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She used to be strong. Well, maybe "strong" isn't the best word; maybe she was more stubborn. But now, to look at her, you'd think she had been close to a point of death for most of her short life. At eighteen, Anne looked like a half-crazed specter, haunting the recesses of a rehabilitative hospital, her long, dark hair framing her face and making the rings under her eyes seem much deeper in contrast to her extremely pale skin.
No one knew what exactly was wrong, or why she didn't get better. Everything those white-coated doctors gave her seemed to have some slightly-lethal adverse side effect. The pain inside her was so great that it left Anne reeling for days, and most often huddled away in some back corner, fearing the hand that somehow managed to keep her alive after all those rocky episodes. Despite all their competence, the professionals could not stall this disease from eating her up, taking all her comprehensive ability and energy with every turn.
Only the doctors knew how long Anne had been like this. Her family felt like it had been forever, and soon it became too traumatizing for both themselves and the sick girl to visit her everyday. Anne could barely push words past her dry lips, to say nothing of understanding what utterances of support her family could muster. Soon she found herself left alone in the long halls of the large hospital, always cold and lacking everything that kept her mentally secured to this life. She couldn't be monitored every moment of the day, leaving the opportunity for Anne to wander aimlessly through the numerous identical passages, losing herself and not being able to find her way back to her room. Most often it was the nurses left to deal with a sobbing and shivering Anne, who sometimes became so delirious that she became physically sick all over herself. The nurses soon took it on as routine, and watched out for this little creature, trying to steer her back to her room the best they could.
It only took numerous complaints from the nurses to make Anne's doctors realize that it might be better for her if she was transferred somewhere where she could receive solitary attention, instead of leaving her to the hands of a busy hospital staff who were getting more and more frustrated with every passing day, every passing episode. The move was arranged with familial consent and Anne was taken to a remote place in the middle of the countryside.
The place was like every countryside, lush and open and green, but to Anne's dark eyes, it might as well have been the hospital; she was so far gone that the sights could not move her, and her new caretaker believed nothing registered in Anne's mind.
Daniel Epson was a hard working man, always up to a challenge. In some places, Dan was the equivalent of St Jude as the patron saint of lost causes. At this point, Anne had become a definite lost cause, and even Dan thought she might not make it. Never the less, he swore to put his all into making her life more comfortable, if he could not rise as high as to alleviate all her pain.
The first few days were more rocky than even the roughest at the hospital, but that may have been due to Dan's lack of experience in dealing with Anne. She could be like the walking dead, and on somedays, it was hard to get her up and about. On slow days, though, Dan would wheel Anne outside onto the stone patio, wrapping her up in a blanket and sit with her, talking about the history of the land before them. She never so much as moved, and Dan thought it doubtful that she could even hear anything he said. Anne's eyes were usually glazed over, the long lashes flicking against her sallow cheeks slowly as she stared off into the distance. She was like a wax figure, hauntingly beautiful despite the emaciation and sickly pallor of her cold skin. No matter what Dan did, Anne's flesh was always chillingly cold, though she never complained of discomfort of any kind. It was most likely that she couldn't complain, and Dan believed that at a conscious level, Anne was unaware of certain pains and stimulants.
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