For Alexander Amarov, the process of dying was a simple case of taking a back seat and watching as the Other gradually took him over.
He wondered if anyone had bothered to actually ask an Infected person what it felt like. Not the pain, aches, chills, nausea, disorientation, weakness, fever and gradual shutting down of the body's organs. No, he was referring to what it felt like, psychologically. If someone bothered to inquire, Alexander would happily convey the experience, for posterity.
In the beginning, it felt like a mood – the kind where you give in to the urge to be difficult, or irritable, usually knowing that it was because of hunger, fatigue, pain or something else identifiable. You knew that the bad turn was temporary and that you would find your way back to equilibrium eventually.
Not so when you were Infected.
The 'mood' was a permanent fixture—oddly both inside and around you—a darkness that spread like a neurodegenerative plaque, casting out insidious tendrils across the brain. Through inertia and potentiation, the diseased network strengthened over time, such that the Other was there in the background in every action that you made, every thought that you had.
If Alexander was thirsty, he drank, but the Other reminded him that no matter how much water he consumed, his thirst would not be slaked. The skin around his bite injuries had started to crack and scab. Had his hands been free, he would have scratched, but the Other whispered in his ear, telling him that scratching was not enough. It would have goaded him to dig harder and deeper, to rent his own flesh apart until it chunked in his hands.
It was a good thing, then, that they had tied him down.
These macabre thoughts were not confined to his own person, unfortunately. He watched the people around him – Belikov, Prestin and others who came to tend to his injuries and treat him. If he unfocussed his mind and let the Other run unchecked, he no longer saw other people as people, but as…living units of unfulfilled purpose. They were not prey, because it wasn't hunger that he felt, exactly. The virus did not require its host to consume human flesh to survive, although newborn zombies did seem to have a penchant for certain fatty and nutrient-rich organs. What the virus wanted was to survive, and for that to happen, it needed to spread.
Alexander began to fixate on movement. The whirring drone of a desk fan, the swaying arc of a piece of paper as it fluttered to the floor, the pulse of the infirmary lighting that regular, human eyes could not detect. These movements beguiled him, but not nearly as much as people. People were unpredictable, and as such, Amarov's Infected gaze was drawn to them.
The next step in Infection, he realised, was for this beguilement to turn to bloodlust and a need to devour and tear apart. When that happened, then the Other had taken over and Alexander the man, would be no more. Re-Gen waged a brave but ultimately futile battle within his body. It staved off the inevitable and afforded him the dubiously beneficial position of lucidly observing as his faculties were hijacked by the virus.
The scientists would use him until he was use-less. It was exactly what he would have done under similar circumstances. There was also the small hope that the cure could be fine-tuned in time to save him. He knew the odds of this were slim to none, but the team had already worked miracles. Perhaps one last miracle was in store?
Not many people had cause to enter the men's infirmary. If they did, they were outpatients and were not there for long. Other than that, the medical staff came to check on him, to feed, wash him, and change his bedding and to see to his toileting needs. They observed, drew blood and injected him with yet more Re-Gen, as if that was sufficient to keep him going for another few days. There was no conversation. No one wanted to save him, which was ironic because they needed to.
To his surprise, Hermione Granger began to visit the infirmary more often in the last week.
The first time, she came with a trolley full of equipment. This was prior to the Taransay refugees joining the fleet. She might have enlisted Potter to assist her with magic, but she did not. With pronounced physical effort, the trolley was half dragged, half pushed across the room, wires and cables dangling. At first, Alexander assumed she was setting up a secondary workstation to run more tests on him, but he soon learned that the machines were for some other purpose.
Soon, the glass cell that had been relocated to the infirmary was filled by the things Hermione brought—a table, chair, medical instruments. Alexander knew the cell was there to contain him, if or rather when he turned. Was that eventuality more imminent that expected?
If the cell wasn't now being outfitted for him, then what was Hermione doing with it? And why wasn't anyone else assisting her? The answer eluded him and he was too weak to engage her in conversation she was likely to ignore anyway. The next time she came, yet more equipment was wheeled in. A tarp was tossed over the lot, such that it looked like superfluous lab equipment. On the third occasion, she carried a microscope. Alexander wondered if anyone else was noticing the items were going missing from the labs.
It was impossible to see exactly what she was doing inside the glass cube, as Alexander's bed was faced away from it, but he could hear the bleeps and blops of the equipment as it was turned on and calibrated. One evening, while he'd been in the throes of a painful fever, he opened his eyes and saw Hermione standing over him. Her expression was unreadable, which was unusual for her. He wanted to tell her his insides felt like they were on fire, but his mouth was too parched to be of much use. All the joints in his body were in agony. It felt like he was being drawn and quartered. Even in the middle of the fever haze, he was acutely aware of her. He wanted to ask for help. Or mercy. He wasn't sure yet.
"You're going to die soon enough," she replied, somehow answering both versions of his unspoken question.
She smelled…different. There was something almost tantalising about her scent. It was intense and heady. It made his empty, shrunken stomach clench painfully. He could feel his pupils dilating, and suddenly, the already meagre lighting of the infirmary was too much. He turned his head away from the lights, making a guttural noise to convey his agony. Even so, the urge to grab hold of her was unholy. Although he had no idea what he would do next if afforded the opportunity.
The shock of an icy-cold washcloth laid over his forehead and closed eyelids succeeded in muting whatever nonsensical words he'd been working up to. It provided some relief from the burning. She gave him some water to sip. There was a tug at the cannula on his left hand, followed by the cold flush of saline and then…something else. Something that quickly imparted bliss in its wake. Soon, the searing pain in his limbs lessened, as did the pounding of his head and the sensory overload.
"Thank you," he rasped out.
"Try to keep it together until next week," she told him. "And then feel free to cark it."
When he'd awakened later, he wondered if he'd simply imagined their interaction. But then he felt the washcloth beside his face. And he was still relatively pain free.
Yesterday, Alexander's former personal physician, Dr Prestin, visited in the morning and ran his observations. As always, a guard stood close by. Prestin was not trusted by the fleet and rightly so, Alexander mused. He was an unpleasant man, but had been loyal to Amarov.
"How long do I have?" Alexander asked him.
"It's difficult to say," Prestin replied, as he changed the dressing of Alexander's bite wound. He cast a sideways glance at his watchful shadow. "I am no expert on this disease. Belikov says it could be days or weeks."
Alexander shut his eyes, but then opened them in surprise when Prestin pushed something into his hand. The doctor leaned over his patient, making a show of tucking in the bed sheets.
"Die on your own terms, Alexander," he whispered. He straightened up, peeled off his gloves and smock, and tossed them into separate HazMat receptacles. "I am done," he told the guard, imperiously.
Alexander didn't dare look at the item in his hand until Prestin and his guard was long gone. He lifted his head to glance down, wincing at the use of protesting abdominal muscles. His hand opened. Prestin had apparently given him the gift of mercy.
It was a razor blade.
Hermione's visit to the infirmary very early that morning was unexpected. The wall clock just above the infirmary doors told Alexander that her shift had just begun in the labs. She had no cause to be there at this time of day. All she carried with her on this occasion was a cardboard box. She set it down and without bothering to pull on any protective clothing, not even gloves, proceeded to draw his blood.
"Good morning," he said, with his permanently hoarse voice.
To his astonishment, she actually looked at him and spoke. "Good morning, Mr Amarov."
"Why are you here so early?"
The smile she gave him was miraculous. And quite wry. "I'm rather late, actually. I should have done this days ago."
"Done what?" he wanted to ask, but his voice failed him.
There was the scent again. It was maddening. He shut his eyes for a moment, hoping it might help him to calm down. Unfortunately, all he could think about behind his closed eyelids was grabbing her and squeezing and squeezing until something gave, until bones cracked and blood began to run.
The razor blade was safely tucked under his left thigh, just beside his cannulated hand. It would be an easy thing to reach for it now, as she moved around and over him, entirely focussed on her task. Her long, unbound hair brushed the side of his face. It was slightly wet. For some unfathomable reason, she was not taking any safety precautions with regards to the Infection. The virus was only transmitted through blood and could not survive in the open for very long, but still, there were protocols…
She collected her samples and then retreated to the glass cube in the corner of the room. It wasn't until she had stepped away from him that Alexander saw the wand sticking out of her trouser pocket. And then, he heard the soft, wind-sucking swoosh of the cell door opening. There was the hum of machines turning on, either via electricity or magic. An odd thing happened then. Or rather, a series of odd things.
The air pressure in the room changed. Alexander could feel it in his ears. This was followed by a sharp burst of energy that swept over and through the Infirmary in a sparkling, golden glow.
"No," he called out, trying to twist his body so that he could look at the cell. The part of him that was quintessentially Amarov had finally realised what was going on. "Don't…" he wheezed.
Inside the cell, she could not hear him or see him. He would need to attract her attention.
Or perhaps, not her attention.
As it turned out, the easiest part of escaping from the infirmary was using Prestin's razor blade to saw through the bonds at his wrists. It was slow work, with the foam padding of the cable ties proving to be the most annoying part to cut through, as they kept twisting around the ties. After about twenty minutes however, his hands were free. This small exertion had him panting and perspiring already.
Getting off the bed and onto his feet proved to be the trickier part. His heart was racing from the exertion, sweat beaded across his forehead and he heartily wished for an additional dose of morphine. It was adrenaline that kept him going. Belikov had explained that his body was growing more and more adept at producing it. He winced as he extracted his urinary catheter with wildly shaking hands. After pulling out his IV tube, he tumbled off the bed, knowing that it was a painfully long way to the floor.
Once on the ground, Alexander took care to stay low, so that Hermione would not see him should she chance to glance in his direction. The screens around the bed provided initial cover. The floor was pleasantly cool and Alexander took a moment to simply soak up the cold. The difference in temperature between his palms and the linoleum was stark. He managed to arrange his limbs into a crawling position and quickly discovered that he did not have the strength to pull himself up. The IV stand loomed just above him. He grabbed on to the metal pole and using the wheeled stand as a support, staggered towards the infirmary door. The doors were ridiculously heavy, but he managed to slip through with the IV stand, after a minute of wriggling.
Once out in the corridor of the ship that used to be his, in the fleet he had once presided over, Alexander Amarov had yet another decision to make.
Bloodshot-eyed and en déshabillé, Draco opened his cabin door. He was initially confused to find a lone IV stand and no one standing beyond the threshold until the wheezing sound at his feet captured his attention.
Amarov lay in a heap on the carpeted ground, in the foetal position. He reached out an arm towards Draco, who ignored this plea for assistance and instead hauled the sick man up by the front of his sweat-drenched shirt, until they were at eye level.
"Please tell me that this is an elaborate attempt at suicide. If so, I'm quite happy to drop you, shut the door and go back to sleep."
His last reserves were long faded. Darkness loomed, but before Amarov passed out altogether, he forced out a single word - both warning and entreaty.
"Hermione."
