Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven
She has red hair, long and tangled and matted with blood. Her cheeks and forehead are pallid and waxy, and a deep cut slashes across her cheekbone. A large burn mark mars her forehead where the frown marks haven't quite faded. Her pale hand rests palm up on her blankets, and an IV trails from an artery in her wrist.
Her eyes are closed.
She's lying there. Not tired. Not broken. Just lying there. She can't hear the steady, monotonous beep of the flatlining heart monitor. She can't feel the pain of the injuries that took her life. Her chest no longer rises and falls, because all of the breath has left her lungs.
Smears of blood are streaked over her exposed face and arm, obscene flashed of colour against her bloodless skin. Burns and grazes and cuts have been left to bleed as focus was turned instead on the internal haemorrhaging that they couldn't stop.
The girl in room five is no longer in room five. She has left the room. She has left the hospital. She has gone on.
When she was alive, she was a supermodel. She was a daughter. She was a lover. She was a mother.
She... was.
Tomorrow they will cry for her. Tomorrow they will clean away the blood, the sweat and the tears. Tomorrow her picture will be in all the papers. Tomorrow they will bury her.
Today, she has left them all behind.
A world away, a universe away, a whole lifetime away, she will watch, and wait for her loved ones to join her.
But here... where she matters...
She is gone.