The Reader and the Ink I COMPLETE I ??

The Pain of a Thousand Pages

The ride to the hospital was loud and sterile. Lights flashing through her blurred vision. She heard snippets of conversation, numbers, codes. Her mind tried to pull meaning from them, as if it were reading another page.

She thought about a story she read when she was twelve. A girl with eyes made of stars, cursed to see everyone's truth. She remembered crying so hard her ribs hurt. She thought, that was the first time I broke.

The breaks never healed. They just layered.

There was a boy once—in a romance novel she read in spring. His smile haunted her. Not because it was beautiful, but because he died loving someone who didn't love him back. It reminded her of herself. Always loving. Always alone.

The ambulance turned. The wheels shifted. Her fingers curled against the gurney.

She wondered what would happen if she died. Would the stories leave her then? Would they unravel, page by page, until she was just a girl again?

Or would they bury her with them?

She hoped, for once, to be alone in her own ending.

The hospital doors slid open.

She couldn't hear anything anymore. Not the sirens. Not the voices.

Only stories.

Always stories.

And in every one, she died a little more.

~~~

The beeping was back.

It was always the first thing she noticed when waking up in a hospital—that steady, patronizing rhythm of a machine that said: You're still here.

Her eyes blinked open to a sterile white ceiling, harsh fluorescent lights burning spots into her vision. Her throat ached with dryness, her body numb but heavy. She didn't move. Didn't need to. She knew where she was.

Alive.

Unfortunately.

She turned her head slowly, dragging her gaze across the hospital room. Machines beeped, IVs dripped, a small tray of untouched food sat on a rolling table to her right. The curtain was drawn halfway. There was no one else in the room.

Good.

Because she didn't want to explain. She didn't want to look anyone in the eyes and try to describe the unbearable weight of it all.

The Itch had already begun. Crawling along the inside of her skin, wrapping around her ribs like barbed wire, pressing into her lungs with each breath. A need. A thirst. An obsession.

To feel.

To read.

To consume.

She hadn't even been awake for ten minutes and already her fingers twitched with the phantom sensation of paper, of screens, of words searing themselves into her veins.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

"Please," she whispered to no one. "Please just let me go. Just let me fade away."

But no one ever listened. Not to a Reader.

Readers were broken from the start. Born with souls too soft, too raw, too porous. Every story they read, every emotion another character felt—they felt it. Really felt it. Their bodies processed it like it was their own: heartbreaks, wars, betrayals, deaths, endless longing.

Every fantasy was a battlefield. Every romance a slow death. Every tragedy a personal apocalypse.

And the worst part?