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There was nothing as relieving as the opening of a door to promised sanctuary. The moment that Adal started screaming Georgie's name, bouncing impatiently with Chauhn held in the cradle of the Plague's arms, the boy realized just what was before them: The end of their frantic and hellish scramble for freedom, and also...Clurie's chance at life. Through all the panic and hectic fight for survival, scapegoating and plunging through the fingers of death, narrowly escaping by the skin on their teeth and expending everything and anything they had to fly free from the cage of Obscuvian torture, Chauhn had nearly forgotten the reason for their trials in the first place. Clurie. Somewhere underneath the folds of Chauhn's wet clothing, was the tiny little Ash Excito, either mostly dead or slightly alive.

Suddenly, Chauhn felt compelled to scream and shout and beg for Georgie to open the door as well, save them from the rain and the Cultists, but when he opened his mouth, his dying voice could only scratch out a few forced syllables and every so often he'd be able to make a terrible squeak of sound. He didn't need to scream for long, though, because Georgie had ripped open the door, pulled them inside from the Obscuvian claws that were raking into their clothing, and the two panicked and beaten boys fell to the ground in a tangled heap.

Wiggling himself out from underneath Adal, yelping with pain whenever he had to move his now completely rendered useless ankle and foot behind him, Chauhn dug his hands into his clothes, desperately trying to find his little brother. When he couldn't locate the little Excito's body, he gasped with each breath, as if every second that passed without Clurie's discovery was a terrible gut wrenching surprise, which, for Chauhn, it was. At the rate that he was breathing he might as well had hyperventilated. Every passing second illustrated the possible instance where Clurie might have been dropped into one of the puddles outside filled his mind with fear. With no luck, he resorted to ripping off his jacket, vest, shirt, and undershirt, in a desperate search to locate his little brother, mouthing with each moment his name with increasing worry.

"Clurie...Clurie...Don't leave me," he begged, nearly in tears. He completely ignored Georgie who was kneeling close to him, the very picture of confusion. With his ribs clutching and relaxing his chest in rapid gesticulations matching his frantic breathing, making the blossoms of disgusting lilac purple and rose red bruises punched into his skin flutter, Chauhn pulled and searched through the fabric with careful frantic fingers. When he pulled open an inner pocket of his overalls, he saw him.

Carefully dissecting Clurie from the pocket, Chauhn could hardly breathe. The little ash Excito was a ghost of his former self, and quite literally so. His skin was as pale as the foggy sky outside, pale and ash-like like the ash left behind by burning clean wood, and his fingers and skin looked cracked and flaking, shuddering off into bits and pieces. When Chauhn carefully cradled him in his hands, as light or even lighter than a feather, he flopped and fluttered lifelessly, feathers of ash shaking free from his skin. It didn't look like he was even breathing anymore. The only sign that he was still filled with some sort of stubborn energy was the dim feverish glow in his cheeks, and the fact that he hadn't entirely fallen away like ashes in the wind.

Chauhn, all but breaking down into heart wrenching sobs, lifted up Clurie's little body for Adal and Georgie to see, and then shoved him into the chest of the latter, a little tiny plague body tangled into the lifeless shape of little limbs and wet clothing.

"...'elp 'im, Georgie, please," he rasped. His voice was completely gone and his fight and spunk were nothing but shadows of the hopeful and desperate determination he usually had in his green eyes. The Clemmings boy was blinking out globs of tears from his eyes. "...'elp 'im, he's dyin'," he began to say, but then the panic began to set in and he glanced in between Georgie's shocked face and Clurie's little pallid and sickly form, disturbed more and more with each moment that Clurie remained lifeless in his palms, "...e might already be dead...'e might...Oh 'ealth...'e can't be dead, e's all ah got! 'E's all ah live for, Georgie, please! 'E's dead!"

Chauhn tilted back his head and wailed a terrible and broken-hearted squall of voiceless grief.

Chauhn almost broke down into an irreparable state of hysteria the moment that Georgie carefully lifted up Clurie's form from his hands leaving a small pinky's width of area that now felt as if a hole that size had been driven through his palm. It was as if Georgie, in some way, represented death itself and had come to reclaim Clurie's life for good, and Chauhn had to fight his arm's invisible attachment to his brother, reaching out after him as if he wanted him back. Instead, he madly blinked the moisture from his eyes, struggling to keep his gaze clear enough so that he could see the other boys work around him, and, with trembling fingers, attempted to pull on his wet and clinging shirt back over his head and slip his vest over his shoulders to cover up the map of their day's worth of adventures left imprinted on his body.

His stability was only countered by the very dread that threatened to shake him to pieces.

As for following after Clurie, it was a process he was already trying to attempt by the time that Adal had recovered the necessary components for their rushed and spontaneous surgery and Georgie had turned to him after locating an appropriate area for the crumbling and gray Excito. Disregarding his ankle, which could easily be seen underneath his pant legs because of his lack of shoes and was swelling with a brilliant shade of stormy purple, Chauhn was trying to twist himself up onto his knees and somehow levy himself onto his feet. He got as far as resting his weight on one knee while his other leg, the good one, lifted up into a fold, ready to push himself up from the ground, but he couldn't manage to convince his trembling leg to rise. All his energy had already been expended and all he was able to do was quiver, lurch forward a bit as he summoned a burst of energy which wasn't enough to throw him much more than an inch's worth forward and then he yelped again with pain when he fell back on his ankle. When Georgie knelt down to lace his arm underneath his shoulders, Chauhn practically clawed for a grip onto his neck and collar bone, struck with a desperate and fierce motivation to get to Clurie's side.

"Ah can, if'n ah can ge' up," Chauhn managed to wheeze, lifting up onto one foot with the freckled boy's help. Then his typical polite nod of gratitude, now a shivering shake of the head, "Thanks."

He had seen Clurie die once before, while he crouched some distance away from him, helpless and invoking no help while he laid cradled in the iron arms of the fireplace. Like hell, he was going to stand a distance away again. Chauhn was going to be beside him, no matter what, helpless again, but an arm's reach away, balanced precariously on one foot and stiff with anticipation. Perhaps Clurie might feel his presence. Or he might not.

Underneath Adal's careful and squinted observation, the little ashen body of Clurie managed to show no signs of movement in response to the golden eyed Anhelo's question, unless a slow flaky collapse of the tips of his fingers counted as a sign. Eventually, though, something did happen. Clurie's cheeks seemed to glow a little brighter with it's slow and fading heart beat glow, and his tiny barely discernible shape of a mouth pursed it's shape as if he were licking his lips before hanging back open in a haggard hang. A faint response if there ever was one, but a response all the same.

The chair was anything but helpful to Chauhn. From the moment that he sat down, he was trying to lean up on his elbows on the edge of the table, somehow inch closer to where Adal and Georgie supervised the small and microscopic procedure being applied to his little tiny brother, but one he realized that he would be doing nothing but getting in the way, he restrained himself to sit with his back tight to the chair, as if he were on strict order not to let his back lift up from the oaken wood.

In response to Adal's quiet addressing of the tears speckling the corners of his eyes, Chauhn couldn't turn a glare of irritation to him. He was entirely right about the latter. Surely, Chauhn hoped with every fiber of his being that every ounce of effort that they expended and burned from the ends of every cell in their bodies, helped influence the outcome of the former, but Chauhn wouldn't be convinced until Clurie was awake and eager again, burning with a natural curiosity and hunger. He bit away the glitter in his reddening eyes and nodded, firming his face despite the pain that wriggled behind his expression and wormed between the muscles of his face. Crying hadn't ever helped him before, he had convinced himself to neglect tears and weeping for a good two years once upon a time and he could convince himself to stop from falling apart now, or so he hoped. He kept trying to tell himself that it certainly wasn't going to help him now. Though, now, things were different. Before, he hadn't anything left to cry for save himself, and it wasn't an honorable thing to do to weep at one's own misfortune. That's what his older siblings taught him. But...It was a different matter entirely when another was involved, namely his family, his own once flesh and blood, his little brother, his responsibility and now his only reason for living. Chauhn found it difficult not to cry, not impossible, but definitely difficult.

So, instead, he clenched his fingers tightly into the thin, wet, and gnarled folds of fabric on his pant legs and waited, focusing entirely on keeping himself from tripping over his breath. The only reason he didn't flinch immediately away from the smell was because his nose was clogged with snot.

Beneath both of the Malt brother's respective and close huddled stares, the little body of the ash plague hardly shifted in response to the tinkering and fuddling near him. By all appearances, he seemed beyond hope, beyond repair, a crumbling shape of ashes that seemed ready to collapse at any moment, at any stray breath, in on itself. Already it seemed like his breathing had stopped in those few desperate moments that they took to uncork the bottle and juggle it into a spoon small enough for his Excito size.

Though, at the rancid odor of the black liquid, Clurie's finger's may have twitched in response, or was that just his digits in their last spasm before death?

When the spoon was pushed up against his lips, there was no sense of motion from the tiny Clemmings. Even when it was dribbled into his mouth, haphazardly administered to his lips, there was no twitch or flash of breath, no response to the promises of safety made by Georgie. What black glowing liquid there was clumsily pushed into his mouth had begun to seep back out again from the corners, then, beyond all reasoning, the little incarnate of death choked weakly, his faint breathing clogged by the black gunk that slogged down his throat, and he spluttered on the gruesome remedy in an effort to clear his breathing until it dripped down in globs along his chin and onto his soggy clothes. With that effort alone, a bit of the gunk had somehow managed to crawl its way down his throat, and a bit of blessed energy bloomed in him, like an ember given just enough air to try and glow. Clurie, with a suck of his lips and a lick of his tongue, tried to swallow what he could of the precious vile tonic, but the attempt left him coughing again, weak and feeble. Yet, Clurie opened his mouth again, yearning for more.

He was, regardless of the trials set before him, stubbornly and resolutely alive.

With fingers clenching and relaxing, testing their reflexes as if discovering them for the first time, Clurie began to move and flinch his body as if advertising with all the strength he had that he was alive. Flakes of ash were still peeling off his skin, but it seemed like the color was already deepening into a richer grey. He gave another cough from the lowermost of his tiny ribs, and, tilting his head back so far that his messenger hat slipped off its stubborn perch on his cranium, he gazed up at Georgie's relieved face with a lidless gaze. Even though he didn't have eyes, it felt like he were wrenching open every blink like he had waken from a deep sleep. When offered another spoonful of the putrid gunk, Clurie opened his mouth for the next dose and weakly reached up with both his gloved hands to grip the tiny Excito-sized spoon as if he were determined to get every single last molecule of the black elixir. It took a little wiggling to get the Ash Plague's fingers to peel free from the tiny spoon so that it could be replenished with another dose.

Swallowing with effort, Clurie dropped his hands back to his side and instead focused his attention on breathing, taking big gulping breaths before letting his chest settle down into a rhythmic rise and fall while he patiently waited for another spoonful. His cheeks were now a steadier glow of warm ember and there might have been a relieved smile pinned onto either side of his haggard black-smeared mouth.

When the spoon was brought yet again, he greeted it with an open palmed grip, and held it in place as he ravenously nursed the elixir.

Nearby, Chauhn ravenously watched the procedure, open-eyed and gaping with fish-like qualities as he tried to keep himself suction cupped to the chair. For a dreadful few seconds, it seemed like all their effort was for naught, and Chauhn could feel his stomach drain out into his knees and drip into his feet. He was ready to wail, force himself to make any pitiful stentorian shriek of ague in commemoration for his brother's second death, when Clurie began to flinch and wince. Chauhn didn't blink. He didn't breathe. Afraid that if he were show any bodily function on the possibility that he might shatter the waking dream, he watched as Clurie's little body revived like the stubborn flame of a doused fire. The more he realized that he was coming to, staying alive and with him, a brother to keep, protect, and live for, the more Chauhn couldn't see. His Imisese eyes were quickly layering over with tears. But he still could not make a sound.

With Georgie's relieved exhalations and Adal's hopeful reassurances rebounding between his ears, Chauhn let himself sink into his chair with a drugged drag of relief. He leaned forward onto his knees, heaving a few faint and dry sobs of breath, while he pressed his face into his palms and let his shoulders shake about his ears.

Clurie was fine. Clurie was more than fine. Clurie was alive.

Chauhn lifted his head from his palms and held his chin and mouth in the cup of his hands, his face wet with grieved relief, but underneath his messy smear of tears and dirt, was a smile and the shaking of his shoulders wasn't from sobs, but from laughter.