Chapter 84: It’s Just...
Before he said anything, the teenager pulled himself through the room, with people shifting out of the way for him to get himself closer.
"...Paris." The name scraped out of his dried and hoarse throat.
Dion slightly raised his brow at the name. He remembered from history, reading that there had once been an ancient city that was named Paris. It was the ancient capital city of the long gone nation of France.
’It’s a good name...’
"And what about your last name?" he asked
Paris shook his head then, and he took in a breath before he said, "I’m just Paris."
Dion nodded faintly, silently thinking to himself that the guy must have his own circumstances. From his own assumptions, that he was orphaned, a part of him even felt a bit more respect for him.
With Paris introducing himself, Basil half turned to look at him as he approached.
And there, Dion continued to say, "I’ll be clear that I’m not going to force you into this. If you say no, I’ll eat it myself and that’s the end of it. I could take three quarters of it and give you the rest, and that would be a good deal safer for you. However, something about the thing is telling me that it would be wasted on me."
He gestured slightly to the pot in his hands.
"Whatever this fruit is meant to do, it’ll do far more for someone who hasn’t already awakened. And I’m asking you specifically, because you had the liver to chase a little boy’s teddy bear down in the middle of all of that, and you nearly died to do it."
Paris gave way to a shaky laugh at that. If he was being honest, even he was surprised at his own audacity then. But there was also a part of him that felt a relief about it, that even though it had been reckless and stupid, everything ended up being alright.
Basil finally stepped out of the space ahead of Dion and the approaching Paris.
When he spoke this time it wasn’t to Dion at all, and it wasn’t the voice that he had been using either. He came up close enough that Paris had to lift his head to look at him.
"Paris, you don’t have to do this. He pulled you out of that rain because it was the right thing to do, and it doesn’t mean that you owe him your life for it. You can say no and nobody standing in this room is going to think any less of you."
The rain filled the silence that came after that. Paris’s breathing stuttered through it,, and his hands though quivering, clenched into fists.
Then he shook his head.
"...There isn’t anyone waiting for me at home." The words came slowly, each one of them dragged up through whatever was sitting in his throat. "There never was. My whole life I’ve done what I was told to do, or what I had to do, and I never..." He stopped, his gaze falling away from everyone and going to the floor as he swallowed and pulled in a harder breath, and then started speaking again, "And ultimately, when you’re an orphan, you never get much of a say in anything important that goes on in your life until you have to leave the orphanage."
His eyes came up off the floor and looked past Basil, at Dion.
"He risked his own life to save mine even though I had done something reckless and stupid. That’s more than anybody’s ever done for me. So if he’s giving me a choice because he thinks it might help me, then... I’m willing to taking it."
’Hell of a thing, to hear that the first important choice he’s being allowed to make is this one.’
Paris’s breathing hitched, and he swallowed again as he said, "...Let me eat the whole thing, Mr. Dion."
Basil’s mouth opened, and then it closed again without anything coming out of it, his jaw finally tensing hard.
Then he stepped aside, not looking at Dion while he did it, his gaze only on the young teenager..
"Alright, then it’s yours, Paris."
The people crowded into the doorway had remained quiet through everything that he had said. A woman had pressed up her hand over her mouth now, and further back down the corridor somebody was being told to move aside so that the ones behind them could see.
And Dion walked the final few steps between the two of them as he pulled the fruit free. Just like when he had been touching it, the fruit almost happily let itself get pulled off the vine with hardly any resistance at all, and the glow of it brightened against his palm with the pulse quickening under his fingers.
He held it out to Paris, and the young man took it, his hand shaking around it hard enough that the green light spilling between his fingers and lighting the grey of his face from underneath quivered.
Paris didn’t wait even a moment longer for any hesitation to fester inside him, and he bit into it.
The sound was soft and wet, like biting into something overripe, and the glow flooded out of the break in the skin and ran down his chin in pale streaks and he ate the fruit till there was nothing left of it, with there strangerly not begin any seeds at all.
He chewed with his mouth full, his expression tight and braced as if he had expected it to be bitter, and then he swallowed it down in several gulps.
And then, within moments, his eyes pried wide.
Then his knees hit the concrete, and his hands swiftly moved to clutch around his gut and he immediately curled himself into the fetal position over the floor
The noise that tore out of him came up from his stomach, rumbling through his hoarse throat, his fingers twisting into the fabric of his shirt and dragging it tight.
His breathing broke apart into sharp ragged pulls. The muscles of his back seized under the wet cloth as his forehead pressed down against the concrete, and his body shook ceaselessly.
"Paris!"
Madeline was down on her knees beside him before anybody else in the room had moved at all, her hands going out to his back, but she stopped just short, hovering over the light that they could now all see was threading itself under his skin.
"Paris, can you hear me? Paris! Dion, wha—what is this, what’s happening to him?!"