January 1st, 2020, Central City Hospital.
The sound of cars driving. Vehicles moving all around. People in boxes. Waves, waves everywhere. Music, words, all hissed from the scratchy metal hums of their radios. Even the clearest signals came with some distortions, however inaudible. She could hear them all.
Then came the hospital. A vast stone box which housed an orchestra of noise. The sounds of ambulances coming in and out of the garages, their engines churning with burning fuel whilst their humans press down the pedals. Doors, so many doors opening and closing, sometimes sliding with a pneumatic hiss. Footsteps, footsteps! Shoes on so many different feet clapping like thunder loud enough to sunder mountains. Beds, stretchers, wheelchairs and trolleys all squeaked along on their wheels as they rolled on and on.
The voices, oh the voices. So many voices she couldn't make out what they were saying. Like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in a stadium but the stadium is the width and height of the moon and the sounds just keep echoing around as they build upon one another like raindrops cast into a monsoon. Each sound was loud enough on it's own but the sum was a perfect storm so much more than any could imagine. Just as the scope of the sun's vastness could rarely ever be truly imagined, only expressed in a mathematical understanding, so too was the sum of the hospital's noise so vast when viewed through the unconscious periscope that was her still listening mind.
What was not lost on her was the terrible nature of these voices. How sickly, how miserable they all were struck her unlit mind with their wrongness. For a place of healing and birth there was no shortage of misery or death about. Amidst the sea of beeping monitors were coughing and groaning, wheezing and crying. All those who suffered found themselves here and it was in these people that this building found it's true voice. The gasping voice of someone who's life is slowly leaving them, the pained groan of someone who seeks relief but finds none, the shrill cries of one who's arrived in a last ditch grasp at life and the sorrowful sobs of someone who's lost something they cannot replace.
This was the hospital's voice.
_
She might of been unconscious but somewhere deep in that region that could not tune out the sound she dreamt in a dreamless slumber. Like watching the world through smoked lenses that were only the slightest bit transparent she was aware of the fact that she was being moved into this well of suffering. Time however was no object. Seconds could have been minutes, hours, days or even years. There were no thoughts, no emotions, no sensations. Just sound.
But it all came flooding back that awful moment she finally regained consciousness. The mind opened up like a piggy bank shattered with a hammer, the senses spilling forth like so much loose change. She twitched and thrashed as the pain hit her all over again, the overwhelming force of it's magnitude robbing her of all control beyond that of a bundle of nerves hooked up to a car battery and left to jump and flail without aim or purpose.
She tried to scream but all that came from her throat was a raw wheezing rasp, her vocal cords devastated by the unholy wail she had let loose earlier. Her bloodshot eyes shot open and the sight was much too much to take in all at once. It was one thing to not only hear but feel the very sounds around you. It was another thing to see those very sounds in lieu of the proper electromagnetic radiation everyone has come to know as light. It was a barrage of colors as dull resonances that constantly thrummed through the air and surfaces were bombarded with bright neon flashes of sudden sounds like beeps and voices which ripped through the air, ricocheting off of things in rapid blurs. Everything looked just a bit slower as she was processing sound at the speed of sound. It wasn't dissimilar to an adrenaline rush, moments crawling by as though they were full minutes, constantly stuck in a state of having too much time and nowhere near enough.
She was only tangentially aware of the nurses who were pinning her arms down, preventing her from thrashing hard enough to eject herself from the bed. More than that were their voices as they shouted instructions back and forth between each other. She wanted so badly to ask them to be quiet but her throat was so raw and the sound coming from herself would only bring her greater pain. Even the very attempt at trying to lessen the weight upon her mind would only break her down harder.
They inserted a few IV's into her veins, keeping her arms and consequently torso restrained all the while. It was only when the morphine started to hit her system did clarity start to bleed back into her mind. It was slow to be sure but there was little else she could do but lay as still as her organic processes would allow and grit her teeth until she was able to start riding the minor abatement of her suffering like a life raft on a planet who's entire surface is wholly underwater.
_
No longer wholly paralyzed by the full force of her newfound power she was able to start taking in the effects this change of hers had on her senses. It was really quite strange how she could feel everything moving in the sound all around. It was like someone being keenly aware of every cell in their own body. Every change and every motion in this sort of 'Soundscape' felt as though it were all occurring within herself. Sound generated by physical friction was like skin brushing across her own. The sound of hands grasping onto another in a handshake were like if she were shaking her own hands. Then there were the sounds of harsher notes. Wheels squeaking, metal rubbing on metal, were akin to the feeling of her own teeth grinding. It was an abrasive and harsh feeling.
It was overwhelming to even try and grasp just how much was happening that fed back into all of her senses and more. Her focus turned to closer matters a deep dark violet wave kept washing across her. The beeping of the heart-rate monitor in her room. It was painful both due to it's volume and proximity even through the haze of painkilling drugs that were running their course through her bloodstream.
Not really in her best senses she felt it was in her best interest to move away from the violet sound closest to her vicinity. There was no getting away from the sound naturally, it was all throughout the hospital and sounds were bouncing off her constantly, many transmitting through the physical medium of her flesh and weaving in with the organic orchestra that played within. All the low burbling and gurgling noises flooded her form with a light red color, sharp like a cherry but with only a dim radiance, a quiet glow. Deeper shades of red resonated from the creaking groans of her mediocre muscles and tense tendons. The sources which shined the brightest were the stomach and the heart, Two organs ripe with noise. The heart pounded heavy like a drum with bright red waves rolling off it with each beat. The stomach held a more steady yet fluid pattern, it's glow like that of anemic glow-stick fluid but red.
In a way it was truly disconcerting, perhaps less so than the trauma that's been brought upon her but still disquieting. She could feel everything moving both around and inside her. She could feel her blood pumping in more ways than one. Her eyes could see through her rather translucent form like she was an anatomy class dummy, a class of dummy only slightly smarter than one of her variety.
_
THUD!
The very sound of her waifish form colliding with the smooth hospital floor sent shakes all throughout her, the pain of the sounds from her struggle out of bed greater than the impact from the fall. Even through the morphine it was enough to bring her to coil into the fetal position as her body shook uncontrollably. It was only then, so close to herself, that she noticed gross sliminess of her shirt. It was not so long ago when she first arrived at this hospital that the nurses had the opportunity to swap her clothes out into a proper patient's gown yet. There were many patients after all and with no clear visible symptoms or injuries the nurses hadn't had placed her low in their tier of concerns.
While very low in her list of actual concerns the vomit that clung to her shirt was one of the few issues she had power over. Alas, between the cloudy soft numbness that had taken hold of her body & limbs and the strain all this pain has put her body through she was barely able to muster up the strength to crawl. Despite not being able to read the sign on the door she was able to identify the bathroom by it's interior shapes painted in the echoes which flowed through the walls.
As she was about to reach it however something caught her, tugging from behind. The IV stand they had her hooked to was caught on the bed, unable to be pulled along by her IV tubes any longer. Not exactly in the most right of minds she found this impediment to her current fixation, regardless of it's intended benefits, a nuisance. Not really thinking she pulled her arm away from the stand like a belligerent mule against it's tether. The morphine buried the pain of the tubes being yanked free from her veins, blood starting to run from the apertures born from her poor logic.
_
After fumbling at the handle she dragged herself into the bathroom on her hands and knees. The room was starch white, old stains remaining despite the efforts to maintain this facility's cleanliness. It was a very bare design, only a shower head and a low toilet with a railing leading up to it. The room was obviously designed to give wide berth and offer support to whoever uses it, regardless of their condition.
The echo of her ragged breathing carried easily in this room, it's deep indigo hue bouncing about with a low rate of absorption from the tiles. It was quite awful really, this room trapping sound so well. Alas, it was still beneath her pain tolerance whilst she was still aboard the S S Morphine.
She grasped the knob and gave it a twist, unable to tell how to control the temperature precisely. In an instant the room was flooded with more than just water as the shower head hissed to life. A cascade of sound darker than any she'd heard, felt or seen so far washed over her, shortly followed by a cascade of ice cold water.
It was strange that many often referred to the sound of rain as 'White Noise'. This sound which flooded her was the darkest sound by far. It was so black it felt as though it were swallowing up the light inside her. She was drowned within this sound of water steadily raining upon her. It left her submerged in the deep darkness of the blackest rain.
It was curious though. With intense sounds being so painful to endure it was strange to find peace in this continuous blast of sensory stimuli. Perhaps it was the fact that it dulled the sounds of this sickly beast she dwelt within with it's consistent, undiluted tone. Perhaps it was because the pain was distributed in an even fashion, pressure spread equally across her mind creating a mild equilibrium, at least within this diminutive chamber.
Or perhaps it was a result of the morphine's numbness mingling with the cold water further dulling her physical sensations with it's frigid embrace. Needless to say the nurse who arrived at her room when her silent alarm went off was certainly taken aback by this unique sight. He looked into the doorway to the bathroom to find a young girl with blood leaking from her wrist knelt in a puddle of ice cold water, looking up at the shower head with a vacant stare. A more gothically poetic soul might of ruminated on the nature of the scene before him. This nurse however was less concerned with artistry and more concerned with doing his quite literally bloody job.
The black rains were suddenly silenced, only to be followed with what she could deduce to be curse words flowing freely from the nurse's mouth as he hoisted her up from below her armpits and dragged her meager form back into her bed. Consumed with the sudden barrage of stimuli her only reaction was to tense up, her teeth painfully grit as she kept from crying out. Her vocal chords were pushed well beyond their limits back when this all started, leaving her voice as little more than a raspy gasp. Not only was the act of screaming agonizing to her but at this point it wasn't even an option anymore. All she could do was rest as still as possible as she ushered pained gasps.
The nurses reattached the IV to her arm and had security apply arm restraints so she couldn't go on any more 'exciting adventures'.
But hey, at least her shirt was clean. Well, cleaner.
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