Mallory's Melody

Chapter 61

"Your boyfriend's dying, Mal. He's dying."

"What do you mean he's dying?" Mallory asked the doctor, nearing him. He moved a step backwards, not wanting to be the object of her fury. 

"We thought it was the burns before, but as we dug deeper, we found out it was a brain haemorrhage. Something must have knocked him out in the fire, a plank or something. We tried to heal him, tried surgery, tried everything, but it's not—"

"No!" Mallory plunged for him but Ava and the security guards pulled her back. "He's lying. He's a liar, Ava. Jason can't be—he can't be dead!

The doctor rose to his feet, smoothening the wrinkles that had formed on his lab coat. "I never said died. I said dying. We managed to retain him in a comatose state. He's alive, but unconscious." The doctor picked his clipboard from the floor. "He hasn't got much time. If I were you, I would stop trying to kill a doctor who isn't God, and spend the last minutes with him. It's all he has."

Mallory was wrecked from inside. She was trembling. She'd toppled over the cliff of madness, over all the cliffs. Greif. Anger. Sadness, until she was on overdrive, like a turbulent bot who had been clogged with too many bugs and was about to self-destruct. 

She ran to the doctor before he could walk away. "But you can still save him right? You said it yourself, that I was dead and I came back to life. You can—"

"There are limits to what we can do, young woman. Yes, I did say you were dead, because there was no hope for you, but somehow you came back to life. It was a divine intervention as far as I'm concerned." He paused to search her eyes. "I hope your boyfriend is that lucky."

He walked away.

Mallory slipped down the wall and stared bleakly into the atmosphere. She couldn't cry. It was one of those moments that stripped you of the ability to do anything. Her chest clenched, her mouth dried, and all she could think about was the void that would remain if Jason were to go to. Cole's void was still there, and it was already large enough, to widen it with Jason's death would result in instant death.

"I know this is hard to digest," Ava said, stroking Mallory's hair. "He was my son too."

"Bullshit!" Mallory spat, to Ava's horror. "You hardly knew him, Ava. You didn't know him like I did. Were you the one who spent most of the summer with him? You didn't get attached to him—"tears poured heavily from Mallory's eyes— "Hell, you didn't love him!"

Ava looked down, pain flashing on her face. "You can't blame me from being absent in his life, Mallory. It wasn't my fault. It was Jane's."

"And that's why i envy you. Because no matter how much you hurt Jason with your absence, it wasn't your fault, but me. Me? it was all my fault. It was my fault he walked into that fire to save me. It was my fault he's lying in a bed. It's my fault he's going to die, and if anyone thinks for one moment that I'm going to live if that happens, then they've never been any more wrong."

Ava shook her head at Mallory, speechless. "You've got a little more time to spend with him. Stop mulling, and use it well. Do you want to come in, or would you rather stay here, and mull over a past that can't be fixed." Ava shrugged, entering the ward where Jason was in. "The choise is up to you."

She slammed the door on Mallory's face.

Mallory began to walk away. She couldn't for a second stand to look at Jason in the state that he was, breathless, on the precipice of death. One look at him, and she would instantly hate herself. All she would see was a million reasons why this was her fault.

But this isn't about you. It's about him.

Mallory stopped in her tracks at the suddenness of that internal voice. She didn't know whose it was, but It definitely wasn't hers. It wasn't—