All That's Left (The Walking Dead FanFiction)

Chapter 15

Seeing Sasha on the floor like that, covered in her own blood, reminds me of when my mother accidentally cut herself.

I had climbed down the stairs, my small feet sliding down the steps, as I made my way to the kitchen. My mother stood at the counter. Her dirty blonde hair was collected into a low ponytail and she smiled at me when I sat up on one of the barstools. When she glanced up to look at me, she cut her finger. She dropped the knife she had been using to cut a watermelon. She had hemophilia.

Her finger wasn’t going to stop bleeding.

I was six-years-old and the thing I remember most was how much blood there was. Her finger refused to stop bleeding. It just keep pouring.

 I thought she was going to die.

She looked at me with a calm expression poised on her face as she casually wrapped a towel around her finger, grabbing the car keys from off the counter. My father was at the office.

I sat beside her in the car and I started crying when the small towel became soaked with blood. She never said anything to make me feel better. She let me cry until the back of my throat hurt from screaming. I kept asking her if she was going to die, if her hand would ever stop bleeding.

“Mommy, are you going to die?” I shrieked.

She acted like I wasn’t there. My lungs burned from screaming at her, yet she never answered my questions. She never even acknowledged I was there, sitting beside her, begging her to tell me she was okay.

Looking back, I realize my mother thrived on consistency. She had cut herself before and been fine, and this time wasn’t going to be any different. And she was right, it wasn’t any different. The doctors got her to stop bleeding and we went home.

 I remember wishing nothing more than for her to have looked at me and said everything was going to be okay. But my mother never did. She made me believe that the only feelings I was responsible for were my own. It wasn’t my job to fix people. They could do that on their own. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for her to have the affair. To leave me and my dad. She was only responsible for her own feelings, not ours.

 It wasn’t her job to fix us.

 Now, I look at Sasha, the knife still in her stomach. It’s my fault she did this to herself. She tried to talk to me, she tried to get me to make her feel like her life was worth living, even without her daughter in it. I should have told her that it was. I should have told her that I wanted her to keep living.

I step around the blood that’s accumulated around the floor to check her pulse, expecting to find nothing. When I press my fingers to her neck, I feel the faint beat against the tips of my fingers. I stare at her for a few seconds, not truly believing she’s alive. Her eyes are closed and her lips are slightly parted.

“Daryl!” I’m screaming as I take the steps two at a time. I keep screaming his name. Opening the bedroom door, I nearly run into him.

His face is just inches from mine. “Are you okay? What’s goin’ on?” he asks with frantic eyes.

I’m slightly stunned when he asks me if I’m okay. If anything, I expected him to be pissed at me for waking him up. I get flustered with him being so close. “It’s Sasha, she tried to kill herself and she’s downstairs, bleeding all over the floor.”

“Christ, go get Eli and Jonah. I’m gonna try to make the bleeding stop.” He pushes past me, his hand brushing my collarbone.

I rush to end of the hallway to find Eli and Jonah already awake, with Becca standing behind her father, holding his hand. “Sasha hurt herself, she’s gonna bleed out,” I explain.