Ch 35: Jonathan
The descent took most of the afternoon.
By the time the raid force filed back through the guild gates it was early evening – the city lit up in the particular way cities lit up when the day was closing its proper business and handed things over to the night for improper business. The mountain was behind them. Tomorrow, they would enter the gate and begin the raid.
Rena went to her office, changed out of her gear, and came back down.
It was ritual.
She didn't call it that out loud but it was – the same thing before every raid, every lifetime she could remember. The night before, she visited Jonathan. She started a little over two years ago and now, it was a habit.
She hadn't asked Rian and Arlen to come. But they did, they always did.
They were already at the guild entrance when she got there.
Arlen was leaning against his car – an aggressively, almost philosophically red thing, low to the ground, obnoxiously loud and incredibly fast. A very flamboyant vehicle. He had his arms crossed and his jacket open, waiting for her with a pleasant, languid smile.
Rian stood beside him with his hands in his pockets staring at the sky.
Neither of them said anything about being there.
Rena walked up.
"We have plenty of time," Arlen said, and opened the door.
The drive took twenty minutes.
Arlen drove the way he did everything – with a generous confidence and absolute disregard for the speed limit. The city moved past the windows, restaurants lighting up, offices closing down, the hum of the post-work dinner rush rising into a cascade. Rena watched it without seeing it.
Nobody talked in the car. That was the other ritual – the drive was quiet. Arlen kept the music low, something instrumental she didn't recognize, and that was sufficient.
Rian passed her a coffee candy without looking.
She accepted it, unwrapped the foil, and popped it into her mouth. A nutty caramel and toffee taste landing pleasantly on her tongue.
The hospital appeared at the end of the street the way it always did – large, white, lit up against the evening sky.
Arlen found parking without difficulty. He always found parking without difficulty, which Rena had stopped questioning. One of his talents.
They went in.
✦ ♡ ✦
[ Vert City – Aldway Hospital – Long-Term Residency Wing ]
Arlen had brought sunflowers.
He always brought sunflowers, Jonathan had mentioned to him he liked yellow once and Arlen kept that detail permanently seared into his memory. He set them on the windowsill beside the others – the ones from last time, dried now, the ones from the time before that, and so on, a small archive of visits rendered in progressively faded yellow.
Rian set down a bouquet of Zinnias without comment. Magenta ones. He never varied.
They stayed for a few minutes the way they always stayed – present, quiet, peacefully existing within the white hospital room's walls alongside the steady pace of the machine that pumped Jonathan's lungs. Arlen talked a little. He always talked a little. About nothing important. About the weather, about the guild, about something someone or other had done that morning that had made him laugh. Talked while Rian listened and Rena stared at her brother's eyelashes, watching his chest slowly rise and fall.
Rian said nothing. Simply nodded on occasion. Straightened the blanket on Jonathan's stomach, stood at the window, and looked at the city.
After a while Rena looked at them.
They understood. Arlen squeezed her shoulder once on his way out. Rian paused at the door.
"We'll be downstairs," he said.
The door closed.
And then it was just her and Jonathan.
She pulled the chair close the way she always did – it scraped and rumbled noisily as it always did – and sat down. Looked at him. Dark green hair, tousled and now slightly overgrown. Brown, doleful eyes hidden underneath his eyelids.
She reached out and straightened his hair the way she sometimes did. It had gotten long – past the point he would have allowed it if he had any say in the matter. Jonathan had always been particular about his hair. Had a specific way he liked it cut, a specific product he used, had complained once at length about a barber who hadn't listened.
She thought about that sometimes. The complaints she would give anything to hear again.
He looked the same. Albeit thinner – the gradual erosion of muscle from disuse, the body quietly undoing what years of living had built. Lack of movement. Lack of consciousness to work his body in the living world. But his countenance was the same. The familiar gentle set of his mouth. The deep set eyes that looked exactly like her own.
His hands had always looked like their father's. They still did, just less of them now.
Two years and he looked exactly like her brother, exactly like the person she had grown up beside, exactly like someone who might open his eyes at any moment and say something wise and gentle and completely Jonathan.
He didn't.
She reached out and took his hand.
Held it for exactly fifteen seconds and then something unexpected happened.
The jolt hit her like a fist.
She sucked in a breath – sharp, involuntary – her body recoiling before her mind caught up. Her free hand shot out and caught the chair's armrest. She held on.
She knew this feeling.
It was the same as the morning on her run – the same feeling of invasion, the same sensation of someone else's life arriving without permission into the space behind her eyes. That morning it had been forty-three lifetimes of Rian's memories, unprompted, unasked for, arriving with a god's indifferent command.
Now, it was her brother's life.
His memories poured in.
She had seen them before. Most of them. But now on the other side – his childhood rendered in fragments, the years she had been beside him and the years she hadn't.
Saw her brother hold her hand when she was little. Put a bandage on her scraped knee. Then, she heard his voice call out it was time for dinner, see her teenage self reluctantly walk down the stairs with a moody frown. Saw him ruffle her hair in affection. Play soccer with his friends. Kiss a girl he liked for a long time. Some other embarrassing memories involving his hand and tissues she passed by rather quickly. Then the university lounge, the cramped and cheerful chaos of it. His friends' banter. His well-humored responses. The part-time cafe he worked at in the evenings to fund her private school studies. His entrance to grad school, meeting his professor, relentless late nights at the lab – the exhaustion and pride of someone building something from nothing. Small memories. Ordinary ones.
The texture of a life.
She let them move through her the way she always did.
And then – something she hadn't seen before.
A bar. Late. A noisy, lively place with too many people and not enough space. Her brother was laughing at something, leaning forward, his whole face doing the thing it did when he found something genuinely funny.
A figure across from him.
Blurry. The face wouldn't resolve. But the shape of someone. Small. Dark hair. Something about the way they held themselves.
Her brother inviting them home.
And then his apartment. The familiar layout of it – she had been there enough times to recognize it even through his eyes. The window. The city lights.
And then something wrong.
It happened fast. One moment and then the next and the space between them collapsed into something she couldn't name.
Not pain. Not immediately. Something more fundamental than pain – the sensation of something leaving. Not blood, not breath, not any of the things the body could lose and survive. Something underneath all of that. His life. The warmth of it. The aliveness of a body.
Draining.
She felt his confusion first. He didn't understand what was happening. His body was failing, organs suddenly in excruciating pain, and his mind was running calculations that didn't add up – reaching for explanations that didn't exist, cycling through them faster and faster as the warmth kept leaving and nothing explained why. Limbs weak, couldn't pry off the thing holding tight against his mouth. Couldn't do anything.
Then the fear arrived.
Not gradual. Sudden. The dawning terror that something was catastrophically wrong. His heart hammering. His hands trying to find purchase on something, anything.
His legs gave.
She saw the floor come up, his head hit the ground wrong, and then he was looking at the wall, gurgling, blood coming out of his mouth in heaving gasps – and somewhere next to him, small feet. Scrambling backwards. Someone gasping. Not her brother. The other person. Someone in the room recoiling from what had just happened, from what they had done, the sound of horror arriving too late.
Small hands on his chest. Pumping. Trying to get the heart to beat.
A pause.
An ear to his chest, listening.
She felt his heartbeat – faint, irregular, barely there – and knew the other person felt it too. Knew they heard it. Knew they made a calculation in that moment about what they could and couldn't fix.
And then–
The window.
A thud. The cold air coming in. The sound of someone climbing out rather than walking through a door – a decision – someone who couldn't be found here, couldn't be explained here, couldn't stay.
And then nothing.
Her brother's heartbeat. Faint and wrong and all alone.
Rena sat in the chair beside her brother's bed and held his hand and breathed very quietly.
She had been trying to understand what happened to Jonathan for the past two years. She had found him, after three days of unseen messages and growing unease, lying unconscious in a pool of his dried blood, crumpled next to his bed. The window was open. His shirt and belt slightly undone. His spine broken in his apparent fall.
The hospital had theories. The System had flagged him as an esper when she had found him – the awakening happening sometime in the days he hadn't responded. Wasn't sure if someone had hurt him or if it was a consequence of his awakening. There was no forced entry, no signs of a struggle, just an open window and her older brother, lying broken, on the ground.
Rena looked at her hand and slowly clenched it into a fist.
Something had been in that apartment with her brother. Something that had sat across from him in a bar and laughed and come home with him and then had taken something from him that he couldn't survive losing. Not a civilian assault. Not an awakening gone wrong. Something had eaten his life and left him like he was now, unconscious, unable to properly breathe, unable to eat, unable to wake up, hooked on machines – no expected recovery in sight. Comatose.
Maybe an esper – or a monster – wearing human skin. A thing had taken away her brother, his laughter, and his future – the one he finally had for himself, after Rena had grown up well under his care – under his sacrifice.
She sat there very still.
The yellow and deep pink flowers on the windowsill caught the evening light.
Rena set her brother's hand down carefully.
Something furious was boiling underneath her brown eyes.
She didn't know what had touched her brother. But she was going to find it.
And she was going to destroy it.
The counter on her blessing ticked up.
< Call of the Witness >
A god has granted you a Blessing.
Remember or die.
Records discovered: 44