I had been staring at the white ceiling for a long time now.
I wasn't sure exactly how long, somewhere between a few hours or maybe forever, and I hadn't moved or spoken or done much of anything except breathe and stare and let the dull, constant throbbing from my arm stump and the place where my leg used to be and the stab in the side of my stomach and the cold, itching wrongness of the curse in my eye wash over me in slow, overlapping waves.
It didn't feel like battle damage anymore.
It felt like the deep ache of wounds that had been cleaned and bandaged and treated and were now in the long, grinding process of being endured rather than addressed, which is a very different kind of pain than the sharp, immediate kind.
And in some ways, they were considerably harder to deal with because there's nothing you can do about it except lie there and wait and think about things you'd rather not think about.
