Death Divide -- Chapter 1
#1 of Death Divide
All characters and plots surrounding such characters belongs to me © Eben Black
Hospitals. I hated hospitals with a passion that burned and seared inside me. I hated them because they were full of people who tried too hard to help others. I didn't want help. I wanted to die. But here I was for the fourth time in three months, bed-ridden and under suicide watch in a private room in the depths of some cold, sterile place. I'd been here for a few hours now. I had severe blood loss and wounds on my wrists. I'd been found in a bar, locked in a toilet cubicle, knife on the tiled floor, while I sat against the door, bloodied hands and forearms in my lap, letting the darkness just envelop me. But someone had intervened, someone had bandaged the wounds, and someone had called an ambulance. And here I was. Trapped. Why did I want to kill myself? Depression? Anger? No. Sheer boredom made me want to end it all. I was a firm believer of greater things beyond death and with nothing keeping me bound to this world, I figured I had the right to end it then and there. But like I said four times now I'd attempted to end it all, and four times some good samaritan had intervened and prevented me from the beyond. I lay in a quiet meditation, considering what the next move would be. Sterile white walls, white bed sheets and a simple window overlooking the skyscrapers outside was all that surrounded me. November had come and with it a blizzard of tremendous proportions had enveloped us.
The local weather station had warned the blizzard would remain for at least two months. Not that I was bothered. I planned on leaving this world soon anyhow. Shadows danced across the darkened room as cars struggled to travel the snow covered streets below. I listened to the distant repetitive beep of the monitor beside the bed. I was hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor. I was under what the doctor had delicately called "suicide watch". This was not suicide. This was liberation. Suicide is what depressed folk did when life had become too much of a hassle, and too much of a struggle to continue living. No. I felt none of that. Just a sheer boredom toward this wall. I glanced at a blackened sky and realised I was seven stories up. I peeled the bed sheets back and swung my legs out of the bed, perching myself on the edge of the hospital bed. Nausea swam and burned inside me as I realised I was still too weak to even consider standing, let alone crossing the expanse of room between the bed and window sill. A mirror stood in the corner of the bedroom. I glanced over and caught my pale reflection in the mirrored surface.
I stand at five foot seven, not the tall, broad-shouldered athlete that my father or older brother was, but a slender, toned form, a more feminine form. The pale blue of my husky fur blended well with the pale-beige of the pyjama bottoms that the nurse had handed me when I'd realised I'd be spending a few nights here. I gazed at the lavender eyes and pale-pink nose. All bestowed upon me from a beautiful mother. I was not one-hundred-percent husky. I knew that my father had been a black timber wolf, and while my brother had inherited his fur colour and overall look, all I had recieved was his shape of tail. Instead of the curled mass that huskies usually owned, mine was more of a sweep of pale blue fur that curled beside me and hung slightly over the edge of the bed. I glanced at my right ear where a pair of silver loops used to reside, before the nurse deemed them a potential instrument of death. It seemed protocol to remove anything that would harm, or otherwise kill me when under suicide watch. I wasn't even trusted with a pencil. I squeezed the mattress under me and took a deep breath, I closed my eyes and slowly let myself ease up off the bed. I took several deep breaths until I was sure I was standing and then opened my eyes. I crossed the bedroom in several slow, small steps until my hands touched the cold window sill. I gazed down upon the city below. It was such a drop. I reached up and found no latch, or handle. Nothing. No manner of opening the window. Now I knew why they had me put in a secure private bedroom. This wasn't for a pleasant private stay, I'd realised this was more of a prison cell than a bedroom. I cursed under my breath and turned, the movement too quick as nausea built up inside and seared me again. I closed my eyes and took deep slow breaths as I lay back into the cold surface of the window pane. It would be double-glazed too, near unbreakable. The bed was bolted down, as was the bedside table. I had nothing else to throw at it or use to break the window pane. This truly was prison. I heard voices and opened my eyes to see shadows cast across the other window of this room. It stretched along either side of the door, and had blinds block the view of the ward beyond. Lights remained on the ward and cast the outlines of two figures standing outside the room. One a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette, a familiar figure with horns and standing at over six feet. The other small, slender and with a mane it seemed.
The broad-shouldered bull was a male named Leopald Rin, Doctor Leopald Rin. He was familiar because he was an old acquaintance of my father and had been introduced to me once as a child, and then had become a familiarity whenever I had been brought into this hospital. No doubt he was the reason for this private prison cell. He and my father had been at college together, and while father had studied to be a lawyer, he'd studied medicine. Leopald was a good bull, an honest, hard-working male who cared for others, but he also felt somehow responsible for me. You see, I no longer had family to speak of. Some distant relatives abroad, but nothing immediate or close. Father had died of liver failure six years ago, thanks to a lengthy bout of alcohol dependancies, and soon after mother had passed away from sheer depression. She'd loved her husband, and being without him had destroyed her. Before long me and my brother grew distant with one another, and when we were old enough we went our seperate ways. I'd not been in contact with him since then. He'd moved out of town and I'd been left a small manor house and a small inheritence that had been more than enough to sustain me for these past years to follow. Through caring neighbours and Leopald's kindness I'd remained in town, but I'd been alone. I'd grown up alone and this is what let me realise how boring life was. I squeezed the window sill and pushed away from it, crossing the room in small steps before easing myself down across the bed, listening to the conversation outside my prison cell.
"You have shown a great interest in Nathaniel, doctor. More so than the other patients. I never saw you as one for favouritism." A female voice. I assumed it was a nurse of some kind.
"This is not favouritism. I've known Nathaniel since he was a child, nurse."
"Even so, you have shown a great concern for him."
"He's been diagnosed as depressed, a clinical depression that is too severe for medication to handle," Leopald explained.
"So what do we do, doctor? Legally we cannot hold him forever."
"I've called in a favour with an old acquaintance. She's coming down to speak with him, she may be able to disillusion him about this suicidal tendancy of his," Leopald replied.
"Disillusion him?"
"I believe Nathaniel's suicidal tendancies are down to a depression so deep that even he doesn't recognise it as depression, but merely a boredom with life itself. He desires death because he believes there is some other world, a fascinating realm where mundane nine-to-five life does not exist, and rather a more exciting, fulfilling world awaits him."
"Its disturbing to think that someone so young can think like that, doctor. And a little sad too," the nurse replied. Her paw touched the window as she spoke. She like Leopald was the kind who held her heart on her sleeve.
"He has good enough reason to be this way."
"His parents deaths?" the nurse suggested.
Leopald's silhouette nodded. "That and his brother's abandonment."
"Abandonment?"
"He and Nathaniel grew distant and when he was older enough his brother left and travelled abroad."
"So you think all this was too much and instead of accepting the depression, he simply snapped and declared it as boredom?" the nurse asked.
"I have attempted to contact his brother several times, but I haven't been able to track him down, only residents he's lived in." Leopald's silhouette started padding down the ward away from the window as his silhouette faded.
"Such a shame." The nurse followed and soon her silhouette faded too.
"Its amazing how the medical profession can put everything down to something complex and insane," a cool, deep voice remarked from across the bedroom.
I sat up and looked across the room. Standing at six foot three, a broad-shouldered, slender-waisted fur grinned at me from the shadowed wall. He leaned back, paws buried in the pockets of his black denim jeans. A silver chain at his leather belt hung on one side. A pair of black hiking boots, a dark red tank top, and leather short-sleeved jacket with fur at the shoulders and collar. His fur was a pale off-cream, with stripes, dark red and brown stripes. The fur atop his head was shoulder length and a deep chesnut-brown that hung in a thick braid behind him. His eyes were a piercing yellow that looked both beautiful and eerie at the same time. There was something odd about him. He looked like a tiger, but also looked like a lion. Was he a liger?
"Something wrong, pup?" his cool, deep voice rang out through the shadows again.
"Apart from the fact you've somehow managed to break into a hospital ward unnoticed?" I replied with a raised eyebrow.
He grinned again and said, "Yeah, apart from that."
"What are you?"
"I think you already worked that out. From one half-breed to another."
"And why are you here exactly?" I asked.
"I'm here to make you an offer." He pushed from the wall and crossed the bedroom, standing at the foot of the bed.
"An offer? What kind of offer?"
"An offer you won't be able to refuse. Your name is Nathaniel Kaine, your twenty-three and deemed suicidal. So here I am to kill you." His words dropped like a stone in water, the silence rippling out as I stared up at this liger with a sudden caution. Was this really happening to me?