Meetings

When you grow up going in and out of hospitals, taking weekly family trips to the emergency room, you get a sort of... sense for when it's peoples' time. It might be only hours away, or days, or maybe weeks, but there's an air about those people and their families. They don't always seem to notice it. Maybe it's hope or desperation or stubbornness, or maybe Eve was just more attuned to such things.

It didn't matter the reason. It just mattered that Eve knew when the first whispers of the afterlife started latching on to people.

So she knew the signs. 

Growing up a sickly child, she wasn't unfamiliar with shaking limbs and weak lungs, of collapsing after going up a flight of steps. It shouldn't have been any different this time, and yet, it was. She saw that veiled terror in her mother and her father. She saw it in the mirror.

Knowing what was coming wasn't the same as giving up, though.

First it was religion- her stockings, they had come in a bit late, filling in and shaping up when she was 19 and relatively healthier. That must be a sign, right? A sign from God that this was her calling, and that through Him, she would be saved, happy, healthy.

"Eve," a gentle voice drew her from her reading, soft as her own and saturated at that now ever-present fear. "Sweetie, dinner's just about ready. Wash up before coming down?"

Eve pulled her hands back from the dry pages of the tome she'd been pouring over, shifting in her seat to greet her mother with a soft smile. "Of course, I just need to finish up here."

A nod, a bit too quick to be natural or casual, and Eve was alone again, smile turning bittersweet. Her parents try, but nobody would be able to hide from her what she already knew about her condition. The doctors might talk about how the survival odds for her type of immunodeficiency were high, how she's lucky to be in such a wealthy family, able to buy her treatments, but she knows.

That's how she got to this.

Because from religion, she found the occult. And while she wholly believes in God, in His ability to save her... well. God helps those who help themselves.

It must be God's will, then, when the sharp edge of the paper slices the thin skin between her fingers. Must be God's will to help her on her way, to have her flinch back so her hand smears barely a drop of blood across an ancient figure, drawn in faded ink on pages long since abandoned by their author.

So then, who else could it be but God that she hears, that she feels enveloping her in gentle warmth?

You are sick, a voice echoes within her, and Eve straighten, stiffens even against the protesting of her aching joints. Is that why you freed me?

Freed? Who would dare try to shut out God? Eve feels anger well up in her chest, though she can't move her face to express it, can't move at all.

Barely-there hands brush her temples, ruffling her hair in a soft wind.

God, the voice says, and Eve cries out to it, cries out for salvation. God. I can be your God.

And when the voice fades, when Eve can move again, can head out her room to wash up and join her parents, can say grace before partaking in her meal...

Eve can't feel those tendrils of death around her anymore.

She found God, and She won't let Eve suffer anymore.