Chapter 9
Turns out that twenty years ago was still medically relevant.
Elowyn woke because her body refused to let her sleep peacefully.
Not gently.
Not gradually.
It was the kind of waking that felt like being yanked out of a dream by the collar, disoriented and immediately offended.
Her head was pounding—throbbing—in a way that felt Biblical. As if tiny construction workers armed with jackhammers had unionized inside her skull overnight.
They were clearly not observing noise ordinances.
Or mercy.
Her throat?
Raw. Tortured. Betrayed.
She’d clearly swallowed a fistful of needles in her sleep.
Or maybe sandpaper.
Or barbed wire.
Elowyn swallowed experimentally and winced, the motion scraping painfully on the way down.
She inhaled through her nose.
Nothing happened.
She tried again.
Still nothing.
Her nose was so clogged it felt purely decorative.
At this point, it existed only for aesthetic balance. A suggestion. A lie.
Being sick was nothing new to her, but somehow, it was torturous every single time.
You’d think her body would have learned by now. You’d think there would be some kind of muscle memory for illness. Instead, every cold felt like a brand-new betrayal, fresh and personal.
She mentally ran through the checklist the way she always did.
Congestion.
Headache.
Sore throat.
General sense of impending doom.
Yes, she’d had all of this before. Many times, actually. But this one felt… personal.
Like her immune system had taken a look at her and decided today was the day to settle a long-standing grudge.
There was also the quiet, traitorous voice in her head insisting that this time was worse. That this time something had shifted. That surely, statistically speaking, she had reached the point in her life where her body simply decided to stop cooperating altogether.
She lay there, staring at the ceiling with the hollow dismay of someone who had accepted their fate.
She wasn’t just sick.
She was on her deathbed.
This wasn’t a mild inconvenience. This was a final chapter situation. A slow fade to black. If someone started speaking softly at her bedside, she wouldn’t have questioned it.
If this was how it ended, she decided distantly, it was deeply unfair. She still had half-finished puzzles under her bed. Books with bookmarks stranded in the middle of chapters. Yarn projects abandoned mid-row. A perfectly good hoodie that hadn’t been worn nearly enough.
Who would take care of her stuffed animals?
She slowly pulled the blanket over half her face and whispered, in the frailest voice imaginable:
“…why.”
One of her many stuffed animals—an elephant—didn’t answer.
Coward.
She attempted to sit up, made it approximately four inches, then collapsed back into the mattress like a tragic Victorian child.
The effort alone felt heroic. Her vision sparkled unpleasantly at the edges, her head protesting the movement like she’d attempted parkour instead of basic human functioning.
Her body reacted as if she’d attempted a full sprint rather than a basic change in posture. Her head protested violently. Her vision fuzzed at the edges.
The cough that came next was so pitiful she genuinely wondered if angels were gathering.
It scraped its way out of her chest, sharp and rattling, leaving her throat burning afterward. The sound echoed too loudly in her own ears, like her body was announcing its failure to the universe at large.
She lay there afterward, breathing shallowly, offended.
Elowyn reached for the mug of tea her dad had left. Her hand trembled dramatically—as if reenacting a scene from a movie where someone poisons the king. She took a sip.
It burned.
Her soul left her body.
Not metaphorically.
She was fairly certain it actually exited through her ears.
“No,” she croaked, pushing the mug away like it had committed war crimes.
This was unacceptable. Tea was supposed to help. Tea was supposed to be gentle. This tea had clearly chosen violence.
The room spun a little as she flopped backward.
This was it.
This was how she died:
half-asleep, wearing mismatched socks and clutching her teddy bear.
There were worse ways to go, she supposed, but not many.
Her phone buzzed under her pillow, but she didn’t even bother checking it.
What was she supposed to text back?
Sorry, I’ve passed away. Please water my plants.
Or worse—voice to text. Absolutely not. She would rather perish with dignity than let her congested, croaking voice be transcribed into something unforgivable.
A second buzz. She ignored it harder.
If someone needed her, they would have to wait. Or mourn. Whichever came first.
Even moving her eyes felt exhausting. Breathing was a chore.
Existing?
Honestly, too much effort.
The blanket was suddenly too hot.
She kicked it off.
Instantly regretted it.
Pulled it back up.
This process repeated several times.
There was no correct temperature. Only extremes. Her body could not agree with itself, and she was caught in the middle of the argument.
She hacked out another cough, rolled to one side, then whispered to no one:
“I’m never recovering.”
It wasn’t a complaint. It was a statement of fact.
She wasn’t dramatic.
The world was just cruel.
She’d known better. She’d known better than to run through the rain. And yet she’d done it anyway, seduced by a cardboard box and the promise of a puzzle.
At some point she sat up just long enough to blow her nose, producing a sound that absolutely could have summoned wildlife from the backyard.
The tissue told a story she did not wish to hear.
Then she fell sideways again, making a soft oof as her face hit the pillow.
Her limbs felt heavy now, like gravity had quietly doubled while she wasn’t looking.
No thoughts.
No reflections.
Just pure, unhinged, over-the-top suffering.
Time became strange after that. Stretchy. Unreliable. She floated somewhere between sleep and awareness, drifting in and out as her body finally seemed to surrender to exhaustion.
And the faint, distant hope that someone, someday, would tell the tale of her bravery during this illness.
For now, she groaned quietly and drifted back to sleep, her final conscious thought being:
If I die, someone please delete my search history.