Heavy breathing. Turning. Pain in her legs and lower back. Half awake and half unconscious, caught between sleep and illness and chemicals. Dreams and hallucinations. Fragments of lucidity, sitting up curved, cold sweat, looking over herself and panting. Seeing herself mirrored in the window at times, eyes wide open, reddened, pupils the wrong size.
Morning seemed to never come. The minutes piled onto each other, the seconds failed to climb over one another. Every time she looked at the clock, every time she found herself staring at it without any context as to how she'd found herself facing that direction, it never seemed to have moved any further than the previous time.
It was a kind of torture worse than even the kinds she'd envisioned in her time away from society, and yet she was only half there to experience it, and she didn't know, truly, if that made things better or worse or if simply it made them be the way they were, an integral part of why her situation caused her so much suffering. Suffering she could only vaguely understand, sometimes a dull backdrop to hazy thoughts she couldn't put into focus, sometimes tearing through her mind like a hammer and bringing her to clarity and pain and a screaming jolting and then nothing, nothing again, drowning again without anything to hold on to.
The covers were a light shade of blue. Thin. She'd taken notice of them one time, as her eyes had come into focus, as she'd found herself bent over with her head near the edge of the bed. Sometimes she heard the clock ticking. Sometimes that was all she heard, all she felt, all she knew. The slow, too slow beating of seconds one after the other, as her mind stayed suspended in grey nothingness. Blind, unthinking, numb.
Her legs hurt. Her back hurt. Parts of her flesh hurt to the point she couldn't feel it anymore, like it was melting. At one point she wanted to vomit. There was no vomit the next time she came to, so she assumed she hadn't. She lost count of how many times she woke up and how many times she passed out, she wasn't in a state of mind fit to keep count either way and she often wasn't able to remember either. It was getting hard to tell dreams and nightmares apart from reality, or maybe it had always been that way.
She was alone. She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling. She was cold. She couldn't feel anything in the lower half of her body. Not her legs, not her tail, nothing past the height of her belly button and below. She was too weak to move the parts of her body she did feel. She was tired. She was alone. She was deadly tired, yet unable to fall asleep.
She was falling. Nowhere, without an end, drifting downwards. Unconsciousness was a better alternative to what she was experiencing, so she took it.