Get Comfy

Amira doesn’t like curtains or enclosed spaces.

Words: 438
Genre: I dunno
Rating: teen/mature?
Warnings: broken bones, claustrophobia, panic attack

It wasn’t the small space Amira minded, it was the damned curtains everywhere.

“They’re for privacy” the workers had explained when she first arrived, clutching her shattered arm to her chest. But didn’t everyone already know that privacy was a lost cause here? The smells of shit and vomit didn’t care about a few strips of fabric, and nor did the screams of the soon-to-be-dead.

And those workers, had placed her in the middle of the compound - no sightlines, no exits. The cot was too low to stand on and try to see over the curtains.

“It’s safe here.” the workers had explained. But she had seen the tension between the less-broken patients. The way they held the tension in their bodies, had tracked each others movements - hers too - and how they angled themselves into easy reaching distance of heavier objects.

Amira knew full well that anyone could barrel through the curtains separating off her “room” at any time. From any direction. And while there was a little she could do with the woven food tray, she’d still be fucked.

She’d walk out if it wasn’t against direct orders and doing so would involve her not unlikely aggressive arrest. On the bright side, it meant that no one was going to attack her. Probably a lie.

She’d named all of the round objects in the space, then the white ones, then the ones that had come from natural means. She’d counted backward from 200 by sevens. She’d completed forty rounds of her inhale-pause-exhale-pause pattern.

She was out of ways to ignore the tension growing in her arms and legs, the pain in her chest, the way her breath was coming in shallower.

The doors somewhere at the front of the compound swung open loudly - Amira started.

Pain screeched up her arm, and she hissed.

It wouldn’t be a problem if she could just see the damned exits for fuck’s sake. But no. This is how it was going to be.

She let out a short, cynical laugh - the kind of angry amusement that only rose up when things were screwed and utterly out of her control.

Amira was like this a lot she realized. Not that it made a kind of difference. If it could keep her alive, she’d take it.

Now she just had to wait it out, the pain in her arm, the racing heart, the brain the kept fucking her over and keeping her not dead yet in that vicious cycle.

Amira shook her head. This wasn’t going to go away for at least the next few hours, so she might as well get comfy.