The Nuclear Reign of Strottimar [Part 1]

Chapter 18; Resign and Rebuild

 South wing, the doctors quarters was silent under the blanket of moonfall. The most silent, I think, I'd ever heard in all of my time here. Every instinct in me stood still, frozen in its place as I picked the dried blood from my nails without a thought to my mind, just awaiting Porter's return. All of us doctors seemed to just sit around patiently, anxiously, bouncing legs and pickled wings.

My eyes felt heavy as I blinked a few times before my attention was caught by a voice across the room. Aster was drunk, as he was sometimes, except this time he was completely wasted, beyond the point where it was probably dangerous enough for him to stand on his own. He was little, his body was that of a fragile one, which he never seemed to accept, puffing his wings to seem bigger and wearing thick soled boots just to feel taller, the height he thought he deserved. He hated how he was, he hated it from the start.

I watched as he sat, hunched over, hiccupping, pale as ever as he wheezed and uttered something incomprehensible through a drunken slurred tongue. He looked just about ready to vomit before holding his chest and setting his check down on the branch he sat at. "I don't feel well." I thought I could make out from his impossible speech but I didn't say anything. My mind was too far astray, and my eyes felt as if they looked just as distantly dead as Ida's.

"Well then," Maria's shadow suddenly emerged from a dark corner of the quarters as she brushed herself off hastily. "Maybe you should stop drinking yourself half to death, how about that?" She took the drink from Aster's reach and pulled at his collar as a sore attempt to meet his eyes. He blinked slowly before moaning and laying his head back down.

She cussed before setting the bottle down on a separate branch and rolling her eyes. "Come on, we can't just sit around and look as lame as this!" she looked around, meeting the sad eyes that matched the faces of the doctors in the room as she sighed. "What do you want us to do?" some voice mumbled from a nest to my right as Maria shook her head. "Look a little more alive, who knows what could be thrown at us next!" she implied, but as much as I tried, I could not feel her energy. I lied my head back and wished for some sort of miracle that sleep would take me.

I just wished Maria would sit down. I loved her, I needed her to sit back down. Though, she continued to pace the room as I let out a pain-stricken sigh and grumbled anxiously.

It was a while before Porter returned again. I heard the branch shift and the rustling leaves caught onto his dark coat as he shoved them aside aggressively to squeeze through the entrance of the quarters. His eyes were bloodshot in the dim candlelight of the room and he wheezed, out of breath with his black wings puffed to be twice their size. I swallowed and sat up nervously. Something was very wrong. "Wh-"

"I quit!"

Caught at the throat by his words, I didn't say anything as he smiled and let out a breath, his wings twitching and accidentally knocking a shelf of herbs to the floor. His white teeth were clenched together tighter than his fists, I'd never seen the man so pissed before. Porter has always been a calm man, I'd known him better than most of the apprentices here, because I was so called second in command, if that's what you'd call it. Now, he seemed out of focus, like he'd lost sight of his composure in the dark of the hour. I sat stiffly and waited for an elaboration.

Maria finally sat and I let go of my choking breath. "What's going on?" I tried not to snap though my anxieties, standing finally as he set down his coat and scrambled about the tightly weaved branches of the quarters. This time he grumbled, snagging a rather large fabric duffel bag and croaking, "I'm out of here at dawn."

The statement sounded too unreal to believe, leading me to blink a few times as if it'd mettle with my hearing. "What do you mean?" I didn't mean to sound so distraught. "I said I'm done."