I owed her everything because I knew these flashes of awareness were thanks to her.
She was the one interrupting the midnight.
The one throwing me lifelines and trying to pull me free.
I didn’t want to let her down. I didn’t want to leave her alone.
Give it to me again!
The blackness thickened.
I slipped.
A diving belt lassoed around my middle, complete with weights and anchors, yanking me into the deep.
…
…
…
Blue lit up my world, drenching me in periwinkle, teal, and cobalt.
I was ready this time.
I charged toward the pigment. I harnessed a body I could not see and used colour as my instrument to feel it.
To slip into fingers and toes.
To focus on the softness along my back and the faint throbbing in my legs.
I gave up on swimming toward a surface that didn’t exist and instead fought to regain ownership of something that would have the power to keep me from the black’s grasp.
Ice returned…smeared gently along my lower lip before inserting just a little onto my tongue.
Flavour smashed through me, vicious and all-consuming.
It tasted like summer and sunshine.
Blueberries.
Ambrosial medicine making me want more and more and more.
I moaned with greed.
I tried to stick out my tongue for a bigger serving.
Nothing moved.
Why can’t I goddamn move?
I couldn’t do this anymore.
I couldn’t be trapped here any longer.
I wanted to open my eyes.
Open my eyes!
Open my eyes!
My furious heart pumped hard, filling the void with rapid drumbeats.
I lost it.
My heart had killed me, yet it was the only part of me still alive. It’d deleted me as its host and now existed in an empty chest, keeping an empty body the prison for a broken mind.
I couldn’t accept that.
I won’t!
It’s mine.
I went wild.
I sank into violence and beat up nothing and everything.
…
…
…
Another taste of ice.
Along with a fourth gift.
A gift that I’d had at the start of my incarceration but had lost along the way.
Hearing.
“…so hard, seeing you like this.”
That voice.
Like stardust and sand, like raindrops and satin.
Eleanor.
I stopped my endless war.
I hung in the darkness to listen.
“I’ve tried everything, Sully. I’ve argued with Louise about what I’m doing. She tells me I could kill you. That I might choke you by giving you a taste. But…the first night I ran my finger with berry smoothie along your bottom lip, your heart spiked. Did you feel it? Did it mean anything at all? Can you hear me, or are you fading, just like she warned?”
Silence slipped between us.
Speak again.
Please, for the love of everything fucking holy, speak to me.
“Three nights I’ve repeated myself. Three nights, I’ve made you a smoothie and fed you just the essence of it, knowing how dangerous it is to put something in your mouth when you can’t swallow. By trying to save you, I might just kill you, and you know what…I’m beginning to think you might want that.”
Her voice cracked, but she heard my plea and kept talking. “Jess is awake, by the way. She woke up over a week ago. Dr Campbell let her move into Cal’s villa yesterday. Her wounds are healing. She’ll never have children, but she’s alive, and I’ve never seen her so happy. She said you’re aware Cal had finally seen how she felt about him. Well, they’re taking things slow…obviously with them both wounded, but they’re together.”
A quick slash of blueberry on my tongue before her voice dropped with painful secrets. “I can’t be around them for long. Does that make me a terrible person? I’m happy for them, of course I am, but seeing them laughing together, touching…it breaks my heart, Sully.” Her voice was as tragic as I felt, heavy and hitched with grief. “I just wish…I wish you were here. I mean, you are here, but you’re not. I have your body, but without your soul…there’s nothing.”
I’m so fucking sorry, Eleanor.
“Almost six weeks you’ve been hiding. Six weeks of sleepless nights and endless hoping. I hate myself that I’m complaining when you’re the one trapped in there, but…it’s so, so hard. So hard not knowing how I can help. So hard thinking I’m not helping enough. So hard just letting time either cure you or kill you.”
I’m here.
I’m not going to die.
I give you my word.
I’ll find some way to get back to you.
“Louise said if you stay under much longer, your body will start shutting down. She keeps trying to talk to me about the end. Whether or not I’m prepared to sign documents that allow you to fade peacefully, or if she needs to have life support ready to drag out your catatonic existence forever.”
A sliver of ice danced over my lower lip as she ran her thumb with blueberry smoothie.
“I told her that it’s your choice. It’s always been your choice, and I have no power to make you choose, but…if you can hear me, I need to say something. I need you to know. After all, you can only make a choice on informed facts. You don’t know what I’ve done. You think the world you left is still the one you’ll wake up in, but…it’s not.”