((J. Dac: Just want to give everyone a head's up—whether or not I finish this fic is really a matter of chance/time. While I do have summer break coming up, that's going to be chock full of working to pay off college debts. On top of that, I'm eighteen now and trying to forge a path to being a writer early … which means getting serious about my original material, and sending it in for serious readings. (Whatever 'serious' means. I sound so grave and silly.) I've got about ten more solid parts after this one, so there should be no slow down of output at the moment. I know how this fic is supposed to continue/end past where I've written, so at the very least, once I'm done putting the remainder of this up I could give you an idea of what would've happened.

Anyway, back to the fic.))

I paused, and then released her hands, holding up my own as I backed away. I retreated back to the toilet, opening my black bag and preparing a second dose of tranquilizer as promised. She, too, appeared to be keeping her end of the bargain. No magic glittered at her fingertips—no ancient language traveled down her tongue. Her eyes never stopped following me around the room.

"Yes, I'm an exile," she began slowly. "An 'invalid.' I'm not a criminal, though."

"Your uniform begs to differ."

"Do you want to hear me out or not?" she snapped. I gestured with a roll of my eyes for her to proceed. "I'm not a criminal in Faerieland, I meant. That's not what earned me the mark. I was exiled because I was neither Earth, Water, Air, Light, Fire, nor Dark faerie. Exiled because they couldn't rightly pin me, and they were scared of my magic."

"Yes, well. Faeries don't tend to stand for things they fear very long," I said sarcastically.

"Hush. I was exiled to a dark cloud, far from Faerieland. I couldn't stay there. I hate being caged. So I decided to try my luck in space. Big black expanse, I figured it couldn't be much worse or suffocating than Faerie prejudice. Turns out I could breathe there—could travel there quite a bit faster than I could in oxygen, too. So I packed some food, and made a break for it. That was fifty years ago."

"A little under twenty years after I left."

"Yeah. I guess after there were no more Feathers to blame, Faeries had to start turning looking inward to find imperfections. And they found me."

"Boohoo," I replied dryly. "At least you have some semblance of a home to return to."

"What home?" she snapped. "Better to have no home at all than one that you're barred from returning to. It's always there, mocking you."

"Cut it, Faerie. I'm not interested in your self-pitying diatribes."

"My name's Hoshiya, not Faerie. Stop calling me that."

"And my name's Dr. Frank Sloth, not Filthy Feather."

"Ugh. You Feathers and your ugly names."

"You Faeries and your ridiculous names," I retorted blandly. "So tell me, what wound you up here?"

"Well, it's sort of difficult to find a legitimate job when you barely speak the language of the universe," she replied bitterly, clearly remembering some wound inflicted upon her in the past. "Maybe you might've had an easier time making your way because you're a male, but when you're clearly female, your options are somewhat reduced." The bitterness in her voice increased twofold with this comment, and her eyes blazed upon me accusingly. I rolled my eyes, looked around the room briefly for any recording device, and then leaned in close for a confession.

"Are you kidding me, sweetheart? I had just as much difficulty as you did. And yeah, I had a few stints meddling with illegal activities. But for the love of betty, I didn't get caught. And that's got nothing to do with what gender I happen to be."

"Well, maybe as a guy you can practice some black market medicine, Doctor Frank," she sneered. "But females, our options are limited. I had to choose between reckless, beaten harlot or on-the-run assassin." She smirked. "I chose the latter. And that's all I have to tell you, Dr. Frank."

Her story apparently finished, she fell silent, turning her gaze towards the wall. I watched her for a long while, arms crossed over my chest and the fingers of one hand fondling the stopper of the syringe. Briefly, I gnawed on the thumbnail of my left hand, and then unfolded my arms and pointed at her sharply.

"I don't believe it."

"What's there not to believe?" she demanded.

"I don't believe why you left. I believe that you're an outcast, and I believe that you had to take a dangerous job once you were out in the universe. But you're omitting something."

"And what makes you think that?"

"Your eye lids. They give you away. You were blinking too much when you were talking about leaving Faerieland. You left because you didn't want to be there anymore, yeah, but there's another part of the story. I bet if I got a lie detector on you during that part of your story, the needle would be tearing up the chart."

She smirked, turning her head back towards me. "You're a clever one, Dr. Frank."

"Dr. Sloth. That's my surname. If a Faerie can even understand that."

"With every pointless insult you get yourself further and further away from your answers," she replied dryly.

"We're never going to like each other, Hoshiya. I'm over it, personally. But I think you left because you're looking for something. And fifty years later, you still haven't found it. And hey, I'm interested in what has you so desperate to find it that you're willing to take a despicable job. So here's your confessional. Have at it."

I crossed my legs in a gesture suggesting I had time to waste waiting for her to blurt out the truth. She looked at me a long time, perhaps mentally gauging whether or not I was willing to wait out her admission. Finally, she let loose a sigh of aggravation, and turned her sight back to the wall.

"Fine. The Faerie Queen … she promised me that if I bring back a vial from … a vial of water from the Fountain of Youth, I would be readmitted into Faerie society."

Another long silence occurred between us—but this time it was broken by my uncontrollable laughter, which I had only managed to stifle for the few pregnant seconds that the room had remained quiet. Sniffing indignantly, she turned her head away from me.

"I shouldn't've expected a Feather to understand the significance of such a magical element."

"That's because it's ludicrous, sweetheart," I managed to choke out between spats of laughter that literally overwhelmed me. "There's no such thing as a Fountain of Youth. We as Feathers and Faeries are fortuitous to have the long lifespan our bodies grant us, spanning centuries at a time. But like anything else, we have to expire. It's just a natural part of life. The cells stop reproducing, start atrophying … the body erodes, life its battering stream. There's nothing you can do to prevent that, short of expanding your life through medical means. And even that has a limit."

"Ah, your Feather medicine," she sneered dismissively. "It's putting those limits on your worldview. Death isn't inevitable. Death, with strong magic, can be cured, just like any other sickness."

"But death isn't a sickness. It's a natural process, like growing up. The bloom of the pituitary glands, the shaping of a mature adult body. Death is just another stage."

"Magic doesn't have to make those distinctions."

"Alright. Alright, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, for the sake of this conversation. My question is, what makes you so sure this Fountain of Youth can be found in the universe? Did the Faerie Queen give you a map or something? X-marks-the-spot and all that jazz?"

"Yes."

The confidence in her monosyllabic answer hit me unprepared. Though my assumptions about her as a Faerie discredited the validity of anything she strongly believed in, the assertion with which she backed that one word came at me like a punch to the bread basket. With that shock, she planted something else inside me, something far more potent than any physical blow: curiosity.

I leaned forward, the amusement evaporating from my voice. "Humor me, Hoshiya. Where does this map point to?" A sinister smile stretched across her face, making her eyes narrow naturally. She gave a slow, 'come-hither' motion with her forefinger. Automatically I leaned closer, my interest outweighing my common sense. That was my second mistake.

My first mistake was not recognizing the hand motion as something more than a mere indicator to come closer—namely, the opening movements of a Faerie spell. As soon as I came within three feet of her, she extended her fingers violently in my direction, barking a few choice phrases in another tongue. Two tendrils extended from both hands, spiraling around one another as they made their short trip towards me. Before I could stab the syringe down and let loose another wave of sedatives upon her system, the braid of magic grasped me by the hand. It penetrated my palm and, like a Hissi entering a hole in the ground, slithered inside of me, wriggling its tail as it completed its entrance.

Without thinking, I dropped the syringe to grasp my hand. The clink of glass couldn't drown out my loud curses, slightly from the wasted chemicals, but mostly from the unidentified spell that just usurped my body.

Turning away from my hand for a moment, I pounced onto Hoshiya, grasping her by the collar of her jumpsuit. Despite my aggressive actions, a smirk remained plastered on her face. Clearly, she had succeeded in something. "What did you just do, Faerie?!" I demanded, shaking her savagely. "What bloody curse did you just put into me?!" She allowed her head to flop about indiscriminately, letting her eyes fall to her hands cuffed to the bed frame.

"You won't be the last Feather for long, Dr. Frank," she said quietly. The small, malicious smile she directed at her side nearly paralyzed me; at the very least, I dropped her clothing and backed away, the dread of possibility rising in my stomach. Visions of the mutated and brutal deaths of my colleagues and family cycled through my head at a frantic pace. I held up my hand to defray the anxiety rendering my limbs immobile—but there was a mark, new to the landscape of my skin: olive green, like a rash or a sinister stigmata.

And then, she began to writhe. A convulsion caved her chest inwards, and she gave a low moan of pain. Her hands curled into claws, and attempted to reach and massage her chest, but they were stopped short by the restraints. "Chest …" she managed to gasp out, and buried her head backwards in her pillow, eyes squeezed shut. Emitting low groans that slowly escalated into full-blown screams, she continued to squirm about in the bed uncomfortably.

I knew what was happening to her, and watched on in morbid fascination. The symptoms were classic female heart attack, and left unattended, she would pass out and likely perish. If I wanted it, the defibrillator could be in her cell in minutes, and she would stand a chance of surviving. It would take a single call. If I stayed where I was, observing her struggle to catch her breath and somehow still the blinding agony, the massive cardiac event would take its course. Her heart would stop—the valves would quiet, and her blood cells would come to a standstill, eternal rush hour traffic.

Vengeance. Moments before, she had poisoned me, placing the same plague that had wiped out my species less than a century earlier (a fact I would find out later). She had written my death sentence with a few jerks of her fingers, without a pen. Granted, she gave me a less aggressive form—a strain that would conquer me slowly, creeping up my skin like a green glacier, twisting me like time twists an old house: gradually. And she, she belonged to the race that abolished my brothers, my father, my family. Could my taste for revenge be quenched by sacrificing her life? Could that prison mattress be the altar on which my hatred and suffering was repaid?

No.

She grew limp. Medically, she was dead.

My instincts as a doctor overcame me, and I rushed to the door of the cell, unbolting it as quickly as I could with my shaking hands. "Inmate is coding. Get me a defibrillator in here immediately!" I shouted to the guard immediately outside the door. He blinked at me momentarily, and then began speaking into his walkie talkie. I went back into the room, and repeated my request into a black intercom that connected directly to the main switchboard of the penitentiary.

In no time, there were two guards rolling a defibrillator into the room. In no time, the plug was in the outlet and her arms removed from the handcuffs, and her jumpsuit ripped open to the midsection to reveal her unmoving chest. In no time, I held two paddles charged with the power to restart her life, remove her from the long dark tunnel where light loomed on the other end.

One on the heart, one on the side—and the current, running inanimate from the power plant's generator to travel across a once-living organ and lend it a second life. The lifeless reviving the once-living; it never failed to astound me. And here was the brutality of life most apparent: it lurched the revived inches off her bed, her consciousness coming back into her body like a shot. Magic might bind the soul to the body, but medicine maintains that link, and when need be, brings it back.

It is a process of remarkable violence; it is a process of remarkable beauty.