"The Last Name That Almost Was"

[Sammy Riot]

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The Last Name That Almost Was
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The Red Dragon Inn murmured around her; pipes hissing behind old walls, distant laughter from the lower floor, the hum of a place too used to pain to ever fall fully silent.

Sammy lay on her back, one arm draped over her eyes. The bed creaked every time she breathed too deep. The mattress was lumpy as hell and smelled like centuries of smoke and sweat, but she’d slept in worse. Her cannon leaned against the footboard, faintly aglow. Old Reliable sat on the nightstand, twitchy as always when she didn’t touch it for too long.

She should have been asleep hours ago. Her body needed it; genome spike symptoms were back. The muscle tremors had started again, and her left eye flickered neon whenever she blinked. But sleep never came easy.

And when it did… it came wrong. Every time.

The medstation reeked of recycled air and antiseptic, the kind of sterile stink that never quite masked the blood in the corners. Sammy had always hated it. The way everything gleamed like it had something to prove. Like shining hard enough could erase what happened inside.

She lay on the metal slab with her spine arched in pain, the sheet beneath her soaked through and clinging like skin. Muscles seized, released, then convulsed again in a new rhythm, as if her body were a choir of screams without breath. Her fingers clutched at the edge of the slab. She hadn’t realized they’d broken; three of them bent wrong, swelling like angry fruit.

Jared was there. At first.

He sat beside her the first night, hand over hers even when it twitched into claws, even when the seizures made her vomit fire and bile. He didn't speak. Just breathed with her, like maybe if he stayed still enough, he could anchor her to something softer than war.

They had said the drug would work. That her genome would accept the override. That this was it—the cure. A clean slate, permanent cohesion. A future. A future with him.

She had whispered that, delirious between spasms. "Jared... tell me again." Her lips cracked on the words. "What would you name the bar?"

He’d smiled. “The Driftwood. ‘Cause we’re both wreckage, yeah? Washed up. But still floating.”

She’d laughed, even as her jaw rattled loose. That was Day One.

On Day Two, he came late. She remembered the click of the door more than his voice. The way he lingered in the hall, like maybe he was debating if it was still worth walking in.

He stayed for fifteen minutes. Told her something about a contact needing a run. Promised he’d be back. Kissed her forehead like a goodbye he didn’t admit.

Day Three, the door never clicked.

She screamed for six hours straight that night. When it ended, her vocal cords were gone. Burnt out like frayed wire. The doctor said that was normal. Nothing about this was normal.

Her body tore itself apart with a kind of quiet violence; tissue sloughing beneath the skin, tendons unraveling like old string, cells mutinying in organized chaos. The stabilizer hadn’t kept up. It had been years since her genome accepted anything longer than a few days of calm. The doctor said the new trial was an upgrade to those. She’d have killed him if she could move.

By the end of Day Five, her blood had turned to acid. She saw it in the mirror; veins glowing like supernova threads, pulsing wrong under her skin. The overhead light flickered every time her heart beat.

Jared still hadn’t come back.

She stopped screaming. Stopped waiting. Started whispering to Old Reliable, which lay on the tray near her bed. Her fingers couldn’t hold it, but she could see it. Still there. Still ugly. Still hers.

On the seventh day, she rose.

The mirror didn’t lie.

She was still Sammy. But something else, too.

Her legs buckled once before they held. The doctor had left a note. A printed message, in bold text, probably in case her vision failed next. *“The medication failed. Recommend return to prior stabilizers if you have any left. Immediately. Genome activity exceeds safe thresholds. Apologies.”*

Apologies.

The word rolled around her mouth like a loose tooth. Sweet. Rotting.

The medbay was quiet, save for the hiss of oxygen and the flicker of misfiring plasma nodes in her bloodstream. She lifted Old Reliable with one hand. The grip felt foreign—like shaking hands with a memory.

She snapped awake.

The room was dark except for the low flicker from the lights outside. Her breath tore from her chest like a shot. Sweat soaked her tank top, plastering it to the scar across her shoulder. Her skin buzzed, like her whole body was still trying to scream.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Voice raw. Half-choked.

The walls were real. The mattress was real. Rhy’Din’s cold seeped in through the cracked window. She was back. But it still hurt.

Her fingers shook as she reached under the pillow, past the spare knife, past the bottle of backroom-grade stabilizer she hadn’t used in two days. She pulled out the thing she coveted most.

A doll. Ragged, stitched from scraps. Missing one button eye. Ugly as sin.

She cradled it in her lap, silent. The first kid she ever saved gave it to her. Back when Sammy still believed she could be something more than the Federation’s mistake. She didn’t hold it often. Not unless she couldn’t stop shaking. Not unless the ghosts got loud.

Her thumb found the seam. The back split with a soft hiss of worn velcro. Inside, tucked deep into the stuffing, was the ring.

Simple. Silver. Scratched like hell. She stared at it a long time. Let the silence stretch. Let the weight of it push her deeper into the bed.

Love wasn’t for people like her. It was a story told to children and fools. A myth she’d dared to believe in. For a minute. And then he, and that belief, left.

Her genome was unraveling again. Her body felt like rusted wire under her skin. But the worst part was how she still checked the doorway some nights, like maybe he’d show up late. Like maybe there’d be an apology.

She closed the doll, tucked it back under the pillow, and lay down.

Eyes open. Breathing shallow.

She didn’t cry. She never did.

She just whispered, to no one, “I'm still Sammy.”

Then rolled to her side, and waited for the dark to get quiet again.