Chapter 17: A Poem of Pure Pain

Surprise! I know this isn't my normal posting day, but I needed to post something fun to stay positive after noticing readers dropping the story a few weeks in. Tears were shed, but the grind continues. Onward to the chapter! 🚀

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Morning arrived. Not with the gentle chirping of birds, but with the brutal, unrelenting pressure of daylight forcing its way through Ethan’s eyelids.

He didn’t so much wake up as he became incrementally, miserably more aware of his existence.

The world was weird. A beautiful, suspiciously weird.

He managed to roll his head to the side, which felt like moving a bowling ball filled with wet sand, and his forehead gently smacked against the cold glass of the window.

Unff.

“Urgh… five more minutes, universe,” he mumbled into the pane.

But then his bleary eyes focused. Beyond the smudge-mark his forehead left, the world outside was… different.

The sky wasn't its usual ashen blanket of perpetual, gate-tainted fog. It was… blue. A painfully clear, crystalline cerulean blue, stretching from horizon to horizon without a single wisp of gray. Sunlight—actual, honest-to-goodness sunlight—poured in, illuminating the dust motes dancing in his room with a golden, almost sacred glow.

If a sky could look smug, this one was smiling down at them, saying, “Look at me! Look how pretty and normal I am! Bet you forgot what this looked like!”

It was the kind of beautiful morning poets wrote sonnets about. The kind of morning that made you believe in fresh starts and new beginnings.

Ethan’s body, however, was writing a very different poem. Its title was: “Everything Hurts and I Think My Blood Has Been Replaced by Molten Lead.”

His head was a single, throbbing entity of pain that had decided to take up residence inside his skull without paying rent. His bones felt like they’d been individually replaced with bags of wet cement. Standing up wasn't an option. Standing up was a distant, mythological concept from a bygone era of health and vigor.

The most he could manage was a tactical half-slide off the bed, leaving the upper half of his torso propped pathetically on the mattress while his legs dangled off the side, feet planted on the floor. It was a pose that screamed defeated marionette.

Just then, his door creaked open. Mia shuffled in, still in her pajamas—a soft blue set dotted with cartoon bears wearing what looked like tiny, smug expressions. She was scratching her stomach with one hand, her hair a magnificent bird’s nest.

“Broooother,” she yawned. “I only have, like, thirty minutes to get ready. Why didn’t you wake me up earl—whoa.”

She blinked, her sleep-addled brain processing the scene. Her brother, the mighty E-Rank hunter who had faced down poop-throwers, was currently folded over his bed like a discarded towel.

“Is that… a new posture?” she asked, tilting her head. “The Tragic Slug? The Half-Melted Gummy Bear?”

A low, guttural groan was her only answer. It was a sound of profound existential despair mixed with sinus congestion.

Concern finally cut through Mia’s morning fog. She padded closer. “Brother? You okay?”

She reached out a tentative hand to shake his shoulder. The moment her fingers made contact, she yelped and snatched them back.

“AH! You’re burning!” she gasped. Her brother wasn't just warm. He was a human furnace. A very miserable, groaning human furnace.

Her eyes went wide as dinner plates. The last time Ethan had been sick, she’d been nine. It had been a whole production involving chicken soup and her trying to nurse him with Band-Aids.

Panic, pure and unfiltered, took over. “W-wait! Okay! Don’t die! I’ll—I’ll change! I’ll buy medicine! Right away!”

She spun on her heel, pajama pants swishing, then froze, staring back at his prone form. A new, more complex fear emerged. “Um. What… what do sick people eat? Soup? Soup is good! Soup is a liquid! It’s easy to… digest?” She said the last word like it was a complex scientific term she’d just learned. “Right! Soup and medicine! Don’t move! Or… do move? To breathe! Just keep doing that!”

She fled the room, her mind racing faster than her feet. Ethan, from his pathetic vantage point on the bed, watched a cartoon bear on her retreating pajama pants seem to wink at him.

He groaned again, turning his heavy head to stare back out at the impossibly blue, treacherously beautiful sky.

“Great,” he mumbled into his sheets, his voice barely a whisper. “The apocalypse gets pretty weather… and I get the flu. Priorities.”