Nineteen
Her boots echoed hollowly against the stone steps as she climbed upward toward Caius’s rooms in the tower. Her heart was going at twice its normal speed and was lodged in her throat, threatening to choke her. She didn’t know what she would say to him, or what he’d say to her. She didn’t know what this explanation would hold.
All she knew was that his brother was hurting probably more deeply than he knew, that Jason felt betrayed and lost and abandoned, all because his brother hadn’t told him himself that something was going on, that something had gone wrong.
Elaine hoped that she’d been right about it being something that had changed, not something that Peter Grey had known about before he’d told his brother to go, to come to Michigan to finally meet the girl he’d been talking to for months, the girl he’d fallen in love with. She hoped that Jason’s deepest fears hadn’t been realized—fears, she didn’t think Jason had even realized he had until that moment in her kitchen.
The door at the top of the stairs was closed, but when she tried it, it was unlocked. She didn’t bother to knock, just walked inside. Caius was there, standing by a door to a balcony at one end of the room, staring through its windows at the world outside, or perhaps at his own reflection in the glass. Elaine closed the door gently behind her, watching him for a few seconds. Her heart slowed but her throat tightened even more.
Somehow, she could tell he was tired and it had nothing to do with the game—it had everything to do with life.
“Real talk,” she said, her voice half a whisper as she locked the door. “Out of character.”
“Real talk,” he agreed, his voice quiet. “Out of character.”
He turned and she could see the tears on his face, his eyes red and puffy, as if he’d been crying for a long time. He leaned a shoulder against the French doors to the balcony, watching her as she stood frozen, her hand still on the lock.
“I’m sorry,” he said before she could say anything. “I didn’t see another way.”
“You couldn’t have called him yourself?”
Caius squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “No.”
She wanted to ask why, but the words died on her tongue as she stared at him. His shoulders were slumped, his expression slack. Her hand fell away from the door and she moved toward him. The only sound was their breathing and the wind outside, even the sound of her footfalls was muffled by the thick rug spread across the floor of his sitting room.
“Talk to me,” she said, the whispered request almost a plea. “Please.”
“That’s why I asked you to come,” he admitted, reaching to take her hands. “Because I wanted to. I needed to. I needed someone to hear me and not judge and help me figure this out. I—I thought—” he broke off as his fingers closed around hers. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Maybe I thought wrong. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you my messenger, Isolde.”
“Elaine,” she said.
His eyes popped open. “What?”
“My name is Elaine,” she said, watching his eyes, his face. “And yours is Peter.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
His fingers were cold around hers. Elaine wet her lips, taking half a step closer, still holding his gaze. “Talk to me,” she said, her voice stronger than she thought it would be. “What’s going on? Jason is freaking out a little bit. He said your sister called and talked about a neurologist and was trying to figure out why you would have lied to him.”
“I didn’t lie to him,” Caius—Peter—said to her, shaking his head. “I didn’t. When he and I talked about it on Thursday, I told him the truth. My neurologist didn’t think it was anything.”
“And now something’s changed,” Elaine said.
He nodded. “Yeah. And it sucks.”
“What’s going on?” she asked again. He exhaled, leaning back against the doors.
“I don’t know,” he said, and somehow she knew he was telling the truth. “I really don’t know. I’ve—” he broke off, sighing. “This is where shit gets complicated.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Just what I said,” he murmured. “This is where shit gets complicated.”
She watched him for a few seconds, then asked, “Should we go sit down?”
After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, we probably should.”
She nodded, then took him by the hand and drew him toward two chairs near the fireplace. He didn’t sit in one of those chairs, though—he sat down on the floor, cross-legged, staring at the flickering flames. She drifted after him, sitting down alongside him, tucking one leg up underneath her and drawing her other knee to her chest. He stayed quiet for a few moments, just watching the fire, and she let him take the time he needed to gather his thoughts, to put some organization to whatever chaos was raging inside his head.
“I’ve been sick my entire life,” he finally said, the words coming as a low murmur. His gaze never wavered from the flames. “It started when I was little and just kept coming back no matter what anyone did. It’s a neurological thing that no one can seem to figure out. There’s no predicting when it’ll come or when it’ll go away. When it does go away, no one ever knows how long it’s going to stay away. Everything’s a crapshoot. Usually it puts me down pretty hard and it’s only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, but the remissions seemed to be longer, at least for a while. It’s…” he trailed off. She reached over and took his hand, squeezing gently. Only then did he glance over at her and smile, though weakly. “It’s hard. Jason’s always been there, and our sister, too. They suffer right alongside me but different because they don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen. When my neurologist told me on Thursday that she didn’t think it was anything, I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe her so badly.”
“But something changed today,” she said softly.
He nodded and his shoulders slumped slightly. “I woke up with a migraine. I was getting ready to go into work anyway because that’s what I do. Sometimes they happen and they don’t always mean something.” He closed his eyes. “The last thing I remembered happening before eight o’clock in the morning was staring to make a cup of coffee. I came to on my kitchen floor at nine.”
“You passed out?”
“Something like that,” he said. “It might have been a seizure. I’m not sure and no one else was there so there’s no way to know and my memory’s too fuzzy about all of it to figure it out. Usually I can tell the difference. This time, I couldn’t and that scared me. It scared me a lot.” He sighed. “I called my brother-in-law to take me in. My sister came with him.” He swallowed turning back to the fire. “It’s flaring up again and I don’t know what I’m going to do or how bad it’s going to be this time. I just—I just have to work through it for as long as I can. There’s still so much I want to do, that I want to accomplish. I can’t just lay back and relax and whatever the hell else my neurologist is going to try to make me do. I can’t stop living because I’m fighting this bullshit again—and I don’t want anyone else to, either.”
Elaine tried to swallow past a lump in her throat. His hand rested on his knee and she reached for it, weaving her fingers through his and squeezing gently. He bowed his head. A tear caught the fire’s glow as it fell, dropping from his lashes to soak into the linen of his loose pants.
She leaned toward him and wrapped her arms around him. He reached up, wrapping his fingers around one of her arms, resting his chin against her wrist.
“I shouldn’t have made you my messenger,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I just thought—if I talked to Jason myself, Elaine, he would have argued me down and he’s where he needs to be—where I really need him to be. There’s nothing he can do for me here right now. He needs to be where he is. She’s his future. In my heart of hearts, I know it even if he doesn’t yet. I just know it.” He shook his head a little. “Everything’s just too raw right now and we don’t know enough—I don’t know enough about how this is going to go. I knew that Marissa would call. I knew she would. I didn’t want her to, told her not to, but I knew she wasn’t going to listen, not about that. As angry as it makes me sometimes that she’ll just do shit like that, I understand it.”
“Marissa’s your sister,” she said softly. He nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, older than the two of us. She’s the business brain. The rest of us are the creative ones and the programming, the tech. She’s the one that keeps shit real. She always has.” Another tear slipped free, dropped onto her wrist.
She held him a little tighter, heart aching. “So what happens now?” It was hard to ask the question. He might not even have a real answer, and even if he did, he might not want to tell her. He barely knew her, after all.
And yet he’d reached out to her.
That means something, right?
“My neurologist and I work out a course of treatment,” he murmured. “Something I can hopefully handle. We hope that we can mitigate symptoms until my nervous system settles down and decides to function normally again. Every time it happens, we don’t know how it’s going to go.”
“What kind of stuff are we talking?” she asked, brow furrowing. Her head rested against his. He was warm, leaning against her now, body starting to relax slowly but surely. “What are you facing?”
“Probably hell,” he murmured. “My nervous system malfunctions. Things stop working. Things misfire. Cognitive function always seems to be fine but everything else? Everything else has a very distinct possibility of being really screwed up.” He swallowed hard. “When I was fifteen, I ended up on life support for two weeks before my brain remembered that breathing was a thing I needed to do so I could keep living. When I was twelve, I lost motor function all along the left side of my body. They thought I’d had a stroke but I didn’t show any signs of anything burst or shit like that. Stuff had just stopped working. Severe synesthesia when I was eleven. I could taste colors and see sounds and the migraines almost gave me a literal aneurism. Seizures that just kept coming when I was five. Nothing could stop them and there was no predicting when they’d hit. A couple years ago, around the time my niece was born, it got bad again. I was bedridden and trapped in my own head for a month. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t do anything. I was on life support again then, too, because my heart kept stopping. They couldn’t tell if it was from pain or my nervous system misfiring or microseizures or something else. That’s how bad it can get and even after all this time, we’re nowhere near figuring out what’s caused it and how to stop it. All we can do is watch and treat the symptoms as shit happens.”
She stayed silent, struggling to breath around the tightness of her throat. He stayed quiet for a few minutes, too, the two of them just staring at the fire.
“I just wish I had answers,” he finally said. “I wish I knew what caused it because then maybe we’d be able to figure out how to fix it.”
“I am so sorry,” she breathed. He shook his head slightly.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. It just is. There’s nothing I can do that’s going to change it, I just have to hang on, push through, wait and see what happens.”
He was much more relaxed now, almost slumped against her, the tension that had been there when she’d arrived gone. It was like somehow a weight had been lifted even though she knew a new one had settled over him—now she knew and there was an open question of what that would end up meaning in the long term.
“If anyone should be sorry, it should be me,” he said, gazing at the fire. “You didn’t ask for this.”
“No,” she agreed. “No, I didn’t. But it’s okay. I’d rather know than be in the dark, I think.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, was it was kind of rough playing the messenger for you? Yeah, a little. But at least now I know why I did it and why Jason’s upset. Stuff makes a lot more sense now.”
“And I haven’t scared you off?” He looked at her now, gaze searching hers. For a second, she tried to remember what color his eyes were supposed to be and found that she couldn’t even as she fell into his gaze. “You’re not ready to…I don’t know. Run screaming?”
“No,” she said. “No, in fact, if anything, it makes me want to get to know you better.”
“You sure about that?”
She smiled crookedly. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay.”
Her arms tightened around him slightly and he sighed, relaxing into them, gaze finally drifting back to the fire. She rested her head against his again, watching the flames as they flickered and danced, the logs crackling softly, breaking up as the fire burned. It was warm and comfortable here, cozy, somewhere she wouldn’t mind lingering despite the hard floor beneath the plush rug. Even that didn’t seem so bad.
“Where are you right now?” she whispered. “Physically?”
“At home,” he murmured. “Marissa wouldn’t hear it when I wanted to go back to the office. They dropped me off at home. I’m in bed with my VR rig. Migraine hasn’t quite gone away, but it’s better, at least.” He paused. “Is that so you can tell my brother?”
“Partially,” she admitted. “It was partially because I was worried.”
“I didn’t mean to do that. Worry you.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Every so often, a little worry’s good.”
“Maybe,” he murmured. His thumb brushed over her arm gently where he held onto her wrist. “Thank you for coming.”
“You asked,” she said.
“I know. But you didn’t have to. I just—I hoped you would.”
“Occasionally, we get what we hope for,” she said softly.
“Yeah. Yeah, we do.”
They lapsed into silence again, staring at the fire. His thumb kept stroking her arm. Somehow, for some reason, it felt good, felt right.
“I made this so I’d have somewhere to escape to,” he said in a faint whisper after what seemed like a long time. “All of this—everything we’ve done at GreySoft, it’s a sick child’s dream. A place where people can be free and not worry about anything outside. Where they can live in ways they never thought possible.” He wet his lips. “It’s been worth it, I think.”
“Is that the story behind it?” she asked, stomach feeling hollow. “That’s really why?”
After a bare moment’s hesitation, he nodded. “Yeah. I thought it could help people. Maybe it can. I hope so.”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about there.”
He glanced at her and smiled, settling further into her arms. She smiled back, squeezing him gently.
They sat there together by the fire for a long, long time.
