In Passing [closed]

There came a point where X'ni was wishing to get sicker. He wore the pearly beads about his ankles as shackles; a sign of his reluctant health when his love lay dying. He slunk about the infirmary as one of the lucky ones. People laying in their deathbeds saw him upright and breathing but were too weak to be jealous. He took their numbweed - persuaded it out of the hands of busy healers to tend the dying man that he kept up in his weyr. All the while, he hoped for some malignant strain of the plague to take to his lungs. He cursed the harmless bumps that ringed his legs.

He was not a healer. His hands were never accustomed to being gentle, but he forced himself to learn tenderness. He spread salves on F'lan's rupturing body; draped cool cloths about his burning forehead; tipped fellis between his cracked and bloodied lips when he had to. "Don't you leave me," he had said many a time, but after a while, he lapsed purely into silence. F'lan could not gargled anymore promises back to him, anyways.

E'rin would come knocking sometimes, violently. "X'ni, let me in, he's my dad. I want to see him," he'd cry, but X'ni only let the boy in once, early on. He watched the whiterider stand motionless at one end of the room, hesitant to even go near the hacking, pale beast that was his father. After that, X'ni shut him out.

"You don't get to see him like this," he told his son. And perhaps, for once, there was caring in his voice. A protectiveness. Mostly, though, he wanted to keep F'lan's weakness to himself. He wanted to preserve the bluerider's dignity by being the only person privy to his downfall. In the rest of the Weyr, Enlith and Seceth were silent - or else wailing.

X'ni perfected stillness. He sat at one end of the bedroom with a single glowbasket open. In the haunting green light, the blood that seeped from F'lan's comatose body was not so red. Even in his self-imposed quarantine, X'ni had heard tale of the illness from Enlith. He knew the end was coming for F'lan. By extension, he knew it was coming for him, as well, but all that showed of the plague were the flaking beads about his ankles.

He wished he were sick. He wished that he was feeling the same pain; that maybe, in their shared suffering, they could have both pulled through - or either both slipped at the same time. It pained X'ni to watch F'lan decay, and so that was precisely what he did. He sat and he stared. In the darkest hours of the night, he would openly weep, and Enlith would croon from the weyrledge. He knew, though, that F'lan could no longer hear him. F'lan's breath grew ragged, shallow, and burbling - and then all at once, it stopped. Seceth silently blinked between, and Enlith, so accustomed to the quiet that had consumed the old renegades, only choked up the barest of keens.

X'ni handled his beltknife with a blank consideration. He imagined the smoothness of its blade against his through; envisioned his cold body dead against F'lan's. He had watched the only thing that mattered in his life die, and in the process, had been given all too much time to consider his own end. The thought of functioning without F'lan made him feel feral; like the civilized part of him, however small, was ripped clean out. He simultaneously wanted to lash out and hide away. With an anguished wail, he stood suddenly from his chair and swept the lamp and trinkets off of the dresser. They shattered and he collected himself.

Then, with nothing behind his eyes, he lifted F'lan from the bed. Pustules burst at the touch and leaked. Slowly, he walked himself and his weyrmate out to Enlith.

"Time to go," he whispered to her. He wanted nothing left of him and F'lan. He wanted the Weyr to fall prey to all the Thread of the Red Star; he wanted all who had condemned them those years ago when dragons fought dragons to fall to ruin. He wanted to be nothing. Him and F'lan: absolutely nothing, gone to the cold of between.

Enlith passed her muzzle against the side of his face, gathered him up on her back, and flew out high into the night.

X'ni tucked a stray, greased lock out of F'lan's face. Briefly, he remember how pretty his lips had been before they dried up, and then they were gone.

---

In her weyr, Jarith screeched. E'rin, patchy with opalescence, caught a breath in his lungs. Tears welled up in his eyes and he found himself incapable of doing anything other than sobbing into his dragon's shoulder. She nuzzled him, and the remainders of their family came up to show them sorrow. Green Lana perched kindly upon his shoulder and Rats shoved his face in at E'rin's ribs. Even Levi paid heed, alighting on the back of the pillie Levi II. Mitzi, Merps, and Murmle kept their distance, little more than hilly silhouettes were the hunkered in the corner.

For once, even the daft, sparkling Jarith understood pain. She was loathe to let E'rin cry, but she knew there was no other way.