The words are out even before her expression changes; this careful slide toward sympathy for her other self, even as it pulls her back and inward without her body shifting on the arm of Dick's chair. Not being injured was not a thing she had wished on her other part because it wasn't a thought to exist in her own head. She took her life as it was, and then she demanded it be what she said it would. She was not broken. She was not beaten. She refused all such ideas. She had created the biggest ghost in the machine, which all the heroes in her world relied on, from it.
"I have a temporary neural implant." One that was experimental at best when it went in. With a shelf life of 'it won't last forever,' might fritz out, stop working at any second without warning--that she'd had to cut directly out of her body with her own hands more than once. No one needs to tell her what that's done to its viability and shelf-life either. "It bypasses the severed part of my spinal column that can't ever be fixed."
It takes so little effort to say the facts,
and so much to make it through the next two words. "For now."
"There are still whole strings of hours or days I need a wheelchair. It's only sheer luck it hasn't happened yet here." And it is only a yet. There's no question of if in her voice." It's still had touch and go days since arriving, but not insurmountable problems yet."
no subject
The words are out even before her expression changes; this careful slide toward sympathy for her other self, even as it pulls her back and inward without her body shifting on the arm of Dick's chair. Not being injured was not a thing she had wished on her other part because it wasn't a thought to exist in her own head. She took her life as it was, and then she demanded it be what she said it would. She was not broken. She was not beaten. She refused all such ideas. She had created the biggest ghost in the machine, which all the heroes in her world relied on, from it.
"I have a temporary neural implant." One that was experimental at best when it went in. With a shelf life of 'it won't last forever,' might fritz out, stop working at any second without warning--that she'd had to cut directly out of her body with her own hands more than once. No one needs to tell her what that's done to its viability and shelf-life either. "It bypasses the severed part of my spinal column that can't ever be fixed."
It takes so little effort to say the facts,
and so much to make it through the next two words. "For now."
"There are still whole strings of hours or days I need a wheelchair. It's only sheer luck it hasn't happened yet here." And it is only a yet. There's no question of if in her voice." It's still had touch and go days since arriving, but not insurmountable problems yet."