IT almost sounded like a kicked dog - and yet it was still better than the cacophony of screaming pigs he’d become accustomed to - and he picked up his pace to hurry up the stairs into the room he’d heard it come from.
“Sally!” In alarm, he moved to sit beside her, blackened fingers stroking tentatively at her hair as he tried to see what was the matter. “Are you ill? You look to have a fever.” It was beyond his knowledge, what the lost souls of this world did to themselves, but it looked about the same. “Are you injured?” He was looking for blood, his heart sinking as he feared the worst - that someone might have come to kill her, and would leave her to bleed out… as he had once. Yet as he threw the covers back he saw no blood, only the sweat of some violent fever.
She shook like a leaf, and he moved to fix her blankets, wrapping her up tightly. “The best remedy for a fever is to keep warm, to let the poison that ails you sweat from your pores,” he told her, feeling very sure in his medical knowledge.”
Had she not been on the verge of dying ( or at least it sure felt like it ) Sally would have taken a deep breath and answered each and every one of his desperate questions. Was she ill? That was one easy way to put it. However, Sally’s present affliction carried not only agonizing pain that no medication would have been able to fight back, but great meaning too —— one she couldn’t begin to explain, not even to herself.
Knowing he was there, ready and most importantly, willing to help her was the kind of boost the blonde needed to lift herself off the soaked bed - as best she could - and inch closer to Ambrose’s lap, seeking the kind of warmth that simply couldn’t be found in a pile of old blankets. “Hold me.” She whispered between clenched teeth, her nose finding refuge between the folds of his ancient trousers the colonial man wore with what seemed to be great pride. “I’ll be okay if I —— if I just sleep it off… it’s all my fault.” A sob, coming out from the depths of Sally’s pounding heart, caused her last words to falter and turn into yet another whimper.
It truly was the junkie’s fault — hers and hers alone. She couldn’t recall anyone pushing her over the edge of a bottomless pit of addiction, that wasn’t the way things happened. From the first moment a needle forced its way inside her body, Sally felt like she had found the one true love of her life, one that wouldn’t hurt her or leave… true love. But now, with every drop of sweat dripping from her pores, it was all being taken away from her.