DT 2022: After Rain

Merlin dreamed of death.
A quiet, cold end. Stillness and everything creeping in towards darkness. The cold spreading like wildfire but only bringing frost. His body twitched, and twitched. Merlin wasn’t sure he felt it, or felt anything at all.
He tried to breathe. His chest rumbled with panicked refusal. His heart thumped in the distance but he didn’t feel the beats. The cold was in his mouth, down his throat. The freeze slipped down, dripping into his stomach.
Death wasn’t abrupt. It was slow, and lethargic. Merlin couldn’t move, trapped in a disorienting soup where time didn’t move.
Merlin wished he could scream. He couldn’t feel his throat muscles. Whatever this feeling was, it wasn’t the feeling of life.
Angel wings, no, arms wrapped around him. Did they come from above, or below? They hugged him, embracing him tight. Brave legs kicked up a dust storm, dragging Merlin along in a slow daze towards a destination unknown.
What did people call the place beyond everything? Maybe there.
Merlin wondered about this angel. He couldn’t see well in the depths, long shadows of dirt and disturbed riverbed keeping illusionary sunlight away. But he saw her.
Maybe she wasn’t an angel. A mermaid then, a siren? Her dark brown hair turned black with mud and stringy like kelp weed. Her simple shirt-and-shorts uniform soaked up water, weighing her down.
Merlin didn’t know why she worked so hard for him. Was the kingdom in the darkness something to excite for, or something to fear? Merlin didn’t have energy to panic. His thoughts already slowed to a crawl. He felt with the tight arms around him, like floating. Like dreaming.
In the death spirit’s embrace, the cold didn’t seem so bad. Merlin was ready for the end.
Then the two children broke the water’s surface.
Merlin jolted upwards amongst white water as the spirit’s drenched strands of hair caked his vision. She leaned his limp, ghastly form upon her chest as she kicked towards a nearby shore.
“I got him! Clear the edge!”
The angel’s voice crackled like thunder, a familiar desperate shout commanding rare attention and even rarer determination. A voice that rarely reached such heights for fear of her place, and even fewer miracles.
“Andra! Bring him here,” Another girl called from the shoreline. Merlin remembered that voice first, Roxanne. His still mind warmed as the smallest demands for survival kicked in.
Merlin’s limp body was pasty white like a ghost, but he threw a fit in every direction anyway as he inched away from the doors of Death. His desperate convulsions overtook Andra’s methodical survival kick in a violent flurry of movement.
Desperation. Air. Cough. Breath.
The spirit, Andra. The girl. His best friend. He remembered now. Her toned arms snaked around Merlin’s ribcage in a death grip. She shook him hard, wrestling down his desperation as the drowned boy threatened to drag them both under.
“Merlin,” she called through the haze and the shock. “Merlin! Stop fighting. I got you, I got you! We’re almost to the shore.”
The panicked boy didn’t stop but Andra’s desperate grip held firm and her breaststroke pressed through the fight as it was all she could do for them both. Desperation met determination and the latter won.
Andra floated Merlin at her side and found still-water. She pushed Merlin up a short cliff before climbing out, shivering from the unplanned swim.
Roxanne met the two drenched friends along with Daniele and Zach of their Team Boson family, holding themselves together under wind-beat ponchos and struggling to see through the storm. There was no sunlight out here, only flashlights and the distant headlamps of a turned over, half-submerged Mother Goose four-wheeler buried in the rock-and-silt riverbed.
Merlin keeled over on the drenched grass and brittle mud, threatening to collapse into a minor mudslide. Roxanne tried to straighten him out and check him, but he kicked her away as he sputtered and coughed globs of water.
The boy survived but he didn’t feel the world. The sting of the rain. The itch of unstable ground. The comforting hands of his teammates. He felt only the cold, yet in the memory of the deep-water Merlin remembered his heartbeat. It came back to him, pounding like angry clockwork. Alive, alive.
He kept coughing as a poncho and two black towels dropped over him, burying him in half-drenched cloth but warmer than the air and the clothes on his back. A drenched body leaned against him, joining the poor excuses for warmth. Drenched, dark brown hair returned to Merlin’s eyes. Andra’s hair. She was close. Merlin felt lips press shapes against his ear.
Andra tried saying many things but Merlin couldn’t hear against the wind.
The Spartan trainees shouted at each other through the storm as they secured Andra and Merlin onto the back of another four-wheeler. Merlin vaguely registered Roxanne and Zach staying behind to deal with the other trapped vehicle.
Daniele gunned the motor and raced back towards Camp Ambrose.
Merlin didn’t remember much, but he spent three extended days and nights in the camp infirmary. He and Andra fell off their Mother Goose in a training accident. The soil along the riverbed came loose during the downpour and sent their vehicle for a wild tumble into a freezing storm surge.
Andra was fine if a little rattled and close to hypothermia. Merlin was similar but suffered his second concussion since starting Spartan training. A reminder they weren’t Spartans yet. Just children, hardly invincible.
But Merlin remembered the time after he recovered most.
The drowning stuck with him, haunting him days after. Merlin trained and lived as if nothing terrible happened. He put on a brave face for Team Boson, for Delta Company. In bed and alone, however, Merlin met his match. The memories of the cold, the silence, and the creeping endless end.
Tears rolled down his eyes. The first time in some years that weren’t born of frustration, exhaustion, or surprise. The true scars of terror. He raised his knees under the covers to his chest and held the blanket close. The bunk across from him jostled and Andra approached him once more.
Andra whispered in low tones as Zach’s quiet snores echoed rhythmically nearby. Merlin’s soft gasps joined them.
“You survived, Showerhead. You’re alright.”
Merlin’s teasing nickname was hardly a celebratory title, but Andra laced it with affection. Her hand reached out to Merlin’s cheek and brushed away a couple tears.
“Here. Let me join you.”
Andra stole Merlin’s comforter and squeezed her lithe form into the small, one-person hammock and enwrapped her form around Merlin’s.
Merlin said nothing at the gesture but nuzzled his cheek into Andra’s shoulder. He instinctually raised his arms up and around Andra’s waist and she wrapped her reassuring arms around him once more. Merlin suppressed his tears even as they continued to fall little by little.
Andra remained quiet with Merlin for a little while, letting his stunned tears drip onto her night shirt. She pressed little circles of assurance into Merlin’s back, remembering the forgotten ways how her mother and father did it for her.
Their embrace was a familiar one. Not for the first time either. The first time, Merlin held Andra. He hurt her with innocent words, reminding the strange girl of her dead parents. She tried to assault Merlin in a moment of weakness, but instead fell to pieces as he awkwardly comforted his attacker-turned-friend.
Merlin didn’t know what to do in that moment, a confused five-year-old hugging another five-year-old stranger. But he did and said what he could.
Now was Andra’s chance to return an overdue favor.
“What are you scared of Merlin?”
“I… I don’t know how to swim.”
Andra waited a second before hushing him with a platonic kiss on the cheek like her mother or father might have done. She understood, his fragile tone speaking volumes.
“This will never happen again. Don’t worry. I’ll make you the greatest swimmer in Spartan history.”
Merlin held onto Andra for dear life. Her words and presence slowed his tears to a standstill.
“Thank you…”
Tiredness took over and they drifted off to sleep together.
But Merlin remembered. This was the first time he almost told Andra “I love you.”
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories