone in the world talked about what happened to Lily May Howerton, Stephanie Babbage was allowed to recover without anyone knowing they were the same person.
It allowed her to work through her shock, horror, and grief in some semblance of peace. She didn’t take the amputation of most of her legs well. She was horrified by her physical imperfections, by the scars that tugged and pulled when she moved her arms, and the strangeness of her post-reconstructive surgery face (That’s not me! That’s not me!). And she had to take some time out of her life to deal with what had been done to her and how it had ruined her plans for the future.
By the time she was back to feeling normal again, four years of her life had passed. She’d had multiple reconstructive surgeries and gotten used to her prosthetics. She’d inured herself to pain; to the point that it eventually disappeared.
She learned to walk and run and laugh again.
And then she found the love of her life.
/END
