Welcome to the final chapter! If anyone thought this was going to be a happy chapter, though... well, trigger/spoiler warning for offscreen torture and death, mentions of malnutrition, PTSD, and internalized ableism.

The walk to the hospital felt so very long.

The walk to the hospital was two agonizing blocks and one alley they had taken because Claire had taken one look at the mass of people and –

She didn't remember what she did, but she remembered Jim and Toby trying to calm her down, telling her that she didn't have to interact with a lot of people yet, that they knew a shortcut.

What had she been thinking? That once she got out of the Shadow Realm, her anxiety would suddenly go down to zero?

The entire way to the hospital, Claire had been on the edge of a panic attack and she didn't know why. She was safe now. She had saved Enrique. Her friends were still alive. Jim was alive. She had escaped. A mob of people doing last-minute Christmas shopping – because she had been there for six months – wouldn't be able to hurt her in a meaningful way, so why was she so scared?

Was it because everything was so loud? She was used to sounds only happening because she made them happen, but she had been always listening to make sure Morgana wasn't coming back to torture her.

Claire was thankful for the diversion from the crowd. Her knees, ankles, and hips were not thankful for the supposed "shortcut." She had tried to keep up an exercise regimen, but it was hard to keep to a schedule when the passage of time was a nebulous concept. The amount of weight she had lost didn't help, either.

Jim didn't let go of her hand. Toby only let go of Claire's hand when he needed to readjust Enrique. It was better for him to hold her brother; there were sharp edges on his armor. He was less of a hazard.

The waiting room for the clinic was empty. There was a clock reading 3:46, and it ticked, because time was meaningful on Earth. The receptionist looked up and immediately reached for their pager. "Doctor Lake? Your son and his friends are here."

Barbara must have been close, because not a minute later – Claire kept the clock in her vision – she came barreling down the corridor.

First Barbara's eyes landed on Toby, and she looked relieved to see Enrique, alive and mostly well, aside from the cut on his hand. Then her eyes passed over Claire in favor of Jim; Barbara had a look of frustrated concern upon seeing Jim's burns. It was as if burns from the sunlight was a too-common occurrence. Then, finally, Barbara noticed the figure standing between the two boys.

She looked like she had seen a ghost. Claire didn't fault her for that; just because she was opaque didn't mean the girl who had jumped through the portal hadn't died six months ago.

Barbara recovered quickly. "Toby, take Enrique to the pediatric ward. Jim, I'm sure you know where the burn treatment center is."

Toby ripped his hand from Claire's with an apologetic look. "I'll call your parents, tell them that you and Enrique are here," he said over his shoulder as he walked away.

Jim began to move away from her, too, and in panic – chains, Blinky, torn, snapped – Claire used her other hand to hold onto his. Immediately she felt guilty, but she did not let go.

"Hey, Mom? Is it okay if I stay with Claire for a bit?" he asked, giving her a comforting smile. Or at least, it was supposed to be one. Claire took no comfort in the situation, no matter what changed.

"Five minutes, maximum, and then you're getting those burns looked at."

They walked to an empty patient examination room. Claire couldn't remember if this was the same one where Barbara had proclaimed that Claire's illness from the portal was due to stress. She hoped that Barbara had gotten better with identifying the symptoms of dark magic.

There was a scale and a blood pressure cuff in the room. Claire felt her eyes widen; she didn't want anyone to see her. She didn't want anyone to see how much she had been warped.

"Can you take off your armor?" Barbara asked. Claire's joints ached even when her armor braced them; if she wanted them to heal, she would have to let a doctor see them. Barbara had accepted when her son had become a troll, so she was the best bet for not casting Claire away in horror.

Claire braced herself against the wall with one hand. With the other, she closed her fingers around the crystal in the center of her breastplate and pulled it out. Her armor glowed and was pulled in like a star into a glowing black hole. Her porcelain-white hair floated around her head for the briefest of moments as she placed the crystal in her pocket, carefully wedged so that she could don her armor again in a half-moment's notice.

Someone inhaled sharply. Shock, probably, from seeing the way cracks crawled their way up and down her arms, with a concentrated group around her wrists and elbows. From seeing the irregular choker of cracks around her neck, a scar from when her neck had snapped when she had first become trapped; a brand that said no matter how many times Claire died, Morgana would resurrect her again just to make sure the agony never ended.

She was thankful that she woke up cold, and wore sweats, socks, and a t-shirt instead of the tank top and shorts she had gone to bed in. She wished she could be wearing a long-sleeved turtleneck, and a hood, and gloves, and maybe a glamour mask while she was at it.

Taking off her armor was a mistake. Not only was she shaking, but they knew, now. They knew that she was not the Claire they knew anymore; she was broken, and her body was just a bunch of brutally glued together pieces. She was very tempted to take out her hairclips and hide behind her hair like she did as a child.

"Hey, Claire?" Jim asked. "Why are you wearing my clothes?"

"What?"

"I mean, you wore your Papa Skull shirt when… on that day, when you and Toby were putting on your armor." His face fell, but then he grinned. "Why are you now wearing gym clothes?"

She couldn't help the laughter that caused her to nearly double over. "You, you aren't even funny," she said when she was able to catch her breath. How long had it been since she had laughed like that? How long had it been since she had last smiled?

Barbara pushed her glasses up slightly to pinch her brow, despite her shoulders shaking slightly from laughter. She and Jim then helped Claire to the scale.

Concern flashed across Jim and Barbara's faces as they saw just how little Claire weighed. Claire didn't think her weight was that bad; it was harder to see her ribs than when she had first escaped Morgana.

She had to be helped to the bed, too, because her arms and legs ached, and she didn't want to risk triggering a panic attack by levitating herself. Claire pressed her lips together and tried not to think about the way the blood pressure cuff squeezed her arm.

"Hey, I don't know if I told you this, but that was pretty cool, what you did with the chains," Jim said. He was trying to distract her. She appreciated it, because logically she suspected that no one wanted to attack her in this hospital despite her anxiety telling her to be vigilant.

"Thanks," she said, the energy from her laughter gone. She glanced at the blood pressure monitor and realized that she had no idea what 130/78 meant, though she was pretty sure usually the top number was lower.

"Claire, I'm going to ask you some questions. Jim, go get your burns treated," Barbara said as she removed the blood pressure cuff.

"Yes, Mom," he said, reluctantly. "See you in, like, twenty minutes, Claire."

Claire waved and winced at the strain.

"The places where the cracks are," Barbara said. "Do they hurt?"

"Sometimes," Claire said. Her eyes darted about, looking for a clock. Twenty minutes. One thousand, two hundred seconds. Without a clock, it meant nothing to her. She didn't hear a ticking noise.

"Have you… were any of your bones broken?" Barbara asked, and her voice was awkwardly stiff, like she was trying to stick to a procedure. A list of questions to ask a former POW, or something.

Claire nodded. "They… they got healed, though."

"Okay," Barbara said, writing it down. "Can you say how long ago that was?"

"No." Claire found the clock. It read 2:10. A large post-it note was on top of it, and it read "REMINDER: FIX!"

"Do you think they're the reason why you have difficulty walking?"

"Uh… no, it was… it was… I'm sorry." Chained, pulled, snapped, slammed –

Claire gnawed at her lip. She was supposed to be okay here. "I can't remember which, which method of torture made my joints bad."

"It's okay, it shouldn't affect the treatment," Barbara soothed; she pulled her stethoscope from where it hung around her neck. "I'm going to check your heartbeat and breathing." She pulled Claire's shirt up from her back. Barbara's gasp would be inaudible for anyone who wasn't hypersensitive to every sound.

The feeling of the cool metal circle against the crisscrossed scars and cracks was an odd one, but Claire tried to keep her breathing steady.

"Well, the good news is that your heartbeat and breathing are normal," Barbara said. She smiled, and Claire tried to mirror it. Her own felt like an ugly, broken mess.

"When was the last time you ate?" Barbara asked.

Claire shrugged. "I… I don't know, I guess in the last day?" As if on cue, her stomach growled. "Yeah, last day, since my body is still acting human." She had come to notice that if she didn't eat for a long enough period of time, her magic would switch on to keep her alive. She always felt more tired than usual when that happened, though. Maybe more depressed and anxious, too.

"When was your last period?" Barbara asked.

"Um, like, a week or two before the Eternal Night?" Claire said. "I… I think between the, the torture and the forgetting to eat it just… stopped."

Barbara pulled out a small flashlight, and then put it back into her lab coat. Since she then began to gently feel around Claire's head, Barbara must have realized that Claire didn't have pupils anymore.

"I'm going to start an IV," Barbara said. "Will you be okay for that?"

Piercing, claws, heart, ripped –

"I should be," Claire said, blinking away the flashes of memory. "Will you be able to find a vein?"

"Your veins shouldn't be harder to find than Jim's," Barbara said, feeling around Claire's elbow. "Make a fist?"

Claire looked away but complied.

"Your parents are going to be so happy to see that you're alive."

Would they be, when they saw?

Pain, piercing, claws, gold –

"Are you cold? I can go get a blanket," Barbara said. Claire realized she was trembling, and that there was an IV drip connected to her arm.

"I, I'll be fine."

"Do you have a lot of flashbacks from what happened to you, in the Shadow Realm?"

"Y-yeah."

"You're safe here," Barbara said, looking Claire in the eyes. "And even if anyone were to come after you, I keep an enchanted knife on me these days."

And Claire had her armor, and her magic, and maybe she could fight well enough. She was exhausted, though.

"I'm going to get you something to eat," Barbara said. Claire realized she must have frowned or did something wrong because Barbara rolled her eyes. "Don't worry, it's hospital food, not my cooking. The bread shouldn't upset your stomach."

Claire was pretty sure she had eaten a jalapeño or two while in the Shadow Realm, but bread was fine. Barbara left the room. Claire was alone, again.

There was noise, though. A lot of noise. Had Earth always been so loud?

Enough time passed for Claire to count forty of the white parts of the triangles in the ground, with the couple times she had restarted twice because she had lost focus because a noise outside had startled her.

Claire heard three sets of footsteps as well as Barbara's voice.

"She shows some signs of malnourishment, and I'm going to want to run x-rays on her later, to see how well her broken bones healed, and also maybe find a cause to her bad joints," Barbara said in a hushed tone. The footsteps stopped outside the door. "And, please don't take this as a formal diagnosis because I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I think she might have PTSD. She's really spooked, and she says she often has flashbacks to her trauma."

The door opened.

Barbara held a small tray of food, but despite her hunger she wasn't the person Claire focused on.

Claire's parents looked ecstatic, and then bewildered. And why wouldn't they be? They were expecting their daughter, not a girl covered in black cracks with white hair and black-and-purple eyes.

Claire couldn't bring herself to put on her armor, even though surely that would make her parents realize who she was.

"Claire?" her mom asked in a shaking voice. Her mom's voice never shook. Her dad looked like he was about to cry but was holding himself together for the sake of her mom and Enrique. Enrique, whose hand had been bandaged from where the sorcerer had cut him.

Claire couldn't bring herself to speak. Couldn't speak, not really, not with the panic settling in. The muscles in her jaw and neck kept twitching as the left side of her mouth kept trying to move downwards. It wasn't a frown her face was trying to form, it was a raw expression of pain she knew too well.

She missed them so much, but surely they would leave, now that they knew the truth about her.

Claire gave a slow nod, and that was enough permission for her family to suddenly be close and hugging her.

Suffocated, restrained – no. Claire forced herself to breathe deeply.

She had survived the Shadow Realm.

She was safe. She was home.

She hugged her parents back and began to weep.

She might even get to live.

Huge thank you to everyone who left reviews, especially Forever-Furuba.