Chapter Text
Eris had no idea who the kid was, but her pain was so overwhelming Eris could taste it. Human emotions were like that, sometimes, staining the air with their intensity. She lay on the sofa in the other room, quiet ever since she’d wrung her throat dry with her sobbing. A crusty old textbook lay open on the countertop.
The twins were going to hate this.
“That’s not a good news face, Eris,” Selene said, exhaustion bleeding into her voice. With Eris stuck flipping through books written in languages the others couldn’t read, Lenny ended up designated feelings person, trying desperately to steward a perfect stranger through what was–hopefully–the worst pain of her life.
“She needs good news,” Janus added.
Eris sighed, letting something of the hysterical laugh welling up inside her spill out. “Who, the kid on the sofa or Lenny?”
“E.” Selene sounded disappointed in her, somehow. She understood. There was no reason to let her own tiredness hurt them as a byproduct. Both, was the answer. But Eris had been here long enough to be better, when it came to things like this, for them.
“Sorry. I know. It’s not bad news really, you guys are just going to hate it.” She spun the book around to show them the only solution she could find, watching their eyes flick over it, tracing an almost identical pattern across the page.
They both came to a stop at the same time. Neither of their expressions changed.
“No.” Janus closed the book.
“Yeah, fuck this,” Selene said, gesturing at the book on the counter. “I know no one else can help her, but there has to be something other than this.”
Eris closed her eyes, breathed in deep. The sound soothed her, usually. Now she could scarcely hear it under the poor girl in the other room, ragged and hoarse and loud enough to be heard from the other room, though much quieter than before.
She opened her eyes, looked straight into Selene’s, trying to project some kind of calm and control to drown out the fear she saw there. Strength was so much easier to hold for someone else’s sake. For the twins. For the girl in the other room.
Eris didn’t even know her name.
“She can’t hold on that long.”
“She has to!” Selene shouted.
Janus winced, but nodded. “She’s not going to die if she has to wait a bit longer. So she waits a bit longer. We always find something.”
Eris looked away again, down at the floor. Her left sock had a hole in it on the end above her big toe. This would hurt them, and she couldn’t bear to watch. Did that make her a bad friend? A bad… whatever she was to them.
Maybe it did. She hurt them far too often. But-
The girl’s breathing picked up from sniffles into weak sobs.
She didn’t really have any other choice.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She pulled the book back towards her, and opened it back up.
She only hoped her pain would stretch far enough.
“” “” “” “” “” “”
“Ready?” Eris asked them all.
The poor girl who had spent the last few hours alternately screaming and sobbing on their sofa nodded jerkily.
Janus said, “Yes. I still hate this.”
Selene agreed with both parts of the statement, but nodded anyway. With what Eris was about to go through, letting this happen quietly was the least she could offer.
“Okay then.” Eris lifted up her glass, full of a thick greenish liquid, as if in toast. The mixture itself was the consistency of blood and the colour of the forest, and smelled somehow of both things at once, earthy and metallic, like decay. She took it like a shot, grimacing at the taste.
They all watched with bated breath as she laid her hands on the girl’s arm, hands gentle but–from the first contact of skin against skin–beginning to shake.
Both Eris and the girl let out shaky breaths, one of relief, the other trying to settle under a weight heavier than expected, and not quite succeeding.
This was why neither of them had wanted her to do it.
Maybe it was the only way to save the girl, maybe she was just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t deserve to die such a miserable, painful death in the living room of a bunch of strangers, but it wasn’t fair that the world kept demanding so much from Eris in exchange for other people’s lives, while forcing Janus and Selene to sit by and watch, unable to help in any meaningful way, unable to share the burden.
Seconds pulled and stretched and clung on until they felt like hours, and the tremor in Eris’ hand grew steadily more violent. Lines of pain etched themselves into her face, and she seemed to age ten years in as many moments.
Selene forgot, most of the time, just how old Eris really was. Now she couldn’t ignore it. Every minute of pain from all that time was plain to see.
It wasn’t fair. Janus had said it well: they both knew she had to do this and they both hated it.
The worst part, she thought, was that they couldn’t help. That they had to watch. Eris had tried to make them leave, but if all they could do was comfort her with their presence, that was what they would do.
They’d take the pain themselves, if they could. Split so each was suffering the same.
Not fifty-fifty. People got that wrong a lot. They were twins and they both valued balance and fairness as much as the next person, but fairness does not mean sharing everything into two equal parts and taking one each.
For Janus and Selene, fairness meant each getting the same benefit or the same negative from any situation where the net negative could not be decreased (or net positive increased) by tipping the scales in one direction. They wouldn’t split a bag of fruit sweets exactly in half, they would each take more of the flavour they liked the best, or give all of any flavour they didn’t like to the other, even if that meant an unequal split according to numbers.
It drove her crazy how many people didn’t understand that.
If they could, they’d take the pain so Eris didn’t have to, each taking a proportion based on pain threshold and tolerance, and on tiredness and anger and not ever based on pride.
That was Eris’ mandate. Pride–in this context–is useful for nothing except getting dead.
That was all beside the point anyway. No matter how badly they wanted to, neither of them could help now. The cure only worked when an individual with inherent magic drew out the disease, having ingested the horrible green mixture which would soak up the toxin, allowing them to be harmlessly passed out of the magical individual’s body.
She never thought not being able to take someone’s pain would be a downside to being human.
Because harm less did not mean pain less. The toxin causes extreme pain in almost any species, but in those without magic inherent to their physiologies–humans, for example–that pain brought with it a creeping death.
Eris made a high keening noise, an animal caught in a trap. Eyes shut tight, her whole body was tense except her hands, still so gentle, feather light against the girl’s arm.
The girl, who looked almost comfortable now, able to tolerate the pain and crying with pure relief at the contrast. She’d probably fall asleep once this was done. They’d wake her with tea and toast, get a number to call, get someone to come pick her up.
Eris would wake up with the aftershocks still in her system. Her muscles would ache from holding this tension so tight for so long. She’d be dehydrated from the tears, drained from using so much energy, magical and physical.
Eris would have survived this, if it had affected her. She would likely have survived drawing the toxin into herself without the mixture. It just provided a level of safety none of them were willing to compromise on.
It was all kind of a mystery to Selene. Magic was magic. How and what and why were wonderful questions, and she didn’t have any of the answers.
Eris always said that every problem related to magic boils down to control. Drawing specific compounds out of someone’s body without upsetting the balance of anything else inside them, and doing it fast enough and thoroughly enough to be sure the toxin is entirely gone from their system, whilst also maintaining enough magic within yourself that you can still defend against and heal from the damage caused by the toxin, whilst enduring the incredible pain the toxin causes…
Too hard. Too much risk.
The mixture was the best option. The only option. It took away some of the danger, some of the need for control. It was just that it did that partially by amplifying the pain.
Janus was clear how much he hated it. Selene thought it wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t. Nothing ever was.
But this was a girl in pain, and Eris could do something about it.
So she sat there, shaking with pain, crying, unable to move enough to open her mouth to scream, taking it all in so a stranger didn’t have to.
She’d wake up the next day and smile. She always did. She shouldn’t have to.
It wasn’t fair.