Falling through Fire
For Bethaboo and TheEdwardEmmett's 'Make it Count' Contest – a short story less than one thousand words. If you like, please vote for me when the competition opens (20th March!) Please review to let me know what you think!
Oh. Yeah. I don't own Twilight.
Hope you like it xxx :)
He'd never thought about how he was going to die. Not really. The time he lived in was full of it – disease, poverty, war; things which could strike a man down one day where only hours, minutes before he had been completely fine. Naturally, he'd seen death.
Strange, then, that Edward had never really considered it as a possibility for himself.
After death was a different matter. He'd thought about that, thought long and hard, because if death was an everyday occurrence of life then religion was one of the pivotal points. Edward was quite clear on what happened; your soul, that part of you which held everything that you were and which God had created, left its body behind for eternal life. He knew that. But it had never truly crossed his mind that he would have to die first; that part always seemed irrelevant, something which would never happen to him.
Not the dying itself.
And certainly not so soon.
Some part of him knew that it was evening, that the light outside was fading. The sun was setting over Chicago, the city which he had never had the opportunity to leave, which he now never would. Was it better to die here, he wondered, than in some far distant place which he didn't know, in a war that he no longer cared about? Edward couldn't say. Did it really matter?
Perhaps not. It didn't matter which city, or state, or even country, that he was in, because the high-ceilinged, stone-walled prison of a hospital could have been anywhere. They all had the same sounds – low moans of the terminally ill, hurried footsteps, hushed voices.
They all smelt of death.
He hated lying there, waiting to die. Knowing that he would never consciously leave this miserable crypt, that even if he did he would have nothing to return to. Had he been strong enough to turn his head, Edward knew that he would have seen his mother's ghostly pale face on the bed right next to his, face twisted with the same agony and hopelessness he knew must be written across his own. Be grateful for small mercies, her voice seemed to chide him from memories long past; now gone forever. At least he wouldn't have to watch her suffer, see the light fading from those eyes which had use to sparkle as she sung around the house on sunny days.
He knew that she was still alive, but barely.
If he strained his ears, he could hear her, barely a whisper as she held a conversation with someone – real or imagined, it didn't really matter. She seemed to be begging, and he hated whoever it was who refused her anything. How could they make her hurt even more than she was already?
She sounded so weak; a world away from the woman he loved so dearly. It was as if he'd already lost his mother; it couldn't be her. His mother couldn't be dying.
It had been worse some time ago – minutes, hours, maybe even days, as time merged into one long tunnel of seconds ticking by steadily towards the end of his life – it had been worse when they took his father away. Hearing her sob, too weak to turn and comfort her. She was stronger than him, yet she sounded so broken now. He couldn't even weep for his father.
The room was cold, colder than before. Darker, too, so the sun must have gone. It was hard to tell – maybe he had just closed his eyes.
Shoes scuffed across the floor; somebody coughed. A man was shouting outside, words unintelligible above the sudden clangour of a passing cart. It was only when the wheels had rattled by, when the man had walked on, that Edward realised his mother had fallen silent too.
He prayed that it was because she was asleep.
She couldn't be dead.
Please, God...
"Edward?"
Something brushed across his face, colder than the cloth with which his mother had bathed his forehead before – before. He didn't move, didn't open his eyes. He didn't want to, because that would be acknowledging a reality which he no longer wanted to accept. Even the air was too heavy, filled with the stench of the fate which he knew would soon befall him.
Again, insistently, came that voice. "Edward."
It seemed too soft, too beautiful to have a place here, where death stunk the air and pain was in every heartbeat, every breath. Less so now than before, though; Edward felt like he was drifting, the voice suddenly a very long way away –
Was this dying? He certainly didn't feel bound by his body any more, bound down to earth. Was this that moment he had long wondered about? He was calm; if this was dying, then it wasn't so bad. It was life that was harder. Death was easy.
Then an abrupt, fiery agony clamped down on him, and if he could he would have screamed. If he had been drifting before, now ropes had been flung around him and were jerking him to a halt, dragging him back down, down into the excruciating torment of life. He was too weak to fight it; poison running like white fire through his veins, engorging his heart so that he thought it would burst –
He was falling, down and down into the fire.
"God, please forgive me," he heard. And then, Edward, forgive me.
Please review and vote! xxx :)