Sickness had come. They were all dying, everyone. Raruo did not remember getting sick. He did not remember wandering from the pride as chaos overwhelmed it and it fell apart. It was not t a pride any more. He did not remember making the decision to leave. He never would have, certainly not: he was loyal. He was a warrior. A soldier with a life time of service, and suddenly it was all for nothing. There was nothing there any more, there was no one to protect. His cubs. His mate. He had nothing, not even the knowledge that they had died or survived.
In the daze of fever, he did not know anything.
The thick fog that had settled over his awareness, the eternity of weakness and heat and confusion, lifted slowly and fleetingly. Bursts of lucidity penetrated an otherwise incoherent day, but he could do nothing with those moments. He was lost. He was alone. He was starving. Laying on the top of a flat rock, which he had fallen over when the decision to stop getting back up finally overcame him, he breathed a heavy, rasping sigh. He was dying, he knew it.
The old lion was not afraid of death. As a warrior, his life had been coupled with the awareness that his death would not be nice, it would not be neat, and it would not be quiet. He would die valiantly, in battle, or slowly, in agony. It would be violent and unpredictable, but he had always known, with his very soul and with each breath he took through all his days, that his end would be in battle.
Except he had been wrong, all that time. He closed his eyes.
It might have been a minute, or an hour, or far longer, before he heard the voice calling him. The haze lifted again, and he opened his piercing, red colored eyes at long last. The air around him was cool and damp, and his body seemed to be on its side where before it had been on his stomach. Or had it? He couldn’t feel the grass that had been poking at his paws from under the rock, or the bugs that had been chewing at his hide, his scars, in an effort to reach the dying flesh underneath. He wondered if he had been wandering again, and how far he had come. How he had managed to find shelter, when all the other times he had simply awoken where ever he had fallen.
“You’re awake!”
The voice sounded strange in his ears, more muffled then even he was used to and he was going deaf in one ear. It sounded like they were standing behind a wall of fur, trying to speak through it. It was not the best for a lion who already had issues hearing, but he grunted in response just because he heard a voice at all. The words might have been a little mumbled and thick, but they were there and that was an improvement over the blur of the last few days. Or however long it had been.
He felt something nudge him and he lifted his paw. It was resting on something soft, and he realized someone had been laying next to him, and he had somehow gotten his paw around them. They stood and his paw dropped to the floor, but was caught in gentle teeth just before it hit the ground. Stone. He was in a cave, he finally concluded.
“I was worried about you. Looks like you got sick, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I saw it in some folks. Mostly because you didn’t die. Or at least, you haven’t yet, but if I have a say in it you won’t anyway. How are you feeling?” The source of the feminine voice lowered its head and he looked into her eyes, his only half open and heavy lidded. She examined his eyes for a long moment, longer then might have been comfortable under normal circumstances, then shook her head, “you’re still not all here, huh? That’s okay, at least you can eat on your own. You’re a damn big guy, you know. Getting you to swallow enough food has been the worst part in all this. For me. I imagine there are a whole mess of things harder about it for you.”
She moved away from him, her voice echoing in the cave and becoming even harder for him to distinguish. He was not sure what she was babbling about, in fact, or even if her words were meant for him. The voice, which had all but vanished, slowly came back into his limited hearing range.
“…your big tail squashed it,” she finished, shaking her head, “but I forgave you for that days ago. Here we go,” something plunked nearby and his eyes shifted enough to see a chunk of meat. His stomach growled ferociously and his impulse was to leap on it, but his muscles did not respond. He could barely move his head a few centimeters toward it, and the effect was pitiful.
Her voice softened in tone, and drew nearer.
“Here,” she said gently, and he felt her body against his, pushing him up a bit. She rolled him to his stomach, then moved to sit before him. She brought the meat closer to him and pulled off small pieces with her teeth, which she fed to him with all the patience in the world, like it was the most natural thing for her to do. He ate slowly, with difficulty, but at least he was able to do so for himself, chewing a couple times before swallowing down what seemed to be fresh zebra meat. She did not take any bites for herself while he ate, until his grunted that he could not eat any more, for lack of strength or stomach. Only then did she eat a small portion for herself.
“There, that should help you recover your strength. The fever you’ve been suffering is flushing out your system. The illness is passing, and you’re on the road to getting well again, I can see it in you. You being conscious is a miracle in and of itself. Don’t worry, mister lion,” her voice sounded like it was smiling, and it soothed Raruo into closing his eyes once more.
“I’ll take care of you.”
(Word count: 1,068 in Word)
