The Game - 36. Chapter 36

From the moment they set foot in the hospital Lily had known they were making a mistake. Daniel was in no condition to fight them and Shaun had seemed content to go along with everything and so she allowed herself to go along with it but the feeling of wrongness continued, it permeated her and everything that happened seemed out of step and horribly, painfully wrong.

Sitting with Daniel and watching him sleep she had felt..... overwhelmingly and absolutely that whatever was happening was bad and that Daniel was caught in the middle of it and would not come out of it again. She had wanted to take him in her arms and run run run. Like everyone else she had let him get way under her skin and she could not imagine life without him. He was so innocent, so pure and his voice..... it had made her feel, just for a while, that the world was filled with beauty and that everything would be alright in the end.

But what became painfully and clearly apparent from the moment they had brought him here and drugged him, subduing his light and quenching his fire, was that it was not going to be alright in the end, nothing was going to be alright again, at least not for him and, if not for him them not for any of them.

She realised that she was half in love with him and half afraid of him. There was something about the way he had submitted to everything they did to him, watching with calm, strangely aware eyes until he could keep them open no longer and they closed. The thought had come to her at that point that he would never open them again and it made her shiver.

All the same, even in that moment, even before and certainly ever since there had been a strange calm certainty within her that things were going the way they should, that everything was happening as it should happen and there had been a moment, just before he slipped away, when Daniel had looked at her, his eyes clear and focussed, understanding and certainty shining from them and he had smiled. That smile had held everything; peace, reassurance, understanding, support, and... and... love.

Caught up in the excitement of the rescue, rushing through the corridors, side by side with others who had the same goal, the same sentiment, she had thought, for a time that she had been wrong, that it would be alright, that they would be on time, that they could save him. And then, from the moment she saw Daniel, realised what they had done to him, what they were going to do to him, the hope crashed.

When Daniel died a light went out of her life, a cloud settled on her shoulders and it seemed as if nothing good would ever happen to her again. She felt cold and dead inside, as though with his passing something in her had died too, something vital had gone out of her life and she would never be truly happy again.

When the girl, Annie, threw herself forwards, Lily wanted to go with her, if she had been a split second later she would have beaten her to it but, as it was it hadn’t seemed right. She knew him so much better, was so much closer to him.... it was her right, her duty, her moment. All the same, Lily moved closer, stood at her elbow, helped her up onto the table, gazed with her into the cold dead face, wondered at the surreal beauty and the golden glow that, at first she thought she had imagined. But then it grew and grew and grew until it was enclosing them all in its light, a light that not only shone around them but through them enfolding them in a strangely personal aura. And suddenly there it was again, that feeling that everything was going to be alright in the end.