Chapter 86: I’ll Celebrate You, You Deserve It, But My Dissatisfaction Remains

She stared at him for several moments, her brows furrowing in wonder. What could possibly be familiar to her about something like this? She didn’t know what was going on, that was why she was asking, damn it!

And then Dion continued.

"The first night, when you awakened, didn’t you feel something that put you on the floor exactly like this?"

Her mouth opened a little, and her eyes gradually widened in realisation, then her eyes went down to Paris on the floor, to the green-yellow light pulsing underneath his skin and faintly wafting off of him.

Her hand came up over her mouth, falling away from Dion’s chest then. Back then there hadn’t been any of this green-yellow light, but that time it hadn’t been caused by some mysterious plant.

But now...

Then suddenly, Paris coughed onto the floor.

It was a violent, wet sound that tore up through his chest and his whole body lurched with it.

His hands pressed flat down against the concrete and his arms shook as he pushed himself up off it inch by inch, dragging his own weight after him.

Another cough ripped out of him, and then another, and in between them his breathing came ragged, but strangely with each passing moment, it grew steadier than it had been, and the green glow under his skin was dimming, sinking inward and disappearing.

His mouth opened, and another cough came out of it instead, bending him down over his knees that he now sat on.

"I..." He swallowed as he gradually raised his head to look at Dion. "The chron... I got the..."

A cough split the sentence apart, and he pressed the back of his wrist over his mouth, then as his hand fell away he was breathing that little bit easier than he had been this whole time..

He tried once more, and this time the words dragged themselves out of him in one ragged push, and everyone that had remained in the room, especially the three that were the closest to him, noticed how his complexion was rapidly returning.

"...I awakened. The chronicle... I got it. I awakened."

Somewhere out in the corridor, a woman said oh my god, and somebody beside her shushed her.

Madeline’s hands had frozen where they were hovering over her mouth, and her eyes came up off him and onto Dion.

And he had lost himself to a wide, revelling smile at what the young man had told them.

He had done this not knowing what to expect, but this revelation was definitely worth all the trouble!

Basil hadn’t moved from where he was standing. The pistol hung down at his side with his knuckles gone white around the grip, and his eyes came off Paris and onto Dion who didn’t even glance at him..

His mouth opened slightly, and then it shut again, and the hand holding the pistol dropped the rest of the way down as he put it away fully.

The people who had managed to hear what the young man said all began muttering between themselves, and they brough themselves in closer once more, and further back down outside of the room, the ones who hadn’t dared come any closer were craning their necks to see over them.

Paris coughed again, quieter this time, and he gradually began to pull himself the rest of the way up onto his feet, his legs shaking a little underneath him.

"Well, isn’t that wonderful. Now you have the means to make all the choices for yourself that you never could."

Dion celebrated him, while he, through the peripheries of his awareness, noticed how the plant in his hands stopped drawing in the ambient prana.

Thereafter, with the fruit gone, they avoided anything worse of a crisis than what they already had.

No more mutating birds tried to assault them, finally giving them the peace to organize themselves and deal with the other consequence of the rain.

Madeline had taken charge of the sick for the most part, while Basil had finally taken the rest that his body had been demanding of him all this time, mingling himself amongst the rest of the sick.

Many of the people who had earlier volunteered to help search through the rooms also brought themselves forward to help her take care of the sick.

No one knew what was going on with everyone, but at the very least, it didn’t seem like anyone was getting worse than showing the initial symptoms. Not to mention that over time, there were a few people who even began reporting that they were gradually feeling a little better.

The larger majority of everyone was still being afflicted with bad headaches and shivers, amongst which one was the young boy whose teddy bear Paris had saved.

Dion only asked that Madeline keep an eye on them as he helped check on other people, keeping his distance as much as possible.

Basil had taken himself off to the stairwell. He sat on the second step with his elbows on his knees and the pistol on the concrete beside him, and he didn’t look up when people went past him.

Paris was sitting against the wall near the doorway with a bottle of water that somebody had brought over to him, drinking it slowly, and the colour had come all the way back into his face.

The people nearest to him kept glancing over sideways at him, as though they were waiting on something else to happen, while a good chunk of the conversations that a lot of people had were filled with speculation about what the plant was, and even mutters of envy in some of them in their regrets that they should have asked to use it.

Part of the attention of anyone who had been moving around had thus been diverted onto searching through the rooms for any other such mutating plant.

Eventually, Dion left them to it, excusing himself to his designated room.

The vine in its cracked pot where he had put it down over the table that was in the room, its thickened coils draped over the edge of the wood and the darkened leaves hanging.

It didn’t look at all like there would be another fruit spawning on it again.

Not any time soon at least, or so he hoped.

He closed the door behind himself, and the rain dropped back to a duller sound.

Dion lifted the pot and turned it over in his hands as he took a seat in one of the chairs.

He turned the plant until he found the nub where the fruit had hung, and he could still feel prana flowing through the fruit.

Now that he had made himself aware of prana in the air, he could also feel how it and the prana interacted with each other, so he knew that the plant was still alive and wouldn’t be dying yet anyway.

’Is awakening someone really all that you could do...?’ He thought with some dissatisfaction, as if spurring an awakening wasn’t already a monumental enough discovery.