“Could you get me some water?” Eric asked weakly. He smiled softly at Serena, her eyebrows knitting together with worry. She’d only got here a few minutes ago, but he could tell she was genuinely concerned about him.
She practically flew out of the room, blurting out an “of course!” Eric was a pretty sorry sight, of course. Most of his body was covered in bandages, his face included, and his bed was surrounded with flowers like he was about to die. As it turned out, saving someone and then getting rescued by a superhero was a good way for a lot of people to notice you.
“Should we tell her?” Tony asked. “This feels mean.” He sat next to the bed, the paper on his lap. Eric gave it a suspicious glance. It was weird, seeing his own face in black and white like that, especially considering the fact that he didn’t think he’d ever actually read a newspaper. But there he was, sitting in the back of an ambulance in black and white, a much more impressive-looking Penumbra by his shoulder.
The hospital had dismissed him quite quickly, which had been a blessing. They couldn’t exactly afford extensive bills. That said, a lot of people in the city had offered to pick up the tab, and despite his mom’s trepidations, they’d accepted the offer.
That, and the truckload of flowers. Apparently the woman he’d saved had been an old city hall employee, someone related to someone important. So now he was the hero son of the hero cop. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that, now.
“Not wrong,” Eric said and hopped out of bed. “Gimme that.” Not missing a beat, Anthony tossed him the paper as he hopped into the bed. They only barely managed to get into position when Serena walked back in with the glass of water. Eric felt only a little bit guilty when he saw her face go from worry to confusion to the face his mom had made when he had first tried to introduce her to Updog.
“Oh, thank you,” Tony said as he reached for the glass.
Serena made exactly zero effort to give it to him. She glared at Eric. “You should be in bed, you monster.” She put the glass on the night stand, took the newspaper from him and rolled it up. “I will make you.”
“I’m very seriously wounded, you know,” Eric said. “Cough cough,” he added.
Serena smacked him on the head with the paper. “You are, why are you making light of this?! Shouldn’t your whole body be hurting?” She seemed genuinely distressed. Okay, now he felt a bit guilty, and clearly Tony did too. They swapped places again sheepishly.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Uh, no.”
“What do you mean, no?” Serena balked, waving her arms around. “You were in the middle of a burning building, you can’t just be fine! Oh God, what if you can’t feel anything because your nervous system is shutting down—”
“Serena,” Eric said as he tugged at the bandages on his face. He’d taken them off earlier today to check, and they came down easily. “I’m fine.” Her eyes nearly popped out of her head.
“Wh—” she said, then looked at Anthony. “You knew about this?!”
“Sort of, yeah,” Tony said. “I had to know if he was okay, you know?” Eric squeezed his eyes shut. That was the wrong answer. The newspaper came down on his head with all the fury of a woman scorned.
“So!” SMACK. “Did!” SMACK. “I!” SMACK. Serena managed to perfectly accentuate every word with a perfectly aimed strike. Eric tried not to move, hoping that perhaps her vision was based on movement. It wasn’t. She spun around and pointed the paper at him. “And you! Were you just… pretending yesterday?! The doctor said you had bad burns on a big chunk of your body. Was he in on it?”
“No,” Eric said, shrugging, “I think it just healed.”
Serena looked like she was about to crawl up the wall, possibly rotate her head 360 degrees and speak in tongues. “You don’t heal like that overnight, you little weasel!”
Anthony sat up straight. “Don’t say that, weasels are actually really fierce hunt—”
SMACK.
“I’m going to kill you both,” Serena said. “And then, apparently, you’re just going to heal anyway, and then I’m going to kill you all over again!” She took a step to the bed, but Eric rolled off the other side before she could get to him.
“I’m warning you, Serena!” he said. “My fight or flight is kicking in and I’m like a cassowary.” That caught her off-guard. She lowered the improvised weapon with a look of disbelief and cocked her head. Anthony also stared at him. “You know… a flightless bird.”
“Honey, you’re more like a dodo,” his mom said from the doorway. “Get back in bed. Serena, please don’t kill my son, I need him to help me around the house. Hey, Anthony.”
“Hi, Miss M,” Tony said with a little wave.
“Yes, Miss M,” Serena said as she whapped Anthony over the head one last time, then discarded the newspaper. “Sorry.” It looked like Eric’s mom had just walked past to check up on them, but she stepped inside.
“No, I get it,” Lauren said. Eric crawled back into bed, taking the bandages off of his arms, too. There was no scarring, no burns. The only way anyone could tell he had even been in a fire the day before was the lack of hair on his arms, and the fact that his eyebrows had thinned out a bit, and he didn’t really care about either of those things. His mom looked at them and pursed her lips. “I don’t understand it either, but honestly, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I could have lost him, and I didn’t. That’s all that matters to me.”
“Maybe that Penumbra thing did something to you,” Tony said. “Nobody knows what all it can do.”
“It doesn’t exactly look like a thing made for healing,” Lauren said. “But who knows?”
“Woah,” Serena said, “I hadn’t even thought of that. Maybe you did almost die and Penumbra fixed you up!” She stared at Eric. “Woah.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “She must have just gotten to me in time.”
“You really don’t remember most of what happened?” Anthony asked.
Eric shook his head. “Nope. Hit my head, everything before and after that is blurry and smoky. I just remember helping the woman out the window and how much it sucked to hit the window with my forehead. The next thing I know, I’m on a rooftop with two superheroes and I’m pretty much fine.”
“Well, as long as you’re okay,” Lauren said. “And if you really were… healed, by this Penumbra character, don’t push it, okay? You probably still have a concussion or something. Try not to walk around too much, and you ask for something if you need it, okay?” She came over to his bed and gave him a kiss on his forehead. “I’m proud of you,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anyone. And if you ever do something that dangerous and stupid again you’re grounded until retirement.”
“Mine or yours?” She didn’t respond. “Uh, yeah,” Eric said. “Yeah. Hey, Serena, could you get me some water?”
Serena jutted her jaw forward and pointed at him. “The dodo went extinct,” she said. “I’m sure I could outrun you, chicken legs. No matter what bird you are.”
“Love you too, Serena,” Eric said with a smirk, then looked at Anthony. “I… I’m really glad. That I, um. Have. You. Like. Both.” A genuine smile was somewhere backstage, waiting for the director to call it in, but the director was currently struggling getting the main actor to get the words out without passing out on stage. “I know what I did was dumb, but… I had to. And I wasn’t… thinking, you know? I just knew I had to do something, and then I thought of dad, and I didn’t want to let people down and…”
“You could never let us down,” Serena said, “except when we’re doing anything together at all, in which case you are a constant disappointment and I’m going to have to get back surgery from carrying you through every single game and activity we’ve ever done together. But you know,” she put a hand on Eric’s shoulder, “you couldn’t let us down.”
“Maybe next time you can let us know when you’re about to try to be a hero, so I can save your dumb ass without you giving yourself a concussion, hmm?” Anthony said. He looked a little annoyed, but straightened himself out when he got a glance from Serena. “And no, of course you couldn’t let us down.”
“That’s not true, though,” Eric said. “I made you worry about me.”
“Eric,” Anthony said with a frown, “we always worry about you.”
“Yeah,” Serena said. “You’re a dodo.”
“Our dodo.”
“Well I don’t want to be anymore,” Eric said, feeling strangely uncomfortable. Maybe he was still nauseous from the concussion. His friends were expressing genuine care for him, which was of course more than enough reason to be uncomfortable, but he also got the sense they were treating him like a kid, and that made him want to do something immature. “I think I need some more rest,” he said, frowning. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re fine, Dodo,” Serena said. Anthony seemed to be a little quicker on the uptake, giving him a concerned look, but Eric shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about this more until he had his own feelings figured out. Any sooner than that and he was liable to say something. Something stupid. Something incriminating.
“Hey, are you still going to be checking the college thing tomorrow?” Tony asked.
Eric’s head felt like a beach-ball filled with pudding all of a sudden, made worse when he shook it. “No,” he said. “That’s Monday.”
“It’s Sunday, Eric,” Tony said. “But maybe it’s best if you wait a couple of days, see how you feel, okay?” Eric just nodded and gave him that particular kind of smile, the kind that said “for legal reasons, I am pulling back the corners of my mouth, and that is the fullest extent of my smiling obligations.” Serena had jokingly called it the white-people-smile before. Anthony nodded back, and they left the room, leaving Eric alone with his thoughts, which was possibly a fate worse than death.
No matter how much he cared about them, Eric just couldn’t be around them anymore. For some reason it had felt suffocating. At the start of the day, when the reality of the situation had sunk in, he’d felt pretty damn good. Like a hero, even if only for a moment. Saving a life. Now he felt like a little kid who had gotten out of the kiddie seat but rescued a cat out of the pool by accident. Admirable, but should probably be kept on a leash.
Eric hated the idea of Serena and Anthony looking down on him, like they were the adult, responsible ones and he was the toddler. Did they think of him that way? As their helpless little Dodo? He rolled over in his bed and squeezed his eyes shut. He just wanted to be the one that they looked up to. He wanted to be the one to help them. How had it turned out this way?! Saving someone’s life should have made them… what? Adore him?
That felt dirty too. He hadn’t done it for their adoration but the fact that they seemed to think it was stupid and funny was setting his skin on fire, and he had first-hand experience on that front now.
There was a pit in his stomach. He wrapped his arms around himself and tried not to think about anything anymore. Sleep took a while to find him, but when it did, his dreams were full of superheroes and deep, red fire.
Elamimax So I've been writing quite a bit of this. There are currently 35 chapters available on my Patreon. It will be finished next month. If you want to get in early and read all of them before they end up here, consider subscribing!
anyway, I'm sure Eric will be fine. Little dodo.
“Could you get me some water?” Eric asked weakly. He smiled softly at Serena, her eyebrows knitting together with worry. She’d only got here a few minutes ago, but he could tell she was genuinely concerned about him.
She practically flew out of the room, blurting out an “of course!” Eric was a pretty sorry sight, of course. Most of his body was covered in bandages, his face included, and his bed was surrounded with flowers like he was about to die. As it turned out, saving someone and then getting rescued by a superhero was a good way for a lot of people to notice you.
“Should we tell her?” Tony asked. “This feels mean.” He sat next to the bed, the paper on his lap. Eric gave it a suspicious glance. It was weird, seeing his own face in black and white like that, especially considering the fact that he didn’t think he’d ever actually read a newspaper. But there he was, sitting in the back of an ambulance in black and white, a much more impressive-looking Penumbra by his shoulder.
The hospital had dismissed him quite quickly, which had been a blessing. They couldn’t exactly afford extensive bills. That said, a lot of people in the city had offered to pick up the tab, and despite his mom’s trepidations, they’d accepted the offer.
That, and the truckload of flowers. Apparently the woman he’d saved had been an old city hall employee, someone related to someone important. So now he was the hero son of the hero cop. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that, now.
“Not wrong,” Eric said and hopped out of bed. “Gimme that.” Not missing a beat, Anthony tossed him the paper as he hopped into the bed. They only barely managed to get into position when Serena walked back in with the glass of water. Eric felt only a little bit guilty when he saw her face go from worry to confusion to the face his mom had made when he had first tried to introduce her to Updog.
“Oh, thank you,” Tony said as he reached for the glass.
Serena made exactly zero effort to give it to him. She glared at Eric. “You should be in bed, you monster.” She put the glass on the night stand, took the newspaper from him and rolled it up. “I will make you.”
“I’m very seriously wounded, you know,” Eric said. “Cough cough,” he added.
Serena smacked him on the head with the paper. “You are, why are you making light of this?! Shouldn’t your whole body be hurting?” She seemed genuinely distressed. Okay, now he felt a bit guilty, and clearly Tony did too. They swapped places again sheepishly.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Uh, no.”
“What do you mean, no?” Serena balked, waving her arms around. “You were in the middle of a burning building, you can’t just be fine! Oh God, what if you can’t feel anything because your nervous system is shutting down—”
“Serena,” Eric said as he tugged at the bandages on his face. He’d taken them off earlier today to check, and they came down easily. “I’m fine.” Her eyes nearly popped out of her head.
“Wh—” she said, then looked at Anthony. “You knew about this?!”
“Sort of, yeah,” Tony said. “I had to know if he was okay, you know?” Eric squeezed his eyes shut. That was the wrong answer. The newspaper came down on his head with all the fury of a woman scorned.
“So!” SMACK. “Did!” SMACK. “I!” SMACK. Serena managed to perfectly accentuate every word with a perfectly aimed strike. Eric tried not to move, hoping that perhaps her vision was based on movement. It wasn’t. She spun around and pointed the paper at him. “And you! Were you just… pretending yesterday?! The doctor said you had bad burns on a big chunk of your body. Was he in on it?”
“No,” Eric said, shrugging, “I think it just healed.”
Serena looked like she was about to crawl up the wall, possibly rotate her head 360 degrees and speak in tongues. “You don’t heal like that overnight, you little weasel!”
Anthony sat up straight. “Don’t say that, weasels are actually really fierce hunt—”
SMACK.
“I’m going to kill you both,” Serena said. “And then, apparently, you’re just going to heal anyway, and then I’m going to kill you all over again!” She took a step to the bed, but Eric rolled off the other side before she could get to him.
“I’m warning you, Serena!” he said. “My fight or flight is kicking in and I’m like a cassowary.” That caught her off-guard. She lowered the improvised weapon with a look of disbelief and cocked her head. Anthony also stared at him. “You know… a flightless bird.”
“Honey, you’re more like a dodo,” his mom said from the doorway. “Get back in bed. Serena, please don’t kill my son, I need him to help me around the house. Hey, Anthony.”
“Hi, Miss M,” Tony said with a little wave.
“Yes, Miss M,” Serena said as she whapped Anthony over the head one last time, then discarded the newspaper. “Sorry.” It looked like Eric’s mom had just walked past to check up on them, but she stepped inside.
“No, I get it,” Lauren said. Eric crawled back into bed, taking the bandages off of his arms, too. There was no scarring, no burns. The only way anyone could tell he had even been in a fire the day before was the lack of hair on his arms, and the fact that his eyebrows had thinned out a bit, and he didn’t really care about either of those things. His mom looked at them and pursed her lips. “I don’t understand it either, but honestly, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I could have lost him, and I didn’t. That’s all that matters to me.”
“Maybe that Penumbra thing did something to you,” Tony said. “Nobody knows what all it can do.”
“It doesn’t exactly look like a thing made for healing,” Lauren said. “But who knows?”
“Woah,” Serena said, “I hadn’t even thought of that. Maybe you did almost die and Penumbra fixed you up!” She stared at Eric. “Woah.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “She must have just gotten to me in time.”
“You really don’t remember most of what happened?” Anthony asked.
Eric shook his head. “Nope. Hit my head, everything before and after that is blurry and smoky. I just remember helping the woman out the window and how much it sucked to hit the window with my forehead. The next thing I know, I’m on a rooftop with two superheroes and I’m pretty much fine.”
“Well, as long as you’re okay,” Lauren said. “And if you really were… healed, by this Penumbra character, don’t push it, okay? You probably still have a concussion or something. Try not to walk around too much, and you ask for something if you need it, okay?” She came over to his bed and gave him a kiss on his forehead. “I’m proud of you,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anyone. And if you ever do something that dangerous and stupid again you’re grounded until retirement.”
“Mine or yours?” She didn’t respond. “Uh, yeah,” Eric said. “Yeah. Hey, Serena, could you get me some water?”
Serena jutted her jaw forward and pointed at him. “The dodo went extinct,” she said. “I’m sure I could outrun you, chicken legs. No matter what bird you are.”
“Love you too, Serena,” Eric said with a smirk, then looked at Anthony. “I… I’m really glad. That I, um. Have. You. Like. Both.” A genuine smile was somewhere backstage, waiting for the director to call it in, but the director was currently struggling getting the main actor to get the words out without passing out on stage. “I know what I did was dumb, but… I had to. And I wasn’t… thinking, you know? I just knew I had to do something, and then I thought of dad, and I didn’t want to let people down and…”
“You could never let us down,” Serena said, “except when we’re doing anything together at all, in which case you are a constant disappointment and I’m going to have to get back surgery from carrying you through every single game and activity we’ve ever done together. But you know,” she put a hand on Eric’s shoulder, “you couldn’t let us down.”
“Maybe next time you can let us know when you’re about to try to be a hero, so I can save your dumb ass without you giving yourself a concussion, hmm?” Anthony said. He looked a little annoyed, but straightened himself out when he got a glance from Serena. “And no, of course you couldn’t let us down.”
“That’s not true, though,” Eric said. “I made you worry about me.”
“Eric,” Anthony said with a frown, “we always worry about you.”
“Yeah,” Serena said. “You’re a dodo.”
“Our dodo.”
“Well I don’t want to be anymore,” Eric said, feeling strangely uncomfortable. Maybe he was still nauseous from the concussion. His friends were expressing genuine care for him, which was of course more than enough reason to be uncomfortable, but he also got the sense they were treating him like a kid, and that made him want to do something immature. “I think I need some more rest,” he said, frowning. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re fine, Dodo,” Serena said. Anthony seemed to be a little quicker on the uptake, giving him a concerned look, but Eric shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about this more until he had his own feelings figured out. Any sooner than that and he was liable to say something. Something stupid. Something incriminating.
“Hey, are you still going to be checking the college thing tomorrow?” Tony asked.
Eric’s head felt like a beach-ball filled with pudding all of a sudden, made worse when he shook it. “No,” he said. “That’s Monday.”
“It’s Sunday, Eric,” Tony said. “But maybe it’s best if you wait a couple of days, see how you feel, okay?” Eric just nodded and gave him that particular kind of smile, the kind that said “for legal reasons, I am pulling back the corners of my mouth, and that is the fullest extent of my smiling obligations.” Serena had jokingly called it the white-people-smile before. Anthony nodded back, and they left the room, leaving Eric alone with his thoughts, which was possibly a fate worse than death.
No matter how much he cared about them, Eric just couldn’t be around them anymore. For some reason it had felt suffocating. At the start of the day, when the reality of the situation had sunk in, he’d felt pretty damn good. Like a hero, even if only for a moment. Saving a life. Now he felt like a little kid who had gotten out of the kiddie seat but rescued a cat out of the pool by accident. Admirable, but should probably be kept on a leash.
Eric hated the idea of Serena and Anthony looking down on him, like they were the adult, responsible ones and he was the toddler. Did they think of him that way? As their helpless little Dodo? He rolled over in his bed and squeezed his eyes shut. He just wanted to be the one that they looked up to. He wanted to be the one to help them. How had it turned out this way?! Saving someone’s life should have made them… what? Adore him?
That felt dirty too. He hadn’t done it for their adoration but the fact that they seemed to think it was stupid and funny was setting his skin on fire, and he had first-hand experience on that front now.
There was a pit in his stomach. He wrapped his arms around himself and tried not to think about anything anymore. Sleep took a while to find him, but when it did, his dreams were full of superheroes and deep, red fire.
Elamimax So I've been writing quite a bit of this. There are currently 35 chapters available on my Patreon. It will be finished next month. If you want to get in early and read all of them before they end up here, consider subscribing!
anyway, I'm sure Eric will be fine. Little dodo.
