Czeslaw Meyer is Still a Child Even After Over 200 Years of Life
Csezlaw Meyer gripped his chest, felt his heart pound pound pound away in his chest. He knew all the times his heart had pounded like that, he'd just relived a small sampling of them in his dreams; they'd blurred together in his subconscious, the unending years of all the various things that Fermet had done to him and the recent incident on the Flying Pussyfoot when the Rail Tracer showed him that even after two hundred years there were still so very many forms of torture he hadn't experienced, hadn't been prepared for. "Ridiculous." Czeslaw Meyer muttered to himself as he stood in front of Firo and Ennis's door. "This is completely ridiculous." One bad dream, one nightmarish swirl of pain and anguish that made him beg for release, made him curse his stupid decision to drink that cursed and forsaken Grand Panacea, and here he was standing before the door like any child. "I'm not a child." He clenched his fist, dug his nails into his palm. "I can deal with this the way I always have." He turned his head to the kitchen; there were coffee beans in the cupboard, he could grind them and boil them and drink it down black, keep himself awake until his body was completely exhausted and he'd enter a dreamless sleep. He knew it would work, he'd done it before, he could do it again, because he was not a child.
"Eh? Is that you Csezlaw?" He heard Firo's voice through the door, he'd just knocked on it and he was the only other one in the apartment complex aside from Ennis, who was in there with Firo, so of course he would think it was him. That he was right didn't reduce the sting any. Mattress springs compressed, feet struck against the floor repeatedly, then the door opened. "Whoa, you're looking like you saw some manner of ghost or something."
"I didn't see a ghost." He knew what he saw wasn't real, he knew that it had just been memories, he wasn't a child!
"Then what did you see?" Ennis was standing there in the door frame with Firo, the two looking down at him, even though he was older than the both of them put together, despite all his years he still wasn't able to look down in the way that was the privilege of countless peoples only a tenth as old as him.
"...Just, just a bad dream." The words were pulled from his mouth like teeth, he grimaced so that Firo and Ennis would understand how stupid it was and recognize that despite appearances that he was not a child, they were not his parents or siblings or anything like that, they weren't family, he was just staying because he had nowhere else to go.
"That so, eh?" Firo put his left hand on Csezlaw's head. "Well, you get in bed between me and Ennis, and I promise you you won't have anymore bad dreams."
"...But..." He couldn't help it, he remembered Isaac and Miria, those fool immortals who didn't even know they were immortal and how they'd shielded him with their bodies on the Flying Pussyfoot when they thought his blood rushing back into his body had been the Rail Tracer out to kill him.
"We don't have to if you don't want to Czeslaw." Ennis lowered herself to his eye level, looked at him with the eyes of someone who'd never been a child once, not even a day, someone who couldn't grasp anything or understand anything about him. "It's up to you."
Czeslaw looked away to wipe the tears welling in the corner of his eyes, pushed his way between the two, and deposited himself in the middle of their bed. Firo and Ennis joined him, he closed his eyes and slept the rest of the night through.