Whatever was going on with my back, it prevented me from sitting up, denied me the use of my abdominal muscles.  I could only work with my shoulders, my head, my teeth.

This sounds… familiar. It reminds me of Interlude 6.

Shifting the pillow over several long minutes, I managed to gingerly ease it under my shoulder and upper arm.  Provided I didn’t move -which I couldn’t, really- it gave my arm something to rest on, prevented all of the weight from dangling off of my cuffed wrist.

Ah, nice. I was half right, I suppose.

Of course, I was now absent one pillow for my head and neck, and the propped up shoulder and arm made my back twist slightly, which only intensified the pain there.

Yeeah, this came at a cost.

I closed my eyes, focused on just breathing, tried not to pay too much attention to how slowly time was passing by, or the cacaphony of noise from the rest of the triage area.

Sometimes, when in pain, it can be good to try to sleep. It’s an escape, but it’s an escape that lets your body rest a bit and focus its energy on repairing the thing that’s causing the pain while you don’t have to consciously deal with the pain or the long hours of the recuperation.

If that was what was going on, being manacled like this would be something of a slap in the face, a way of letting me know it was intentional, while keeping me from contacting anyone to complain.

Technically, Taylor could put up a huge sign saying “Help I’m trapped in a healthy person factory” outside, as long as it’s within four blocks and there are enough bugs left in the area.

My arm shifted involuntarily as I cringed at a painful intake of breath, swinging a little, and I clenched my teeth.

I turned my head, gripped the fabric of my pillow with my teeth, tugged and pulled my head forward at the same time.  It moved to my left.

What are you trying to accomplish here? 

I did it again, bumped my shoulder, making my arm swing on the chain once more.  I suppressed the noise I might’ve made at the pain, choked back the gorge that rose in my throat.

Oh, she’s trying to move the arm further, into a position that’s less painful.

Because when people started doing that, the truce broke and things became ten times easier for the Endbringer.

Ek-fucking-zactly.

The manacle on my wrist made me wonder.  I’d made some enemies with the good guys.  Maybe I was getting some rough treatment because of it.

One ominous idea nagged at me, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.  It was that I might not get any treatment at all – for my back, specifically – because of grudges against me and capes who could ‘suggest’ that maybe the doctors’ resources could be better directed elsewhere.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that since the end of the last chapter… it’s not a pleasant idea.

If they went that route, one hundred percent deniable, excusable, then there’d be nothing I could do about it.

Pretty much the only thing you could do then would be to drag yourself out the door by one arm, get out of your costume, and drag yourself back in as Taylor “totally not the villain with the exact same injuries and other physical characteristics who just dragged herself out the door in the same manner” Hebert.

…this kind of gag works a lot better when you actually know the person by a two-part name.

I made myself take a deep breath.  It shuddered as I exhaled slowly, and not just because it hurt to breathe.

I couldn’t do anything about my back, in the here and now.  My arm?  Maybe.

…how?

The metal pole was fixed to the wall at every foot or so by horizontal bars, and the end of the manacle was stopped from descending any further by one of the bits that extended to the wall, three feet or so above my head.

I wonder if Taylor could pick the lock with her bugs or something. I feel like most bugs wouldn’t be strong enough, though.

I couldn’t really believe they were going to arrest me.  Like Tattletale had said, there were rules.  Largely unspoken rules, but still more important than anything else in the cape community.  You didn’t profit from an Endbringer attack, you didn’t attack your nemeses or take advantage of undefended areas to steal.  You didn’t arrest a villain that came to help.

Exactly! It’s fucking cheating!

Besides, it’s actively against the PRT’s interests to do this kind of thing. Next time there’s an Endbringer, do they think anywhere near as many villains are going to show up to help, the word having spread that there’s a risk the PRT will just arrest them the moment the Endbringer has beaten them up enough?

None of that was even touching on that growing terror over the fact that, hey, I couldn’t feel my legs, and it wasn’t getting better.

Yeeeah. Let’s hope Panacea pities the fool bug, or some other healer or medical personnel can help out on that front.

If my back was really broken, it could mean my best case scenario was surgery and years of physical therapy, years of crutches and wheelchairs.

And explaining what happened to Danny, for that matter. Whether you tell the truth or lie, that sounds miserable. Question is, miserable moment or miserable life?

Taylor has enough of the latter already without having to live a lie towards her dad while recovering from paralysis. Besides, isn’t it better if Danny knows that it happened while she was protecting people and the city, even it does mean telling him she made some questionable and dangerous choices leading up to that?

I guess what I’m saying is Taylor and Danny both deserve better than Taylor lying about this.

My worst case scenario would be never walking again.  I didn’t have a power that would help too much on that front.

Tell that to mister Sha “wheelchair of bugs” Rks.

It would mean the end of my career as a cape, never having sex with a boy the natural way, and never going for another morning run.

“the natural way”

Taylor, the girl who thinks of almost everything, has clearly already considered her options here.

My arm hurt, and hanging from the manacle made that ten times as bad.  My back was the worst thing, a slow, steady, pain that terminated in my midsection.

Owwww.

It seemed to build in intensity every second I paid attention to it, settling into a dull blistering of pain when I focused my attention elsewhere.

Try not to think about elephants. Or the Game. Which both I and all of you readers just lost.

(By the way, it just occurred to me that the Game is a lot like inter-continental nuclear war. The only winning move is not to play.)

If I didn’t focus on keeping my breathing steady and deep, I found that I unconsciously held my breath to minimize the pain.  That only made it worse when I did have to breathe again, because it brought tightness in my throat and chest, along with agonizing coughing fits.

Ouch.

All of the adrenaline, emotions and endorphins that had been building since I first heard the sirens, maybe even before them – when I learned about Dinah Alcott – made for one hell of a rush.

Oh yeah, there’s been a lot going on over the last few hours.

More relevant to the present, it made for one hell of a mental wipeout as I came down from the rush.  A low point to equal the ‘high’.

So essentially, the cape life is… “intoxicating” enough to give Taylor a hangover.

The background noise of screams, shouted orders of doctors and nurses, a hundred heart monitors beeping out of sync and my ‘cell’ of three curtained ‘walls’ cutting me off from everything else?   Didn’t help.

Oof, yeah, that doesn’t exactly sound very conducive to getting over it.

Granted, I fortunately don’t have personal experience with this particular kind of mental wipeout, whether that means the wipeout following the high of fighting a monster that killed over fifty people over the course of a single chapter, or the alcohol-induced kind I just half-jokingly compared it to.

(Or do I have the former kind of experience…? You don’t know. For all you know, I could be a vigilante superhero billionaire.)