Gol can't seem to catch a break….

Chapter 65: Blood

While the peace of that day continued on to the next, spreading from day to day until it had overtaken the next several weeks in its tranquility, that all shattered one morning while Kassra was away for her usual chores, and Gol was reminded that good things, at least for him, never seemed to last.

He stared down at the page gripped in his hand that he had been in the middle of viewing, or to be more exact, at a few specks he had found upon its surface. They were small, but he could see their color, and that color was red. He dropped the page, allowing it to rejoin the pile on his lap, and put a hand to his mouth, heart pounding and mind racing over what it might mean for his future if he had begun to cough up blood. When he withdrew his hand, none of the substance marred his fingers, but what had landed on the page was enough, and his gaze shot to the front door, the door Kassra would eventually be coming through once she had finished her chores for the day. He rose to his feet, the pages slipping off his lap and falling to the floor, the top few swooping away under the table, and he cursed himself for his stupidity before kneeling down to gather them up. Once they were in a disheveled pile, he riffled through them until he found the one he sought, the one with the evidence upon it, and he carried the pages to his room, where he opened one dresser drawer and shoved the offending page beneath his spare clothes. He could rewrite it later. Yes, later. If "later" was a word he could use for much longer, though such morbid thoughts would get him nowhere.

Leaving the rest of the pages on his bed, his next stop was the bathroom, and he leaned in over the sink to inspect his face in the mirror. He tasted blood, but there was no more to be seen, even as he looked at his face from all angles to ensure this was so, the only view looking back at him a very old man in a ridiculous looking pair of black-rimmed glasses. A very sick, very old man. He put a hand to his cheek and pulled down one eyelid. His eyes were indeed the blue they once were, but the edges were turning bloodshot again, just as they had been when the Dark Eco still had him in its grip, which could simply be the result of the lack of sleep he had experienced for as long as he could remember. Yes, that could be all that it was.

He turned away from the mirror to pace back and forth, and then he stopped to cough on his fist, a ragged and wet sound. Gasping for breath afterward, he studied his hand for any more signs of his worsening condition, but none revealed themselves. Drawing in several more wheezing breaths, he rubbed at his forehead and willed himself to be calm. It could be any manner of things, things that weren't serious, perhaps. Yes. His breathing had been abysmal for centuries. Why would it suddenly get worse now?

Gol headed next to the kitchen, keeping his hand to any wall or object he had in his vicinity to counteract how lightheaded he had become. He found what little remained of their Green Eco stores (Kassra had announced just the other day, with no shortage of apologies, that she had been unable to find any more, a fact he hadn't thought twice of at the time), and he threw his head back and drank what was left. That would have to do. Even if he was, perhaps, simply prolonging the inevitable.

He stood there, staring at the dying plant on the counter, a plant that only seemed to get worse despite his best efforts to take care of it, and he tried to catch his breath, but the pounding of his heart made it impossible for him to settle down, let alone do such a difficult thing as easing his labored breathing. His efforts weren't helped when he spun around to face the front door, finding Kassra entering the room with her newest finds. She smiled at him as she made her way to the kitchen, and he moved aside as she set her things down on the counter. As he slinked away from her along the nearby wall, he caught her frown in thought, his heart jumping and his mind searching for what could have possibly made her usual smile disappear so, and he watched her lean forward and extend a hand to hold up one limp tendril of the yellowing plant.

"That's strange. I accidently overwatered this thing weeks ago, so I decided to let it dry out, but the soil's still just as wet as ever, and the plant looks even worse than it did before." She withdrew her hand and looked over at him, causing him to flinch, even if he wasn't exactly sure why, and she shrugged. "Weird. I'll give it a few more days and see how it does, but if it doesn't get any better…" She stuck out her tongue and drew a finger across her neck, and he winced.

"Maybe it's just sick. Even plants get sick sometimes, don't they?" he said.

"Yeah, maybe, but it's sure been sick a long time. Oh, well. Miss Willowbee's had a good life. Get it, because a willow's a tree and a bee's a…"

"I get it."

Her smile returned. "So…"

"No lunch right now. I'm not hungry."

"Oh, all right. I wasn't going to ask that quite yet, though." She rested her elbows on the counter behind her and leaned back against it. "You said your sister used to like plants?"

He looked away. "Hmm."

"Right?"

"Yes."

They had a lot of blank pages left to fill. A lot of blank pages.

"Hey…are you okay?"

"I'm fine." Gol pushed himself away from the wall he had been leaning against to head towards the kitchen table. Pulling his chair out, he gave her a sidelong glance. "We really should get back to work. We're starting late today."

"Yeah…"

He sat down, and she followed suit, before resting her hands on the table and watching him, and he looked down to push around with his thumb a stray pencil that had somehow made its way to his side of the table.

"Tell me more about your sister. What she used to be like. I know you care about her, but you never really talk much about her."

"It doesn't matter." She was gone now anyway.

"What doesn't matter?" She tilted her head to the side. "Were you two close? Because I kinda feel like you were. I mean, not a lot of brothers and sisters stay together for so long, y'know, not once they grow up and aren't forced to anymore. I guess…that means neither of you got married, huh?"

He glanced up at her. "No, we didn't."

"Why not?"

"Can't we get back to work already? We still have so much we have to do. I…I planned on this book being a long one." He rotated the pencil and gave it a push, and it clicked along the table as it rolled across. Kassra reached forward to pick it up and held it in front of her, either hand taking an end as she brought her elbows up to rest on the table.

"We can get started soon. I just want to know a few more things. Was your sister…nice before?"

"Yes, she was."

"In what way?"

"Nice nice."

"And…"

"She liked plants."

"You've already used that one. Try again."

"And she took care of a stray cat once."

"What was its name?"

He opened his mouth, but the words that came out instead were, "I don't know about you, but I don't have time for such…" No, he didn't mean it like that. "We need to get back to work, or else this book will never get done. I mean…at this rate…it's going to take forever. And I'd like to get it over with."

"What's the rush?" she asked, still fidgeting around with the pencil.

"Do you want to spend all our waking hours like this, just sitting at this table all day while I talk at you? Because I don't."

"You sure don't have much enthusiasm for your life's work. Or whatever you said it was."

Gol leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes as he raised a hand to his forehead. "Can we just get back to work? Please?"

She sighed and pulled the next page to her as she readied her pencil over it. "Fine, Mr. Grumpy. I just hope you appreciate all of this."

"I do."

She stalled, stopping to watch him for a moment before directing her attention back to the page in front of her. "Okay, I guess let's continue."

While they fell back into their usual routine easily enough, coaxing Kassra to work beyond their usual bedtime was unsuccessful, though, to make up for it, so were her efforts at striking up a conversation once their work was over. And while she insisted that he tell her more about Maia, claiming that talking about her might make him feel better, he argued that this was not what was bothering him, which was only somewhat true (but what point was there in bringing up something that had been plaguing him since the day it had happened; it's not as if it was anything new), but this only caused her to question him all the more on what was bothering him.

And the only way to avoid her questions and the worried looks he caught her in whenever he dared make eye contact with her was to go to his room, but once he was to himself, this only caused him to focus even more on his problems. Every time he coughed, he would check to see if any more blood could be found, inspecting his hand under the light of the lamp, but no more evidence of his increasing state of illness revealed itself. And then, as if that wasn't enough, he found that infernal cricket to have made its way to his room, or maybe it was another one, and as he lay on his side, he covered his exposed ear with his good hand to block out its noise. He had a hard enough time concentrating as it was without that blasted thing harassing him, but as he laid there, his arm going numb after a time from the position he held it in, his worries wouldn't leave him, and he feared that he would never get to sleep tonight, but that was nothing compared to what he worried about most of all, the possibility that he would soon lose what he had left, and while that wasn't much, it was still something.

It seemed he did manage to find some rest that night, though he didn't know how accurate the word "rest" really was in that statement, as he only knew he had slept at all based on the fact that he had woken up, and when he did, he stared at the wall in front of him for some time before he was able to force his aching body out of bed. And while he tried to review Kassra's work from the day before, he found this task to be impossible to focus on, and he left for the living room with the hope that reading out in a more open space would be better for his concentration. It was, but just barely.

His renewed focus was shattered once again when Kassra emerged from her room, and he informed her that she was starting to amass quite the cricket problem, to which he received the usual smile and bizarre comment. Any insect that sang, she claimed, was a friend of hers, even though he, on the other hand, really didn't consider such a racket to be anything close to singing.

They got back to work after she had completed a few chores, mainly watering her plants, with the exception of the one whose health he had already done a fine job of unintentionally sabotaging. And the day was much the same as before, with minimal talking on his part, and while less work was completed than he would have liked (the pages were filling up as fast as ever, but that was no longer quite enough to satisfy him), he supposed he couldn't complain too much, as he coughed up no more blood today, and so he could only hope what had happened yesterday was a onetime thing.

Nevertheless, he returned to his room that night without engaging in the usual conversations they had been having these past few weeks, the cricket's so-called "song" not starting until a most ungodly hour of the night, during which he turned his lamp back on and spent a good ten minutes searching for the thing on his hands and knees, only to gain a spasm in his back, but no further understanding of where the horrid insect might be hiding. He could hardly move after the onset of his newest backache and was forced to sit on the floor with the incessant chirping eating away at his sanity until the pain had eased enough that he could stand again.

More weeks passed, no more of them spent hunting crickets after the backache his last attempt had caused, but he did manage to convince Kassra to try her luck at finding them once the chirping had spread to the daytime, and he was pretty certain the number of bothersome creatures in his room had become plural (and for once, he was not counting the woman in such a category). She had been bribed easily enough into doing so when he agreed to begin telling her stories of his past again, which seemed a little unfair when she had no more success at finding the infernal insects than he did, but it turned out to be not so dreadful a way to spend his evenings, after all.

This time, their talks focused more on his sister, and besides merely telling the woman of Maia's singing and her plants and the kindness she once had, including the time she brought soup to their ailing Red Sage when the man had contracted pneumonia, an action quite uncharacteristic of the Maia of more recent times, he also brought their talks back to an even earlier period of their lives, back to when his sister and he were children, and he told her all about the adventures they once had. He spoke of when the two of them first found Dark Eco and what had happened afterward, and he described in great detail the afternoon when they decided to play hide and seek during a particularly violent rainstorm and several near death experiences involving lightning and an overflowing creek. But, no matter how much danger they had surely been in, he didn't recall any fear on Maia's part. In fact, he was quite certain she had only laughed throughout the entire ordeal, thinking it great fun, even when he had not shared in her bravery. Her laughter ended when their parents found out.

His dear sister was certainly the livelier of the two of them, while he was, as she claimed, more on the "boring" side, but they were a perfect pair, nonetheless. Even with their differences, they had stuck together through every trouble, through every punishment doled out by their parents, through every persecution directed at them by others. She had been with him through everything, and now that he was without her, he didn't think he was doing so well getting by on his own. How he wished she was here with him again, the old Maia, though, the kind one. The one that sang when she went about her work and didn't argue quite as much over frivolous things, and when she did fight with him, she never got quite as vicious.

The two of them could've started a new life together. One that involved peace, true peace, and not the kind they hoped to create through war. He was given another chance, but it wasn't much of a chance when he didn't have his dear sister here to share it with him. They could have done things differently this time around. Maybe they couldn't change how people felt about them, but they could have at least changed their own attitudes towards others. And he was sure that the old Maia would have been fine with including Kassra in their lives, as well. But, all that was impossible now. It was just him, and he was living as an outcast. An outcast that few even knew still lived, and yet, if they did, they'd hate him for it. And such a thing was so much harder to accept when there was an actual reason for it.

The blood returned, worse than before, but as things always had his entire life, they got even worse than that, when Kassra returned home one morning, hair disheveled and shirt torn, claiming to have been attacked by a Metal Head while she was out in the Wasteland. But, based on the blank look in her eyes and the way her smile failed to return, based on how quiet she was after her explanation, he knew that wasn't the case. He knew that his nightmare these past few months was coming true, and he was powerless to stop it.

And for once, Kassra was the one who refused to speak, to tell him more about the nature of her condition, and though he followed her to the kitchen, questioning her along the way as to what exactly had happened, she didn't stray from her story that it was simply a Metal Head that had done it, and though he was not very familiar with the creatures, her injuries didn't seem quite like something a beast would cause. There was no blood, thank the Precursors, and while her shirt was torn, just a tear on the sleeve as if she had been pulling away from something, the damage did not look like it had been caused by claws or teeth.

When she finally turned to him again, her face had become serious, but at least there was an expression this time, and she told him it was time they got back to work, and though it seemed too soon after her incident, the most he could delay it was when he insisted that she, at least, change into a new shirt first, and she did, and while she was a bit easier to look at afterward, it didn't make him forget. Her usual cheer did eventually return by the time midday rolled around, however, and he didn't refuse her offer of lunch this time, despite the constant nausea that had settled into his stomach over the last several weeks.

By evening, the woman's disposition was of a nature where it was impossible to tell anything out of the ordinary had happened that day, but the events of earlier kept him awake that night, as much so as his coughing and the dread he now held for morning and what new trouble it might bring. More weeks passed, and while he was pretty certain his coughing had grown worse, it appeared no more misfortune had befallen Kassra. None that he could find any evidence of, at least.

The usual continued, the writing of his book and his stories of the past and the woman's ridiculous questions about the trivial, not to mention the decline of his health. His book, he was partly pleased to see, was finally starting to come together, the pages accumulating into quite a hefty stack, though it was also unsettling to see such a visual reminder of just how much time had gone by. There was a chance he would still finish, but his health had become unpredictable. While it would stay much the same for a time, he always awaited the day it would suddenly become worse, a day that never failed to come and which only left him waiting for the time it happened next.

But, he no longer resisted Kassra's efforts at conversation, for it helped to make things feel more normal than they really were, the monotony of each day making them feel like they would never run out. And as terrible as his coughing and his hacking had become, right now he couldn't imagine his life coming to an end. Not yet. He had finally begun to live again, and now it might be taken away from him already. And it wasn't fair for him to lose what he had regained so soon, but he wouldn't be surprised if he did, as that's how his life always went.

The story may be nearing its end, but that certainly doesn't mean I'm going to start making things easier for our poor Dark Sage. Please review.