The Citizen Soldier (DNF)

10) Cold

*Clay POV*

It was George, that was something that I quickly realized to be true. I wasn't coughing or anything, but he was. He looked like he did yesterday like he was suffering badly. I shook him awake, just to be sure that he was able to wake up. He sneezed and looked at me with confusion in his eyes.

"Clay?" His voice sounded quite frankly, terrible. "Clay you're up!" He looked like he was waking up more now. He coughed into his fist. "You sounded scared, so I went to get more wood for the fire because it was getting colder and now if you look around it's dark but then I got a really bad headache and I laid down and I've been coughing and sneezing and my breathing's been off so now I'm having issues with that and I know what this means because I've had it before and I know that I have a cold so-"

I put a finger on his lips to silence him, he needed to calm down and I knew it because his tone was getting louder and louder as he went on and he started sounding panicked.

"Shh. So you're telling me that you have a cold. That's not that bad, it should go away soon."

George sighed. "Clay, I don't think that you understand me. If I get sick, I stay sick for a long time. I have never really been able to afford medicine and shots and such, so I have a bad immune system and I physically can't handle being sick!" He fell into a coughing fit. "This could very well be fatal for me."

He looked down at the forest floor. He felt cold, but hot, and I didn't know how to fix that. The hoodie was much drier by now though. I bent down and picked it up off the ground, brushing off dirt and twigs and the occasional pine needle and handed it to him. He looked at me strangely.

"Don't you need that though?"

"You're cold, you need it more than I do. You don't have one and I can tell you need one. I'll go get us some more wood, and maybe I'll be able to get some food. Stay here." And before he could argue I was off.

As I walked I surveyed my surroundings to get a better grip on my sense of direction, that way I wouldn't walk in circles and never get out. I shivered at the thought, making myself close my eyes to calm down. Except that didn't work at all.

If anything it made things worse.

The moment my eyes closed I was under the water again, the pain the feeling the rush the fear and it was perfectly fresh behind my eyes and senses. I gasped and my eyes flew open to a fall leaf floor. I brought my hand up to my cheek, and my fingers came away wet, which made me feel scared. I knew by then that I wasn't actually under the river, but that didn't mean I didn't feel like I really was. I could feel my heart rate increase by far too much and I fell to my hands and knees onto the leaf-blanketed forest floor.

My left hand came up to clutch my heart, and I winced on pain at the new stitch in my side that made it hard for me to breathe. I could feel tears leaking through my eyelids and I was forced to close them again, which only made the pained sensation worse and worse until I forced my eyes open and gasped for breath, finding myself on the floor next to a massive tree root. I calmed myself down and realized how incredibly dark it was outside.

I could barely even see ten feet in front of me it was so dark. The only thing that I could see in the distance was the faint red glow of the fire. I quickly collected as many big pieces of dry wood as possible and booked it for the fire. George was there in my hoodie, sitting near the coals and hugging his knees. When he heard me he looked up and apparently decided that his headache was something that didn't bother him as much because he stood up, took long strides up to me and slapped me across the face with incredible strength, it left a very bad and very warm stinging sensation.

"Why the hell were you gone for so long?! I've literally been worried sick about you! It's been three hours! THREE HOURS!!! Do you even have a clue how dangerous these woods are?! It's a death trap in there!" He stomped his foot in the dirt. "I thought that you'd died, Clay. That would have gotten us both killed if it were true."

He walked away and sat down on the rock. I fed the fire and sat down next to him, but he walked away again and returned to his previous spot. I opened my mouth to say something, but he told me off.

"Save your breath, Clay. I'm mad at you right now and I'm not willing to talk right now."

He looked into the forest, then laid down away from the fire, but he didn't go to sleep.

"Good night, George."

"Night. Now sleep." He sounded ready to kill somebody. So I shut up and looked at the night sky and its stars until I finally fell asleep.

~~~

I woke up to none other than the sun and the birds. I'd had yet another nightmare about the river, but it may have had something to do with the fact that it was literally right there next to the camp. I scanned around drowsily and shot up like a bulled when I noticed something missing.

Where the hell was George?

I then heard something splash in the water and looked in that direction, only to see George standing knee deep in the water and holding a heavy looking stick with five fish impaled on it.

"What in the world do you think you're doing, George? You're sick!"

"And obviously you don't know how to fish or how to scavenge so at the moment I am feeding us if you do. Not. Mind." He still sounded annoyed with me.

"Look I'm sorry for yesterday okay? I had a terrible dream and I was having flashbacks to it in the forest. I really didn't have any sense of time and I certainly didn't have any control over myself and my emotions so I would prefer that you can it and please be respectful to me because you don't have any clue how bad it was. I couldn't breathe I couldn't think I couldn't even twitch my goddamn finger at will so I don't want to hear it from you. You may have been worried, and understandably so, but I was out there and I could barely even think let alone walk out of there all prissy and spry."

I really didn't mean to sound so harsh and unforgiving but it came out that way and I immediately felt extremely guilty. He looked like he'd just been slapped like he had done to me yesterday. He threw the stick onto a pile of leaves that he'd obviously deliberately put there and he stomped up to me while glaring into my soul.

If you somehow genuinely think that I haven't seen a dead body before, you would be mistaken. I see them at least every other month because I set up a dam for the river. It makes it easier to get out and save yourself, or for me to drag someone out. If you don't think that I haven't seen what this river does to people then you would be very, very very wrong and terribly mistaken.

"So if you even say for a single second how lucky I am to get to live out in the elements, to get to be out here and breathe all the time, you're wrong. Because it's almost worse. It's almost worse seeing people like you every night just killing themselves, or at the very least attempting to.

"It's almost worse having to go through this day in and day out without a job and without my own chance because now I feel stuck here alone in a cold empty and scary place where I know lives end! I am literally living right next to the place that so many people, queer or no, go to kill themselves because they can't handle what it takes to just live.

"You don't get it! You don't get why it's so important that people like you stick around! No matter how much you get bullied, no matter how much time it takes for you to get out of that bad situation you can, you have the power! And it's not dying. You're an example now, Clay, whether you like it or not. Do you want to set the example that it's okay to kill yourself? Is that the kind of image you want to paint for those you know and love?

"I don't know what you're going through or what you went through in life, but I've found that over eighty percent of people who get suicidal are following an example of some sort. Do you want that for your sister Clay? Do you? Do you want to leave her a note that says you died off a bridge and have her follow? You're an example and you're an idol. Whatever community you belong to you represent every second of your life.

"Whatever family and friends you have you are an example and an idol to. Whoever you know, whoever you care about, they have the same for you. They know and care about you. They trust you. They FOLLOW YOU!! DO YOU REALLY WANT THEM TO FOLLOW YOU TO THAT BRIDGE?!"

He stomped off into the forest, presumably to find more wood and to cool off.

But he was already cold.