Chapter 29
The English-speakers had huge smiles on their faces and the woman clapped her hands together and put them against her chest. The man wrapped his arm around the woman and pulled her closer. The red-haired girl, as usual, watched from where she was.
He looked at the man and woman.
"Kial?" he asked.
His throat felt so odd, like his voice was nothing but vibrations. The trade off was worth every one of those vibrations but he couldn't help but wonder if everyone who could speak felt them too.
"Kion vi celas?" the woman said.
He poked at his throat with his wrist.
"Ĉu vi riparis min?"
"Jes."
"Sed…kial?"
The red-haired girl's big smile lessened, he assumed because she realized that without Esperanto there could be no communication, and she didn't know Esperanto.
"Why isn't he excited?" she asked. "He can talk now."
"Because he doesn't understand why we helped him," the man answered. "He hasn't talked for a long time, Jazzy-pants. Why would we suddenly let him now?"
"Ni volis helpi vin," the woman told him.
"Sed kial vi volis helpi min?"
His throat was already starting to ache again.
"Vi estas homo. Vi meritas esti traktata kiel homo."
He took a moment to let that sink in. Just hearing an English-speaker telling him he was human, and furthermore that this was all the reason they needed to help him, was warming.
"Ĉu mi povas konservi ĝin?" he shyly asked. "Mia voĉo?"
"Kompreneble vi povas," she answered.
He felt warm inside, like there was a small bit of ectoplasm there that wasn't enough to hurt him, but just enough to heat him up a little. It was a comfortable kind of warm. It only became slightly painful when tears stung his eyes. He wasn't sure why he was starting to cry about something he wanted and had wanted for a long time—such a long time that he had forgotten he even wanted it until he met Sam and Tucker.
"Dankon," he choked out as he tried to wipe away some of the tears.
The woman pulled away from the man, sat down beside him, and draped her arm over his shoulders. She started whispering hushed coos and rubbing on his upper arm but everything she said was in English and most of it was so quiet he couldn't make out what it was.
He sat in silence, but mostly because his throat kept straining itself whenever he talked. He assumed it was just something he had to get used to. It was disappointing to know that he could've been talking since the day the English-speakers fixed his throat, but at least he knew now. Part of just sitting there was also being overwhelmed by a lot of good emotions he wasn't quite familiar with. He recognized one as gratitude, but any time he'd felt it before, it came more in the form of relief. It was kind of the same but much more intense. The others, he didn't know. Maybe happiness was in there somewhere, or maybe the whole thing was just a lot to process. Maybe he just didn't know how to feel about this half of his identity being taken from him.
The last, smallest part was just because there was a lump in his throat that he couldn't get rid of.
The red-haired girl eventually came over to sit on the other side of the bed. She put one hand on his back but unlike the woman, she didn't say anything. He didn't understand why everyone wanted to touch him all of a sudden but it was a nice feeling. Even if they didn't care about him in the same way Sam and Tucker did, at least they cared enough to try to fix someone else's mess.
He didn't sit there for much longer, being touched and hugged and stroked by good English-speakers, before a list of questions began to compile themselves in his head. Questions he hadn't thought of before. And without the rings, possibilities that hadn't been available to him before.
He started to slide off the bed but the woman pulled him back the moment she realized he was about to stand up.
"Jack, could you get the chair for him?" the woman asked.
"A chair?" the red-haired girl said. "Why? He doesn't have the rings anymore and he always walks with his feet turned in."
"Exactly. Without the rings, there's just a big hole. His bones have tried to adapt to the rings by bending around them. Without anything to stabilize them while they reform, his own body weight could break them."
"How will they reform?"
"Braces," the woman answered. "They won't be pleasant but they'll help the bones reposition."
"I'm guessing his hands need braces too then?"
"Yes. And he'll need to strengthen the muscles so he can actually use them."
The man rolled a bulky chair right up against the bed and the woman moved out of the way. The man picked him up—he was not pleased with being held when he could've just stood, especially with the rings out now, but they did help him so the least he could do was behave himself—and set him snugly in the chair. This chair had huge circles that it rolled around on and a short stick topped with a u-shaped plastic piece stuck out from one of the arms.
The woman tapped on the chair's other arm and said, "Wheelchair."
He assumed she was telling him what the unique chair was called.
She hung his wrist in the "u" plastic on the little stick.
"Joystick," she said. "Uzu ĉi tion por movi ĝin."
He looked at her in confusion but reminded himself that regardless of the graciousness she had blessed him with…she was still an English-speaker. They could do pretty much anything, even make a stick move a chair.
He pressed down on the joystick but nothing happened. He tried again, harder this time, to be met with the same result. This stick did not move the chair.
The woman seemed to realize his dilemma and clutched his forearm, slowly pulling it forward. As if in direct response, the chair rolled forward too. It could only mean that what he sat in was an English-speaker machine, the purpose of which was probably transportation…but he didn't see how this mode of transportation was efficient when they had giant cars. As long as the chair didn't beat him up like the car did, however, he wasn't entirely opposed to it.
"Nun vi provu," the woman said.
He gently pushed the joystick forward with his wrist and the chair slowly moved. When he stopped pushing, the chair stopped moving. But how did a stick make anything move?
He didn't get another chance to play with the joystick when the man emerged from behind him with an odd device that looked a lot like a metal version of the tall shoes that Sam often wore. He knew they planned to put it on him but he hoped they wouldn't. His feet still hurt. Maybe they could wait for them to heal, like how his throat had healed?
"Brace," the man said, pointing to the metal shoe thing.
He wondered if all the Outside English-speakers knew about the shoe—the "brace"—or if it had been specifically designed for him.
The man knelt down and lifted one of his legs. He closed his eyes in preparation and as he had anticipated, there was a sharp pain that jolted throughout his foot and ankle. The pressure didn't go away when he opened his eyes to find the metal shoe strapped to his leg, extending down to his toes. It was very rigid. He wasn't able to move his feet like he did before, rings or not. It felt beyond uncomfortable and the man and woman both seemed to understand this. They probably knew it would happen.
"Poor thing," the woman sighed.
"He'll get used to it," the man replied. "He's a tough cookie."
The man laughed and slapped him hard on the shoulder.
"Aren't ya!" he exclaimed.
"Jack, be more gentle with him!" the woman said, sounding more like she was scolding the man than simply talking.
"Maybe you guys should go ahead and put the others on before Daniel changes his mind about sitting still for you?" the red-haired girl said suggestively.
His other foot soon suffered the same punishment and he swore that his feet had never felt so restrained in his life. At least with the rings he could still move them at all. These braces were far worse. The woman said they were trying to help him but how was this helping him?
As if the feet braces weren't already bad enough, the man left only to return with smaller devices of the same nature and material, and he immediately knew they were for his hands.
These braces were fairly different, however. Instead of just clamping and tightening around his wrists, they reached midway up his forearms and actually strapped to all five fingers on each hand, holding them and his wrists completely straight. He couldn't move his fingers like he could his feet but somehow this still felt just as restrictive as the feet braces…
"Kion ĉi tiuj faras?" he asked the man as the final strap was tightened.
"Ili helpos viajn piedojn kaj manojn resaniĝi por ke vi povu uzi ilin," the man answered.
He looked from the man to each of the four braces, which had basically replaced the rings in the worst way possible without being more rings, and looked back at the man because that just didn't sound right. His throat never needed a brace to heal. It only stood to reason that his hands and feet would be just as fine without braces, if not more so because at least he could still move them.
He didn't like these braces but decided that he would return the favor they graced him with by just dealing with them until the English-speakers took them off.
He was unable to get up any stairs now that this chair and these braces wouldn't let him walk, but he quickly grew tired—the English-speakers told him it was normal after what he'd gone through and he had no choice but to believe them—so they had to pull the chair up the stairs backwards with him in it. The round circles made each bump feel more and more like it was ready to dump him down the whole flight of stairs, and the higher up he got, the more nervous he felt looking down.
By the time they let him maneuver the chair on his own at the very top, he put his wrist on the joystick and pulled it back. The chair gently rolled backward, farther away from the stairs. He still thought it would've been easier on everyone, himself included, if he could just walk. It was true he couldn't walk like them but he wasn't completely immobile.
The chair bumped against something and he looked over his shoulder. It was just a wall, but it proved how much more aware he would have to be. It was similar to the ride in the car. Circles kept moving him whether he was in control or not. The car was a moving box and he'd never seen a chair able to move like a car before. Downright unnatural.
"Here," the red-haired girl said. "Let me help."
She grabbed two sticks jutting out from the top—they looked like handles so he assumed that was what they were—and he moved his wrist from the joystick to the chair arm while the red-haired girl pushed him around. He still wasn't entirely familiar with the layout of the Giant Word Building, preferring to stay in his new room or the kitchen and nowhere else unless Sam or Tucker came.
She moved him through a hallway and from there he could see the corridor that would lead to the kitchen. He wanted to go there simply because he was familiar with it and, by extension, felt more comfortable there. But the red-haired girl passed right by the only entrance to the kitchen and rolled him down to a large, open room that he had seen each time he went to the kitchen but generally never stayed in for more than a few moments. If he remembered correctly, the English-speakers called it the "living room." Even now he showed total disinterest in it. The only thing of slight interest was a monitor with strange moving pictures flashing on it when anyone turned it on. Different sounds and a lot of random English-speakers speaking English to each other. Sometimes they had discussions about the sky at night. A bunch of twinkling things that, as he discovered recently, were not fireflies but "stars." He rarely saw the kind that the monitor depicted. The monitor showed tons and tons of them filling the entire black sky. It was gorgeous. But here? A few every now and then, always very distant from each other and not all that incredible. Sometimes he couldn't see them at all, which was even more disappointing.
The red-haired girl rolled him up beside a long seat covered with cloth that was stationed directly in front of the monitor.
"Should we let him sleep here for a while?" the red-haired girl asked from behind him.
"It would be the best way to keep an eye on him," the woman pondered. "He might not like the couch though."
"Well I'm tired of him sleeping on the floor," the man complained. "Makes my back stiff just thinking about it."
"Jack, that's what he's used to. At least he's willing to take a pillow and blanket, that's a good start."
"Well…the couch cushions don't feel the same as a mattress so he might tolerate it better than a bed," the girl said.
"The epinephrine's probably going to wear off soon and he'll want to sleep," the woman mumbled to herself. "With any luck, he'll be tired enough to sleep on the couch."
She snapped her head to the man.
"Jack, could you go get his pillow and blanket from the guest room?"
The man ran off up another flight of stairs without a word while the red-haired girl looked confused. Perhaps the man wasn't supposed to leave like that?
"He hates those though," she said to the woman.
"It's easier to adjust to a new environment or routine when there's something familiar around," the woman replied. "He might not like them, but he knows them."
The man came back down holding his pillow and blanket and decorated the long seat with them, the pillow on one end and the blanket spanning the length, one corner pulled back slightly so he could slide under it. He knew what all this meant and he was far from happy about it.
The man scooped him out of the chair and set him on the seat, where he refused to lie down in hopes that they wouldn't mind letting him sit without dealing with a blanket or pillow right now. Maybe later, but he just wasn't up to the task at the moment. He wanted to go to his room and curl up on his patch of soft ground.
The man lightly pushed him down and he stayed on his back, head on the pillow, extremely uncomfortable. This seat was nothing more than a stiffer version of a bed.
"Provu dormi," the man said.
He closed his eyes but had no intentions of sleeping. He planned to wait until they were all gone and listened closely for his chance to at least stand up, or maybe move himself into the chair so they wouldn't be upset, but despite his wishes, he felt his body begin to numb and his mind started to fade. He wanted to stay awake but couldn't find the strength to resist slipping away into a dreamless state of unconsciousness.
He eventually woke up to pain around his rings and his eyes groggily fluttered open the more his body registered how tremendous the pain really was. He was turned onto his side somehow, legs and arms extending past the edge of the long seat. The blanket drooped over them both.
He tried to use a wrist to prop himself up on an elbow, but quickly realized that his wrist was stiff and wouldn't support his weight.
Those braces.
He used the core muscles in his abdomen to heave himself into an upright position and fumbled his arms and legs around until the blanket was completely shed onto the ground.
His heart still fluttered at the sight of two ringless hands and two ringless feet, but the pain was three times more powerful than any excitement he could be feeling. He couldn't even try to move his extremities into a more comfortable position to alleviate the pain. It was just staying there and nobody w—
"Daniel?" a voice quietly whispered somewhere outside of the large area he was in—he assumed it was the kitchen.
The red-haired girl poked her head from around the corner of, just as he had guessed, the kitchen and looked at him with a small smile on her face.
She suddenly disappeared back into the kitchen and he heard her say, "Guys, he's up."
The man and woman would tend to talk a bit slower when speaking English to him, but the red-haired girl made no effort to slow down so he could attempt to pick apart the words. He wasn't upset by this, as it was something Sam and Tucker frequently did with their native language, but he did wish all of them would give him some leniency to try to make an educated guess at what they were saying. He barely kept up with the man and woman and they seemed to know more about him and Project Level Up than Sam, Tucker, or the girl originally did.
In fact, despite the rings coming out at long last, it still disturbed him to know just how much the man and woman knew about him. Sometimes he wondered if they had known about him this whole time. Him and, naturally, the explosion and place from which he came. Alternatively he had also wondered if they had ever known the man who dragged him so far away from that place, still burning to the ground and filled with dead bodies. With the rings gone, perhaps there was a slim chance they were the ones who told that man to get him away.
A very slim chance.
Maybe Sam and Tucker brought him to get the rings removed, and he simply hadn't considered that ridiculous possibility. After all, even Sam and Tucker themselves hadn't attempted to take the rings out. He didn't think they wanted the rings in but he never once expected them to so much as try to get the rings out. And they didn't. Maybe they just couldn't, for some reason. Maybe the man and woman were the only options. Maybe they had to bring him here. Why couldn't they have just explained all this to him though?
They probably knew he wouldn't believe it. So stupid to think the rings would ever come out. He knew he hadn't been born with them but he couldn't remember a time without them.
But getting this deep into thought wouldn't achieve anything, or at least not anything he could think of at the moment. Why not appreciate what happened and leave it at that?
The pulsing pain became even sharper, pulling him out of any lingering thought and bumping all appreciation for this odd but kind gesture far away. Yes, his rings would get caught or bumped and yes, they could bleed and it hurt badly…but it was never this painful and paired with the braces he'd already decided to hate, he had to weigh out the pros and cons of this. Was it worth having the rings removed after they'd violated his body all this time if it meant he would be in this much pain?
He turned his hand over and discovered a mixture of blood and green goop—ectoplasm, no doubt—beginning to leak through the bandages. He wasn't the least bit surprised to find blood but the green mixed in with it was cause for concern. In the past, he bled red and only red. Why was he bleeding green now? It wasn't natural, even for him and he already understood how unnatural he was. The man and woman would likely know what was causing this sudden change. Maybe Sam and Tucker would have an idea. But first, maybe any of them—he didn't care who at this point—could stop the pain. It was like an invisible, large, very sharp thing was stabbing at this hands and feet and it hurt so bad it was starting to make his head spin.
He closed his eyes to try to block out the pain and maybe focus on something else, anything else, but it wasn't working.
He barely noticed a crushing hug.
"Hey, buddy," a soft voice said. "You okay?"
He opened both his eyes to find Sam just now parting from him and Tucker standing right beside her. He recognized the voice as Tucker's.
"Why are you crying?" Sam asked. "You should be happy, aren't you glad to have the rings out now?"
"Mom—"
"I came prepared, I came prepared," the woman interrupted the red-haired girl.
She ran past Sam and Tucker, who moved aside to allow her passage, holding a cup—or a bowl, maybe, they were still a bit difficult to tell apart since they served the exact same purpose—filled with water and had her fist raised to him.
On instinct he flinched when she knelt down, irrationally expecting to be hit for defying any of them prior to having his rings taken out, or maybe they just wanted him to lie down and he sat up instead. A distinct lack of obedience and he knew it even while he was disobeying. But she opened her fist to show him a small, round, white…thing. He wasn't sure what it was but he knew she wanted him to have it.
"Take this," she said, evidently forgetting that he had no clue what she was trying to get him to do, and used her thumb to move the little item between her index finger and thumb.
For a moment, even she seemed flustered by her blunder and reverted back to Esperanto.
"Glutu ĉi tion. Ĝi forigos la doloron," the woman corrected.
He still didn't know what the thing did, but he was willing to do anything she said if it helped the pain. He opened his mouth and she popped it inside, then held the cup-bowl to his lips and tilted it so he could swallow.
But it didn't take away the pain like she said it would.
"What's that for?" Tucker asked the woman.
"I was afraid this might happen," she replied. "The human body is amazing. It's so resilient and adaptable even from a young age. In Daniel's case…well, it's a blessing and a curse. His bones didn't break or fracture or become permanently damaged from the rings, but they did develop around the rings as a sort of compensation. Without the rings, his bones are bent for no reason and have nothing to keep them in place like before. It's putting him in a lot of pain right now."
"So you gave him a painkiller, right?" Sam asked.
"A strong one, yes," the woman answered. "I'm not sure if it'll work on him or what the side effects might be, but I assume it'll make him drowsy again. Probably good to let him rest as much as possible anyway."
"How long will it take to kick in?"
"Give it a few minutes. If nothing changes then I may have to administer something intravenously."
The whole room fell silent and he felt multiple stares from each of them. It made him extremely uncomfortable but there wasn't much he could do about that. It only took a very, very short amount of time for the pain to start subsiding.
Maybe the thing the woman made him swallow just took a bit of time to start working. But, in his defense, time was a precious commodity that this amount of sheer agony wouldn't wait for.
He finally realized he'd been crying when he stopped crying and felt wetness all over his cheeks.
"Daniel?" Sam said to him. "You feeling any better?"
The woman seemed surprised and although she didn't say anything, he could tell she was taking a lot of mental notes right now. He just wished he knew what they were...
He used his forearm to wipe off the tears now, since the brace was in the way of his wrist.
"Say something," Tucker said.
"Diru ion," the woman translated.
A/N
Yes, it's Sunday night. I'm sorry. I meant to update yesterday but work was exhausting, it had been a very long day for me. Then I had plans for today in which I had no access to my computer, so an update earlier today was impossible.
What oh what will Daniel say to them now that he can finally talk?