Life # 73: That time Tom and Harry died of the Black Death

Bremen, Holy Roman Empire, 1350

"You're going to have to repeat that," Tom rasped, barely able to keep his eyes open, his cheeks glowing with a fever. "Because it sounded like you just suggested I die a painful death from the bubonic plague to satisfy your curiosity."

"Well, no," Harry said, adjusting her woollen skirts as she kneeled beside their simple bed so she could wipe the sweat off Tom's forehead with a cold, damp cloth. "But also yes."

Tom managed to crack open one bloodshot eye to give his soulmate a half-hearted glare. "Harry, let's just end it now. There's nothing stopping us."

"I know." Harry swiped the cloth across Tom's cheeks. They had a simple rule when it came to suicide. As long as they didn't have young children they could step out of a life if it became too painful one way or another. But if they had children that weren't yet adults and capable of looking after themselves, they had to stick around, no matter what. Both Tom and Harry had been orphans their first life and they weren't about to put their own children through a similar ordeal if they could help it.

This life they lost their infant daughter to scarlet fever the previous year and Harry had suffered a miscarriage just a few months prior, probably due to malnutrition. Food was getting scarcer by the day what with the Black Death sweeping across the whole of Europe and Asia, leaving millions and millions dead in its wake, with fields of crops left to rot without enough workers to harvest them.

Tom ran a small business with his brother Hans as grain importers, bringing in wheat and barley on merchant ships in Bremen port in what one day would be modern Germany, but due to the plague, commerce was in decline and Tom barely brought home enough money to keep them fed and housed. Harry earned a few coins on the side as an herb woman, selling homemade remedies for things like rashes and headaches, but while she could cure many small ailments with her modern knowledge of medicinal plants, even she couldn't produce any antibiotics to cure the bubonic plague without modern technology.

"Aren't you at least a bit medically curious, though?" Harry asked, sitting back and giving Tom a pleading look, hoping to tickle Tom's professional curiosity. They'd both been medical doctors more than once at that point. "We're in the middle of the great plague and we've got this unique opportunity to experience what it's like to die from the bubonic plague."

Tom made a throaty sound of disbelief which ended in a coughing fit. Harry reached for a clay cup of boiled and cooled water for Tom to drink.

"Think about it," Harry rambled on because her inner-scientist and medical doctor were insanely curious about what it was like to go through such a devastating historical event. They'd known they were going to live through the Black Death once they got their memories back and realized where and when they were living and they'd taken every precaution they could, keeping their small house in Bremen pest free as much as possible. Harry had adopted a handful of cats over the years to help with this. Their small dog, a terrier mix named Nils who had been an excellent rat catcher, had been taken away the previous year, along with all other dogs in the city of Bremen, in the mistaken belief they were spreading the plague while in reality they were holding the spread back by keeping the local rat population under control. Harry had vocally and vehemently opposed this policy until Tom had literally dragged her away once the authorities had threatened to throw Harry into the slammer for obstructing the law.

With the dogs gone, and the local cat population outnumbered when it came to the number of rats, the fleas on the rats were free to multiply as they wished, just like their hosts, and bite humans left and right, thereby spreading the bacteria Yersinia Pestis, which caused the plague, like a wildfire.

Not that Harry was ultimately surprised that they'd been unable to keep the plague out of their home, no matter how hard they'd tried. It was the Middle Ages. Personal hygiene hadn't been invented yet, nor did people understand one single thing about the human body and how it really worked.

Any 'doctors' that existed during that time were still convinced the theory of the four humors was the height of modern medicine and bloodletting was the answer to every ailment under the sun.

For months Harry had seen the people around them succumb to the horrible disease, with people leading carts through the streets, pulled by oxen or dogs, to pick up the many dead bodies that threatened to fill the city, to be deposited into mass graves beyond the city limits.

It was a massacre and Harry knew it was only a matter of time before either she or Tom came down with it.

And then Tom came home early from work one day with a raging fever and a bubo, a pus-filled swelling on his lymph node developing in his neck and Harry knew their time had come and their number was up.

The Black Death had arrived.

And no matter that Harry didn't want Tom to suffer a painful death, she couldn't help but be incredibly curious. In modern times the bubonic plague was an afterthought for most doctors. It popped up in some corners of the world from time to time, including certain parts of the USA, but all you needed was a few rounds of antibiotics and your chances of survival were almost guaranteed.

But to see the whole world tremble and society crumble under the weight of one of the worst epidemics the world had ever seen was something else entirely and Harry's inner-academic was unable to resist the temptation to experience every single aspect of it, no matter the personal cost.

"Think about it, babe," Harry whispered, picking up a different cup and holding it to Tom's lips. "Think about what an historical opportunity this is, to experience this event intimately."

Tom sipped the contents of the cup and made a face once he swallowed.

"Willow bark tea," Harry said with a chuckle. "It'll help with your fever. I added some honey but I can tell from your expression it wasn't enough to mask the bitterness."

Tom managed to open his eyes for a second and give Harry a look that was both filled with adoration and exasperation. Harry's grin softened and her chest glowed with the realization how much she loved Tom and how lucky she was to have him by her side in every life they got to live, no matter how disastrous a life it might be.

Just as Harry was about to give into Tom's obvious discomfort with the idea of dying a slow and painful death and call the whole idea off so they could slit their wrists and end things quickly, Tom sighed and nodded his head once.

Harry perked up and stared at Tom in disbelief. "Was that a yes? Did you just agree to my crazy plan?"

"Yes," Tom breathed and immediately groaned in pain when Harry all but threw her arms across his chest and gave him a hug as best she could.

"Sorry," Harry mumbled with a sheepish smile while she sat back again. "Thanks, babe, I really appreciate it. Now, please tell me how you feel."

"Sick," Tom breathed, eyes firmly closed again.

Harry glared at her annoying soulmate, but it had no effect since Tom didn't even see her. "Could you maybe put a bit more effort into that description?"

Tom waited for half a minute at least before he finally said with something bordering on a pained smirk, "Fucking sick."

Sighing, Harry pushed herself up to her feet, conceding defeat for the time being. "Just rest, darling. I'm going to the market to pick up some supplies. We've got a busy week ahead, dying of the Black Death and all that." Harry pressed a quick kiss to Tom's warm forehead, but her soulmate had already dozed off, exhausted as he was by the high fever raging through him.

Harry grabbed her woollen scarf and threw it across her shoulders before picking up the wicker basket she used for shopping. Lastly she collected their money pouch, with the last of their meagre coins, and stuffed it down her dress in between her breasts. That way no pickpocket could get at it without Harry noticing.

Before she opened the door, Harry pressed a cloth drenched in lavender water over her nose and mouth and then she was finally ready to buy some supplies. The faint scent of lavender did very little to mask the overwhelming sickly sweet stench of disease and death that filled the whole city around her as Harry hurried through the narrow streets towards the market square. Just ahead of her, a few men wearing filthy cloths over their mouths carried a body wrapped in a stained sheet out of a house. As they tried to push the body onto the waiting cart, a leg fell out, displaying a necrotic foot with its black, rotting flesh to the world. Harry pushed any revulsion she wanted to feel down, reminding herself she was a doctor, or at least had been in more than one life, and that she'd seen worse.

She wasn't sure if she'd ever smelled worse, though, as she inhaled the stench of piss and shit and pus and blood and dying flesh as she walked past the cart, keeping as much distance as she could.

And then she remembered the trenches in Belgium and yeah, she'd definitely smelled worse.

Harry still desperately wanted to take a hot bath to help her feel clean again but since the start of the plague all the bathhouses had been closed in the city and they had to make do with washing themselves at home using a rag and a minimal amount of expensive soap.

It was one of the things most people got wrong about the Middle Ages, Harry now knew as she lived during that time. Most people thought the inhabitants of the Middle Ages were filthy peasants who never washed.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Middle Ages were a time where people enjoyed communal bathing in public bathhouses throughout most of Europe. It was expected to bathe at least once a week, a habit the Vikings had introduced some centuries before. Some people, like Harry and Tom, went twice a week if they could afford it.

But then the Black Death happened and the bathhouses were closed one after the other for fear of spreading the plague and as far as Harry knew they never really reopened again. It was the centuries after the Middle Ages that people stopped bathing regularly.

Once she reached the market, Harry stocked up on dried peas, some carrots and onions and a small chunk of salted pork. That put together would make a huge pot of pea soup that would keep them well-nourished for the coming days and would be easy for Tom to eat as well, sick as he was.

As Harry walked home, she took in the crooked houses, the muddy pathways, the children running around with dirt staining their cheeks, knowing that soon they'd be leaving this life behind now that Tom was dying. One way or the other, Harry would follow him the moment he was gone.

It had been an interesting experience, Harry thought, to live in this part of the world during the devastating times of the second Great Plague, but she was also looking forward to a new life, hopefully one with a little less death in it.

That was the reality of living during times without modern medicine. Death was an ever-present entity hovering over everyone's heads, ready to snatch their souls up over the simplest of illnesses or accidents.

Harry had lost her mother to what she expected was some sort of cancer, probably of the bowels, some ten years ago. Harry's father she'd lost to an infection of his tooth. Harry had begged her father to just go to the barber's to have the infected tooth pulled, which was the only thing that might possibly save his life, but her father was a stubborn man and, Harry suspected, slightly suicidal after the loss of her mother, and he'd refused to take any action. He'd been dead a week later.

Harry's older brother had drowned when he'd fallen off the barge he worked on, and Harry's older sister had died in childbirth the year before.

And that was all the immediate family Harry once had. Now she was alone, save for Tom and whatever family he had remaining.

Life could really be tough in the Middle Ages, even without a deadly disease being spread by fleas on the rats that were everywhere.

Right before she reached their small home Harry saw a monster of a rat scurry off into the shadows.

Fucking things.

Tom mumbled a greeting when Harry called out to him. She helped him drink a few sips of water to make sure he wouldn't dehydrate because of the fever and then she set to making the pea soup, which was pretty standard.

All they had was a hearth and a few cauldrons. Stoves weren't available yet, so everything was cooked in one pot, no matter what you had to work with. Bread, grains, meat, eggs, vegetables, it all went into the same pot to boil for a few hours and once it was ready to dish up it was called pottage, no matter what was actually in it.

Harry was making genuine pea soup, though, even though it might as well be called pottage, too.

Harry filled the cauldron with water, added the dried peas, the cut-up salted pork and the chopped carrots and onions and then she hung it over the fire in the hearth to cook for a while until it was done.

Not the most delicious meal she'd ever prepared but filling and nutritious and the last thing they'd be eating in this life one way or the other, since Harry had spent the last of their coins and nothing new was coming in since Tom wasn't working. And they'd both be dead before long anyway.

Right as Harry got ready to give Tom some more willow bark tea, there was a knock on the door.

Tom's brother Hans, tall and with a dark beard, and their stooped, aging mother greeted her once Harry opened the door a crack.

"Is it the plague?" Tom's mother asked, her wrinkled face creased even further with worry.

"Yes, it appears so," Harry whispered, her heart aching at seeing the obvious grief on their faces at the knowledge they'd soon be losing their brother and son. It was different for her, Harry knew. Yes, she was worried for Tom, she always was, but she also knew that even though this life was coming to an end, a new one would be waiting for them.

Tom's brother and mother had no such comfort.

"Here," Tom's mother said as she pulled a loaf of dark bread out of her apron where she'd kept it wrapped up. "You need to eat well these coming days. We will pray for you both."

"Thank you," Harry said sincerely as she accepted the generous gift, her eyes getting a little wet knowing this was probably the last time she'd see her brother and mother in law. They were both good and kind people and had always been welcoming to Harry once she married Tom. "Wait a second."

Harry hurried inside her home and collected a few things in a clean cloth. She handed the small bundle to Hans. "Willow bark, make it into tea if someone gets the plague. It will help keep the fever down. And comfrey, make that into a poultice to put on the buboes, to keep them clean. Just in case."

"My thanks, good sister," Hans said with a solemn nod and they said a quick goodbye.

"Was that Hans?" Tom mumbled as Harry approached him with a cup of willow bark tea.

"Yeah, and your mother," Harry said, kneeling beside their bed and putting the cup against Tom's dry lips. "They were worried about you."

Tom sipped the willow bark tea quietly, but in his eyes Harry could see her own thoughts of loss reflected.

"We'll miss them," Harry whispered, giving voice to the kind of emotions they always faced at the end of one of their lives.

"I hope they survive," Tom said with a tired sigh. "They're good people."

"We both got lucky with our families this time," Harry said with smile she made as bright as she could given their dire circumstances.

Tom gave a slow nod but seemed too exhausted to say anything else.

"Just rest, babe." Harry ran her fingers through Tom's dark hair before she got up to check on her pea soup.

And that was their routine for the next few days. Harry took care of Tom as best she could given the limited means she had to work with. She gave Tom willow bark tea every few hours to keep the fever under control and she washed away any pus and blood that leaked from the many buboes that now adorned Tom's neck and inner thighs. And once Tom was clean and somewhat lucid, Harry helped him eat a small bowl of pea soup.

"You've got to keep your strength up," Harry insisted when Tom had initially refused her soup.

"I'll be dead in a few days," Tom grumbled with a fairly weak glare, but he had finished half a bowl of soup, so Harry counted that as a win.

"Are they very painful?" Harry asked, equal parts fascinated and disgusted as she examined a bubo before cleaning it with essence of comfrey.

Tom was unable to say anything, just released an animalistic sound as he jerked away from her.

"I'll take that as a yes," Harry mumbled while hurrying up to not give Tom more pain than was necessary. "Also, I think your fingertips are turning necrotic. Can you feel that?" Harry gently pinched a blackening finger.

"Fuck you," Tom said with feeling.

And then Harry ran out of willow bark. And since she'd spent their last coins on food days before she wasn't in a position to buy any more either.

Tom's fever spiked within hours and with it came a delirium.

"Harry," Tom gasped in perfect, modern English as he lay in their bed, staring up at the ceiling with glassy eyes, sheets pushed aside even as he was shivering as the cold air hit his sweaty body. "Harry! Your mask, Harry! It's broken! Fuck, put on your mask!"

Harry stood still as a statue as she stared down at her soulmate hallucinating while stuck in a fever dream. Or rather, a fever nightmare. Harry knew exactly what Tom was seeing. It had been one of their more traumatizing lives thus far.

In life number 66 they'd been soldiers during World War 1, fighting in the trenches in Belgium. That whole experience had been a clusterfuck. Harry had no words to describe some of the horrors they'd seen there, that they'd lived through.

"Harry, they're gassing us! Put on your mask, Harry!"

They lived through shitty lives from time to time. Abusive families, poverty, discrimination, natural disasters, slavery, arranged underage marriages, they'd seen it all by that point.

But little was as traumatizing as war, and few wars were as traumatizing as The Great War.

"Your mask, Harry! It's broken! They're gassing us!"

A tear slipped down Harry's cheek as she realized she was the biggest, most selfish cunt that had ever walked the earth.

Here was her soulmate, the love of her many lives, reliving horrors that shouldn't have been lived even once because Harry insisted he draw out his painful death to satisfy her curiosity.

The biggest. Most Selfish. Cunt. Ever.

Harry shook herself, wiping a hand across her eyes before turning around and walking towards the wooden chest in which she kept her dried herbs. She dug through what little stock she had left until she found the one thing that if authorities knew she had it would earn her a direct trip to the gallows.

She held up the small, murky vial that contained pure essence of deadly nightshade.

Derived from the plant also known as belladonna, it contained a strong toxin that was lethal in the right doses. Harry produced her essence from both the berries and the roots of the plant, thereby upping the toxicity.

"Harry! Your mask! The gas is coming!"

"I'm here, darling," Harry whispered as she sat down on the edge of the bed, breaking the wax seal on the vial.

"Your mask!"

"I know, sweetheart," Harry said as soothingly as she could while tears trailed down her cheeks and dripped from her chin onto Tom's bare chest. "I'll put on my mask as soon as you drink this."

Tom looked straight up with unseeing eyes and Harry knew he was stuck deep in whatever hallucination he was seeing.

"The gas!"

"Just drink this, love, and the gas will go away." When Harry put the vial against Tom's lips he obediently opened his mouth and Harry emptied the whole vial into his mouth, giving him more than enough to offer him a quick death. Then she clamped her hand over his mouth when some of the bitterness registered and Tom inevitably tried to cough some of it back up. "Just drink, darling, swallow it all, and it will soon be over."

Tom lay staring up at the ceiling for many long minutes while Harry all but held her breath. "I'm so sorry, Tom," Harry whispered against his bearded cheek. "I'm so sorry I put you through this. I promise I won't ever do something stupid like this again."

"Harry, the gas…" Tom managed to breathe before succumbing to violent convulsions that had his entire body rocking the bed. Harry held him down as best as she could, but thankfully Tom's body was exhausted from fighting the plague for days and days now and didn't have much energy left to resist this new poison with and the convulsions didn't last more than a few minutes.

"Sshh. It's almost over. I'm so sorry, darling. I'll see you on the other side."

Tom's last breath was a true death rattle and Harry sat perfectly still for a few minutes, waiting to see if another breath would come, before checking his pulse.

The heart had stopped and Tom was dead.

Harry managed to close his glassy eyes before burying her face in her hands and crying with great, heaving sobs.

She knew she'd see Tom again, knew there was another life waiting for them, there always was, but that didn't mean she wasn't filled with grief over seeing Tom dead once again.

"I'm so sorry, love, so fucking sorry." Harry finally managed to get up and look around the room. She'd used all her essence of deadly nightshade on Tom so that was out. Normally she'd just slice her wrists open. Bleeding out like that wasn't that bad of a way to go. The initial cuts hurt a bit, but soon enough there was an almost pleasant light-headedness before slipping into darkness almost unnoticed.

Just as easy as falling asleep, as Sirius had once called it many, many lifetimes ago.

But somehow, having seen Tom suffer for days, taking the easy way out seemed wrong to Harry.

Tom had suffered because of Harry's selfish demands, and now Harry should suffer as well.

Harry used their only knife, which they mostly used for cooking, to slice open the palm of her hand and then she dragged this open, bleeding wound across every pus-oozing bubo on Tom's cooling body.

There were three ways in which the Yersinia Pestis bacteria could make you ill and ultimately kill you. There was the bubonic plague, named for the buboes on the lymph nodes as the bacteria attacked the lymphatic system. Then there was the pneumonic plague, where the bacteria infected the lungs. And finally, there was the septicaemic plague, where the bacteria infected the blood.

Septicaemic plague was the rarest and most serious of the plague varieties, and as far as Harry was concerned exactly what she deserved.

For the next few hours Harry busied herself with washing Tom's body and covering it with a clean sheet. Then she tidied up around their small home so that whomever found their bodies (probably Tom's brother Hans) wouldn't be stuck with a messy house to clean. She washed out the cauldron she'd used for the pea soup and swept up the dirty rushes, especially around the bed where they'd been soiled with blood and pus while Tom had convulsed violently.

By the time she was done she felt achy and cold and feverish and she knew the bacteria was doing its work. Harry lay down in their bed beside Tom's body and waited for death to come for her and transport her soul to a whole new body.

The fever got her first.

Her whole body ached and her teeth clattered and skin glowed as her mind wandered farther and farther away until he found himself in the trenches, standing in deep mud up way over his ankles.

"Tom?" Harry looked around, adjusting the helmet on his head. "Tom, where are you?"

Tom wasn't there.

The ice-cold mud squelched around Harry's feet as he walked on through the trenches, occasionally almost tripping over one of the many dead bodies that lined the narrow ways, all of them staring at Harry with lifeless, glassy eyes.

Andrews was sitting in the mud to Harry's left, staring down at his feet while pulling on his laces.

"Andrews, have you seen Tom?"

"I can't get my boots off," Andrews muttered as he violently pulled on one of his boots. "Sir, why can't I get my boots off?"

"Because your feet and boots are frozen solid," Harry said, remembering Andrews' gruesome fate. Both feet were severely frostbitten once they'd finally managed to pry his frozen boots off and got his feet thawed. They'd turned necrotic and Andrews had lost them both, returning home an invalid unable to provide for himself and depending on his aging parents for everything. He'd killed himself within the year.

"Oh." Andrews stared up at Harry in disbelief and then went back to violently pulling on his boots.

Harry left him to it and continued his trek across the freezing trenches to find his soulmate.

Nearby mortar fire rained mud and dirt and body parts all over him, but Harry continued on.

Johnson was missing half his head and several large rats were feasting on what was left of his brain.

Fucking things.

More rats showed up, crowding Johnson's entire body as they tore at his bloody clothes and ate his rotting flesh all the way down to his bones.

Harry remembered they'd found Johnson's body stripped of most of his muscles, the rats having devoured him as he lay dead in no man's land. They'd only been able to identify him by his tags.

Harry tried to avoid the rats, but there were too many, and they ran across his feet and up his mud-caked pants and across his face and Harry grabbed them and threw them away as he ran as fast as he could through the squelching mud.

Tom stood with his back turned towards Harry. "Look. The gas is coming."

All around them clouds of yellow gas drifted towards them through the November night and Harry reached for his gasmask only to realize at the last moment that the glass over an eye was cracked.

"Harry, put on your mask," Tom said, voice muted by his own gasmask.

Harry put on his cracked mask and hoped for the best and within minutes he started coughing and coughing as the mustard gas blistered his lungs.

"Harry?" Tom whispered, hands gently shaking Harry's shoulders. "Harry, are you all right?"

Harry looked around herself and realized with a shock they weren't in the trenches any longer. They weren't even in Bremen anymore.

They were standing on a campus of a university in Texas in the warm afternoon sun.

"Fuck," Harry said, and she felt like crying. "I'm so sorry, babe. I never should have asked that of you."

"What?" Tom wrinkled his brow in confusion. "Are you talking about the whole dying of the plague thing? I agreed to that, darling. It's fine." Tom stared down at Harry's apologetic face and sighed. "Harry, what did you do?"

"I'm so sorry, I really am," Harry mumbled while her bottom lip trembled. "I gave you essence of deadly nightshade to end your suffering and then I infected myself so I could suffer as you did."

"For fuck's sake." Tom shook his head while he released a loud sigh. "You fucking Gryffindor. I agreed to it. I wasn't yet too sick that I couldn't slice my own wrists if I wanted to, darling."

Harry managed a weak chuckle. "Yeah, okay, you've got a point. And I barely was sick for long anyway before hallucinating and dying."

Tom's expression became utterly serious. "The trenches?"

Harry nodded. "The trenches."

"Come on." Tom slung his arm across Harry's shoulders. "Let's get some coffee. And some cake. I'm Jackson, by the way. Jackson Freeman."

"Cho-Hee Park." Harry wrapped her own arm around Tom's waist, glad to put the traumas of any past lives behind them now that they had just started a brand new life together. "I'm doing veterinary medicine, again, by the way."

"Me, too," Tom said with a warm smile.

Harry was about to return it when something occurred to her. She stopped walking at once and stared up at Tom in utter horror. "Holy fuck, stick me back in the Middle Ages right now, plague and all."

"What?" Tom looked at her in utter confusion.

Harry swallowed against her suddenly dry throat. "I just realized the amount of student debt I'm going to have by the time I graduate. Seriously, I'd rather do the plague again."

"Fuck me." Tom stared straight ahead in obvious horror. "We'll both be paying for our education for the rest of our lives."

And as it turned out, Tom was right. They did end up paying off their degrees for most of their lives, but that is a story for another time.