Chapter Text
Gina’s last memories are of pure terror; of the floor going out from under her, of trying to reach Gretchen, of tumbling through the window and out over the street below. She can still imagine hanging there, held in the desperate grip of that struggling hero while Gretchen screamed for her and the building crumbled. And she can still feel the horrible lurch in her stomach as it all gave way, the rush of air and the explosion of pain on the unforgiving ground below.
In that darkened tomb of concrete, lost in a fever-mist of shock and pain and terror for her daughter, everything fades. She feels herself going numb, falling into deeper darkness. And for one, brief, awful moment, she knows she isn’t going to wake up.
But she does. By some miracle she’s one of the lucky ones; her eyes open to the blinding white of hospital lights, to grim-faced doctors and sterile sheets. Her whole body is wrapped in casts and bandages, numbed by a cocktail of drugs pumped into her through a tube, and she nearly throws up at the sight of the stump where her right arm used to be, just below the shoulder.
The medics explain her situation apologetically. Her arm was already severed by the fall, they say, her lower body shattered and her vitals barely clinging to life. Apparently that boy, Invincible, did just about save her; his flight slowed the fall, and the worst of the rubble broke over him. But she still has a long road to recovery ahead; she will walk again, they say, but it will take time.
But she doesn’t care about any of that. All she can ask about is Gretchen; deep down she knows the margin of her survival was razor thin, and her daughter’s even thinner. But still she pleads with them to tell her that her daughter’s okay, that her baby girl didn’t perish in that terrible place, and they shuffle and cough and glance aside and for a moment she’s convinced her child is gone.
But no, oh no, her baby is alive; she’s in another ward, on a ventilator and more drugs than her mother, pulled from the rubble in a similar state to Gina. But the doctors don’t know if she’ll wake up, or stay trapped on that darkened brink forever, and even if she does, they have no idea how much of her mind will be left.
The next three months are rough. Gina works through her injuries one at a time; weeks of physical therapy go by in a blur, as she learns to walk again on quavering legs and use her non-dominant arm. There are times when she forgets the other is gone, when she reaches out instinctively with a limb that isn’t there. There are times when she can feel it, too, times when it hurts like it’s just been torn off all over again, but then, the rest of her body is no stranger to phantom pains either.
The GDA pays for her treatment, and Gretchen’s too. The city rehouses her, and everyone else who lost their homes on that awful day. They try and put her on the third floor of a housing block downtown, but the mere thought of living up there sets her heart racing and her mind spiralling back to the collapse; she pleads with them down the phone line until they move her to the ground floor.
Still, she doesn’t sleep well. Pains come and go in the night, and her worries always seem worse, and when she closes her eyes all she can see is Gretchen’s terrified face or the street looming below. The waiting list for counselling is months long; she joins it, but she doesn’t expect much.
One awful night, morbid curiosity gets the better of her. She manages to find footage of the disaster, hunched over her laptop at two in the morning with her good arm shaking, on a sketchy website extolling the dangers of superpowered beings. Her heart stutters in her chest as she browses the videos, but she can’t click away.
The worst footage is CCTV from the subway, a whole train eviscerated in a moment, but that’s not the one that really gets to her. It’s a cellphone clip that does, someone’s shaky recording of her apartment crashing down into the street. The hero who tried to save her stumbles, shell-shocked, from the wreckage, and something dark and limp hangs shadowed from his hand.
He just stares helplessly at it for a moment, and that’s when she finally recognises it; he’s still holding her arm, severed by crushing rubble. She barely makes it to the bathroom before bile surges up her throat, and she doesn’t go looking again. Still, her nights are marred by worse visions and cold sweat for weeks.
She visits Gretchen every day. It breaks her heart to see her baby like that, trapped in a tangle of wires and mothered by uncaring machines, but what can she do? She wants more than anything to reach out, to wrap her one remaining arm around her baby and hold her close and tell her everything’s okay, mommy’s here, and she will be if when you wake up. But the staff won’t let her, and as much as it hurts, she understands why.
Instead she sits at that cold bedside, and she talks. She tells Gretchen about her days, about how mommy’s getting better and how she’s coping. She tells stories, too; her daughter always preferred ones about heroes, but Gina can’t bring herself to tell those anymore, so she makes new ones up about knights and adventurers and magic.
And on some days, when it all gets too much, she just apologises. Because she couldn’t save Gretchen, because she’s awake while her daughter isn’t, and because she can’t help feeling like that’s somehow her fault. She repeats those words until she’s hoarse, never knowing if her daughter can hear her.
But slowly, glacially, Gretchen’s condition improves. After two months she’s taken off the ventilator, able to breathe on her own, and Gina dares hope that her baby girl might be okay. She lingers at the bedside longer and longer, listening to the steady shift of her child’s breathing and the constant hum of the heart monitor, and she holds out hope.
She’s about to leave when Gretchen finally stirs. She wants to rush back over to the bedside, to be there, but the nurse on duty orders her to wait and summons a doctor. She arrives as the girl’s eyes flutter open, a clipboard in her hands and tired concern in her eyes, and Gina can only watch as she asks gentle questions.
They’re basic things: how she feels and what she remembers, can she count and can she hear and how many fingers are held up. And in a shaky voice that one part of Gina was sure she would never hear again, Gretchen answers. She’s still there, shaken and hurt and afraid but alive and whole, and as the questions draw to a close, she desperately asks if her mommy is okay.
Gina can’t stop herself then. She sweeps across the room, past the nurse and the doctor. She lands at the bedside, and reaches out with her one good arm. She pulls her daughter in close, wrapping her one arm around the girl so tightly that she’s scared she might crush her, and in her grip Gretchen bursts into ugly, desperate sobs.
“Shhhh,” her mother soothes, “it’s okay, baby girl, mommy’s here.” And she cries too; cries because months of worry are over, because despite the chronic pain and the missing arm and the glass-cut scars on her cheek, it’s still her, and her baby is coming home.
Gretchen’s recovery is another long road. The fall is still fresh for her, and she wakes screaming most nights, but Gina always soothes her fears and quiets her apologies and holds her close, because she knows how it feels and deep down she’s still afraid too.
Admitting how long it’s been is hard; Gretchen breaks down sobbing again when it finally comes out that she’s been asleep for so many months, apologies for being gone so long spilling out in a torrent.
“It’s not your fault,” Gina finds herself repeating. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.” But she knows it will take a long time for Gretchen to fully believe her.
She has her own physical therapy to face, too; the doctors have done their absolute best, but the fall was a long one and inertia knows no mercy. She shares her mother’s lingering pains, and her muscles have atrophied after three months in a coma. She will walk with a limp for the rest of her life, one leg nearly shattered beyond repair.
She’s quieter than she was before, too; she’s withdrawn, and self-conscious about the limp and the scarring, and she jumps at noises and shadows that never would have scared her before. But she’s still Gina’s baby, still the girl she loves so much, and it breaks her mother’s heart to see what fear and pain has done to her.
She turns away from heroes, too; she doesn’t want anything to do with that world anymore, with the realities of superpowered beings and fights and the disasters they cause. So Gina tells her the bedtime stories she made up while her daughter was unconscious, the ones she told at her hospital bedside in the vain hope she might hear. And slowly but surely, they put their life back together.