The Planet Keeper

Chapter 15

EPILOGUE

I awoke to the familiar pounding of my brain attempting to escape my skull, feeling too physically weak to move in the slightest. I blinked several times in attempt to clear my vision and clarify that I was indeed seeing this, a ceiling overloaded with pictures of Jake and I, and Christmas lights hanging from between the pictures with more pictures of my family hanging from them, clipped on with clothes pins. Slowly and painfully, I pushed myself up, leaning my back against the wall behind me for support, and absorbed in every last detail about the room I was in.

The room resembled mine exactly, every last detail down to the very placement of a candy rapper that was lying on the floor right in front of the small plastic trash bin sitting next to my door. Was I actually here? Was I home? Was this real? I clutched the cream blanket covering me from waist down in my fist, afraid that what I was seeing was part of some trick, some cruel, manipulative trick set up by my abductors. My brain slowly allowed me to come back to reality and see everything going on in the world around me, and just as my eyes came into focus and my brain was ready to take in what my eyes could see, Jake's face was inches away from mine.

Naturally my body jumped backwards in fear. My head slammed into the wall supporting me, a loud bang following the collision of my head and the wall. Holding the back of my head in agonizing pain, I realised I had been so focused on and taken by my thoughts I hadn't noticed the door open or even heard Jake talking to me.

"Oh my gosh, are you okay?" Jake asked as he took me by the shoulder and pulled me close to him and began to frantically pull through my hair in search of any sign of bleeding or injury.

After having not found a single stray hair on my head, Jake pulled me into a hug, kissing my forehead and gently rubbing the back of my head.

"What happened? Did I frighten you?" he asked, concerned. Suddenly his eyes grew wide in realisation, "You flashed didn't you?"

"No, I didn't flash Jake," I said dismissively, turning my attention to the window a few feet away from me.

"Liar."

"I didn't flash."

"Why are you hiding from this? It's okay, Dehlilah, you can't just pretend that everything's okay when it's not." His voice was full of concern and frustration.

Tears slowly sliding down my cheeks, I leaned into him and he pulled me in closer, holding me tightly as I sobbed into his shoulder. He still put up with me and my episodes.

Since the abduction I had been having flashbacks to when I was trapped on the ship, waiting to meet my reaper. Jake and I call the flashbacks flash or flashes, because when they happened, it was as if I was there and flashed back home all of the sudden, and I was unable to distinguish which is just my imagination and which was reality, because they both felt real.

I had discovered Jake had actually been enslaved by my abductors when he was a kid, not even five years of age yet. They raised him believe he was just like them. As he got older, he gained the approval and trust of the Keeper, and this trust led to the Keeper assigning him the most important and sacred task of watching over me, until the time was right for the sacrificial deeds to be performed and fulfilled. But Jake had fallen in love with me, and I him. He had forgotten the reason he was sent here in the first place, until the day I received that letter in the mail. It was a signal that the time had come and the sacrifice was to be made soon. It made him remember, but he remembered too late. He didn't explain anything else to me but that, leaving me to wonder and question everything else about him and the traumatising abduction that had taken place in space.

After that action-packed, dramatic, traumatising, and adventurous time had happened it was almost like nothing happened. Other than my PTSD and other number of things wrong with me mentally, life went back to normal. Jake and I continued to live together, and after a few months he proposed. We married less than a year later.

I currently have a little girl growing and thriving within me. Demetri Rosemary Vartessa will arrive into the world on May 8th, 2019. Although I have endured some pretty crazy stuff, I still find a reason, a will to go on, and I know that even though it's sort of a dark inside joke I can still say I have lived my life to the fullest, to the point that it exceeds Earth.