Knocking on Heaven's Door | 𝐒𝐀𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑

6 - WHIMS OF THE WIND

It started as a whisper. As a sigh in the roiling flesh that was embedded beneath Bellona’s sternum, as a nearly imperceptible groaning in the nuts and bolts that held her spirit together. It was carried like the soft downy of a feather along a breeze, along Sam Winchester’s breeze, when he’d traipsed into her life.

And she’d welcomed it - had opened her arms in reception and forced the iron gates of her heart to do the same. She hadn’t been frightened by the looming thunderstorm of what she felt for Sam. The thunder beneath his amber eyes had treaded the path to her with tip-toe steps, too light to be heard, too demure to be startling, and had struck her chest with its most alluring bolts. It sent a tickle up her throat, croaking up the creases of her interior until it forced a smile onto her face.

But not all incidents can be quite so opportune.

Some stirrings come in a hurricane. This breed of storm is nothing like the one that seeped from Sam’s pores. Rather, it was its bane, sowing concoctions of tribulation and adversity wherever it went, reveling as it left behind budding misery for mortals to reap.

Even worse still, these tempests held no eye. No break from its fury, no chance to flee for shelter from its wrath. No chance to breathe. They were an onslaught of seething winds and rain, a death sentence for any unfortunate soul who dared travel near it. They were the epitome of power, and resisting its outrage was futile.

They’d devastated Bellona Wesson. A cyclone of her own, whose name was not yet known and identity not yet diagnosed, was pivoting above Kaiser Medical Center - above Bellona and her mother.

It had been days since the start of Stanford’s fall semester. Weeks since Agnes Wesson’s most recent - most unsuccessful - biopsy. Months since Agnes had first discovered something was wrong with her, had first noticed an abnormal aching in her chest. And mere weeks until the woman’s final days rumbled across the earth, a storm complete in itself, separate from any other and inevitable unless the doctors could decrypt her illness.

Alas, the collective minds of all the medical professionals in California could not piece together the puzzle that was Agnes Wesson. All biopsies came back negative. Their results were confused, strands of what would be footholds on the hike to Agnes’ diagnosis were jumbled beyond recognition. Much like the minds of every specialist that peered upon her situation.

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” they would tell Bellona after they’d analyzed the lack of results a test provided. “She has a lump on her neck. Not too large, about the size of a pea, and definitely not cancerous, so it doesn’t add up to her current state of being. She should be healthy. She looks healthy. But it’s like her body is trying to tear itself apart from the inside-out.”

It wasn’t until that afternoon, during Agnes’ weekly visit to the Medical Center, that a new specialist had given the Wesson women a definitive answer. “Her white blood cells are bursting, and we can’t figure out why. I haven’t seen anything like this. Ever. If I didn’t have years of schooling under my belt…”