date posted: 2023-12-10
summary: The real first thing she remembers, lucidly, is coming to in a hospital bed, IV in her arm, a nasal cannula uncomfortably settled on her face, and the tight feeling of crusted, dry blood all over her face.
word count: 2,826 words
content warnings: seizures, addiction, a medical setting
notes: this one's kinda just me working through my feelings after having a seizure and winding up in the hospital again, all projected onto rose in different ways besides the seizure itself. turned out pretty heavy and whump-y. unedited.
apologies if anything about her addiction is insensitive or incorrect. this was mostly a means of working through my own thoughts and feelings but the addiction wound up being a major part of the story, and i didn't do much research for it. don't hesitate to tell me if anything's offensive or insensitive.
It's not that she remembers some last thing that solidified in her memory as the before - she remembers some of it. She blacked out, but she remembers some of it: being on her back on the floor, people in front of her, faces blurred, unknown. Rose still doesn't know who was treating her then. She hasn't bothered to ask - doesn't know if she wants to know, if it'd make it any more embarrassing, knowing who was there as it happened.
She remembers being turned on her side, but none of the convulsions. She remembers being brought to the med bay, somehow, carried or brought in on a stretcher, she doesn't know, and still doesn't want to know.
The real first thing she remembers, lucidly, is coming to in a hospital bed, IV in her arm, a nasal cannula uncomfortably settled on her face, and the tight feeling of crusted, dry blood all over her face.
She feels cold air on her face, the left side, and realizes her eyepatch is gone. Rose touches where her eye used to be, feels the sharp scar over it. She rests her hand there, lets her palm cover her eye, shielding it from the air. It's uncomfortably exposed. All of her is exposed right now - vulnerable. Despite her confusion, the clearest thing she recognizes, besides the discomfort, is the anger at being in this position - that she wound up here in the first place, even though she doesn't yet know why.
Her other hand, lying on the bed, tightens into a fist, so tight she feels her nails digging into her skin. Rose grits her teeth, feeling as if she's about to cry from the frustration alone, and it's pathetic, more than anything, how just confusion and frustration could reduce her to this, as she lays pitifully in a hospital bed, alone and cold, stripped to nothing but a checkered cotton gown.
Again, she's found herself reduced to the victim: passive, injured, out of control. Pathetic.
Eventually, she releases her fist, lets her hand relax on the bed, shaky from the strength of her own grip. She closes her eye and forces out a sigh, her chest shaking. She lets her head fall back against the pillow and stares at the dark, tiled ceiling high above her, dazed, staying passive. If she's already screwed, already stuck here again, she'll count her time until she's free again.
Penance, she thinks, for all the control she held for so long, until this point.
She hears a door click open, one far out of her range of sight, and waits until she hears the footsteps grow closer before she lifts her head up.
Cassie. Of course they chose Cassie.
"They didn't choose me for this, if you're thinking that." she immediately says. Fucking mindreader she is, Rose thinks. Cassie can add that to her set of powers now, the prissy bitch.
"Why am I here?" Rose says, stony. It comes out as more of a statement than a question.
"You had a seizure," Cassie says, now at her right, too close. "You hit the floor while talking to Kon."
Rose blinks, lets the words register in her brain. Cassie stares at her, frigid, but still with some amount of concern in her eyes. Rose would almost consider it pity.
Rose knows what caused it; there's no other potential cause. She's not stupid. Stress, chronic conditions, sudden illness, injury, it's not any of that.
The damned Epinephrine. She already knew how right the doctor in Angelsport was when he told her to lay off the inhalers, that she'd be dead. The hallucinations and the pulmonary edema were enough of a warning. But, even as she tossed her bag's supply out in that river, a final puff for the road, she still found herself sneaking into drug stores, tossing inhalers into her bag, shamefully.
She wonders how she even feels shame anymore, now, given how far she's fallen, down and into a hospital bed in Titans Tower. She didn't drop the habit even when she came back, started hitting on Superboy and pretending everything was fine, that she was fine and the Titans were fine and Eddie wasn't gone and Slade wasn't still out there, and now she's here.
Rose sighs again, harshly and almost painfully, with the cannula in her nose.
Rose scrunches her eyes shut, tight together and longer than a moment, then opens them, waits for her eyes to refocus, and she looks at Cassie. She needs to get out of her head before Cassie thinks she's even more of a basket case than she already does.
Cassie has her arms folded. The concern on her face is fake as ever, Rose is sure of it; she's not willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even from where she is. Especially from a hospital bed.
"Do you have an idea as to what caused it?" Cassie asks. "A chronic illness? Withdrawal?"
"It wasn't fucking withdrawal," Rose spits out instinctively.
"Then what was it?" Cassie shoots back, stern.
Rose squints, her cheeks rising with it, pressing her lips together. She looks down at her lap, stares blankly at the blue grid printed on the gown, sees some blood drops stained on it. She doesn't want to admit it.
Slade would call all of this pathetic, but Rose knows he'd be proud of her for sticking to her guns right now. She doesn't know if she should shudder at that sudden thought or lean into it.
She lowers her voice to a rough whisper: "I know."
"What caused it?" Cassie asks. Rose doesn't look up at her.
Rose grits her teeth and closes her eye tightly, again. She doesn't want to say it. She won't say it, admit it, not in front of Cassie, of all people.
She opens her eye, but keeps her gaze aimed at her lap. Absently, she realizes her fist is clenched again, so tight it's shaking. Lifting her head, slowly, she sees Cassie is staring at the floor, something strange on her face. Discomfort, Rose guesses.
Cassie abruptly shakes her head, lets her arms fall to the side. "This was a mistake," she says, and Rose detachedly watches her walk out of the room.
Some leader she is, Rose thinks. She knows Cassie well enough to know Cassie thinks the same of herself.
The room is still cold and dark, besides the few ceiling lights on above her and the reflections of the machine screens on the walls. It's too large, a reflection of the anxiety baked into being a Titan: the danger that comes with heroism, how any of them are an inch away from winding up on a stretcher en route to this room.
She brought herself miles closer to this room with the Epinephrine, and she has nobody to blame but herself for that.
She hears Slade in her ear, can almost feel his large hand gripping her shoulder, leaning in close, calling her a foolish little girl again.
Pathetically, she dozes off. With nothing to do but to stare at the screens monitoring her vitals, to hear the periodic beeping of the machines, the boredom has her out again.
Rose has always hated being unconscious - rather, lacking control. Sleep is a relief, often after a battle, but a dreaded one, where she has no control over herself. She's always been a light sleeper, the way her mother raised her, and where she grew up. A form of self defense.
Slade took that and fine tuned it into an edge that threatens to stab itself out of her chest at the slightest abnormality. She doesn't know (what does she know, anymore?) if she should be grateful for that particular training, but now, as she jolts awake in the bed from the distant sound of a knock on the door, she's at least thankful that she wasn't caught asleep so soon after being away from her mind.
Rose looks up and sees Cyborg approaching her. Great, a reprimand. Just what I needed, she thinks.
"With the IV in, we did a blood test," Cyborg tells her. "We wanted to be sure it wasn't an outside poisoning or infection afflicting you. We had to be sure, for everyone's safety."
Rose nods her head, shakily. She feels a phantom prick on her neck and has to force herself not to raise a hand to the spot.
Despite the exhaustion, there's something thrumming in her chest. Like a motorcycle unsteered, left running in circles, carving out the ground underneath, until it loses steam.
Cyborg's face is stern, as he looks at her, but not harsh.
"Your blood pressure was through the roof. We found high concentrations of epinephrine in your blood, too," he says, looking down briefly. "You overdosed, as far as we can tell."
Rose knows all this, already. He probably knows that she's already aware. Twisting the knife, no matter how unintentional.
Her voice comes out as a rasp. "I know," she says, low. She can't bring herself to look him in the eye for that, instead traces the grid lines on her gown.
The silence stretches between them for an uncomfortable moment. Rose feels as though she's being judged, no matter how Cyborg might actually feel. She doesn't think she cares. Either way, the truth hangs in the air between them.
She breaks the silence, her voice still shamefully low. "I knew what I was doing. I had an incident like this before, and I took care of it," she says.
"What incident was this?"
"None of your business," she says, faster than a gunshot. Cyborg sighs.
"I need to know the details to know how to help you."
"I don't want your help. I don't need anyone's help here."
She immediately realizes what he's going to say before he verbalizes it.
"Then you can't be here," he says, serious as ever.
Rose feels the silence in her gut as it slams back in, its presence in the air tense and bitter.
He's right, she knows. Realistically, she has little right to even be here in this bed, in Titans Tower. She knew returning was a mistake; that she should've listened to her gut and stayed out on her own, after Will and the girls and all of Angelsport.
But, just as realistically, she's here right now. And she's trapped. No matter what she does, another disappearing act or remaining here, she'd be forced to confront this somehow.
Abruptly, before she can think about it, she asks if they, if anyone, went through her stuff. She thinks about the bags in her room, in the closet and at the far corner of the mattress, one under the nightstand. Each bag held few inhalers, but they were still there. The thought of anyone discovering them almost makes her see red.
Without a doubt, her room was searched. They had to make sure they weren't bugged, that she wasn't infected with anything, at risk in any way. She hopes they didn't inspect too far, that they respected her privacy even a little, despite her being distant enough from them that privacy was easier to disregard.
She bites her tongue, blanks her mind. She's not stupid, but she's rational. The Titans wouldn't breach her privacy out of respect, but they would if they thought she was in danger. She knows how they work.
The thought of the Titans worrying about her, Cassie flashing in her mind, unavoidably, pushes her close to fury. She deals with her own shit.
But she's rational, and was with them long enough to understand them, just a little. They look out for their own, as much as she doesn't consider herself a part of that.
Cyborg nods his head, a slow gesture. For someone she doesn't know well, he knows her thought process well, given how he doesn't immediately respond, or even verbalize it. If she was feeling uncharitable, she'd think they sent Miss Martian in a disguised form to search her mind for any sense of betrayal.
She thinks about Bombshell pointing a finger at her on that empty field, how her stomach dropped in that moment, stupidly. The immediate realization that she attached herself to them so much, while still untrusted.
Slade still holds enough of a presence in her mind to reprimand her for getting so involved. She thinks about wrapping her hands around his neck and squeezing so hard that her hands shatter from the sheer tightness of her grip.
Cyborg cuts through the silence, forcing her out of her head. He confirms her thoughts: "We had to ensure your safety. It was uncomfortable for all of us." Excuses, excuses. "Kid Flash found a bag of epinephrine inhalers, and Beast Boy found another."
"You can use their real names, I'm not stupid," she says without thinking. Cyborg sighs again. Disappointment.
"Point is, you overdosed. And you need help. I don't know how else to put that."
"You don't need to put it any other way," she tells him, with barely concealed rage.
She feels bad, partially, that she's directing her rage at someone trying to help her. At the same time, they went through her stuff. No matter that they were trying to help her, all she sees in her mind is that finger pointed at her, Bombshell's grating voice gutting her as she called her the real traitor among them, after all the time she spent gallivanting around the world with them to find Raven, and subsequently the true traitor.
Rose has never taken kindly to being violated. Another one for the list, she thinks.
She's reminded of how much Slade took from her, how deeply he infested every part of her, only allowed her the lives she took and nothing else, not even her own mind. It was all his; she was all his. She can't help but feel in the same position now, from this hospital bed, a needle in her arm and everything.
Cyborg doesn't respond to her immediately - he lets the silence hang, like a phone off the hook, dissonant and obvious.
Sooner or later, Rose not bothering to count the seconds or anything stupid like that, he responds.
"We concluded you had a seizure as a side effect of the epinephrine. That you've probably been experiencing side effects already."
Who's 'we'?, she wants to say, but she's not stupid, she knows he means the Titans, even if not all of them. Enough of them to further curdle the shame residing in her gut, festering and growing.
She doesn't respond. Her fate is already sealed.
"Do you want to tell me what side effects you've had, if any?" he asks her.
"It's not your business."
"It became my business when you had a seizure under my care," he says.
Rose squeezes her eye shut again, unwilling to fess up, foolishly. She'll ultimately have to admit to it, confront it like she tried before at that dock, but then she'll have to confront, out loud, that she fell back into it. Purposefully.
Her pride almost stops her from responding, but she forces herself, because, as unbearable as confessing anything would be, the silence is far more torturing.
With her eye still shut, she talks: "I had hallucinations, while I was away from the Titans." Her voice is pitifully quiet.
"Anything else?" Cyborg pushes.
Rage threatens to overwhelm her again, but she forces it down.
"A pulmonary edema. A doctor saw me and said I'd be dead if I didn't stop."
Cyborg nods. A draft blows through the room and she's reminded of the crusted blood on her face.
"How did I get this? The blood."
"Nosebleed from falling."
She looks down at her lap again. "What about the gown? Customary?"
She glances at him, accidentally makes eye contact with him. She looks away just as fast.
"You vomited all over yourself when you stopped seizing. It was either the fall or, now that we know, a side effect of the epinephrine," he says.
She never vomited from the epinephrine, but she knows it was a possibility, from the doctor in Angelsport.
Rose doesn't know if it's worse that it could've come from the epinephrine instead of the fall. Either way is embarrassing. The shame churns in her stomach.
Cyborg, graciously, decides to leave her alone: "We'll check on you in the next half hour. Yell if you need help, we'll hear it."
"I'll always know where you are. No matter where you go," a voice rasps in her ear, concentrated and all-knowing. She's turned her back, bag on her shoulder, about to walk out the door for good.
No matter what she does, no matter how assertive she is, he always has her by the strings.
Something wrenches up inside of her and twists until she's all gnarled and even more rotted than she was already. She doesn't notice Cyborg's gone until he's already left.