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 Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:43 pm
This clearly did not satisfy the boy's interest. She should clearly go to a doctor and get this checked out. She needed to find out why she was so cold.
And so he told her this.
...in theory.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:49 pm
Working out what Hellis was trying to say was almost as tiring as trying to figure out a crossword puzzle. Crow couldn't help but laugh as she tried to understand.
"It's not a big deal. It's like a fever in reverse, that kind of s**t. Maybe allergies most likely, damn them," she said, shaking a fist at the trees absently. "Julian's been feelin' off too, just like me. It's a bug. Betcha a buck Ethan, Lincoln an' Len come down with it too."
She sighed, wrinkling her nose at the thought. Uuuuugh, a house full of sick people. Ick. She gently removed her hand from Hellis's grip, smiling again.
"S'matter of fact, I probably shouldn't be out here exposing myself to the elements. I'm fragile and delicate'n such," she said jokingly, though privately she was growing a little worried at the way the cold seemed to intensify - the sun was hidden by a cloud, and there was no direct light shining on the grounds and onto her.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:52 pm
"No," Hellis said suddenly. Any backward fever you could feel externally was very bad. And so he voiced this.
"Very bad."
And those were the first words he'd spoken to anyone outside of Björn since his return. His voice was relatively deep for his appearence, and desperately quiet from disuse.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:58 pm
Crow's eyebrows shot up and nearly got lost under her hair. She'd never heard Hellis speak before, and had been almost certain he was completely mute.
"Aw, hon! No, no, it's nothing," she said, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. "Alright, okay. Y'know what? I'll go in, and I'll make tea and go straight to bed. I'll be better and bugging the crap out of you in no time, I promise. And if it turns out I keel over or something, I give you full privilege to tell me 'I told you so'."
Getting up slowly, Crow stumbled slightly as the world seemed to shift under her feet. The dizziness left as suddenly as it had come, and she smiled quickly to cover for herself. Nope. Definitely not going to bend down for the blanket and book.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:59 pm
Yeah. Like he'd say 'so'. Psh.
He politely stood, taking the blanket and book with him and holding them out to Crow.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 5:02 pm
Crow grinned.
"You're a doll," she said, taking her things gratefully. She stood on tiptoe and gave Hellis a quick kiss on the cheek, her lips grazing cold against his skin. "I'll see you later."
She turned to go, then hesitated and looked back.
"Don't tell Liam I'm sick, he'll get all worried'n crap and I don't wanna bug him with it," she said. "I'll be fine."
Waving, she took off back towards her room, ignoring how cold she felt as she stepped into the building's shadow.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 5:18 pm
__Part 6
True to her word, Crow had gone back to her room and was making tea. The room was quiet, the usual noise of the many animals, television and people absent. The dizziness had come back and she leaned against the refrigerator, eyes closed as she tried to ignore the strange feeling of vertigo.
"Quit it," she muttered. "Just...."
Trailing off, she filled the metal tea kettle with water and set it on the stove to boil. Her hands left the chipped yellow lacquer clouded with cold, and this made her angry for some reason. Brows furrowed and mouth twisting, she scrounged for something to eat though she had no appetite. Sinking into a chair at the breakfast table she sighed, biting into an apple and chewing. Her mouth felt dry and swallowing was hard.
"Dammit, if I've got some weird Vavvian flu or something," she muttered. She was so tired again...her tea water wasn't ready yet, either. She swallowed a yawn and pillowed her head on the table, arms crossed under her damp forehead. Huh, was she running a real fever...?
By the time Crow woke, the tea kettle's whistle was earsplitting.
"s**t! s**t, s**t, s**t...."
Rushing into the kitchen, she turned off the stove and unthinkingly grabbed the kettle with her bare hands. The heat seared her skin and she gave a cry of pain, stumbling back. The kettle tipped over and spilled boiling water everywhere. Droplets splattered onto Crow and she stumbled back further, cursing wildly.
"FINE!" she shouted, voice hoarse. "******** YOU."
Nursing her burned hand, she stomped to her bed and threw herself onto it. A moment later, she was asleep again, her burnt hand still cradled to her chest.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 7:21 pm
__Part 7
They're not all dreams.
Sitting in the break room, head lolling against the aged couch, Julian listened to the hum of conversation around him and looked up at the ceiling. He had come to the realization slowly, but combing the details of his disjointed dreams he had realized the shards of memory were coming together. He wondered vaguely about the old nightmare, that had made him scream and claw at his face, and found there was no recollection left of it. It was done. The new dreams had come to take its place.
I guess I'm happy they don't make me hurt myself, he thought dully. It was a plus, when one thought on it. The dreams were strange, fluidly shifting from one event to the other, scattered in time. He wondered how much was real memory, and how much was really just scraps of dreams. As he closed his eyes, wondering when he would stop feeling so fatigued, he slipped off into sleep effortlessly and dreamed again.
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Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 7:23 pm
{Interlude I - Spider Dream}
He was first aware of the pounding pain in his head, then the prickling numbness in his limbs. Julian tried to shift, tried to move, but found himself stuck fast.
There was a clink of metal against metal.
“What…”
His hands were cuffed behind him. He was bound with cords to a chair. He felt sick, the pain in his head triggering waves of nausea that threatened to empty the scant contents of his stomach. He was afraid – he didn’t recognize this feeling of sickness. He’d never even been sick before…
He raised his head slowly to take a look around. He was in a small room, concrete and bare. A bare bulb hung down from the ceiling and illuminated the cell-like space, though it flickered from time to time. The air was stale, still and musty. It smelled faintly of mildew.
Julian didn’t know how he’d come to be in this room. The cords cut into his flesh, drawn taut to keep him secured to the chair. The cuffs chafed at his wrists painfully. Whoever had brought him here had taken painstaking care to make sure he didn’t escape too quickly. He gave the cuffs a fruitless tug and tried to move around on the chair. He head swam and a wave of dizziness swept over him to accompany the nausea, and Julian blacked out.
--
The second time Julian woke, there were people in the room. His head had been yanked up and back by his hair, and he was staring up at the ceiling. A woman was smiling coldly down at him, her pretty face contorted into a shallow, mask-like expression of malice. There was a hideous blank-eyed man by her side, malformed and tumorous. Julian blacked out again shortly after, but not before the woman placed a cold-lipped kiss on his forehead.
--
The third waking was no less disturbing than the previous two. The woman was sitting across a table Julian had not noticed was there, and there was a tray of food and water set in front of him. His stomach was empty and his throat was parched, but he didn’t pay attention to tray. He stared at the woman, trying to puzzle out why he thought he recognized her.
“Who are you?” he asked. His voice came out in a croak. The woman continued to stare at him, sitting stiffly in her chair. He tried to clear his throat, and found it painfully dry. He licked cracked lips and looked at the woman again. “What do you want?”
The woman regarded him with staring eyes for a long time. She blinked only twice, slowly, as though having to forcibly remind herself to do so.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
The woman glared.
“The she-b***h beggar brat. Where is she.”
Julian bristled.
“I…don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. The woman’s eyes slitted.
“I could pull your eyes right out of your skull,” she said placidly. Julian felt a twinge of fear despite himself, but shrugged it off.
“You could,” he said reasonably. The woman stared.
“We can’t find her. You hid her too well. You hid her from everyone. He still bleeds through to her. But he cannot see her.”
Julian shifted, growing alarmed.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Bleeds through?”
The woman smiled. It came crooked and malformed on her lips, as though she didn’t know how to make her face work into expressions.
“She makes an excellent thug,” she said. She even ventured a laugh. It came out coarsely. Julian’s growing confusion and alarm seemed to amuse her. “He gave her a gift. He gave her someone more reliable than you.”
Julian tugged at his bonds, leaning further out and glaring at the woman. His expression was growing angry.
“What did you do to her?” he demanded. The woman gave her malformed smile again.
“He gave her Lethe,” she said. “He gave her a better self. But the little b***h has gone and thrown away his gift, and we can’t find her again.”
“Leave her alone. Leave my sister alone.”
“We know she contacted you. How long has it been? How many years? Five? Six?”
“Seven.”
“Seven years…and she has chosen to contact you now. She let you know where she is. She let you know she has a family now, a child. And the good, saintly brother has deemed it worth his time to go and see how his little reject sister is faring after seven years apart. But we can’t find her. She was so damn oblique in her little message, we cannot make heads or tails of it. So. We ask again. Where is she.”
Julian bit his tongue and lowered his head. He didn’t speak again.
He heard the woman sigh.
--
The fourth waking was a long and deadly dull stretch of consciousness. Julian spent it trying to piece together his memory, trying to recall where he knew his captor from and how he’d come to be in this dank, miserable cell.
It came slowly, but in time it came.
He had been at the academy. Night. There had been…how many people? Two? Three? He remembered Kasalseth was there. His friend, on occasion, when the kid took it upon himself to be civil. Called himself Seth for short. They had been leaving school…
“Will you just come with me?”
“No.”
“Nahalthes, come ON. You’re such a loser. One ******** drink is not going to kill you.”
“Leave me alone, Seth.”
“You’ve been acting weird all day. More emo, too. What, are you like gonna go jump off a bridge? Gonna swallow pills? Razor to the wrist?”
“Piss off, Seth. Leave me alone.”
“One drink. You won’t regret it. C’mon. Maybe you’ll meet a girl.”
“…No.”
There was a hole in his memory, then. He remembered the conversation…a blur of lights and sound…and then feeling sick. Waking up in this dank hole.
“Did you set me up?” Julian asked Seth, who wasn’t there to defend himself. “Did you do this to me?”
There was no answer.
--
Upon the fifth waking, Julian slowly remembered everything. He had given into Seth’s wheedling and gone to the bar. They’d been drinking…and a girl had introduced herself to Julian. Blonde, soft-featured but strangely unexpressive. Julian gave an inward sigh of disgust at the revelation he’d been drunk at the time. He hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.
“You slipped something to me,” he said to the firmly closed metal door. He knew the woman was lurking out there somewhere. Watching. Listening. Waiting. “You did this to me. To get to her.”
He coughed. Damn it all to hell, but he was thirsty…
“Keep me here until I die. I don’t care. I won’t tell you a goddamned thing.”
--
Julian had forced himself to stay awake for a long time. He was exhausted, hungry, and half-maddened with thirst, but he refused to let himself crack. His sister was not going to be put into harms way because of him. He wouldn’t allow himself to slip.
Nevertheless, when the woman entered the cell again, he felt himself cringe away.
“Not in a talking mood today, darling?”
Her cheerful mood disturbed Julian. She’d never been this expressive before. He heard shuffling footsteps and glanced up through his hair. The deformed man was back again, bearing a tray covered in what Julian presumed were instruments of torture. There was a small jar full of a black liquid that caught his eye and piqued a weary curiosity. Poison, perhaps?
The woman was sitting on the edge of the table next to him. She leaned forward and planted a kiss on his forehead. Julian felt his lip curl, but was too weak to jerk himself away.
“Mark him and prepare him for the next flight out to Gaia once he is recovered. And there’s no need to be gentle – he’s far stronger than he looks. He’ll be able to bear it better than you’d think.”
A cold knot of dread choked Julian. Gaia. The woman knew. She knew where his sister was. A rasping sound of protest escaped him.
“Yes?”
Julian swallowed painfully.
“Please…don’t.”
The woman made no reply at first.
“Save your voice. The marking will require it, if you’re going to beg and scream like a proper slave.”
The cold dread doubled, and Julian struggled with his bonds. The door closed, and he realized he was left alone in the room with the deformed man. He raised his head with difficulty and shied away from the looming figure. His eyes darted to the tray of tools and the little jar.
“Don’t,” he said hoarsely. The deformed man made no reply, but scrabbled roughly at Julian’s shirt and tore it open. He grabbed one of the keen-bladed instruments off the tray and brought it without hesitation down against Julian’s skin. The pain of it was a shock, and before he could stifle it Julian screamed. It was ice-cold, seeping into his flesh and freezing his blood. He shivered violently with each movement of the scalpel-like blade as it cut a ring of marks over his heart, and he could not keep himself from screaming. He tried, tried to stifle the sound, to swallow it, but he couldn’t.
Julian screamed.
In the end, left gasping and coughing violently, leaning slack against the cords, Julian looked up blearily at the deformed man. The man was unscrewing the lid of the jar.
“What is that?” Julian asked. The deformed man gave no answer, though Julian hadn’t really expected one. It didn’t keep him from trying, though. “Why are you doing this? Who are you?”
The man twisted the lid free of the jar and set the little glass container with surprising delicacy on the table. He cleared away his bloodied tools and shuffled out of the room with his tray, leaving Julian alone to stare in confusion at the opened jar.
--
Passing into a state half-awake and fevered from the pain of his wounds, Julian watched the jar. The liquid on the inside was black as soot, glutinous and foul-smelling. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see it moving of its own accord, shifting in the little jar.
“What is this,” he muttered hoarsely. He tore his eyes from the jar and glared at the door. “You’re not scaring me with this. Go ahead and poison me. You’re not…you’re not getting any…nnh…”
His voice failed him, and Julian coughed coarsely. He was being pushed to his limits, and he was certain he was going to die in this dismal room. He allowed himself a shred of morbid pride knowing he would die without betraying his sister.
“Nahalethe…. Sarah,” he said, his voice thin. “I wish I could see you.”
He wondered groggily what the woman had meant, during that first conversation. Nahalethe had been “given a better self”? What did that even mean?
He wondered on it until he felt himself starting to succumb to his exhaustion. His head dropped down, and his eyes closed slowly.
They shot open again as he heard the jar roll off the table and smash onto the floor.
He looked up sharply, ignoring how his head swam from the speed of the motion. The jar was shattered upon the floor, and it was empty.
“What?”
Julian’s eyes strayed to the table. A black pool of liquid sat trembling on the surface, and Julian watched in rigid horror as spider-like legs stretched up and outward, lifting the pool up from the tabletop and taking form. A horrifying thing, a bloated spider with too few legs and long pincers scuttled towards him. Julian uttered a cry and tried to push back from the table, but the chair wouldn’t move. The spider-like thing leapt from the table and splattered onto the floor, and reshaped itself, oozing up as liquid up towards the open wounds on Julian’s chest. He sucked in a breath as he felt the cold slime bleeding into his flesh and struggled harder against his bonds. It hurt, gods, it hurt! He cried out in pain, and the cry turned into a choking, gagging sound as the half-liquid creature forced itself into Julian’s mouth and down his throat.
The pain of it was overwhelming, and Julian’s body seized up, going rigid. The thing was inside him, he could feel a crawling cold oozing through him, it was horrifying, he’d never been so terrified in his life-
He found he couldn’t breathe. His heart pounded, and Julian made a terrible sound as he felt the coldness slither down inside his chest, worming its way into his heart. The pounding of blood seemed to spread the cold further and he shuddered violently, tremors as terrible as when he was being cut.
Still struggling, Julian was vividly aware of his heart’s slowing pace, and with a final thrashing fit of horror felt it stop.
After that, there was only darkness.
--
The next time Julian woke, he was in pain again. It was different pain this time...a burn. He was on the ground, looking skyward - a sky bordered by wind-whipped trees. He sat up slowly, a hand pressed against his chest and his head spinning. He didn't know where he was...but it wasn't the concrete room, so it couldn't be that bad.
He looked around. Where was he, the woods? How'd he get here?
"Huh...what'd I miss..."
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:12 pm
__Part 8
The room was still quiet, but with every creak of the couch, every gust of wind outside, it felt as though it was magnified a hundredfold and made Julian's headache that much worse. He muttered in frustration, adjusting the warm cloth over his eyes and reclining, covered in a blanket.
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:15 pm
Hellis had taken it upon himself to investigate Crow's claim of family virus-sharing (after telling Liam, of course), and had no trouble sneaking into Crow's room.
Did people just...not lock their doors in this place?
He shrugged the thought off and approached the lumpy form what was definitely not Crow.
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:18 pm
Shivering and raising a cold-numbed hand to adjust the cloth again, Julian cursed as it slipped off his face and groped for it, trying to keep his eyes closed. He froze as he heard the sound of breathing, and his eyes opened slowly.
"Hh...what? Who's there," he said, trying to lift his head. "Auuhnnn...look, if you're gonna rob us, just go around me, alright? I'm not moving."
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:20 pm
Oh, silly, silly Julian. Hellis leaned forward and placed his chin on the man's chest, and his hand to his forehead. As to be expected, he said nothing.
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:24 pm
Julian's head rolled to one side and he looked down, squinting. Who was...
"Oh...hey, Hellis," he managed, cringing as his head gave a sharp throb. "Hnnngh. Len and...and Crow aren't here, sorry..."
Feeling his blanket slip a bit, he shivered as he drew it back up around his shoulders. He was still freezing. Stupid exhaustion. Stupid sickness. The hand on his forehead seemed to burn the skin and he winced again.
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Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 4:38 pm
Well, whatever they had, they probably had the same thing. Ycch.
He considered for a moment the symptoms he knew of. Corpse-cold and...uh...well, that was pretty much it. Because this was all he knew of, it was all he could fix.
So he crawled atop Julian, head at neck level, and tried to warm him with bare body heat.
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