...her toes are going numb.

That's not great.

She can compensate, of course – it would be beneath her dignity to wince – but it's not just her toes, it's spreading back up through her feet (and her hands, which don't matter). She executes a flawless pirouette, then puts her foot down and – she can't tell if she put her foot down wrong, it sounded a little bit wrong. She goes into the next pirouette, as her calves start to tingle.

The numbness spreads. Her vision is blurring, her hearing fading – probably she's having some kind of stroke. Onstage. In the middle of Swan Lake.

Fuck her life.

She can make it through the rest of the seduction of Siegfried. There's, like, three more measures. She just has to get her leg up –

Her momentum swings her center of gravity, and her still-intact proprioception informs her that she's fallen into Zige, their Siegfried, crashing them both down onto the stage like a bowling ball.

The last thing she hears is the audience gasping in shock.

...but... it's not the last thing she thinks.

She can't hear or see. She can't feel – scratch that. She can't feel anything except her bruises from the fall? How does that work?

But she's not unconscious. She can think.

She suddenly feels her body lifting into the air. Did someone pick her up? She can kind of tell that her head is lolling back unsupported, she can't feel her neck but she can sort of feel the blood rushing to it. She tries to lift her head, and the feeling lessens. Mission accomplished; she lets it fall back again.

She can still move. That's... important.

She's put down on some kind of surface. The surface accelerates. Probably an ambulance! Probably good! Maybe they can help her!

She considers twitching her fingers for some kind of complicated Morse code dealie. Rejects it; the likelihood of a random Shanghainese paramedic knowing the International Morse SOS is very low, and it doesn't actually communicate much.

...she can move. Can she talk?

"PINCH ME IF YOU CAN HEAR ME," she attempts.

There's a pause (of some unclear length, given the circumstances), then she gets pinched.

"GOOD. I'M AWAKE. JUST CAN'T SEE OR HEAR. ONLY FEEL PAIN. DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON."

Pause. Pinch.

"THANKS. ONE PINCH YES TWO PINCH NO?"

Pinch.

"AM I YELLING AT YOU? SHOULD I TRY BEING QUIETER?"

Pinch.

"How's this?"

...pinch?

"Right. Yes or no. Uh, is this a good volume?"

Pinch.

"Is everybody else okay? I didn't break Zige's ankle or something?"

Pinch.

"Okay. Um. ...can you pinch me when we get to the hospital?"

Pinch.

There is an eternity of silence with only the feeling of momentum and the ache of her bruises. (Including a bruise where she was pinched a little too hard.)

Marza indulges herself in the hope that this is an unusually godawful dream. But then, isn't pain supposed to be the one thing you can't feel?