Shadow of a Grave ✧ Sebastian Sallow

chapter thirteen ✧ everything in time

Ghost Under Rocks by Ra Ra Riot

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Trigger Warning: This chapter includes sensitive conduct - please see the comment for a full description of conduct. 

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Amelia Blackwood didn't have a sense of time anymore. She didn't have much of a sense of anything anymore.

It was like being a fish in a bowl of water. Looking beyond the glass that no one inside could reach out of. Time moved around and around whether it was going forward or backward seemed irrelevant. Things blended and blurred together as if every moment had been happening at once. 

Her life hadn't only been flashing before her eyes. It was endlessly all happening at once.

So many familiar faces passed by the glass and she fought her best to stay with them. All she needed was to find someone to help slow the ticking of the endless clock.

Amelia kept finding herself on the day that always seemed to change her life the most, the first time it felt like she died. She sat in the dirty alley and she finally felt like she was beginning to escape the fishbowl of her own mind. She had still been young that morning in the alley. It was a cold day and her skin ached from the bitter bite of the winter wind. Her fingers were pink and numb already as she tried to keep them warm with the heat of her own breath. Instead of wrapping herself in her jacket, she had given it to her brother.

Andrew Blackwood hadn't been well. Only ten years old. He was too young to be sick, she had thought.

Amelia's jacket had been the fourth layer of clothes that she had wrapped her little brother in as they waited in the alley for the doctor's office next door to open. She had wrapped him in every warm piece of clothing that she could find and rocked him in her arms in an attempt to keep him warm even if it meant that she suffered from the cold.

She pushed the stray black curls from her little brother's forehead, tucking them behind his ear and out of his eyes. His hair was grown out long and she knew that she needed to trim it for him soon once he was feeling better. Then she held him close to her chest, hoping to keep him warm even if she wasn't.

"Just another hour, Andrew," Amelia cooed, "Another hour and they will open. They will be able to help, I promise."

Time didn't make sense where she had been. Another hour would pass in a second, a year, then even an entirety until it all came back around and happened again. They would wait an hour, then another, endlessly together. 

Andrew looked up to his sister with tired eyes and nodded. They had shared the same deep blue-colored eyes. When they were younger, his had been so full of love and joy. It broke her heart to see him so weak and eyes looking so empty. Amelia had always admired how passionate her little brother was. He was a shy boy, but he had been full of so much love and an ambitious mind. When he had made up his mind on something then it became the center of his world. She missed when her brother would tell her about his plan or show her his new obsession. Back when he was full of energy.

Now he had been a tired boy with blood staining his sleeves from the coughing that wouldn't stop. No matter how many layers of clothing she added, she still felt him shaking in her arms. And she didn't know how to bring back the life into her brother's eyes.

"Another hour," Amelia told herself for the thousandth time. 

Andrew had been too weak to answer his sister back.