Chapter 01:
Lost Cure

"I want to go outside." He pressed his hands against the icy window. "Is it impossible for me to be like everyone else?" Raserei sighed and stared at his ghostly reflection. His hair was so messy it was if it hadn‘t been combed in several years. Bright, silver bangs, longer than the rest of his hair, framed his face, and the back of his hair was short and jet black. "What a contrast of colors," he muttered. It wasn't that the color was unique, it was just that people simply weren't born with two different hair colors, not anymore.

Raserei’s green eyes took in the picture of the children playing in the snow, building forts and having a snowball war. They were having fun, and doing things that he would probably never be able to do. It was strangely depressing to watch them play in such a carefree manner. "Dormin?"

"Yes, Little Brother?" Older than Raserei by eight years, Dormin had been standing in the doorway for quite some time.

"Can I?" Raserei tilted his head back and stared pleadingly at his brother. "I promise I'll dress warmly." He tried to grin broadly, but only managed a very small, polite smile.

Dormin sat on the hospital bed, crossing his arms over his well-toned chest. "No. You cannot go outside, Little Brother. You know how sick you are. What kind of a brother would I be if I let you go outside when it‘s snowing so heavily?"

"But I'm already sick, I can't get sick again," he protested. “What’s the good of me living in a hospital if I don’t take a few risks? If anything happens, it’ll happen in a convenient place.”

Stern as ever, Dormin glanced at Raserei with a haughty expression settling in his gaze. "There is always the possibility of you dying on us. You know, with your cancer, you can't be as active as you used to be. You can't play outside, you can't wander aimlessly around the town. You have to stay here and receive your treatment."

"I don't think the treatment is working." Raserei looked around the room as if he hadn't memorized the location of every little thing yet. "It's been a year.” He looked back to Dormin. “It’s just cancer, it’s not infectious.”

Dormin shook his head. "This new treatment for cancer takes time. You can't be so impatient."

"I know, I know." Raserei turned his attention back to the children outside. "Still, it isn't fair. Maybe I'm too old to play in the snow like a seven-year-old, but I would like a bit more freedom. They're so lucky, they can play in the snow every day."

"No they can’t. When spring comes, the snow will melt. Then summer will be here and there won’t be any snow for them to play in. Think of it this way, Little Brother; at least you won't be catching a cold.”

Raserei groaned, stuffing his face in his pillow. He breathed in the faint odor of the medicine he took every eight hours. The medicine that always made him feel nauseous and disoriented. "That's not the point," he mumbled. “And besides,” he peered over the pillow at Dormin, “when summer comes they’ll be out there again, this time skateboarding or flying kites. Whatever it is that will make me the most annoyed and I’ll want to throw rocks at them.”

Dormin shrugged out of his lab, folding it and placing it on his lap. "Why don't you take a nap?" He was hoping that Raserei would be less cranky if he slept instead of staying up all night, writing pointless poems in his notepad.

"I'll oversleep. That medicine makes me sleep too much." Raserei threw a defiant glare at Dormin.

Raising a brow, Dormin bit his lip, pondering. "It never bothered you before. Why worry now?"

"There was never anything to do. But did you know that a person who lives to be around seventy-five years of age has probably slept two hundred twenty thousand hours. Did you know that that amount of sleep is equal to nearly twenty-three years? I don‘t want to waste more than a third of my life away sleeping."

"I can't say that I knew that. Where did you learn that anyway?"

Raserei shrugged. "I calculated it out of boredom. Shows how much extra sleep I'm getting. So, in a sense, the human life is much shorter than what many are led to believe. If you live to be seventy-five, you will only have lived about fifty to fifty-five years awake. I, on the other hand, will be getting nearly eighty years of sleep by the time I'm seventy-five. And yeah, I know that eighty is higher than seventy-five, but that's how serious it is!"

Laughing and shaking his head, Dormin smiled. "Little Brother, you should become a mathematician."

"No thank you. Even if I wanted to spend countless hours each day in front of twenty or so students who had no intention of learning math or paying attention, I wouldn't be able to. Cancer prevents me from many things, some good, some bad."

"Lovely excuse."

"Why, thank you," Raserei said, smirking.

Dormin's eyes grew soft as he watched his younger brother with a smile. Even when cramped in a small hospital room, Raserei always managed to have a sense of humor. Frequently, the humor was deranged, to an extent, but at least he wasn't sitting in the same place all day moping about his illness. That took a lot of courage, and they both knew it.

Kicking his legs over the side of the bed, Raserei stood and grabbed his jacket from the hook beside his bed. It hadn't been used in so long it was starting to get dusty, but he didn't care. "I'll see you in a bit, Dormin." He gave a short wave and smoothly walked out the door.

"Wait, where are you going? Raserei? Raserei!" Dormin stood and ran after his brother hurriedly pushing his long silver hair away from his face. "Come back here. You can't go outside!" He pushed the front doors of the hospital open and wildly looked around. Dormin didn't have to look too far.

Raserei was standing at the bottom of the stairs that led to the hospital, staring vacantly ahead. "It's so beautiful out here," he whispered. Tilting his head back, he watched the snowflakes fall to the earth. "They're like miniature angels."

"Raserei, come on. We have to get you back inside."

Shaking his head, he looked back at Dormin. "I haven't been outside in an entire year, Dormin. You don't know what that's like. For an entire year! On my fourteenth birthday…" His breath crystallized the air as he huffed and shivered. "It's enchanting,” he said, looking back to the endless plains of snow.

"Enchanting it may be, but you're ill. You can't stay out here anymore, you have to go back inside."

"I don't want to go back inside. I’d rather stay out here until I’m actually sick than go back into that prison." Raserei looked at the children who had gone from fighting to building snowmen. "Leukemia is stealing my childhood away from me. It isn't fair, and you can't understand. Nobody can understand. No matter how many times you claim you do, all you do is sympathize. You don‘t have empathy."

Dormin listened silently.

Raserei folded his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth on his heels. "You feel sympathy for me, but you still can't comprehend what it's like. You can only imagine my suffering." Raserei watched as each breath he exhaled was crystallized in midair again.

Dormin walked over to Raserei and stood beside him. "I know how much you miss the outside. I know how much you miss our parents and our brother."

Raserei looked up at him. "You're doing it again."

"I'm sorry, Little Brother." Dormin shook his head sadly. "I'm doing my best to understand your pain. But like you said, I can't ever truly experience it. Not without going through it myself."

"I would never wish this on anyone." Raserei watched the snow fall, and it calmed him, just slightly, to know that not all things were evil.

Dormin rested a hand on the top of his brother's head. "I know you wouldn't. I do know you're upset, and we're doing our best to cure you." He smiled sadly. "But it isn't easy. The cure for your leukemia has been lost for a little more than sixteen hundred years." He hated to lie to Raserei.

Raserei nodded. "I know, and I understand that it might not even be possible anymore to heal me. The medicine has helped me a lot. You have to stay positive about these things. Otherwise your sadness eats at your soul until you've been devoured entirely. I don't want to become a puppet."

Ruffling Raserei's hair, Dormin gently turned him around and led him back in through the double doors of the hospital. "Get some sleep, will you? Work on your poetry."

"I'll think about it."

"Good. I'd be terribly upset if anything were to happen to you."

"I know."

"So then why do you do the things you do? Why do you do things that make me worry? Do you do it for fun? Is it for your enjoyment? Is it to get back at me for not allowing you to go outside? Why, Raserei?"

“I don’t like being on the eight floor. It’s the death floor! Move me to the first and maybe I’ll behave a bit more.”

Dormin shook his head. “Alright, alright, just be good, will you? If I move you?” He tucked his own silver hair behind his ears.

“Deal!”