Narrative: Sharon Carter - Stark Tower Who: Sharon Carter What: Narrative - Waking up from the haze Where: Her temporary room at Stark Tower When: Earlier today while I was at Disneyland meeting Thor. Warnings: None really that I can think of.
Sharon had woken up a few hours previous, groggy and being attended to by actual medical personnel calling her name, and rubbing her arms and legs firmly but gently, getting blood moving through her limbs as best they could while trying to rouse her.
Sharon, Sharon can you hear me?
She remembered her eyes opening and immediately closing again even as her heavy head had lolled to one side then the other. They'd asked her question after question, easy ones - could she hear them, was she in any pain, was she feeling nauseous - over and over again until she'd been able to answer, appropriate drugs were given via an IV she knew she couldn't have gotten herself.
Her eyes had darted around the room that she now recognized, and her first thought - beyond answering yes to every question they asked - had been that it must have been over. Somehow it had ended and she had survived it. It took a while for her to figure out what "it" was. She slowly came to her eyes staying open longer as nurses and doctors moved around her quickly and the strange taste of antiseptic in her mouth and the smell of iodine cleaning scratches and cuts she'd given herself or acquired in misguided and delusional escape attempts and running for her life.
She remembered the need to escape, she remembered why she was running, and as things became more and more clear and doctors explained more and more about what had happened to her and how she did her best to piece it together.
At first it had been a useless endeavor as drugs were injected and others wore off. They got her up and walking around, they made her rest and drink sips of water and thick chalky beverages followed up with spoonfuls of ice chips. They had her hooked up to IV fluids for a good long while, until even she had to admit she was starting to feel less like she'd been run over by a semi-truck and instead perhaps just rammed into the broadside of a barn.
She hadn't reached out to anyone as of yet, once she was almost alert she'd checked the journals for updates - checked her SHIELD feeds as best she could knowing the last thing she needed to do was start accessing SHIELD files from Stark Tower. She was already coming up with excuse after excuse as to why she'd been forcibly removed from SHIELD quarantine by Captain America - but she was much less worried about that. That was easy. Accessing SHIELD systems from Stark Tower? Worst idea. For now.
But she did what she could, caught up with what she could. She stayed in bed, back against the wall, knees propped up as she read and learned and closed her eyes and tried to breathe when she read the estimated number of deceased. Her stomach hurt, her heart ached - she didn't think herself so important that if she hadn't gotten sick it would have been better - but she did find herself wishing she'd been able to stay around longer to try.
The doctors and nurses had left her alone for the past hour, which meant they'd be coming back anytime to check on her. She didn't feel great, but she didn't feel like she was dying. And she no longer lived in an unending Hydra fueled delusion. Her heart beat faster just thinking about it. While she couldn't remember every detail, or even any real detail - she remembered enough. She'd lived it once already, and while she knew that it had been awful she had a feeling that anything her mind added to it wouldn't make it fluffier. She worried about what it would do to her actual mental state - the memories flooding back the way they used to when it had first happened. Like she was living it every time she closed her eyes.
She wondered, as she sat on her bed with her feet wrapped in the blanket provided toes curling and flexing as she tried to breathe, if she was ever going to be free of it. Her thoughts went to Steve - the memories of the moments right before she'd started with the symptoms. He'd looked after her - there'd been no doubt in her mind that he would, but she didn't always like needing to be looked after. But she knew she'd have died alone and scared in a SHIELD medical wing somewhere that no one had access to if he hadn't. She was grateful, but concerned. Her thoughts drifted so far down the rabbit hole she almost didn't notice that she hadn't been reading for a full twenty minutes, her eyes just staring at the same sentence over and over again as she tried to make any kind of sense out of what happened. And more worrisome was any impact it would have on her future. The machine next to her, that connected her to the various bags of fluid, started beeping and almost immediately a nurse came in and - for the hundredth time - checked her vital signs and pushed a seemingly random series of buttons on the IV machine.
Once alone again Sharon decided she needed to be at home, she didn't know if she was ever going to feel normal again but she wanted to get back to something normal. And right now that was home. And Steve. No matter how dangerous that was for anyone, or anything, there was no real point in pretending like he wasn't a welcome source of comfort. It worried her, and scared her, but that was nothing new. That she could handle. It was ... Absolutely everything else that confused the hell out of the tall blonde woman who was now just biding her time until the nurse left the room satisfied that she had annoyed Sharon sufficiently.
Left alone with her thoughts once again, Sharon started reaching out - slowly - to check in with everyone.