Infected

The dazzling colours of the sunset dance upon the ceiling. I’m lying on my back, looking up at them, watching them swirl into themselves. It’s comforting, like looking through a kaleidoscope, watching the different shapes morph into each other as they twist and turn. So, so beautiful.
“Marina.”
It’s been so long, but I’d know her voice anywhere. I know it better than any other voice in the world. Her face blossoms from the swirling colours above me, smiling and untroubled.
“Marina,” she says again, “I’ve found you.”
“Vi,” I choke out, overcome with emotion. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I know,” she smiled, her tone comforting. Her presence made me feel at peace.
I took in her features, the crinkled lines from smiling that she hated so much, her upturned lips, the glimmer of life in her cerulean eyes.
“You look so real,” I breathed, my lip trembling. “Is it really you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she tilted her head as she descended from above and landed softly upon the bed, where she sat beside me.
“Am I dying?” I asked, looking up at her. “Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m just here to be with you,” she replied, softly, taking my hand. Her touch was warm. It felt so real as I curled my fingers around hers, relishing the time with her.
I sighed heavily, “I miss you. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing without you. I’ve been fumbling around in the dark, trying to keep Hallie alive, just looking for a light, any light to lead me back into real life.”
“Marina,” she smiled, knowingly. “Maybe you already have it. If you stopped looking so hard, you’d see that it’s right in front of you.”
I frowned up at her as she reach a hand over to stroke my hair, “What is it?”
“You don’t need me to tell you,” she laughed, lightly, “I have every faith you can find it.”
“How do I find it without you? I don’t know how to do anything without you by my side,” I confessed, furrowing my brow.
“Look how far you’ve come without me,” she encouraged, looking around at the room. “California… I would have loved it here, I can tell you that.”
“I wish you were here with us, and Esther,” I answered, longingly. “I’d give anything for Hallie to have her family back.”
“She’s still got family,” Viola smiled, warmly. “She’s got you.”
“I’m no good for her,” I shook my head, looking away from her gaze. She turned my head back towards her, gently.
“You’re perfect for her,” she reassured.
“Vi, we argue all the time,” I began, but she held a hand up, cutting me off.
“That's because teenagers are fucking idiots,” she grinned, wickedly, “but you’re handling it well.”
We sat quietly for a moment, holding each other’s hands, our fingers laced together. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to break the peaceful silence.
“Do you hate me for it, Vi? For not saving you?”
She looked at me sadly, “Mar, I could never hate you.”
I looking up at her through teary eyes, “Is this a dream?”
She squeezed my hand, “It’s whatever you want it to be.”
“Will you stay with me for a while?” I begged, gripping her tighter.
“As long as you need me,” she promised, resting a hand against my cheek. “Why don’t you close your eyes, Marina? I’ll be here. Just let go…”

The room was dark when I opened my eyes again. The dreamscape of colours and the whispers that had been running across the ceiling like a river were long gone. My chest ached out into the night, the pain flooding back in. Her hand was still in mine, though. I squeezed it as I looked over at her… but it wasn’t her.
“Marina?” he asked, sleepily, sitting up and clasping his other hand on top of mine from where he’d been dozing in a chair next to the bed. His hair was messier than usual, tousled with restlessness, and his eyes had dark circles underneath.
“Jimmy?” I uttered, my eyes flickering around, looking for my sister. He put a hand to my forehead and gave me a weak smile.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, leaning over me and dabbing at my skin with a damp sponge.
“Where did Viola go? Did you see her?” I asked, trying to sit up. He placed a hand on my shoulder, gently keeping me down.
“You’ve had a fever,” he explained, gently. “You’ve been calling for her.”
“She was here,” I argued, weakly. “I saw her.”
He only smiled sympathetically at me, continuing to sponge me down. I looked down at myself, frowning. The hideous green dress was gone, replaced by a loose tank top and leggings. The wound on my chest was open to the air, the letters crusted over and pink at the edges.
“What happened?” I asked, glancing back up at him.
“You’ve had an infection,” he answered, putting the sponge down. He swept my hair from my face, and pressed his lips together for a second. “You’ve been out of it for a few days. We… we thought you weren’t going to make it, but then your fever broke tonight.”
I went to put my fingers against the etching on my chest, but he stopped me.
“Don’t touch,” he instructed me firmly. “We’re trying to keep it clean.”
My eyes filled involuntarily, “It’s... It's so ugly.”
Jimmy’s face twisted with sorrow, “Nothing that’s a part of you could ever be ugly.”
I let the tears overflow and run down, as Jimmy wiped them away softly with his thumb.
“I’m just glad we haven’t lost someone else,” he whispered, his eyes piercing into mine. “Brian’s been going out of his mind.”
“Brian? But he hates me,” I countered, my eyebrows knitting together.
“Brian doesn’t hate you, Marina,” Jimmy shook his head. “Brian hates not having Blair. And all this has just…”
He trailed off, leaving me in the dark.
“All this has what? What happened to her, Jimmy?” I pressed, staring at him. He sighed, looking upwards as though the answers might be written on the ceiling.
“This,” he looked back at me, gesturing to the mess on my chest, “happened to her.”
“What?” I blurted, taken aback. “Adam?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, pausing to find the words. “When all this first happened, Blair was mid tour. It was a fucking kick ass tour as well, I totally crashed it and went along for the ride.”
I smiled weakly at the flicker of mischief in his eyes as he said it.
“Anyway, some point midway, I came back home. Brian was quite obviously sick of mine and Blair’s antics, he never did do well with our copious amounts of energy,” he paused, his smile fading. “A couple of days after I got home, everything started going wrong. All that shit that was on the news just seemed to get worse by the minute, so I tried to call them and tell them to come home, but I couldn’t get through.”
“I remember how quickly it spread. The lines were just jammed,” I recalled, thinking back to the panic that swept across the nation overnight.
He grimaced, “Yeah, well Blair and Brian ended up stuck in Oklahoma in the middle of it all. I got the guys together and we tried to get to them, but everything went to fuck really quickly and we didn’t really know what to do. I eventually got through to Brian’s cell, told him to stay put with Blair and we’d come to them.”
He paused for a second, his mouth pulling down at the corners and his eyes full of regret.
“How did you get to them?” I asked, softly. “They shut the airports down pretty quickly.”
“Yeah, a couple of days after I flew back,” he nodded. “We drove. It just took so long to get there, though. We were struggling to find gas and there were biters everywhere… You know what it was like.”
“Yeah,” I concurred, “I remember.”
“I don’t know how long it took us to get there exactly. Weeks, maybe. Whatever. It was too long.” He hung his head dejectedly. “They’d already had them.”
His current sombre mood weighed heavily on the air. It was starkly different to his usual attitude to things, jarringly so.

“We finally got to the venue they’d been playing at, no one there. No sign of them. We looked all over, nearly got ourselves fucking killed in the process. Eventually, we just had to admit defeat. None of us wanted to leave, it felt like giving up… No one wanted to make that call to go home without them,” he shrugged, despondently. “After a couple of weeks though, we had to admit that we had no idea where they were or how to find them.”
I reached a hand over to his arm, gritting my teeth through the searing pain the movement shot across my chest. He put his hand on mine, his eyes drifting over to meet my gaze. I squeezed his arm, encouraging him to continue.
“How did you find them?”
He shrugged, “Pure luck. On our way back, the car fucking gave out. None of us really knew what was wrong with it, so we had to find something else. We found that crackbrain’s hideout while we were looking for one. Of course, we didn’t know he was a psycho until we got through the doors. I was so used to hearing Blair’s voice ring out like a bell. I’d never heard her scream like that before… I’ll never forget the sound she made. Just like I’ll never forget the sound you made.”
“You heard it?” I asked, turning my head away in embarrassment. It felt like such a personal thing, I was humiliated that he’d heard and witnessed my trauma.
His face crumpled, “Yeah, I did. Something I never thought I’d have to hear again.”
“I’m sorry,” I found myself apologising. For what I wasn’t sure, but it was clear now that it wasn’t just my trauma. It had reignited something for each one of them.
“You have nothing to be sorry for, Marina,” he retorted, sighing heavily. “And at least that psycho got what was coming to him.”
“Did he… did he burn Blair too?” I asked, as gently as I could. Jimmy looked away, his face twisted with a deep, emotional pain.
“He did,” he confirmed, quietly. “We got there before he could get to Brian as well. We managed to essentially bargain our way out of there with the pair of them. Brian was ready to kill him, but we had Blair to worry about so Matt convinced him to leave it. Look how that fucking panned out, though.”
“He couldn’t have known,” I replied, quietly defending Matt as I looked down at my wound.
“I guess not,” he answered, his gaze also falling to the angry, weeping letters on my chest.
Jimmy pressed his lips together before continuing, “We lost Blair before we’d even gotten home. We found the van and didn’t look back, driving all fucking night. But she got paler, quieter. We got as far as Phoenix, and we just knew. We knew she wouldn’t make it home.”
He trailed off. He slumped forwards, his shoulders shuddering as he let out a little gasp. I could lay there no longer. I bit my tongue as I sat up, trying to stifle the whimper that forced its way from my throat as my skin protested at being stretched. It was an exhausting challenge, and all I could do once I was upright was fall against him. He seemed a little shocked that I’d appeared at his side, looking at me through his tangled hair that had fallen over his face. I swept it out of the way, revealing his tearstained face, and pressed my forehead against his.
“Brian and I, we both held her hands, but I hate myself so much for not getting there sooner,” he whispered. “Do you think she knew, Marina? Do you think she was scared?”
“I don't think so,” I answered, honestly. I leaned back a little, opening my eyes so I could look into his. He locked his gaze on me, his azure eyes searching mine for sincerity.
“My sister died in my arms,” I confessed, not breaking his stare. “I ask myself the same thing every day. Does she hate me? Was she scared?”
“Marina, why would she hate you?” he asked, his face softening.
I took a deep breath. After everything that had happened, I wanted this off of my chest. Who better to tell it to than Jimmy? He’d not run away yet, and he knew about Esther…
“That was where I went when I left,” I admitted, leaning heavily against him. My energy was dwindling by the second, but I fought to stay focused. “I went to her.”
“In El Paso?” he asked, quietly. I nodded.
“There was a school there. An elementary. She wanted to go in and look for supplies, so I went first and checked the place out. I thought it was clear, I was sure it was... but I didn’t check the supply cupboards. I didn’t even think to,” my voice began to wobble as the guilt came flooding in. “This kid… this little girl... she must have been hiding.”
“Oh, Marina,” he whispered, his brow furrowing with apology.
“She was just a kid, Jim. After what I’d already done to Esther, I just… I couldn’t. I tried to make myself move but I couldn’t… And while I was standing there, doing fucking nothing, this kid bit her,” I breathed, my eyes pricking with tears as I relived it. “Only then did I kill it, but I was too late.”
“Marina, you can’t blame yourself,” he whispered, but I hushed him.
“It was my fault. I didn’t check the cupboards and then I stood there while this… this creature bit my sister. I held her while she bled out…” I trailed off, biting back at the tears that were threatening to fall. Silence fell over us, encasing us in the dead of the night, alone together.
Jimmy looked into my eyes, “I’m sure she wouldn’t have hated you.”
“And I’m sure that Blair wouldn’t have been scared,” I whispered back. “She had you and Brian by her side.”
“And Viola had you,” he said, softly, putting a hand up to my face.
I leaned into it, grateful for his touch, “I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but maybe we’re too hard on ourselves… both of us.”
“You really think she wouldn’t have been scared?” he asked, uncertainly. I’d never seen him so vulnerable, aching after someone he’d clearly loved deeply. It twisted my heart with grief.
“No, not at all,” I answered, shifting my weight a little with a sharp breath. It reminded me that I wasn't in such good form right now.
“Are you hurting?” he looked me over, trying to lay me back down.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, though I really wasn’t.
“You need rest,” he argued, gently pushing my shoulder. “You need to be able to fight this off. I need you to fight it off. Please...”
I complied and laid back again, wincing as I lowered myself down. Once I was down, Jimmy made to get up.
“I should go and tell Brian you’re up. He'll be pleased to know,” he announced as he stood, giving me a small smile. “Will you be okay?”
"I'll be fine," I replied, returning his smile.
"I'll be okay."

Notes

Oh man, some more light shed on the B's heartache </3