A Dance With Death

|| Chapter 21 - Hope ||

                      

I am laying on the floor, my back against the wall. My view is blocked by Althea's worried self, who is kneeling in front of me, mouthing words that I can't hear. My vision is blurry but I can see Griffith standing behind Althea.

"Zayn," Althea's faint voice echoes. "Are you okay?" I blink a few times in an attempt to see her clearly. "Zayn!" her voice grows louder. She is holding me by my shoulders and mildly shaking me.

"I-I am okay," I choke out, nodding hastily. "Just okay." I push her hands away from my shoulder. My vision becomes clearer. I notice my bed to the left. It's surrounded by people – doctors and nurses. The room is darker than usual.

"I thought you were going to die!" Althea cries out. I divert my gaze back at her. "I thought Caius got to you."

"Well, he did," I say. "It wasn't pretty."

"What happened?" She sounds a lot worried.

Struggling to gain my balance, I get on my feet. Althea helps me. "I could ask you the same question," I say looking at the doctors.

"Um, that," Griffith explains, "you underwent a sudden cardiac arrest. Your heart almost stopped."

"When you were going through your memory, I brought you up here," Althea says. "You seemed normal for a while, but then you started to twitch and shake. And shortly enough, your body responded. The monitors started beeping. Luckily, a nurse was passing by. She brought in a few doctors. They found out that you weren't able to breathe properly."

The doctors keep murmuring medical terms to each other. The heart monitor is beeping steadily again.

"From the looks of it now," Griffith continues, "you and your soul seem . . . fine. We were convinced that you were about to die. The soul and the body are connected. Even if what happened wasn't real, it was made real by the soul."

"More like by Caius," I add. Images of the fight bring shivers to my body. They both remain silent because they know it's true. "He tampered with my memories."

"What did he do?" Althea asks.

"Can we go outside?" I plead. "I'll tell you there." I feel quite uncomfortable with so many doctors poking and studying my body in the room and evading my personal space.

She nods. "Sure." She extends her arm towards the closed door. Noticing my confusion over how I'm going to open the door, she adds, "Just walk through it."

I hesitate for a while before I obey her. I strain my body and look at the door. I walk towards the door and just before I reach it, I close my eyes and simply walk, blinking a few times as I emerge through the other side. I feel weird. Just because I am capable of walking through things doesn't mean that I am going to do it all the time.

- - -

We find ourselves in the cafeteria. It's the only place I find suitable to talk, I don't know why. The two reapers are seated on the other side of the table where I'm sitting.

I tell them everything – from the incident in the field, the plants that almost killed me, the battle that I'd seen to the fires that engulfed me. I leave out the part where we talked about Niall's death, but I do tell them that Caius took full responsibility for killing him. I also don't tell them about how sick I'm feeling right now because I don't think they would understand. Seeing all those people die, it makes me feel so uneasy. They weren't real to me, but they had been alive once. I can't think straight, yet I somehow manage to speak.

They listen and examine each sentence and ask me many questions. I just shake my head and tell them that I wished I knew the answers myself.

"He didn't answer any questions?" Griffith asks again.