Plain white hospital ceilings remind me too much of my childhood and the horrors that came with it. I'd been here too many times, fought for life one time too many. Kissed the honeyed lips of death and hoped to die a thousand times. I was born dying, with a cord around my throat that should have killed me. But somehow, I'd survived. It seemed back then that I refused to die before I got the chance to breathe, to live. Now that I am here again, I find myself searching for who was I before my life had become this way? Who had I once been? Who had I once known? Had I still been myself the first time I lay in a much smaller hospital bed.
3 days had I lay here. Pressed up against this cold, thin plastic mattress. The sterilised air had embedded itself into my skin until I lost every trace of what came before. I feel like a piece of wood, surrounded by blankets, made out to be human - something it wasn't. Something it would never be.
I wondered why I was still here, it's not like I still cared for my recovery. It's not like I could get better. Maybe the bruising on my lungs would fade away, but in the end, I would still be me. I'd still want to die, my position hadn't changed.
Maybe I was happy, watching my choices infringe on their sanity. I'd always wanted to see my sister fumble with herself. I'd wondered if my death would damage her perfect facade and now know I knew that my death would crush her. Should I be blamed for wanting her broken? Perhaps in breaking her we'll become less different and maybe then my parents would accept the possibility that maybe, maybe they'd been the problem. Maybe I was only ever destined to die because I had been placed in their palms only to be crushed within them.
I think perhaps; I had once been admirable. Enviable, even. Once I had been a beautiful girl with a future carved out of solid gold, I'd done trivial things and bumped elbows with politicians and doctors and famed glorified artists. What was there to envy now? What was left of me would barely suffice as a shadow of my former shadow.
Or perhaps what was left of me was more real than I had ever been before. That scared me. The idea that I have never truly ever been better than the crumbling chaos of my life. Of my mind. That this is all I have really ever been, a plate sitting at a table's edge with every intention of falling and smashing into too many pieces to even consider keeping it. When things can't be fixed, it's our job to throw them out. They no longer have purpose and the most they might do is hurt someone along the line.
The doctor asked me to be more careful next time as if he believed I wouldn't purposefully put myself in that position. A rich and pretty young girl like me had so much to live for, he said. I had the entire world ahead of me; he said. He was a nice old man, but he was bold to assume I valued my life so much. Bold to assume I cared enough to hold on. I did care about one thing, though. Something that had been biting the side of my neck about this whole, dying thing. Blue. He was slowly becoming a leech at my side, he had literally barely left the side of my bed; he never left unless I asked him to. And even then he was back in the seat beside me before I could say a word. He was dedicated, something that wasn't foreign to him. But the more time he spent in that seat, the more his eyes began to seem like his own again. And the more I see him. Truly see him; not as a stand-in for the romance that I'd once had with Arthur but simply as Carter. My Blue.
He's looking at me now. And I'm looking back at him, wondering how long before I drowned within his gaze. I seem to have forgotten the function of oxygen, my brain runs on the tired smile he offers me. The feeling of his warm hand as he reaches out and touches me makes me sane. My heart feels like a meteor raging through a starless sky. And for a moment, I am unsettled. Torn between the feeling of his skin against mine and the crashing of waves that call me. This hadn't been part of the deal.
"The doctor says you'll be discharged by this afternoon," He tells me. I don't reply, I only nod in silence.
"Your sister wanted to be the one to take you home," He tells me.
"No," I told him, suddenly remembering the rasp of my voice. All the pipes had certainly done a number on me. The doctor said it was only minor swelling, it wouldn't last.
"That's what I told her. Said' I wanted to be the one to take you instead." He shrugs.
"You don't intend on leaving me again, do you?" I smiled, knowing Blue, he was going to stick around for a while.
"Is it that obvious?" He questions.
"You're painfully predictable," I tell him.
He chuckled dryly.
"Thank you," I tell him. " I never said thank you for what you did. You made sure I lived long enough to watch my family reap the consequences of their actions. It feels... good,"
"You're welcome, love," He smiles. His gaze fills with stardust, and he looks at me like I am made moons, like am the most captivating thing in the sky. What could he possibly see in a girl like me? I am in a hospital bed for goodness sake, I probably look half dead. But that crazed look of his refuses to leave, in all the hours he'd spent at my side, he'd looked at me like this.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" I ask him.
The smile on his face wavers thin, his blue eyes darkening into something I had seen before at a smaller extent. His jaw clenches with rage but he keeps his gaze on me. I think I knew the word he planned to say.
"How long do you have left?" He whispers, "Things are in the open now but I know you. I'm not convinced you've changed your mind, not fully at least"
"That, I believe, would be because I haven't," I smile at him.
"Why? You've had your retribution, you saw it with your own eyes. Watched the guilt slowly start to trickle in"
"I never wanted revenge, Blue." I tell him "This. My life. My family. My ex. I'm never gonna have the luxury of wiping them away. They'll cling to me because they know now and the guilt will force them into my life again until they've all had their fill of sorry's they never mean, so I'll spend the rest of my miserable life pretending like what they did to me didn't take as much from me as it did. I can't exist without seeing it in everything. I feel what they did to me in every conversation, every memory I have, every breath I take is full of them. And I can never run, because even now, even with everything they've done, everything they've taken. I don't know who I am without them and what you saw, what you think you saw, this isn't the first time it's happened - they'll get over it like they always do."
"I can keep them away from you, we can file for a restraining order I have strings I can pull to get that to you in an hour and we move to Europe for all I care, or Canada or Tokyo, just say the word and I'll take you there so we can start a life-"
"I have 6 weeks, that's the most I'll take,"
"Please Belle-"
"Stay with me? Please, all 5 weeks and 6 days, just don't leave. I can't do this alone,"
The room is full of silence, Blue leans back in his seat, his touch withdrawn, his eyes downcast, staring at the IV in my wrist. The sanity he gave me slowly begins to dissipate into the air. He is so still. So far away. My skin needs him against it to chase the impending cold. I wish more than anything to pick at the thoughts so clearly coursing through him but he is a gate now, and he won't allow me past it. When it appears that he's come to a decision he looks up at me again and says 5 words that have me trembling at their mention.
"If you go. I go." He says. My heart stops, the world dimming as its orbit slows. It seems even the air is still in shock. He wasn't- he wouldn't. Would he? Why would he-
"What?" My voice is barely there anymore but he's still heard it. The smile he offers me touches his eyes.
"You heard me, Belle, if you go, I'll go with you,"
No. You can't do that. You deserve a life. You deserve so much more than this. There's a fire in his eyes I want to drown out him. A crazed, determined sickness holding him captive. A chill runs down my spine and it does not leave. Death doesn't suit him not like it does me.
"Stop it," I say. I demand. I command. But he does not budge, my voice lacks the same weight as his own. There is no intimidation. There is no finality. I am crumbling. My sanity is breaking again.
"You aren't the only one running from reality, Belle. You want to die, I want you but I can't love you in this world because you won't stay in it so I'll follow you where ever you decide to go-"
"Don't do this,"
"You don't do it," He shoots back and gets up from his seat.
"You're bluffing,"
"Am I?" He asks, "After all this time, wouldn't you be able to tell?"
"You're being foolish, what about your family? What about everything you built for yourself? What about your future, you idiot! You're gonna let it all go just like that? Because you want to be with a broken woman who has nothing to offer you! Think. Carter. It's not worth your troubles, I'm not worth your-"
"There is no future I can think of without you in it, I'd take that as a sign wouldn't you?"
"So you're manipulating me." I spit, my eyes narrowing at the man before me. He seems so, unmoved, so unchanging, he is at complete peace with his decision. I wonder how long ago he'd decided, it was obvious it wasn't a spur of the moment thing. Blue wasn't a spur-of-the-moment kind of man. No. He'd decided to do this a very long time ago.
"I am," He says. "If it means keeping you alive, my love, there is nothing I wouldn't do"
The shock keeps me from screaming after him. My head is ringing when he walks out of my room, and the nurse comes flooding in to discharge me. It should have been a happy day, my nurse is smiling and gushing over the man waiting outside the door but my chest is tightening by the second and I cannot breathe at the thought of his lifeless body clinging to my corpse as the ocean consumes us whole.
That is my fate. It was never meant to be his.