She had fallen before him in the hall, landing on her back with her legs wide apart and looking up at him with fear that was for him and not of him. Tagen seized on the image and in his mind, he went to his knees to take the clothes from her body. The lingering trace of her musk became her scent as her flesh was bared to him. She welcomed him, brought him to her, and even if there was no truth in his imaginings, the violent rage of Heat seemed to ease, just a little. He felt the churn of true-cum blooming low in his belly at long last. Tagen shouted relief and let spill. Then he collapsed, his vision graying out yet again as he fought for breath.
‘I cannot die from Heat,’ he reminded himself. From thirst, yes. If there was anything at all the matter with him (and he would not admit that there was), it was only that.
He reached for the water condensing beside his bed, watching with an exhausted eye how his hand shook. He drank some, poured the rest out over his chest, and moved to set the glass back on the tray. The distance to the stack of boxes on which the tray waited seemed to stretch out, and the empty glass to take on an unreal weight.
‘I cannot…die…’
The glass slipped from his fingers. He buckled and fell facedown on the mattress, feeling a distant pain somewhere in the great wasteland of his body. His hand, he supposed, striking the floor, or his other shoulder, trapped at an awkward angle beneath him. He struggled once to rise, and then passed out of the grey and into black.
*
Daria went into her room and closed the door behind her. She lay down on her bed and curled on her side, hugging a pillow to her chest like an armless teddy bear. It was nice and dark in here. Still too warm, but here on the north side of the house, it wasn’t overwhelming. She stared at the far side of the room, with its dulcet powder blue walls, and listened to Tagen scream.
He wasn’t even trying to be quiet, and the sounds he made terrified her more than anything he had ever done. Not because of what he was doing, but because of the noise itself, because it meant his control was fraying. His control, his body…his mind, perhaps. How much pain could a man take before it broke him all the way?
He kept saying he couldn’t be killed by Heat, but she found that hard to remember when she looked at him. Every day, he’d gotten a little bit worse. Yesterday, he’d seemed pretty okay, at least until late afternoon when the weather turned. Then he’d gone from okay all the way to awful in less time than it took to watch one episode of Law & Order. She’d thought he’d looked bad then, when they’d been sitting on the couch together and both of them pretending he wasn’t dripping sweat or shaking. When at last she’d found a reason to wander back into the kitchen, he’d gone straight to his room and hadn’t come out. She hadn’t been able to imagine he could look much worse, but at least he’d been walking. Now he looked like he’d just clawed his way out of Hell. He was falling over now. He was losing his grip on English. He was losing his grip on everything, and it scared the hell out of her.
‘Everything scares you.’ Tagen’s voice, weary and without rancor, as he’d said them just before he’d tried to shut the door on her. The rest of his remembered words followed before she could even feel too bad about the truth in the first ones. ‘Go, Daria. I am not dressed.’
And no, she supposed he hadn’t been, but she’d been only abstractedly aware of it. She’d had eyes only for his face, for the agony etched down to the bones of him, the sweat glazing his skin, the confusion swimming through the searing hunger in his eyes. The rest of him didn’t matter. It was the body of a sick man, nothing more.
What would happen if he did die? It was a ghastly thought, one that actually made Daria feel cold in spite of this rotten, muggy weather. She couldn’t even think about what it would mean to her (finding him slack and stiff, having to touch the dead flesh of him, having to drag him out and bury him), what would it mean back on his world? This prisoner person he was here to track down would get away, that for starters. Big deal, there’d always be criminals. But Tagen had a home somewhere. He’d spoken of his father, someone who would be waiting for the rest of his life for a son that would never come home. And surely there had to be a girl in the picture somewhere. Tagen had that firmly faithful look to him, so there was probably a wife and kids. Daria could easily imagine him kissing someone goodbye on his way out the door to his ship the day this mission of his had been handed to him, and now they’d never see him again. Because of the weather. The weather!
One last anguished cry fractured the air and then silence.
She should go check on him now, while he was…done. Make him drink. Maybe get him to the shower long enough to change his sheets. He’d been swimming in that bed; sweat had pooled, literally pooled, in the folds draping him. It was probably an old wives’ tale that you could get pneumonia from being wet all the time, but it couldn’t be healthy, either.
Daria didn’t move. He’d told her to leave him alone. He was already thoroughly miserable, he didn’t need the humiliation of having her constantly checking up on him. She knew all about the value of pride when a person didn’t have anything else to hold on to.
But she found herself thinking back to her memories, splintered and surreal as they were, of their first meeting. She, drugged and babbling, throwing up in the sink while he held her hair. How he’d put her in the shower and cleaned her up over her wailing protestations. He’d taken care of her, because she needed help and never mind her pride. He’d never brought it up again, and she’d sobered up and hadn’t died of shame. Because pride was fine, but in the end, no one really wanted to be left alone when they were lying on the bathroom floor with pissed pants.
Daria got up.
The hall back to Tagen’s room was eighteen feet long. She’d measured it before, she knew. When she’d nerved herself to come up here before, her heart slamming in her ears, terrified that she would be interrupting him, the hall had stretched out the length of a football field. She’d thought she had a thousand chances to turn back. She’d thought it had taken a whole hour just to get there. Now, it seemed she took only two steps and she was there. She tapped timidly to no reply, and then pushed the door open.
He lay crossways on his stomach on the bed, the sheet around his hips, one arm dangling over the side and his hair in limp strands across his face. He didn’t move when she said his name. She could hear him breathing, but the sound was shallow and uneven.
He said he couldn’t die from this. He said.
Daria went to him. She picked up the empty glass that lay close to his hanging hand and put it on the tray. The arm itself had a horrid feel, hot and slick and heavy. His skin, thick and perfectly hairless, didn’t even feel like skin. It probably never did, really. She’d never touched him before.
She rolled him onto his back with effort, giving the sheet a tug to preserve his modesty. He groaned, kicking slowly and curling his claws into the mattress, and finally opened his eyes. They were glassy, unfocused. He spoke, a hoarse and incomprehensible string of alien words that ended in a question.
“Can you stand up?” she asked.
He looked down at himself and then up at her. “No,” he said. He sounded confused.
“Hold on to me,” she said, offering her arms.
He drew back at once, his nostrils flaring.
“Come on,” she said softly. “Ten steps down the hall to a cold shower. I’ll change your bed for you.”