Whoever looted the meds from these cabinets took most of the good painkillers and antidepressants. Cheadle passed her gaze over the sparsely-stocked shelves of the ship's infirmary, reading the names on each little box, then sifted through a drawer chockfull of blister packs filled with predominantly expired pills.
"Do you regularly take any of these?"
"No."
Cheadle wiped her forehead. It was raining again, the ship a piece of burning metal. "Did you ever take any of them?"
"Maybe?"
"Which one?"
"Must've been a painkiller."
And he must've resisted taking it for months.
"You can take all these pills to the settlement if you want."
"They're expired or about to be." And for a suspicious time, too.
She turned to Ging, sitting on the examination bed, waiting, restless, for her to finish prodding him. He had found time to shower and shave, too, sitting only in one of the boxers she got him, a thick roll of old bandages conveniently hiding his injured leg.
"Are you gonna unwrap whatever monstrosity you're hiding under there?" She asked, pulling a chair to sit opposite him.
"How did you notice?" Ging asked, his fingers toying with the frayed edges of the bandages.
"You're weirdly shifting your weight," she said, then shrugged consolingly when he seemed annoyed by this. "Don't worry, it's not that noticeable. I might not have found it if I wasn't already looking for something."
He was, after all, pretty good at concealing his damage.
Cheadle gestured for him to lift his leg up to her. His foot rested on her thigh, then her hands went around his calf, trying to locate the end of the roll.
"It's pretty gross." Ging said casually, leaning back on his forearms.
"I'm pretty sure I've seen grosser things." She groaned internally. The bandage was endless; he had wrapped it like one seals a vault with the intention of never opening it again. To him, not seeing something directly pretty sure meant he didn't have to deal with it. Immediately or ever. "You took painkillers for it?"
"For what else?" He said, waving his hand impatiently over the leg stretched out on her lap.
Little by little, the bandages started pooling down on the floor, and the thinner they became the clearer she could make out the misshapen mess made of his limb.
Completely uncovered before her, her eyes stared at a scarred, rived, deeply dented wreck of a leg. Her fingers hovered over sinkholes in skin and muscle that ran the length of his shin, concavities around his calf attempting to mend themselves with new, fledgling skin tissue. All this damage was the result of some sharp object, a knife or a scalpel, she guessed, and not by someone who knew how to use either surgically.
Like a piece of half-kneaded clay, Ging's lower left leg sat in her lap, and every time she glanced somewhere she saw new scars and dints.
The two of them remained silent. Cheadle didn't look up at his face and he wouldn't have met her gaze if she did. The neon lights overhead made everything under her hands a little darker.
"How can you even walk with this?"
"I don't know, I just do."
Cheadle wanted to sink her face in her hands. "Don't tell me you did what I think you did, Ging."
"Worse," he chuckled awkwardly. "I did it several times, and failed."
This time she let herself groan out loud.
"What?" He was about to withdraw his leg off her but she held onto his foot.
Cheadle glared. "Auto debridement? Really?"
"Yes, really."
"What were you even trying to remove?"
Ging grimaced, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. "The unnatural tissue that was growing in my leg."
"Like a sarcoma?"
"I thought so at first, but I don't think it was that," he said. "They were several, seemed to move around, protrude in different spots, press on nerves."
"So you went poking around with a knife wherever you felt one."
Ging shrugged, said nothing.
"Well, did you manage to remove them all?"
"Yeah."
"Does it hurt now?"
"Yeah."
Cheadle sighed. "Okay, I'm gonna do a quick test. Tell me where it hurts most," she looked him in the eye. "and don't lie."
Surrendering to his situation, Ging fell back on the examination bed with a frustrated groan. "I knew I should've hid it better."
"Shut up. You know you need this." Cheadle suspended her hand run over his left leg, pooling nen in her palm, then slowly set it down over his ankle, coiling her fingers gently around the bone. "I'll increase the pressure little by little and move up slowly, alright?"
He nodded.
"Relax."
"I'm relaxed."
"Really?" Cheadle pressed his ankle harder. He flinched. "Because I feel like you're about to kick me with all the nen you've punched up in your leg."
Ging sighed, loosening his shoulders.
"You can lay your leg on the bed if you're uncomfortable like this."
"It's fine. Just get it done with."
She pressed over the lower end of his shin. He winced. "How about up here?" She placed her thumb in a small dint. His jaw tightened.
And like that, her hands traced up to his knee, trailing a path of pain and nerve damage that made her wonder how his leg has remained functional in any capacity. Her fingers pressed his dented calf, her nen sinking down to his tibia, noticed him swallowing back pain. "Does it hurt too much?"
"It's bearable."
"Why did you do this to yourself?" She asked, sliding her fingers over thick, discolored scar tissue, tracing down a particularly nasty contusion. "You could've gone down to the settlement, they could've helped you."
"I didn't think it was a big deal," Ging said, staring up at the ceiling. "I thought I could handle it by myself."
"By mangling your leg like this? Repeatedly?" She didn't know how to begin describing to him just how much damage he's caused himself. Most of it irreparable.
His tone was flippant and casual, but she sensed there was something missing. Ging was single-minded but not idiotic, he believed in and sought people's expertise; if he believed that the settlement people could help him he would've gone to them.
"Shouldn't you have learned enough medical nen by now?"
Ging twisted his mouth. "Learning is one thing, applying it is another," he said with a half-hearted shrug, seemingly content that there were some things he's never going to know or be good at. "I know the basics."
"The basics?" Cheadle scoffed. "You're forty-four, you should know more than the basics."
"I don't have the sensibility for it," he propped himself up on his elbows to regard her with irritation. "Everything I try to heal heals weirdly, I always do a botched job at it. Whenever I try, something goes wrong." He waved his hand. "I can do broken bones and small injuries."
"It's not that impossible to learn properly, if you actually put effort." She said, but her voice carried little conviction, and that seemed to annoy him more than what she said.
"I wouldn't ask you why you don't know how to excavate in the middle of a desert or distinguish between hieratic Katamese and demotic Swaian."
Cheadle frowned. "But this is different," she said, hating how this conversation was turning. "You're different."
"I can't do it well," Ging returned her frown. "You know that." He pointed at her with an accusatory finger, and looked just about ready to snatch his leg away and leave the whole room.
And she did know. The long, gnarly scar that crossed the length of her abdomen can attest and confirm. Apparently his skills at nen healing haven't gotten any better in the last twenty years.
Cheadle pondered saying that she didn't mean to be condescending, but instantly knew she would be dishonest. She was being a little condescending, and he knew it. Apologizing wouldn't work for Ging that way, so she decided to just own up to it.
"I guess not even you can have it all."
"Yeah." He shrugged, gazing contemplatively sideways, in his own head.
Strange, she thought, that through all the years of his absence, she never wondered if he's injured or in pain, probably never imagined it, even. Because, mostly, Cheadle now thought, she never saw him in such a state.
Duly late for annual medical checkups mandatory for all Zodiacs, Ging would show up months after the date and sometimes not at all, had to be contacted multiple times as a reminder, was more likely to run into her in one of her far away clinics than in the headquarters' infirmary where he'd demand she do everything quickly because of course he had somewhere else to run to. The world couldn't wait, even when he himself wasn't in a hurry.
Cheadle searched his profile, for what, she didn't know, and then realized that this was the first time since seeing him here that she took a good, long look at his face—not in some attempt to find wounds or some sign of illness or to refamiliarize herself—but just to look. Because she had missed him, and didn't think she had missed him this much until this very moment.
He had the kind of face that made him seem distant and unapproachable, a natural frown made harder by a pair of ever-skeptical eyes that found you first and left you first, and yet it was a face that spoke openly of his disposition—moody, daring, evasive, guarded, confident, endlessly curious, and charmingly, insufferably childish.
That face hasn't changed much, but some things about Ging himself have. She couldn't tell what, now, with any certainty, and maybe she never will, but for a moment she let herself be glad that he's here, and alive, and still tenacious and prideful enough to walk on a leg past saving in any real sense.
"Is it comfortable?" She asked.
"The general atmosphere under your judgmental scrutiny?"
"The underwear."
"Ah, yeah," he shifted a little. "Smells like you."
Cheadle lowered her head, bit the inside of her cheek. "I had to keep them at my apartment for a while, before taking them to the seaplane. It's probably the detergent, since—"
"I'm not complaining."
She smiled, hoped he couldn't see it with her head cast down.
"So, are we done here?"
Cheadle cleared her throat, realizing that she was still holding his leg, a hand over his thigh. She slunk her hand away. "Mostly." She said, glancing down at the bandages piled at her feet. "Are there any clean bandages here? I'll give you some antibiotics, too, to ward off infection." She looked at him. "You'll have to clean it regularly and take care of it. No more sealing it away like it's a curse."
Ging gave her an incredulous look. "What, not gonna do anything about it?"
"There's nothing to be done about it." Cheadle said that honestly, and withheld the rest selfishly. She didn't tell him that his leg was probably going to get worse because of his botched surgery, that the damage to his tibia and fibula was irreversible, and that sooner or later he'll have to be without it entirely. Perhaps he already knew.
"Whether it gets better or worse is on you."
Cheadle didn't tell him that it would be better to just amputate it because she sensed, strongly and without an inkling of doubt—and perhaps erroneously, but she didn't consider that—that saying this to him would make him run away. It's better, she believed, that he think it didn't need anything other than consistent care.
Eventually, she settled on telling him that there is no long-term solution for it, only management.
Silence pervaded the room, then he nodded. "Is that all?"
"Yeah, we're done," she said, having already taken samples from him, samples she won't be able to study until they were back at the settlement. With clean bandages in hand, she went about rewrapping his lower leg. "So, how did it happen?"
"It just did," Ging shrugged. "One day I started noticing the growths; I don't know what the cause is, exactly."
"If you had to guess."
"Any number of animals or insects or plants here could've caused it," he said. "I go everywhere, I try everything, and I've probably touched everything, too."
"When did you first notice?"
"Last year, around the same time as now."
"And you weren't interacting with anything specific around that time?"
Ging looked at her. "If wandering ancient cursed archaeological sites can cause unnatural tissue growth, then sure."
"Still wandering these?"
"Where else would I wander." Ging said. "I've discovered some pretty neat things, nothing like the previous expeditions."
Cheadle smiled. "You did?"
"I wasn't sitting on my ass this whole time."
"What new archaeological sites?"
The two of them gazed towards the door where Pariston stood, or a version of him that had stepped here from the past, suited and vested and ready to ruin something.
"Or you know what? Don't tell me now," he went on, coming inside the infirmary to look around, curious and in haste. "We'll talk over dinner, or is it breakfast? I'm pretty sure we're past twelve but there's no way to tell." He seized them with amused, listless eyes. "Are you hungry? I'm starving."
When neither spoke, Pariston chuckled, his gaze traveling down to Ging's leg on Cheadle's lap, where her hands had stopped short of tying the bandages. "Oh, am I interrupting something?"
"Hardly," Cheadle said, tying the knot tightly around Ging's ankle, let him draw it back. "Now that you're awake, maybe Ging will finally deign to tell us why we're here."
Ging hopped off the bed and started picking \up his clothes. "We'll eat first, I'm hungry too. Aren't you?" He looked at Cheadle, gone for a moment as he slinked back his t-shirt over his face.
"What's there to eat?"
"Please let there be meat." Pariston chimed in. "We haven't had meat in a while."
Ging pulled up his pants. "Yeah, but I don't go out to hunt as much anymore, so if what I have here isn't enough feel free to go out and hunt your own meat."
"You know, the food in the settlement is awful." Pariston said as they left the infirmary.
"You don't trust the food there?"
"We don't trust anything there." Cheadle said. "They don't even know why animals stopped appearing around the place."
Ging led them through the third deck, this one more spacious than the one above, designed for leisure and activities. The map of the ship, hanging large at the entrance of every deck, showed a dance hall and a swimming pool area, a cinema theater and a restaurant, although it was harder to tell where these rooms were with the way Ging had upturned the whole deck, leaving the main hall completely empty. She wouldn't be surprised if these maps were just red herring.
If Cheadle had to guess, he'd probably structured the place so that whomever found the ship and intruded wouldn't find anything of particular value. If Ging hid anything important here, it's going to be either sealed behind trapdoors or placed extremely in plain sight. A couple secret rooms wouldn't be out of the ordinary, either.
There was something strange about the ship, too, not least of all a medicine cabinet filled with expired pills. Most meds usually expired after three years of production, but the ones in the infirmary had a remaining shelf-life of less than one by the time they were stocked in the ship. That might not be very strange if the cruise liner had a planned short journey with a set destination, but luxury nowhere voyages usually involved more meticulous stocking arrangements. Did this mean that the Dark Continent had always been the intended destination of this ship? Its sudden disappearance—and reappearance—was certainly peculiar.
Pariston and Ging were walking a little ahead, their twittering low and consistent, something about food, about the big chandelier in the main hall, about clothes, about the incessant rain outside. She wiped sweat off her forehead.
Was it possible that the Sea Cherry passengers were plagued with some similar disease to the one in the settlement? Did it crash in the ocean and then float to shore? Did it arrive safely and was then struck by some disaster? Did nothing of note happen? Did the passengers just collectively decide to leave the ship or did something occur, forcing them to leave? Could this incident pertain to her research? Something about what that Samion kid told Pariston rang in her head. Could the rogue group of his story and the passengers on this ship be one and the same?
This ship didn't just crash, did it.
Cheadle held onto that thought as they entered the kitchen, a huge space of white walls and stainless steel, smelling slightly of something old and metallic, the only signs of human presence a bunch of dirty plates in a nearby sink. There was a kitchen like this on every deck, and each one had a backdoor to move stock around and a main one open to every eating area. Fridges lined the wall to their left, but Ging only pointed towards one large walk-in freezer.
"That's where I keep all the food."
Pariston took large steps to the freezer and with a strong pull dragged it open. A cloud of condensation wafted out, and he stood there, peering silently for a long moment into the insides of the freezer, something turning in his head.
He looked at them. "Let me cook."
Ging lifted himself up a counter, his head hanging low, away from a cabinet that hung over it. "Do you know what's in there?"
"No," Pariston smiled. "You'll walk me through the ingredients, won't you?"
"I can just whip up something quick."
Pariston frowned. "No, the three of us are together in the same place, alone, mind you, since forever, and I want to honor the occasion," his eyes shifted from one to the other. "Don't you feel that this is a special moment?"
The two of them only stared at him, impassive.
Last time the three of them were together, alone in the same room, mind you, was the day the two entered her new office in the Association's headquarters to hand her their resignation forms from the Zodiacs. Cheadle had an inkling that day, that she was never going to see them again under any sort of ordinary circumstances, and that thought had come true in more ways than one.
And she had not felt strange about this reunion until this very moment, perhaps precisely because they were all finally in the same room, not moving through spaces, about to cook and have dinner together, on a previously believed to be vanished ship, in land, in the Dark Continent.
Cheadle took a long breath.
It wasn't just this moment. Even through all the political and economic turmoil and upheavals of the past decade, she still conceived of that life as largely an ordinary one, to someone like her and with her job, and now that conception was slowly coming apart, peeling little by little with such a mundane act as Pariston pulling out items from the freezer, a fledgling tower of sticks collapsing from within as he set everything on the counter and regarded them expectantly.
She now believed with strong conviction, as she watched Ging name one thing after the other, that she, personally, with these two or away from them—and even in the unlikely occasion that she returns to mainland, still chairman—was never going to live through any ordinary circumstances ever again.
Cheadle was a little right about this, and a little wrong, too, as always with her, but she didn't ponder that for long.
"You said there's alcohol?" She asked Ging, absentminded.
He took a break from telling Pariston the source of a slab of red meat to nod at her and point at what appeared to be a pantry door. "There's some there, I don't know if they're any good though."
"You never tried any?" She asked even though it wasn't very strange. Ging was never much of a drinker.
"No, never felt like it."
She rolled her eyes, left his side on the counter to check the wine pantry. "I would've drank myself to death if I were you."
"Good thing you aren't me then."
Pariston smiled at her as she walked there, following her from the corner of his eye. "Pick a good one."
Ignoring him, she opened the pantry door and stepped in, her shadow stretched before her long into the dark pantry, the only source of light the kitchen outside. It was warmer here, and she could make out the wooden shelves, more empty than stacked. So not only the medicine was taken, but wine, too. There was something slightly amusing, slightly morbid about this, more so because she would have probably done the same, taking with her the same things.
There weren't many choices, and the ones that were available spurred only ambivalence, so Cheadle settled on picking one she's never tried before, a red Karah Nouh in a plain bottle, and she had to hold the bottle against the kitchen light to read the fine print. Apparently it was produced in a private Padukian winery.
Whatever.
"Oh, this one's good!" Pariston said once she set the bottle down on the counter. "I've been to that winery myself once."
"Nobody cares."
"Do you mind cutting these vegetables then?"
"Fine."
Cheadle reached for the nearest glasses she found and poured wine for all of them, then conked her butt down in the nearest chair, a bowl of weird Dark Continent veggies between her hands, absentmindedly accepting the knife Ging passed her. Pariston's good mood irked her, as it always did, in its own special way, pointed and specific like nothing else.
Something about this moment reminded her of her last visit to Pariston's villa, before she spirited him with her to this godforsaken land, around the table when he made her tea and served her his irritatingly good homemade cookies; everything there was happening inside a veil, the real reflection of events only difficultly glimpsed outside of a translucent barrier.
Impatiently, she peeled and sliced and chopped everything in the bowl. Cheadle wanted to move as soon as possible, to begin discussing tracking plans, the promptitude with which she left the settlement now dampened by the other two's carefree meandering.
She glanced at them, their backs to each other, Pariston bent down in search of something under the sink, Ging standing with his hands in water, picking apart an oblong leafy plant. He caught her gaze, broke a leaf from the base of the plant and handed it to her, cold, dripping with water. "It's like lettuce. Try it."
"Where do these grow?" Cheadle accepted it with a cautious hand, twirled it between her fingers to inspect it. "Where do all these vegetables grow?"
They were nothing like the ones in the settlement, which wasn't entirely surprising. Different lands supported different crops, but edible plants were few in the continent, cultivated ones fewer.
"My grandpa's farm."
The piece of continental lettuce sat half-chewed in her mouth. Pariston, too, had stopped what he was doing to stare.
Ging resumed washing the vegetables, nonchalant about their reactions. "I tried to till a small farming land here a way south of the ship, but the soil didn't support any crops. I still can't figure when it works and when it doesn't, there's no pattern." He said, still in his own little world. "I even stole some of the settlement crops but they didn't take either, neither did Don's." He lifted up his face to gaze at them in turn. "I know it's like this in the settlement too. Don says fertility here moves in four year cycles. Do you have any theories why?"
"Don Freecs?" Pariston asked, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "You found him?"
Ging chewed through his own piece of lettuce. "It's more like he found me. I got distracted long enough for him to get bored and just come out."
"Does he have anything to do with us being here?" Cheadle finally asked.
"Yes and no," Ging said. "You came here because you need my help, right?" The water over his hands stopped. "I need your help, too."
Cheadle put the vegetable bowl on the counter. "Well?"
"I'm excited to talk, but I wanna do it properly," he said. "Besides, you haven't told me anything, and I believe that what we both want is interconnected."
And just as he wanted, any relevant information on his part was delayed until the food was ready. So as he continued to describe all plants and meats to Pariston's working hands, Cheadle began recounting everything, from their arrival to the continent to what they saw along the road here. There were little details she found irrelevant—too personal to mention—and the discomfort of deliberately omitting them came entirely from Pariston's presence, silent but no doubt listening intently, reminding her that he's been there for all of it, that whatever she chose to keep to herself didn't solely belong to her but to them both, and yet he assisted her quietly, only nodding to affirm something here or there.
Gregory stood as an especially thorny subject amid all this, but Ging was resolute about hearing all of it. By the time they left the settlement, there was barely anything left of the scientist. No attempts at preservation worked. Her body shriveled and wasted and more than anything, her corpse came to resemble a rotten tree log. But that which was inside her continued to live—thrive, even. It grew a little bigger, still a shapeless mass of sentient flesh, she told Ging, and was right now under the watchful gaze of Hima, who was observing the creature and documenting its growth and habits and studying the samples collected from it.
"So you still don't know what's causing it?" Ging asked, opening a large jar of some spice. There was no incrimination in his question, but she felt guilty nevertheless.
Throughout history, doctors and medical practitioners observed, studied, and at times even healed various illnesses without ever knowing what pathogens caused them, or how. Moreover, she was careful about definitively labeling the cause of the illness in the settlement a 'virus'. She had no proof, and the samples from the sick that she'd collected only revealed damage but not the agent behind it. Viruses were difficult to culture, and she needed living cells, and lots of luck, to catch one, keep it alive, and make it reproduce. Even then, there were no guarantees of successfully devising a cure.
"I need to gather more data," she said, helping them by pulling plates and bowls out of a high cabinet. "We have to capture animals in the region not only to take samples but for experiments, too. There's also—" and here she stopped, because her main proposition was contingent on a loose string of associations she drew between several things, and she didn't know where and how to begin explaining them, chasing a hunch that might very well lead to nothing and waste time. "Let's just say I'm hunting a particular semi-aquatic fungus I believe might be connected to the infection, and I want your help in finding it, along with everything else."
It wasn't just something connected to the infection, but a thing that has to do with the whole settlement, a homegrown, gradual affliction that might turn out to be completely absent from the natural world around the premises, perhaps, even, if samples proved it, a thing that has spilled from the settlement outward.
Ging, mostly in silence, standing over a boiling, steamy pot of stew, absorbed everything he heard, perhaps a bit of light finally shining on some obscure parts of his own story. At one point she stood up to take on the task of constant stirring from him, and they both stood over the pot, staring down at its swirling contents, lost in thought.
Dipping the wooden spoon in the pot, Cheadle lifted it up, gently blew air on it, then stretched it towards him. "Taste it."
He leaned closer and opened his mouth, and she chuckled when he threw his head back, willing cold air into his mouth as food sat there, steaming hot.
"You still make a good stew?" She deliberately phrased it as a question.
Ging nodded with a pained expression, finally swallowing all of it, sniffing, tiny tears at the corners of his eyes. "You didn't have to shove it in my mouth like that."
She hummed, returning contentedly to the stirring. "You seemed a little too eager."
"Because I still make a damn good stew, dammit. Give it here," scowling, he snatched the spoon from her hand with some force, wrenching her stubborn fingers off it. She resisted but only playfully. He grabbed her hand and pushed it away.
This perked up the attention of Pariston across the aisle, until this point completely and silently immersed in doting over a piece of steak in an oversized pan, his whole being devoted to grilling it to perfection.
"Is that true?" He asked, turning around to regard them with a curious expression. "What's the story here?"
Ging's scowl deepened. "There's no story, other than Cheadle meddling in my business like she always does."
Cheadle stared at him, offended. "Meddle in your business? You're the one who leeched off my mission, remember?" She said with a bemused smile. "I had something interesting going on, you were accidently 'passing by', on an isolated island no less, then you decided all of a sudden to stick around when you were supposed to leave."
"You asked me to stay in your I-didn't-ask kind of way," Ging countered. "While you were busy looking down your nose at people there, I knew the local language and you were fumbling like an idiot among the populace, having doors closed in your face, before I came and saved your ass further embarrassment."
And saved your life , but he didn't say it, and wasn't going to say it, although Cheadle's own apparent reticence regarding the subject made him more excited to recount events.
Through this, Pariston was still listening, regarding them intently, his question yet unanswered.
"So you see, we're inspecting a bunch of plants up a hill, total boring shit," Ging continued, deciding to retell it, waving the spoon over their head, ignoring Cheadle's weak protests. "And then a couple kids suddenly fall into a river below us, a badly constructed bridge just collapses," he said, sticking the spoon back in the pot to stir it some more. "So Cheadle, remarkably idiotic in her bravery, just drops everything to run and save them, without taking time to study the situation," then he laughed, amused and admiring all the same. "She managed to get those boys out, but got stuck in debris and swallowed so much water I had to jump in after her," his eyes sought her, but she was looking away, letting him have control over the narrative, waiting for him to just embarrass her. "Because of her noble and gracious deed, the boys' family invite us into their home, agree to talk to us, and we finally have a breakthrough with the mission."
That was the meat of the story, anyway.
"And you cooked at their home?" Pariston asked.
"Yep, for the whole family." Ging nodded, turning off the fire under the pot. "It's ready."
He ended the story there, on a quite anticlimactic note, opting to leave behind little details that had no bearing on the mission, the details he was aware were the real source of Cheadle's embarrassment. Was she upset that he shared this story, or parts of it, with Pariston? Even after he was done, she remained silent, didn't utter any defenses, and then promptly busied herself with setting up their dinner.
There were parts of it that were way more embarrassing to Ging himself than her, and he had omitted those too, while Pariston himself seemed more excited and satisfied in knowing that he wasn't privy to all of it, that there were more to dig up in this muddy ditch.
Slowly, their little feast came together. Pariston insisted on using a dining table and all, maybe candles and napkins if there were any (there were), and Ging obliged him. The ship contained numerous objects that he had simply never used, or never cared to use. Entire rooms were filled from floor to ceiling with what he considered junk, maybe useful for later, but of no interest to him at the moment, and now he found himself opening all these doors in search of things he'd left to collect dust, objects that never really belonged to anyone, commodities bought to furnish the ship, replaceable and disposable, and some others that were clearly personal, some he wondered what their owners thought when they left them behind, how willing or unwilling they were to move forward without them.
What things had to be abandoned, what more didn't make the journey, now all confined to the alien geometries he's made of this ship.
There was one room which he used to store all the musical instruments, none of which was kind to him. Ging appreciated music but had no particular musical taste, was tone deaf, and couldn't play an instrument to save his life. He tried. He tried all of them, from string instruments to percussions (which seemed deceptively easier than the others. Wrong.) He tried because, for a while, he seemed to have all the time in the world, and nothing of what he wanted originally was working out for him. He could neither find new, relevant artifacts or sites nor decipher the ones he'd already discovered.
His purpose in limbo, Ging picked up a side hobby.
Now behind him stood Pariston, peering into the newly-opened room with bubbling curiosity. "There's a piano," he said it in almost a whisper, his voice underlined by an old reverence.
Ging turned to him. "You play?"
"Yeah!" Pariston smiled. "Does it work?"
"How should I know, try it."
More than happy to oblige, Pariston entered the stuffy room, trekking his way with careful, small steps between dusty flight cases, making his way to the black piano at the other end of the room. "That's a good Baby Grand." He said, sweeping his hand over the dusty black surface of the piano. "We used to have this beautiful caramel-colored upright at home. It's on that piano that I learned how to play."
Pariston lifted the fallboard, pressed a couple keys, tilted his ear down as if to better discern the quality of the sound produced, then pressed some others, segueing into a short musical phrase.
Even though Ging didn't know shit about pianos, he knew it just didn't sound right.
Pariston laughed, then offered Ging a sheepish smile. "The strings have suffered some." He said, looking down at the rows of strings. "Oh well."
"What terrible sound was that?" Cheadle appeared beside Ging, hands weighed by a tray of utensils and silverware. She looked around, her eyes finally landing on Pariston inside, who had stood up, hunched over the piano, slightly disappointed. "Are we going to eat?" Cheadle's wrist watch showed it was past twelve in the morning. "If this dinner is going to take any longer than this we might as well just raid the fridge."
Time was moving slow for her, but to Ging it was flying by. He barely sensed its passing since they'd arrived, the way they reappeared, the way they casually re-entered his life, and this coming and going of people wasn't unusual for him. The pressing but fleeting nature of human encounters was the backbone of life as a Hunter; nobody ever stayed for long, friends and acquaintances and enemies alike came and went, passed and left, and Ging liked this. One of many in constant movement, he never thought much about it, about time passing, in spite of the fact that his closest relationship—debatably—throughout the past years being with someone defined almost entirely by the length of time he'd spent alive. Except he was never alone for such a long period of time before, the ship a place Don had never once set foot on, disinterested in the goings-on of Ging's life away from him, the ship a place, a structure, Ging thought of as more a project than a home. A project to pass the time.
Now those two were here, arguing about the 'impossibility of truly tuning a piano' and that catgut strings 'are not actually made from cat guts', not venturing far but somehow occupying this place, and for the first time since he sensed the intrusion in his En\, before he even saw them, Ging was entirely glad for their presence.
Finally, around a long table of red oak, the three sat, high on well-cushioned chairs with wooden frames carved into elaborate, reticulated leaves, their faces lit by long, honey-colored candles placed in ornate candelabras, triangular flames flickering and forking and finally settling into a gentle sway as they all got ready to begin dinner.
"Do you like it, Cheadle?" Pariston asked, filling their plates with food, animated by the patience of a man who had all the time in the world.
He filled their long-stemmed glasses with another wine Cheadle had chosen, placed the plates in front of them, and then took his place opposite Cheadle at the other head of the table, chin resting on the back of his entwined fingers, the shadows cast on his face making the left corner of his mouth appear a little too big.
"Very gothic." She answered, finally, her napkin a triangle on her lap, the forks and knives and spoons laid out before her on the table in an arrangement different from the one Pariston had laid out first. She just forced a smile at the questioning tilt of his head. "Cultural differences."
Ging observed her fumble for a moment, elbows on the table then off it, hands down at her lap then tinkering once again with the arrangement of the silverware, possibly being chastised by a voice in her head.
"I'd like to raise a toast," Pariston started, his wine a bloody dark orange in the candle light, the brown of his eyes twinkling warmly in the glow of the dinner table. "Here's to the Dark Continent, for bringing all three of us back in one place," he started, smiling. "and to our first dinner together, may there be many more."
Cheadle rolled her eyes but raised her glass anyway. Ging did the same.
The wine tasted like distilled copper. He could get used to it.
With elbows on the table, he leaned forward, addressing them each with a long gaze. "So, guess it's time for me to talk. You want the short story or the long one?"
Pariston unfolded his napkin with a swift move. "What's the more interesting one?"
Ging smirked. "The one where I'm planning a journey to meet my mysterious ancestors down the center of the Earth? Or maybe it's the one where I discovered a series of new, hidden and possibly interconnected temples all over the south and southwest of the continent?"
And he could have phrased either differently, but enjoyed their staring, contemplative, blinking faces. They weren't shocked—they knew more than to be shocked—but cautiously curious. Even, on Cheadle's part, slightly dismissive.
"Mysterious ancestors, you say?" She mumbled. "Any hard, biological proof?"
"Not on me there isn't," Ging said, unthreatened by her doubt. "Does it matter?"
"Well, you specified ancestors, didn't you?"
Ging stuck a fork in his meat, enjoying the way it split in soft tendrils. "I admit it's more speculative guessing than concrete science, so far, but hasn't it been proven that the continent was once inhabited by various civilizations?" He asked rhetorically. "I have archaeological findings—not conclusive, I'll give you that—which may prove that a connection between the Kujira Archipelago and the extinct people of the southwestern region exists."
He hoped this made the connection between his two endeavors clear.
"And you need my help because?" Cheadle asked, taking a sip from her wine, turning it in her mouth, biting the inside of her cheeks. Pupils dark and big, her irises took on a murky blue in the candle light.
"Because some of the inscriptions on the temples' ruins alludes to an ancient illness that I believe is similar to what's happening in the settlement right now."
That got her full attention. Eyes a little wider, she sat up straighter, but he quickly dampened it.
"But," he started. "Due to the designs of the totems, the inscriptions could be read in multiple ways, some contradicting this theory. To be completely honest, I didn't think much of the disease theory until recent events brought it to the forefront of my mind; I was more interested in the linguistic and storytelling structure of the inscriptions, the way those people wrote in verse and riddles, how each one lead to the other, like it's a treasure trail."
"So what is it you're pursuing now?" Pariston asked, stretching his arm towards a bowl of salad at the center of the table. He didn't reach it, so Ging passed it to him.
"Nothing." Then he clarified. "Nothing now . I'm a little stuck, so I'm doing other things," he shrugged. "Call it a creative block."
And he wasn't lying about that creative block. At one point his mind simply stopped clearly processing anything to do with archaeological work, a sudden inexplicable blackout in that corner of his brain. The longer he looked at all the papers he's collected, all the dots he's attempted to connect, all the ruins and ornate puzzles, the less any of it made sense.
It all started with a simple poetic verse, resisting reasonable interpretation, leaving him obsessed but befuddled for months, and snowballed from there. Even things he was near certain about became once again obscure and unreadable, demanding he look over them again and again.
He hasn't given up. Hell no. He just needed a kind of repose, an intermittent period to rest and recharge, a side project, or two, or several, except the ship side project—picked up completely on a whim and fancy—had taken years out of his original research.
Year after year, Ging lost the members of his team. One by one they were gone, swallowed in whole or part. Initially the loss was of a conventional sort: attacked by predators, or trapped by raiders, or falling victim to poisonous plants. Then the world around them became an odder, more sinister place—an idea that he's resisted for long and still did. The continent didn't become any more unwelcoming and hostile than it was before, it's only his inability to parse the true fates of his teammates that made it seem so. Some of them had vanished gradually, experiencing a degradation of mind and body before any physical disappearance, bedridden for months, he had watched them die slowly. Others—still sane and fit and hopeful—gone completely in the dead of night.
At the end, only his brain was left processing all the research they've done, and after a while, something in there had just called it a day and refused to cooperate, resisting the urgency he felt to achieve something, anything, to reach a breakthrough, to make the death and sacrifices and losses and effort of team members worth something.
Working alone, being alone, everything mattered too much and didn't matter at all.
Still, he didn't despair, mostly because he was never prone to it. He recognized, too, that bringing in other fields to his work always helped. After all, archaeology had a whole branch dedicated to the study of ancient diseases as documented and displayed in the remains of those who experienced them.
Ging had dipped his feet before in paleopathology, but he was far from an expert. Cheadle too probably had her runs in the field, but her work mainly concerned living organisms. Either way, one of the Dark Continent's biggest and longest-standing mysteries stood as a sizable hurdle against any serious paleopathology research or field work, and when he gazed at Cheadle he saw the same concern in her eyes.
There were simply no human skeletal remains of any kind. None belonging to the ancient, native populations, anyway, and not in any of the regions he'd combed.
"Any chance you found a cemetery?" She asked with a wry smile.
Ging shook his head. "Does that make you less excited to go along with my theory?"
"No," she stretched her glass outward so Pariston could refill it. "I just want to move as quickly as possible."
Knowing her, she most likely came here with a whole timeline in mind that was probably already failing her, cracking when she most needed it to hold together.
"We can dig for skeletons and fossil dung all you want," she continued. "But I must begin my field work fast, and it will take precedence."
"Sure, I can accept that," Ging smiled. "We won't waste each other's time."
"Good."
Her eyes sought Pariston, characteristically silent whenever it came to matters he was no expert in. On the fringes of their fields, he was acquainted with the literature but not the technical work.
"What will you be doing?" Cheadle asked him.
Pariston smiled as if caught off guard, as if he never once thought of himself or his presence as anomalous or strange or unnecessary.
"I will be doing whatever you ask me to do," he answered. "Just like I've been doing since we came here, right?"
"Right."
Deliberately she avoided looking at Ging, and in a way he avoided gazing at her for long, too.
No discussion about Pariston and his presence was ever going to happen with Pariston in the same room, and he knew just as well that sooner rather than later she was going to fire up another round of questions at him regarding the subject. After all, Pariston was here because he had asked for Pariston to be here. Ging dreaded that moment, and not just because he believed only Pariston could succinctly put into words what he actually wanted, if the man himself even knew it.
"You haven't forgotten me."
In a little less than a decade, that was the first thing he heard Pariston say. In that dingy room in the settlement, he had quietly opened the door, visibly pained and weary, then came to a stop when he found Ging sitting on the edge of the bed. An imperceptible eyebrow arch, like he was already expecting Ging to show up at any moment. A ready, tired smile appeared on his face then. He didn't ask Ging anything, where he was, how he entered, how he found the room, how long he's been there—he just walked closer and sat next to Ging on the bed, letting out a long sigh, his wiry fingers pooling in his lap.
You haven't forgotten me, he said it with the voice of a man who's still only recently acquainting himself with freedom. Marginal and controlled but a freedom he was willing to accept temporarily.
Ging could have said, then, that he had forgotten Pariston, for a while at least, in the muck and grind of daily survival in a hostile land, but that wouldn't have mattered and would've probably annoyed the other man, so instead he reminded Pariston of their last conversation.
He had made a promise, he said as much. Pariston nodded, and then they fell into silence, sitting beside each other on the bed, staring out the window at the murky sky. Ging offered his invitation for them, but Pariston had something else in mind.
It was simultaneously sudden and expected, Pariston's hand sliding under his shirt, over his thigh, his face inching closer, his breath held behind tight lips, and Ging knew it was a bad idea almost instantly but went with it anyway, an old kind of desire rekindled in him, a latent desire he had to later admit, alone in the ship after leaving the settlement, wasn't found anew or rediscovered at the moment but been building up since he learned of their arrival.
And it was strange, to be this close to someone else again—to be this close to Pariston, specifically, again—and he felt a little out of it as it was happening, wanting it and not wanting it, less strange his suspicions—confirmed soon after—that Pariston mostly had Cheadle in mind, not Ging, when he initiated the whole thing. Perhaps that little factoid ought to have irritated him, but it didn't. He didn't get a whole blowjob due to that little mind game, but he hadn't gone there seeking or expecting one, and he couldn't always be concerned with how Cheadle reacted or decided to blame him for every little thing Pariston did, but seeing her face so suddenly in the doorway, the way her laughter rang in his ears, the way her eyes took them all in and then seemed to blink them both out of existence in the span of a second, it all made him realize this wasn't the way he wanted to meet them again, yet it seemed like such a fitting, sufficient reunion for them, three people who were never easy with one another.
Perhaps, even, and in a roundabout way, it had made things smoother.
Cheadle, he suspected, was somewhat wrong in her interpretation of Pariston's intent, if what Ging sensed from the latter said anything. Pariston didn't want to make Cheadle feel unimportant and left out, but to annoy her enough to make her jump out of her comfort zone and into his. He was baiting her.
If Ging told Cheadle that Pariston was mainly here to have fun she would probably bite his nose off.
Even at their worst, he could always handle either of them alone. Cheadle, especially, was a more pleasant person when her sworn nemesis wasn't around, but whenever they were in the same room the air itself smelled differently, and throughout all their various conflicts, from the silliest to the most serious, he never believed there was ever more bad blood between them than now.
The negative energy overflowing from both ends of the table made him want to retreat in his chair; it was never wise to stick one's nose in what amounted to a complicated, career-spanning conflict of interest, let alone enter it with two powerful, emotional basket cases. Yet willfully or not, Ging almost always found himself in the midst of these two, one way or another.
For now, however, he was content to simply be curious about them, alone and together. Their bodies and faces were still guarded and antsy, and there was still much they didn't reveal, but Ging didn't mind that.
They spent the dinner in amicable conversation, all of it having little to do with the continent. Cheadle talked at length about the state of the world outside, the shifts in global power relations, the brewing anti-monarchist movement in Kakin, the Hunters working there to investigate, the civil war in Trafalovia and the attempt to enforce a conditional neutrality law upon the Association.
A month was a lifetime, a lifetime absolutely nothing. More wine on the table, more politics, more anecdotes about people he hasn't seen in years.
III
Once again in the kitchen, time rolled on silently, only the sound of water on dishes and cups streaming around them, and when that stopped they could hear the hum of rain outside.
Despite the food and alcohol, none of them was sleepy. Each stood over a task or another, and after an hour or two, the kitchen returned to a time before they stepped in it, perhaps even cleaner. The table and chairs remained.
They worked in companionable silence, and Ging had left a big kettle to brew slowly over the stove so that by the time they finished working the hot drink he prepared was ready.
"Will it cure our hangovers tomorrow morning?" Cheadle asked, taking the steamy cup from Ging.
"No, but you won't feel as groggy now." He answered, sitting on the carpet of his room next to them.
Ging's room wasn't a suite but one of the more modest balcony cabins on the ship. He liked it because it was the highest one and only called it his room to simplify directions. None of the rooms on the ship were his, and he rarely inhabited any one of them for long during the day. Sparingly decorated and furnished, he liked the timber walls and the small bed and the little nook and the way the moon climbed up the nightly tunnel between two trees when it was full.
A map unfolded between them, they discussed their journey plans well into the night, and Cheadle insisted, despite the rain and the possibility that it might not stop tomorrow, to start moving with the next sunrise.
While Ging built up a mental inventory of all that they'll have to carry with them, Cheadle retreated up to the nook with her MP3 player, and Pariston settled for a while into contented silence, lying on the ground with cheek resting on hand, putting down the cup of tea Ging handed him beside the book he was reading, an absent-minded 'thank you' leaving his mouth in a murmur.
"Mandango?" Ging arched an eyebrow, regarding the cover of Pariston's book curiously. "Now that's a relic."
Not minding the interruption much, Pariston lifted his gaze from the paper to Ging. "You've read it?"
"Yeah, the whole series."
Pariston smiled. "Even the really terrible ones?"
"Aha, everything," Ging said. "When I was eleven."
Pariston laughed, hardly embarrassed. "The good ones are still very readable. I think it's written much more intelligently than people give it credit for." And that was directed more at Cheadle than Ging, which she duly took note of.
"It's pulpy and puerile," she said with a judgmental side-eye. "Besides, the female characters are terribly written."
"Right," Pariston said. "You like your female characters homicidal."
"I like them complicated."
"Nobody's complicated in these books," Pariston argued back, letting his hand slip to the floor when Ging dragged the book from under his hand.
Cheadle rolled her eyes. "Isn't that even more of an indictment against these novels?"
"They're for children."
"And you're pushing forty, Pariston."
Then she seemed, suddenly and without warning, greatly upset at that fact. They were all so old it made her want to punch a wall, but was being younger any better? Cheadle's adolescence was almost uniformly terrible, a long series of trauma and losses and repression and rejection, and how she's managed to make anything of it at all was a mystery. Her twenties in contrast were immeasurably better; transitioning and graduation and finding a purpose and a foothold in the world made life a little less alienating. And still, the place where she read these books wasn't a place she could ever return to. It wasn't a place that would ever take her back.
She's read Mandango. Of course she's read it. Every eighties kid on the planet read it. She read it despite the disapproval of her parents, because it wasn't 'serious literature', and contained 'immoral themes', and teenagers fooled around and kissed in it—all very terrible, damaging things for a 'young, impressionable mind'. They had attempted to persuade her away from this series of novels not knowing she was sneaking into the school library to read worse things. In shame, of course—everything she's done back then was in shame—but hungry and horny and questioning the appropriate desires she was supposed to have, questioning the very body she lived with.
On the carpet, Pariston was having somewhat similar feelings, an age-related existential angst. He was pushing forty, against every fiber of his will, against the eminent desires of his whole being. He never wanted to grow old, but mostly, he didn't want to look old. When he was fifteen none of this would've mattered, because the world is eternal at fifteen.
One day you're fifteen and suddenly you're pushing forty, in a ship away from civilization. He remembered that his childhood home was often full of old people, all of whom repulsed him greatly, and he had to call them aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas even though none of them were actually that. Pariston's own father was very old, always old. Was he going to become that?
"I'm actually 38." He protested, knowing full well it made him look silly, but she didn't hear him, the music from her earbuds reaching his own ears. She drew her knees up to her chest and curled, staring out the window.
Inside the book, one at page 15 and the other at 70, Ging found a tender leaf, still vibrant green and glistening, and a pressed gardenia flower, less alive but no less fragrant. He returned the book to Pariston, didn't ask him about the flora bookmarks.
He walked to his bed to lie down. Despite having given them their own rooms, Ging suspected the other two were going to sleep right here, Cheadle's eyes already fluttering shut, Pariston taking longer to flip a page.
Under his bed he had pushed the box he'd received earlier, inside it still the things he didn't touch or open. He stared long at the white ceiling, his body growing heavier.
Last time Ging was on mainland, he stood under the snow in Swaldani beside a café, waiting for Gon.
Behind the glass front of the café people were setting up Christmas decorations, hauling a massive neon sign through the front door, struggling to hang it up in the perfect place on the brick wall, their voices intermingled and distant, and a Christmas tree, squished behind glass, peered down at him, heavy with ornamented red globes and vaguely-religious knickknacks and icicle lights and tiny angels and scented letters.
At the end, Gon didn't come.
His body bathed in the warm glow emanating from behind glass, his breathing visible, people moving around him on the sidewalk, across the street, Ging stood still, felt the world stand still, too, and remained there just to see the Christmas tree light up. Then he left.
III
AN: One of the things I always wanted to explore is nen as a healing tool/method, its consequences on the body, and how difficult medical nen actually is. It seems nen-users can't heal themselves using basic aura techniques, even when they're advanced users utilizing multiple affinities (e.g. Morel, who ends up in a hospital post CA arc); a healing factor has to exist *within* a Hatsu, such as Kurapika's cross chain, Bisky's masseuse, and Pitou's Doctor Blythe. Nen healing is uncommon and people who can do it well, let alone professionally, aren't many. That shit takes time to learn, and it's just fun to give mighty Ging Freecs this one serious weakness.