Jack Dawkins and Aurelia 'Ria' Emerson should never coexist. They are opposites. They are in literature terms, two stars written to never meet. A surgeon and a writer. A woman of royalty and a thief. Two young souls never meant to interact, and yet...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The Dodger was drenched in blood, red was his color. It has painted his skin, stained his hands, and weighed down his heart. He's a surgeon after all, the job comes with the red thick liquid, without it, well he wouldn't be him. Blood is what makes the Dodger Jack Dawkins, without bloody hands and a scalpel in his pockets, he's just a thief who fled and escaped prison.
The red liquid that leaks out of others is what makes him have purpose, he is thankful for every patient he has helped. Well, all but one.
He barely registered the blast of a gun going off. He was sure it happened, he knows it happened, he saw her body fall to the floor. She was here all just to read, all to explain a procedure to him because his brain couldn't comprehend the words on a page. She was here for him, and now she might die because of him.
His hands are already covered in blood, there is already a patient on the table, there is a gun pointed at his head. It's all happening at once. His life being threatened as he tries to do a procedure never achieved before to save the governor's daughter, his lover bleeding on the floor from a gun shoot wound that never needed to happen and a deathly weapon in his peripheral vision. Two lives fighting to survive, two girls bleeding out. His friend, the woman that helped changed the ways of surgery, and his lover, the woman who taught him to read and changed his life.
Their death is on his hands. He can see them slip away. He's out of his body. Powerless. He's just a boy in this moment. A young man hoping for a miracle, praying to God's he doesn't believe.
He's to blame, his Aurelia, his sweet Aurelia, is slipping away, and as his hands work to try and save the Governor's daughter so he lives to then save his love, all he can think is how right he was.
"I may not know much about books or words on pages, but I know a doomed story when I see one. And ours, it was meant for failure before the cover was opened."
He wishes those weren't some of the last words he spoke to her. The heartbreak in his eyes, it's similar to the distance look she gives now.
She's in pain.
It's all he can think. They were doomed. No matter the story, no matter the universe, no matter the time, Aurelia and Jack were never meant to be. It's how life is written.
And although the words on pages and letters in books confuse him, he's wishing more than ever he was an author and not a surgeon, maybe then he could change fate, rewrite their story, and not have the knowledge of the wound being deadly.
