He Was A Dog When I Left, I Swear!

He Was A Dog When I Left, I Swear! - Chapter 14

Chapter 14:

Bruno:

Two weeks, four days and eight hours. That was how long she’d been lying in the hospital bed. No response; just the rhythmic beeping of the machines keeping her alive. It wasn’t right seeing her like that. Blue was too full of life to be so still.

It already felt like she had died.

That was how her parents spoke about her; it was always Blue was, or Blue had been. I felt like taking them by the shoulders and shouting at them, screaming at them that she was going to be fine; that she would wake up, look around and then flash us all a huge grin, berating us for having no faith in her waking skills.

But, seeing her there, made it hard to imagine her ever opening her eyes. I was beginning to forget her facial expressions; how bright had her smile been beforehand? Did she ever have dimples? The questions fired themselves at me, twisting my gut unprecedentedly. Maybe if I’d turned around a split second earlier…

“Why won’t she just wake up?” Marshall mumbled, peering at her face. “Surely if the doctors say there’s nothing wrong with her, then there’s nothing wrong with her?”

If it had been under any other circumstances, I would have been inclined to agree. But this had been an attack by Inga; if she wanted Blue dead then…Blue wasn’t going to wake up.

I glanced at Blue’s peaceful looking face, guilt spreading through my gut and radiating painfully throughout my body. This was all my fault. They were going to lose a much loved family member if I didn’t do something about it…

And that was when the realisation dawned on me. The bleak, fearsome realisation that I had been trying to fight for the past two weeks; I was going to have to go back. A life for a life. That was what Inga wanted. She wanted to use the love I had for Blue against everything I had built up.

It was all part of her plan to get me back to The Realm.

***

When night fell, I crept back into the small room off the ward that Blue was staying in, hidden under the blanket of darkness that seem to settle when the visitors went home. Hospitals were lonely places; I had never understood that until very recently. Before, they had always been full to the bursting point, the chatter and the noise coursing through my ears. But when everyone went home…there was nothing. There was no hope, no light…the already bleak existence of those inside it became darker and darker, until there was nothing left.

Hospital sucked the life out of those who were already struggling to live.

She lay there though, face half hidden in the shadow cast by the moonlight coming in through the blinds. Her ventilator rattled ominously, much like one of the toys that they’d always thrown at me when I was frequenting as the family pet. The foot was on the other shoe now, though, and it was me who had to watch – with breath held – for her to make some sort of reaction to the rattling.

“You can’t hear me,” I started, sitting down in one of the seats, “which is probably for the best, yeah? You’d shout and hit and…stress yourself out more than normal.” A chuckle escaped my throat, the hoarse sound barely making an impact over the noise of various machines. “But I’ve got to go, Blue; you can’t die because of me.

“You’re only like this because I’m in a world I’m not supposed to be in; I need to go back so that you can live in a world you’re supposed to be in. I-It’s not fair to expect you to die- No, I don’t expect you to die; you need to live. You need to…grow up, get a job, get married, have some kids of your own…” My voice trailed off at the thought of that; Blue…marrying a faceless man, him loving her just like I did. Her kids faces matching that of the nameless husband…not mine.