See my profile for reason for lack of updates.

Kamquat- Glad you like it.

Stella the Sniper- Dads always seem to get a bad rap, so I thought I'd make her mom the 'bad guy'.

Chapter Eight: Pain is a Powerful Thing

I ran out of the shop as fast as my legs would carry me, tears stinging my eyes.

Amelia wasn’t sure how far she had run. She wasn’t sure how much farther she was going to go, either. To be honest, she didn’t really care. She wasn’t thinking; She wanted it to stay that way.

Keep Running.
She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, do anything else. Keep moving. She had to keep going. Had to keep her arms pumping back and forth. Had to keep her legs flying underneath her, barely touching the ground long enough to keep her propelled forward.

Don’t Stop.
No, she wouldn’t do that. She never did. Even when she was just barely in her teens, she would not stop, would give her body no respite. Sorrow, grief, and woes of the heart had always been kept at bay. To stop was to give herself time to remember. She would never stop; She would eternally outrun her pain.

Don’t Breathe.
Was she even drawing breath anymore? She must be, to still be moving. She couldn’t feel any air in her lungs, even as she took it in. As she tore down alleys and streets alike, pushing past pedestrians and pokemon alike, she felt light-headed. She was pulling oxygen in as fast as possible, but it never felt like enough.

Does It Hurt?
God, yes, she hurt. Her whole body felt as though it were aflame. Her lungs burned. Her arms and shoulders ached with their constant twisting, pushing, and pulling. She couldn’t step right anymore, either. No matter how her feet hit the ground, it felt like she was landing directly on a long spike. And her legs barely even existed. They felt as though they had melted away under the burn she felt. The only way she was sure they were there was the sharp ripping feeling that emitted from her muscles every few seconds.

Good.
She focused on that pain. Used it. Wrapped her mind around it so that everything else disappeared. Her physical pains were all she knew. Nothing else. She cataloged each separate stab. Every ache, every burn, was filed away. Her increasing lack of balance was noted, then promptly ignored. This type of pain could be dealt with. Her body would recover easily enough if given time. Yeah, this pain was easy. But, if she stopped….. That type of pain couldn’t be compartmentalized so easily. Time, contrary to popular belief, does not heal all wounds.

And then it happened.

An innocuous thing, really. An every day occurrence so mundane that most forget completely about it just moments after it happens. It was not the first time this had happened to Amelia, nor would it be the last. However, at that moment, it was the last thing she wanted.
Her foot hit a stone, and was held back from it’s forward movement for naught but an instant. It shot forward once again, much too fast, in an effort to compensate for the lost time. The extra force sent it diving into the ground. The momentum of her lower body broke. Her upper body continued forward. And, for a brief moment, she was flying. She landed, hard, her eyes wide with shock, then forced tightly closed with pain. It took her a moment to register what happened.

She tripped.

She fell.

She stopped.

And then, she wept.
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I….. Well, I don’t really remember things too clearly after that. I found out later that I had flat out sprinted for nearly two whole miles. Turns out that kind of exertion isn’t good for your body, as I had discovered time and time again.

I remember that I ripped my right arm and leg up pretty bad on the sidewalk when I fell. Not enough to be life-threatening, of course, but it was enough to catch the attention of a passing woman. Huh, a teenage girl lying on the sidewalk shaking and crying and bleeding. That, added with my already, shall we say, frazzled appearance probably made me look like some sort of refugee.

She’s asking if I’m okay, which, by the way, is the stupidest question ever, when everything started to fade in and out. Seriously, ‘Should I be concerned about all the blood coming out of you?’ Why does everyone always ask that?

When I come back around the first time, there’s a woman in a nurse’s outfit peering closely at me with concern while I‘m being held by the lady and someone whom I assume is her boyfriend. ‘Great‘, I think. ‘I’m in a hospital.’ Yeah, not so much. My vision clears up a bit and I realize she’s got pink hair. With those stupid hair-loopies. You guessed it, she was a Nurse Joy. Man, those girls always freaked me out. I mean, what kind of whacked-out inbreeding does it take to make every girl in their family look the exact same? Doesn’t that mean the guys marry women who look just like their own mothers, and grandmothers even?

Come to think of it, are there even any boys in that family? I’ve certainly never seen one. How does that work? Some sort of secret nurse cloning program or something? Are they all some sort of genetic super-nurse, stationed innocently at pokemon centers the world round, waiting for a signal from their shadowy masters to strike? I still, to this day, get a shiver running up my spine whenever I have to talk to one of those creepy, glassy-eyed girls. Them and those freakish Officer Jennys.

But, I’m off track.

Why take me to a Pokemon Center, you might ask? Well, for one thing, I apparently fell just a few blocks from it. And, for another, all Pokemon Centers are outfitted the exact same. Like, completely identical. So, the ones in the cities, like this one, have the same supplies as the ones in the middle of the woods, which are often receiving injured kids along with the Pokemon brought in. Not too cost effective, but helpful.

Needless to say, they’re like miniature hospitals unto themselves. Joy looked at me, declared I was not bad enough to need an actual hospital visit, and had the nice lady and her rather, heh, beefy boyfriend put me down on one of the many beds in the facility. What, you thought I was holding on to him so tight cause I was afraid of falling? Ha! That man had stud-muffiny abs of steel! A shame he was already taken. Not that I would’ve had a chance with him, he was, like, twenty-seven or something like that, but you can’t blame me for dreaming. (1)

As he lay me onto the bed, I blacked out again.
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Marcus awoke to the sound of his phone ringing. His home phone, not his cell. Truly, the worst part of being a doctor was the fact that you could literally be called upon at any time. With a groan, he reached over to the end table that sat beside his beige couch, and to the phone that sat atop it.

“Whatimeisit?” he slurred into the receiver, his free hand rubbing the sleep from his eye while simultaneously trying to straighten his glasses, making them move up an down in a see-saw motion. His hand and glasses ceased movement as the voice on the other end responded.

“I’m sorry,” Marcus pulled himself to a sitting position, feeling much more awake than he had a few moments previous. “Did you just say what we think you just said?” He was already on his feet and making circles around the room, searching for his shoes.

“Seriously?” he questioned again, not believing the doctor on the other end, yet still searching for his shoes. Ah, there they were, under the coffee table. How they always ended up there, he never knew. “And who left him alone?” he hopped on one foot, trying to shove his shoe on with both hands while he held the receiver in place with his shoulder.

“Whatever happened to monitoring the patient?” he griped. “He just got out of surgery not- Oh, five hours ago, really? How time- Gah!” he tumbled backwards, hitting the floor and pulling the phone off the table. It too hit the floor with a clatter. At least Marcus‘s shoes were now on. “Ow…. No, we’re fine, forget it. I’m on my way.” He righted the phone and put the receiver back on it, getting to his feet again.

As he dashed out the door, he couldn’t help but ponder aloud.

“How the heck did he manage to leave the hospital in his state?”

Okay, so, at this point, I had managed to formulate a plan: Step one, Get a disguise. Step two, Find that girl and get my Gastly back. Step Three, get the heck outta Dodge. Err, whatever city I was in.

Of course, I had to get out of the hospital first. Oh, what’s that? You want to hear all about my daring escape? Yeah, right. It was closer to a five-seconds-from-falling-over-stumble-o’rama.

See, I woke up in the hospital, right? So far, no problems. I wasn’t really sure how I got there, though. All I could remember was fire and leaves and purple smoke. My backpack sat in chair by the bed, which, while helpful, didn’t give me any clues as to what was going on. Though, it did get me moving.

First order of business: New clothes. I had yet to remember what got me in the hospital in the first place, or why I was still there, but I saw no reason to sit around in one of those stupid gowns when I had clothes sitting a few feet away. I wanted pants, darn it.

You know those DNRs? You sign them and the hospital can’t lift a finger to revive you if you crash during surgery or whatever. I wish there was a different kind of DNR. A Do Not Remove……my trousers. (2) I mean, was it really necessary to take off my pants for a shoulder wound? I don’t want to wake up in some strange place without my- Hey, wait a second. Shoulder wound?

That’s when I remembered why I was there. I looked at my shoulder and, sure as the sunrise, it was swathed in bandages. Whatever they had me on must’ve been some heavy-duty stuff, though, as I couldn’t feel a thing. That didn’t last long.
See, while the painkillers were, obviously, dealing with the pain, they were also muddling my thinking. So, like an idiot, I pulled out the IV so I could put on a shirt. I’m just glad I managed to actually get the shirt on before the meds started to wear off.

When they did, it was painful. How painful, you ask? What was it like, you ask? What is it with the human race and its affixation with pain? I mean, really, we avoid it like the plague, yet we want to know all about it. If you really want to know, why not find out for yourself and get stabbed in the shoulder? ‘Oh, no!’ you say. ‘That would hurt!’ you say.

Isn’t that the point? The truest way to learn is to experience. You want to learn what pain is like? Then put yourself in pain. If you aren’t willing to do that, then you don’t really want to know, after all. It’s not a bad thing to want to avoid pain, certainly not. I myself would rather be without pain than with. However, when your fear of pain starts to keep you from doing what you have to do, that’s when you need to stab yourself in the shoulder. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

So, as the meds began to wear off, rather quickly, I might add, I faced a choice: Stick the IV back in my arm, lay back down on the bed, and forget about escaping; Or, grit my teeth, stick to the plan, and be in agony for a while. Ironically, my fear of pain was trumped by two other fears. Namely, my fear of what my parents would do when they found out and my fear that I would never live down the fact that I wound up in the hospital on the third day of my pokemon journey. A ten year-old nearly beat the elite four and I, at sixteen, was whipped on day three? No way I was going to let that fly.

So, I stuck to the plan. Getting my pants on was, thankfully, not too difficult a chore to complete with one hand. Also, good ‘ole Mom had packed some off-brand painkillers in my backpack; I dry swallowed three. If anything, they took the edge off the shoulder. Oh, and my legs, oddly enough. All that walking from the past few days had managed to catch up with me sometime during my blood-loss induced slumber.

At any rate, I had half of step one completed. I no longer looked like an intensive care patient.
“Speaking of which…” I said to myself, glancing at the heart monitor I was still attached to. I let out a slight laugh, though I’m not sure why, as I watched it for a moment. It beeped steadily, half a millisecond behind my actual heartbeat. I shook my head to break the slight trance the methodic sound had lulled me into and reached up under my shirt to pull off the wires that had somehow managed to stay attached.

Luckily, common sense finally managed to kick in before I did something stupid. I stopped short of pulling the wires loose and instead rolled the heart monitor away from the wall in search of the plug. I located it easily enough among the other cords in the wall, as it was blue, not black like the others, and pulled it out. The monitor flicked off and I pulled the wires from my chest without bringing a group of nurses with a crash cart down on my head. Escape would have become somewhat more difficult had that happened.

That’s when I caught sight of my plan’s first complication.
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The second time Amelia awoke, she found herself lying in a different bed than the one she recalled being put in, with a few changes to her person. Change number one, which she noticed immediately, was that her right arm had been bandaged. This, of course, led her to search for, and subsequently discover, change number two: her right leg was bandaged as well.

The discovery of the second change brought her to notice the third change, for the only way she could have seen the second change was if she were no longer wearing long pants. Thus, the third change was unearthed; Her clothes were different. Instead of a blue short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, she wore a green tank-top and black shorts. Different, but not alien. They were still her clothes, which meant some Nurse Joy had gone through her pack, and changed her clothes, which gave her the willies beyond all form of reason.

She made a mental note to disinfect her bag and take a very, very hot shower as soon as the opportunity arose.

However, first things first: She needed her jacket.. For some reason the teen could never fathom, PokeCenters were always kept about ten degrees cooler than she considered comfortable. It was a conspiracy hatched by the Joys, she was sure of it. However, there was a bit of a problem with getting her jacket in the fact that her jacket was in her pack and her pack seemed to be missing. Probably carried off to some dark nether dimension by those horrible, evil, nefarious Joys.

“Curse those Joys….” Amelia muttered quietly, wrapping her arms around herself and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, wincing at how sore her entire body felt. “Curse them to- Oh.” She stopped short as her legs bumped into her backpack, which was lying by the side of the bed. “Nevermind then.” She rummaged through her pack, locating her Miltanks-leather jacket and throwing it on.
“So far, so good…” She slipped her pack around her shoulders and began to tiptoe towards the exit. “Now, I just need to get out without being see-”

“I’m sorry,” A very familiar and chilling voice stopped her in her tracks. “Were you talking to me?” Amelia turned slowly, her fear realized.

Nurse Joy was standing a few feet away, holding a pokeball and cackling madly while lightning flashed in the background. Err… she was holding a pokeball, anyway.
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On the end of the bed, there was a piece of paper with a bunch of medical jargon. And my name was on it. James M. Malone. James M. Malone. They knew my middle name. That could only mean one thing: They had found my Pokedex and pulled up the information about me.

They knew who I was. They knew everything about me. My home address, my parents phone number, everything. At any moment, they could call my parents, if they hadn’t already. This was bad.

Okay, okay, okay. I could handle this. All I had to do as augment the plan a little. So, step one was still get a disguise. But first…….
I rummaged through my backpack until I found a marker and, as carefully as I could, I changed the ‘o’ in my last name to an ‘a’, making it say James M. Malane. It probably wouldn’t fool anyone for long, but it would buy a little time.

I slipped both straps of my backpack over my good shoulder, with a bit of difficulty, and peeked through the blinds of the giant window that made up one wall of my room, before making the bed. I thought it might help add to the illusion of Mr. Malane. At the very least, it would make it look less like I had ever been in the room at all.

Then, with one last peek through the blinds to make sure the coast was clear, I left.

(1)- I hope I never again have to type ‘stud-muffiny abs of steel’.
(2)- I had a surgery a few years back. The worst part of the whole thing was the stupid hospital gown they made me wear.
Until next time.