Gerad was silent, a shadow hovering on the very edge of the room, his heart beating frantically as he watched Terra and Celes cast healing spell after healing spell, theirs the only one's powerful enough to have any real affect as they waited for Locke to return with the antidote they needed. Magic would not clear this poison.
It would have been him.
Had Sabin not leaped in front of him when he did, it would have been him who'd taken the brunt of the attack, would have this aggressive poison inside him.
He would have been dead.
He'd been distracted, frozen as his brain fought to catch up with what his body was doing. He had been reaching, not for his sword, but for something else… something he had been almost sire he had at his fingertips, something big, heavy, familiar and something that would have cut that dammed creature down in a single swipe. But whatever it was he had been reaching for was not there, and it had made him a liability.
As Locke rushed into the room, holding a vial of antidote out in front of him, everything became a blur, and Gerad was shocked to find tears obscuring his vision. He was further shocked when he blinked them away to find that the room was empty save for himself and Sabin.
He stumbled his way to the chair Terra had been sitting in, and let himself fall into it, trying desperately to make sense of what he was feeling. Maybe he had been around these people too long, he was starting to lose his sense of self. He wiped the remaining tears away and looked at Sabin and sighed.
Time before the world changed was something he had no knowledge of, he had woken to his sister's worried face, and desperate to know who and what he was, he had taken her every word as absolute truth. But the longer he spent in the company of these… no, the longer he spent with Sabin, the more he questioned what he had never before thought to dispute.
"Pro'lly shoulda given it back to you before."
Gerad blinked and frowned when he saw Sabin's eyes open, though unfocused and hazy. "What?" he asked. And then immediately followed it up with. "You should be resting."
"'s broken. Wanted to get it fixed before I gave it back… Shoulda known no one but you could fix it anyway." Sabin's words were slurred and sleepy.
"What are you talking about?" Gerad couldn't stop himself asking.
"In my bag." Sabin said, lifting a hand a mere inch off the bed before dropping it. But Gerad knew where the bag was, he'd seen him store it earlier, before they'd ended up in that dammed fight.
Curious Gerad stood and went to the bag, it was bigger than the packs the others carried. He lifted the flap, and it took only a little digging to unearth the large pieces of what looked like a … chainsaw? His hand curled familiarly around the handle and pulled it out, and when he had the pieces in a row on the floor he felt his stomach sink, and was glad he had taken up a position on the floor, because he might had done something as undignified as collapse had he not.
He knew how to fix it.
He knew exactly how to piece it back together to fix it.
But with that knowledge came nothing… except the sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, Sabin might be telling the truth. He had hoped that one day he past would just rush up to greet him, showing him everything he had forgotten. But even though he knew this chainsaw was familiar, even knew exactly how he would deploy it in future fights, there was no flash or insight into when he had used it before, or what he had started using it to begin with.
It was his though, he knew that for a certainty.
He looked at the bed where Sabin lay for a long moment before he dropped his head into his waiting hands and struggled to make sense of this… He wasn't Sabin's brother… even if it was true. He didn't know how to be his brother, he didn't remember him, didn't know him. They would be strangers who shared blood.
He dropped his hands, and his eyes came to rest, as they did more frequently these days, on the blue gem of the ring Sabin had given to him. "What do I do?" he whispered. "What do I do?"
Ummm… Sorry, these stories are getting progressively stranger with every one. I hope youenjoyed it anyway.