'None of us are immune to grief, and everyone who has suffered loss understands that grief changes, but you never wake up one morning and you've moved on. It stays with you, and, you know, you ebb and flow,' - Terri Irwin.
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FOR SOMETHING SO POISONOUS it's peculiar it has no scent in itself. Only in the wake it leaves behind: The smell of decay, of death, of life's weak force.
It's bizarre really, how something so innocent, so delicate looking can be so deadly.
For centuries its poison has killed our ancestors, and yet for weeks I haven't felt its lethal sting, but now all I wish is for the toxins to overtake me again as opening my eyes seems even more horrible than what a drop of its poison will do to my heartbeat.
At least then I could believe the cause for my shattered and sickly beating heart.
"X-Xavier," My voice is barely audible, yet however my carrier stops.
I can't feel my body. In fact, I feel strangely disconnected from it with not even a single muscle being willing to move. It is like I have lost all control of every part of my limbs and so all that's keeping me from laying limply on the cold surface of the ground is the sturdy elm tree I'm delicately placed up against.
I have no sense of time or my surroundings. I can only count the tears escaping through my lashes testifying to me still being here, alive.
Even despite me wishing, I wasn't.
"X-Xavier," I cry silently again. A wave of anguish filling my exhausted body makes me shiver and I want to double over, however careful hands snake around my shoulders and holds me in place.
"Davina?" Emory's careful voice whispers in plead for me to acknowledge him. The urgency to his voice still lingers, yet his hands hold me as if they'll be there forever do I need them.
"He's de—" My voice cracks into nothing, as the stabbing to my heart becomes more persistent and shaking my entire body more violently.
"Don't touch me," I wince with a wail as a part of me realizes he's a part of the reason for the wrenching pain I'm enduring. "You did this! You killed him!" I yell and push him away, not bothering to look at how he crouches surprised on the ground, and I try to lift myself back onto my feet by my fingertips as they claw at the trunk.
I barely make it upright before I lurch over as nausea hits me like a tidal wave and I sling my arms around the trunk since I'm on the verge of blacking out again.
"I didn't—" The inflection in Emory's voice is too much for me to handle at the moment and I flinch at him.
"You brought them here. Because of you he's dead. Xavier didn't deserve this. He didn't." I feel my knees threatening to buckle again and the bark slowly crumbling under my desperate fingers. "All because of you. Because of you...," I iterate the tears choking up my words, and I feel the tiny spark left of energy leave my body again so I slump back against the tree. Its trunk trying to soothe a bit of comfort into my broken state by cooling my forehead.
