Original Stories Fan Fiction / Realism Fan Fiction ❯ Aqua ❯ Deaths Door ( Chapter 14 )

Chapter Fourteen

Deaths Door

 

 

Auntie ran back to Aqua's side as she let loose an unearthly scream. She bowed her head as though in prayer and said, “The final stages of the Sickness have begun. There is nothing we can do from here on out, except keep her as warm and comfortable as possible.”

 

“That's not so,” came Cota's voice. Auntie and Cora looked at him in surprise and saw that he was carrying several herbs cradled in his right arm. He was completely soaked to the bone from the drenching rain that had so suddenly begun. “Cota?” Cora tentatively asked, unsure if the boy before them was really her brother or not.

 

“Think about it, Cora,” he said urgently. “The Soul Sickness has only ever attacked in the time of the dry seasons, not the wet seasons where there are enough herbs growing to choke a horse. I've collected some of the herbs that we normally use to treat our annual virus. If we can cure the sickness part of the Soul Sickness, than we improve the infected person's chances of surviving, and she will, if she has a strong enough soul.”

 

For the next hour Cora and Auntie bustled around making medicine that would break Aqua's fever and bring her body temperature back up to what it had originally been, while Cota sat beside her in her room. He changed out the rag every so often and switched the sweat soaked blankets out every few moments with a clean one.

 

“What does it take to overcome this damned Sickness?” he asked to no one in particular. Watching over Aqua had reawakened long forgotten memories that he had tried to bury with the rest of his past. There had been a time, not so long ago, when the girl he had loved had come down with the Soul Sickness.

 

~Flashback~

 

A fourteen-year-old Cota sat beside the bedside of an ailing girl not much younger than he was. Her head rolled back and forth from fever, her skin pale from fighting the Soul Sickness. Everyone in their village knew that the child was weak of heart and body, but strong of spirit. Her chances of surviving were fifty-fifty.

 

Cota watched as people, whose faces were obscured by shadows, moved in and out of the room. Sometimes they stopped to murmur their condolences to him, but often they came to pay respect to the one who lay ill. Some tried to give her medicine, but she always ended up throwing it up.

 

By the end of the night, almost everyone said she was going to die. There was nothing anyone could do for her. Cota continued to sit unmoving by her side. Nothing anyone said could convince him that she was a lost cause, he still loved her and he was convinced that that would be enough to pull her through.

 

Tears streaked her cheeks from the pain that occasionally tore through her body. “Cota,” she called softly. “Where are you? Why have you left me to fight this on my own?”

 

Tears burned at Cota's eyes as he brokenly said, “I'm here, Tara. I'm here. I'll never leave your side. I won't let you fight the Sickness on your own.”

 

Tara turned her dulled, milky eyes towards the sound of his voice. “Cota…It hurts too much…I…I don't want to go…through this. They're…waiting for me…asking me why I don't want to come live…with them forever…They're…They're offering to take my pain away forever, that I'll…always be happy with them,” Tara said through broken sobs.

 

“I can't promise to take away your pain like they can. I can't promise you'll always be happy, but if you pull through this Sickness, we'll always be together, I…I promise,” he said, his tears joining hers as they hit the wooden floor.

 

Tara smiled up at him. “This world hurts too much. Its too painful to bare, even with you at my side,” she said calmly, now that she was close to deaths door. “Besides, there are people waiting for me. Come for me.” Crystal droplets fell from her eyes as the light of life faded from them, the smile never leaving her lips.

 

“Tara?” Cota whispered. “No, Tara, come back. Please, don't leave.” As he reached for her hand, someone ripped him away from the bedside. His eyes never left her body, even as shadows seemingly engulfed it. Just above her body hovered two blood red eyes and, with it, a cold, insane laughter that chilled his blood.

 

“That, boy, is what happens to those who are overcome by the Sickness. Anyone or anything alive touching at the moment of death is engulfed along with them,” an angry voice said in his ear, one that he paid no heed to.

 

~End Flashback~

 

Cota found himself being shaken awake. “Cota, she's in the final stages f the Sickness. We've got to do something now,” came Cora's urgent voice. He was on his feet and moving before he was even fully aware of what he was doing. His feet took him to the side of the fire where dinner was prepared.

 

He looked at everything spread out across the hearth and snatched up a bottle of medicine for fever and a knife. Somewhere he had heard that fresh blood was one of the best ways to cure the Sickness when added to a certain medicine, though the draw back was that if it didn't work than it would kill the ill for certain. “You wanna take a definite risk that might end up killing or saving her?” Cota asked Auntie and Cora.

 

“Look, anything at this stage of the Sickness is welcome, Cota,” Auntie said, pouring some type of green liquid down Aqua's throat. Cora made no response as she snatched the fever medicine from Cota's hand and handed it to Auntie who poured it down Aqua's throat.

 

* * *

 

Aqua gagged and spluttered as she gasped for breath through the constant stream of cool liquids being forced down her throat. She could no longer see anything but darkness even though her eyes were wide open. She swatted at whoever was pouring the stuff down her throat and when her hand connected with something solid she felt it go flying, shortly followed by a sharp crash.

 

“…soon…”

 

“…not now…”

 

“…won't last much longer…”

 

“…futile effort…”

 

“…no hope…”

 

“…tasty looking…”

 

“…all a lie…”

 

She could no sense of what the surrounding voices were saying. It might have been a hallucination, but she thought she saw figures slowly emerging from the shadows to join the voices as they became slowly louder. Their faces were cloaked in shadow still, so she couldn't tell what their facial expressions were.

 

“She's at deaths door. It's almost time to dine,” one of the voices said so clearly that she could have sworn that it was right next to her head. The meaning of their words made her blood run cold. She screamed with at the top of her lungs and the shadow figures withdrew a little.

 

* * *

 

Auntie could barely her restrained as she screamed and thrashed around something fierce. As Aqua's scream increased in intensity, she was forced to draw away, lest her eardrums burst. Several people came running through the pouring rain from nearby huts to see what was going on with the one that had come down with the Sickness.

 

They all stopped short as soon as they came close enough to see a great cloaked entity looming over her. Its massive form was cloaked in a blacker than midnight cloak and had its head covered by a hood. It slowly lifted its eyes to them and they screamed and ran off when they saw it had glowing red, demon-like eyes and didn't stop running until they were sure that it wasn't chasing after them.

 

Auntie noted their peculiar actions with little to no interest as she continued tending to Aqua as soon as she stopped screaming. She gasped slightly when she felt a surge of wind blow just past her cheek and turned her head slightly to see nothing there. She looked back at Aqua and saw that she was propped up on one elbow with her other hand palm out. Her green eyes were filmed over with something white and glossy.

 

Sweat gathered on Aqua's brow as she strained to stay upright, but her body was too weak from trying to fight off the Sickness to really remain doing anything. She fell back onto the table that she had been moved to not so long ago. Her breathing became shallower and shallower as the seconds slowly dragged by. Time seemed to have stopped when she fell ill.

 

Cota looked around for another bottle of fever medicine, knowing that each second wasted brought Aqua closer to deaths door. An image of Tara laying in her bed gasping for breath and covered entirely in sweat from fighting the Sickness flashed in his minds eye and made him look harder.

 

He grabbed something he wasn't even remotely familiar with and brought the knife to his inner forearm. Cota glanced at Aqua and instead of seeing her, he saw Tara as she had been before she died, laughing and running with him even though she was always sick. Tears swiftly gathered in his eyes, but he pushed them away as he brought the knife from his elbow to his wrist in a diagonal motion.

 

His arm shook slightly from the pain as blood dripped to the floor from the self-inflicted wound. He turned his arm sideways and dropped the knife so he could hold the bottle better and catch more of the blood. Once he was sure that there was enough, he said, “Here, Auntie. Take this and give it to her.” He held the medicine out with trembling hands and nearly fainted when she took it.

 

“Cota, you bind that wound up this instant. I don't want two bodies to bury,” she scolded him gently as she turned back to Aqua and tilted her head up so that her neck was exposed. She saw the red mixed in with the medicine a moment too late as she poured it down Aqua's throat.

 

* * *

 

It burned. Whatever was being poured down her throat this time burned severely and set her whole body on fire. There were no words to put her pain into. She couldn't even scream, the pain was so intense. The one thing she did notice was that the shadow figure now had almost human faces.

 

Some had twisted faces, some had faces that almost looked human if not for their demon like eyes, and others only had eyes or a mouth. Red eyes gleamed out at her from one shadow figure and asked, “How does it feel to have your soul being ripped from your body? What do you feel in your last moments as a human?”

 

Human? she thought. Was I ever human to begin with? Was everything I ever saw or felt a lie? Heh…I guess so.

 

Tears gathered at the corner of her eyes, and, for the first time in her teen years, she cried shamelessly. Her life had always been a charade, a falsified existence that meant nothing when she looked back on it in her last moments of life. Looking back, all she saw was pain and destruction. She had never done anything but remain detached and aloof from those around her and caused pain for them.

 

The only time she could ever remember being truly happy was when her mother had sat with her in the living room with her on her lap. It was the one memory of her mother she had besides the one where her mother was smiling at her and promising that she would return within the week, never to be seen, nor heard from again. She had clung to that one memory, hoping against hope that her mother would show up at any given moment and take her away from her father.

 

~Flashback~

 

Aqua crawled into her mothers lap and smiled up at the older woman. The sun shone against her mothers oddly pale skin and gave it an almost angel like glow as she smiled down at Aqua. She suddenly looked up and frowned. The sun seemed to dim a little with her mother's sudden change in behavior.

 

She would have asked something, but her mother leaned down and whispered into her ear, “You are different from other children. You will be a key element in a power struggle so old that no one, not even those fighting in it, can remember when or what started it. Be warned, my daughter, my frozen one.”

 

Aqua looked up into her mothers green eyes as she tilted her head to the side and considered her mother's words. “They will come for you, when the one who will melt your heart and force you to move forward appears. You will know him when you see him,” she would have said more, but Aqua's father walked into the living room and her mother began tickling her, making her laugh hysterically.

 

~End Flashback~

 

Thinking back on her mother's words, she realized that her mother had known all along what was going to happen to her. Aqua struggled to draw air into her oxygen-starved lungs as she tried to think. Darkness began to close in from all and she began to slip. She was at Deaths Door.

* * *