It's over. It's done. It's over.
Forever is sobbing when Phil, Cellbit, and Bad walk back into to the room.
It's a desperate tangle of English and Portuguese that's spilling from his lips, nigh unintelligible. As the three of them make their way around the cell, Phil starts to desipher the words: "--faça parar! Faça parar! Please stop, please stop, PLEASE! Faça parar, por favor! Por favor...!"
Forever is curled up in the corner of his cell, face hidden in his hands, crying out for anyone, anyone to help him.
Phil swallows. Breathes.
He takes a step back and lets Cellbit step forward, taking up the view of the window. Cellbit starts to speak in Portuguese to Forever as Forever continues to wail, shrinking away from Cellbit and shaking something fierce. Cellbit asks Bad to remove the glass pane and Bad does so in a heartbeat.
"Olha para mim," Cellbit says with a voice that's firm and raw but not unkind. He takes a deep breath, feline tail swishing about his ankles, and holds a bar of the cell for support as he leans in closer. "Olha para mim, Forever. Abre os olhos. Por favor."
A few seconds pass. Forever's sobs wither out into wheezing breaths, and his trembling hands slide down his face. Bloodshot eyes peer up at Cellbit. Terrified. Confused.
And Cellbit begins to talk. Phil barely understands a word of it, but Cellbit is calm and clear in his speech. He holds up the syringe for Forever to see, pointing to its contents, and he talks Forever down when he starts begging again. Bad, meanwhile, kneels down behind Forever. He doesn't say anything, but he places a feather-light hand on Forever's back through the bars, oh so gentle and wary of his claws.
And Phil? Phil stands off to the side. He gives the two of them plenty of room, refusing to crowd Forever and send him into another fit of panic; but his shield is still strapped to his arm, and his axe still hangs in his hand at his side.
He won't hurt Forever. God, no, he won't hurt Forever, but Phil---Phil needs something to hold onto right now.
At last, Cellbit reaches through the large gap in the bars, holding out the syringe in an open hand. Forever sits and stares at it, throat bobbing in half-aborted sounds of doubt. He doesn't move to take it.
Phil shifts his wings. They'll hold him down and administer the antidote themselves if they have to, but no one here wants to force it on him. He's been through enough.
Thankfully, Forever finally uncurls himself from his corner just long enough to take the syringe. His fingers tremble around it so badly that Phil is afraid he'll drop it and the tube will shatter on the floor, spilling the precious medication, but he doesn't. He takes syringe and jabs it through the pearl-white fabric of his sleeve and into the meat of his arm and sinks the plunger.
Silence.
And then Forever howls. The sound rips out of him, head tipped back and tears spilling over his cheeks and jaw open wide, wide like someone reached down into his esophagus and tore his insides up and out through his mouth.
Cellbit squeezes his eyes shut and ducks away, ears pinned back. Bad knocks his forehead against the cold metal bars and makes a quiet, pained noise. Phil closes his eyes and puts a hand over his mouth and curls his wings around himself and leans on his axe because oh god, he feels like he's going to be sick.
The cry tapers off. Phil hears Cellbit hurry away and start talking to Pac on the other side of the room. Bad mutters something about the inventory scanners. Phil opens his eyes and sees Forever slumped in the corner of his cell, eyes glassy and chest rattling with every inhale. His hand lay at his side, the syringe held limply between his twitching fingers.
Phil approaches the cell and braces a hand on one of the bars. "Forever," he says. Forever doesn't so much as twitch. "Forever, can you hear me?"
Forever's gaze drags itself from the middle distance over to Phil. He blinks. His eyes flutter shut, and he sags back against the bars completely, a heap of limbs.
Phil stands there. Rubs a hand over his mouth. In the distance, there is the sound of soft, gentle Portuguese undercut by anxious mutterings. The click-clack of an inventory scanner being disarmed echoes off the walls. There's an outcry, raw and guttural. Forever's cell is dismantled with a thunk of a universal block breaker. Weeping reaches Phil's ears, muffled by an embrace, soothed by hushed reassurances.
And Forever lies sprawled out on the floor, eyes closed. Unmoving. Phil, for that matter, can't bring himself to move either. He stands, and he stares, and he breathes, and he watches Forever breathing.
"Is he okay?"
Phil jolts. He looks away from Forever to look up at Cellbit. The man's eyes are red, his mouth drawn tight.
Phil shrugs. It's barely more than a shift of his shoulders; it's all he can manage. "I don't know. I think he passed out."
Cellbit nods. "Okay. Okay." He exhales and drags his hands down his face with a shudder. "Jesus Christ, man..."
Yeah. Yeah, that just about sums it up.
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I get why Heart doesn't talk. I'm hard of hearing. I'm not deaf, I just can't hear super well and it will continue to get progressively worse. I'm also loud af because of that. I've had people I'm out with shush me in public places because of it and, I get why they do it because everybody doesn't want to hear me yell, but it still sucks. Because I love to talk.
So for Heart, whose parents have completely removed him from society, most likely due to misplaced shame at his condition, there's a huge chance they haven't let him talk since. He probably did try to keep talking at first and I'm guessing they shut it down because he couldn't control his volume and tone. And now he just doesn't.
Which is a whole other level of heartbreaking to me. Deaf people do not owe it to anyone to speak. But people who had hearing, for an extended period of time and not just the first few years of life, are used to talking. That's how we've been raised to communicate since birth basically. And so when people take that away because we're too loud? It hurts. So much.
I don't think he'll start talking again, nor do I think he needs to. But the fact that he doesn't, when he was hearing and speaking for 12 years, and how it was most likely a choice made for him to not "embarrass" his parents? Or make them feel guilty he got sick? And how his parents also didn't even bother to learn sign either? It's just devastating to me.
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Once upon a time...
in a far away forest, bordered by an icy lake, there lived a warlock who hated all of mankind... but he had not always been this cursed, having ventured long ago into these same woods with the purest of hearts, only to have it hardened and die from the betrayal of his one true love. Having no more heart of his own, he became immortal, and would kill all those who dared set foot in his forest. Only if he ever met a man pure of heart, could he be freed from his curse, and become mortal once more...
His name had been John, centuries ago. He was John of Stonesfall, a soldier in a war that was over only shortly before his life was. His life, on the other hand, was cursed to never end, even if it felt like it had when the curse was passed onto him. For years, he was bound to that forest, to the shore of the lake that it surrounded, determined to wait as patiently as he could for someone who was as pure of heart as he had been when he entered it. Only then would he be able to leave and finally live out the end of his life - free of the power that he didn’t understand that trapped him there.
Except years turned into decades, and decades turned into centuries, and the forest was destroyed so that mankind could expand - it became a city, in enough time, Chicago. There were too many people to kill for trespassing onto land that should have been his, so he settled on an alternative and blended in, instead. But people looked at him a little too long if he introduced himself as John of Stonesfall, and he needed a name that didn’t make people think he needed to be committed to some mental institution somewhere, especially when it might be too far from the lake for the curse to be appeased. So, he chose different names for different identities as time went on - John, Samuel, Caleb, Adam, Daniel, Brandon, Gregory... the latest was Mouse. It was something that no one blinked at as long as he stayed in alleyways, didn’t talk to people besides his dealers, didn’t draw any attention to himself that would leave a paper trail. Then, he would have to change his identity again, and it was harder to do each time he had to do it, when more and more people would recognize his face and potentially expose him.
It had been going fine. He’d lived almost five years as Mouse, and almost no one questioned why his appearance never changed. No one questioned where he came from or where he was going next. It was perfect, until the police showed up when he needed to be anonymous the most.
He’d almost given up on finding another pure heart. The world had changed too much, and those people simply didn’t exist anymore. The centuries he’d spent alone were all for nothing, and he had resigned himself to the rest of them alone. So, he gave the name Mouse to the patrol officer who asked for his statement, any information he could give about the crime that had been committed right in front of him. And the officer - J Halstead was what the badge on his chest said - seemed... nice. But people were only nice when they wanted something, like information to solve a crime, or the body he was cursed to keep living in, or a favor that only he could accomplish because he couldn’t be killed in the middle of it.
Things from there happened without his permission, and he didn’t even know how. Months after their chance meeting in the middle of a police investigation, he was sitting across the table from Officer Halstead at dinner. Three years after that, things were still good. He rarely spent time in those alleys anymore, choosing instead to spend nights in Jay’s apartment, listening to pillow talk that involved discussion about cases he’d closed and ones he still hadn’t solved. When his unit had an open position, using devices that Mouse was an expert in after teaching himself skills as society developed around him, he made sure it got offered.
And that was when John knew he couldn’t keep living that way.
He couldn’t spend every single day in the same building as someone he loved, someone who loved him return, someone who trusted and believed him at every turn. Because Jay’s heart was pure, and that was what he was most afraid of. Maybe he could break his own curse, finally be given the freedom to age and die after spending so long in a kind of stasis, but that would come with a price. A broken curse didn’t go away, it just jumped to the next person, clung to the next pure heart until it was worn down and hardened into one of stone. The cycle had to end, and it would end with him, not someone like Jay Halstead who deserved a real life, the shorter, mortal kind that actually meant something.
After packing a bag and getting ready to leave their home, the one he found himself wanting to cling to instead of just remember, there was only one thing he could do. He had to tell his love the truth, and give him the advice that had been given to him by the witch who had passed her curse to him so many years before. The advice he should have listened to before it was too late:
Run. And never come back if you value this life.
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