The sour face that Sien pulled was absolutely comical, but Ritt still did his best to offer a napkin to Sien in apology so that he could spit out the food, which Sien roughly grabbed and used before throwing it on the floor and stomping on it angrily. Ritt, who had very little practice holding back his laughter, couldn’t help but burst out chuckling at the scene, with a wide smile painted on his face.
“What do you think you’re laughing at?! I ought to kill both you and the chef who served up such a disgusting thing!”
Ritt had to wipe away a few tears at how funny he thought it all was, and even as he tried to calm himself down, the smile on his face still didn’t completely go away.
“I’m sorry, I really thought that it was delicious... Please do not punish the chef.”
His words didn’t sound very convincingly apologetic when he was smiling and still letting out soft giggles like that, but for some reason Sien could only grumpily cross his arms and make an uncomfortable face. The problem was Ritt’s smile, which made him not sure how to respond anymore.
Seeing how childishly grumpy Sien looked, Ritt could only continue to smile. It made him want to act indulgently.
“Would punishing me help to make you feel better?”
Sien’s eyebrows raised at both the question and at the slightly patronizing tone that it was said in. For a moment his anger made him actually contemplate punishing Ritt for treating him like this. However, when he saw Ritt, who figured Sien was being silent for too long and was about to go back to eating, suddenly drop the plate that he’d picked up and send it crashing towards the ground, all those thoughts abruptly vanished away.
It was a complete surprise to Ritt that his arm had suddenly lost all of its strength, and his face clearly showed it. The loss of strength was brief, though, and he quickly regained his composure and reached down to gather together the fallen bits of food and porcelain, to make up for his mistake. Sien, however, wouldn’t stand for Ritt acting like nothing had just happened, and marched over to grab Ritt’s hands away, noting how covered in blood and cuts they were getting from the broken plates he was carelessly touching.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you really this weak?!”
Ritt looked at his hand, embarrassed that a simple plate had been able to cut him up like this.
“...I’m sorry, Sien, for breaking your plates.”
Sien’s already upset face added on a glare.
“Who gives a shit about the plates?! You’re clearly not doing well!”
Sien was right, this loss of strength that Ritt was experiencing was actually very worrying. However, Ritt didn’t want to show off his weakness or his strangeness to Sien any more than he’d already done. It had only been a day, but his life here had already been loads better than anything he ever could have hoped for previously, and he didn’t want to put that at risk.
“...I promise that I’ll be okay, Sien. You don’t have to worry about me, my hands will be all better soon.”
He couldn’t make any promises about his shoulder that had been acting up, though.
Sien’s scrunched up eyebrows twitched, and the force that he’d been putting on Ritt’s wrists slowly lessened. Was… Was he really being worried about someone right now? Was that what was happening? In his whole entire life, he’d almost barely ever worried about anyone, so why was this obedient airhead making him worry like this now?!
Unable to put up with the confusion Ritt was making him feel, Sien simply marched out of the room without a second glance, closing the door behind him.
~~~
It had been 3 days, and Sien hadn’t come back to see him. The servants would sometimes shoot him interested gazes, and he would occasionally catch them gossiping behind his back. Ritt wasn’t really the type to be affected by such things, but he was a bit sad that he wasn’t getting to spend anymore time with Sien. He’d thought, for a moment, that perhaps the two of them could become friends, despite their differences in authority and power.
Really, he’d thought that Sien could have maybe become his very first friend.
Well, no one ever likes when someone who’s been kind to them suddenly treats them coldly. Even Ritt, with his very little social contact, knew that; He’d heard plenty such complaining from the guards when they didn’t know that he was watching them. In fact, he’d heard quite a bit about the various relationship problems that men might face from them. This wasn’t your average peer to peer relationship, however, unlike what they'd all experienced. Ritt was just going to have to accept that perhaps their friendship wasn’t meant to be, and move on. Truly, if Sien just sent him off to a nearby village or town to live, then things wouldn’t be that different from what he’d initially wanted in the first place. He could find different people there to attempt to be friends with. Perhaps his life would be much more normal and calm, then, than it would be if he stayed here.
Oddly enough, he’d actually never questioned why Sien had been keeping him here in his home with him in the first place. He’d just rationalized it away as Sien needing time to observe him closely before accepting him in, or on the possibly darker side, Sien taking the time to size him up before deciding what to do with him. Either was fine. But now that the two had grown apart, Ritt fully expected to hear Sien dismiss him soon, and so he was readying his heart for that.
He wasn’t prepared to suddenly collapse, however.
When Ritt opened his eyes, Sien was there, standing next to where Ritt was lying on his bed, and was shouting menacingly at an older gentleman who was looking Ritt over desperately.
“That’s obviously bullshit! Fix your stupid diagnosis or be prepared to lose a hand!”
The man squeezed his wrists in fear and curled himself up slightly as if to hide them, but he still persisted in not backing down and saying what he’d found.
“I’m sorry Duke! I’m truly sorry! But every doctor you bring will tell you the same thing! This man here, he should be dead. His blood is full of almost nothing but chemicals and toxins!”
Sien audibly grit his teeth, and Ritt could see him reaching for his blade out of the corner of his eyes. It was hard for him to force out the words, but he opened his mouth and spoke, reluctantly admitting the truth.
“He’s right.... My blood… is hardly blood at all.”
Ritt tried to sit up so that he could get a better view, but for some reason his body was barely responding to him, and he soon gave up on wasting his strength.
Sien’s gaze on Ritt was severe, and from his face he clearly looked frustrated. His hand that had been heading towards his sword instead came up to rustle his hair, and the other came up to rub at his face.
“How does that make sense?! How are you not lying?!”
Ritt gave a tremendously weak smile, realizing that he’d missed these little childish actions that Sien often performed. Although he felt a deep impulse to tell the truth to Sien, the doctor being present made him feel a little guarded. There was also the fact that he didn’t want to seem too freakish to Sien and have him cast him out. And so, in the end, he decided to tell only a little bit of the truth, in order to save himself. He did his best to gather his strength together and lifted his opposite arm, shakily pointing his hand towards his now completely numb shoulder.
“I was shot… here. I think… it’s poisoning me.”
It was the only possible explanation that Ritt could think of. If it wasn’t because of the bullet poisoning his blood and messing him up long-term from the inside, then there shouldn’t have been any other reason for him to be like this. No, that wasn’t necessarily true; It could have been possible that he was dying like this because he’d left the mage tower before they were done completing him. Just like the doctor had said, his body and blood were full of things that should have killed a normal human. It’s what made it so special that he, and no one else, had survived all of the experiments. Ritt hated to believe it, but it was wholly possible that he was just fated to die if he didn’t complete the process. And if that were so, there would be absolutely nothing he could do to stop it.
No, instead of that, Ritt would rather believe that the bullet he’d left inside of his shoulder was the culprit.
He knew very well the types of bullets that the guard in the capital used. A majority of the bullets were simply bundles of scrap iron, vaguely shaped like balls, and placed inside of a long barreled gun. Instead of bullets, it would really be more correct to call each of them shrapnel. And having closely overseen the guard for a few years, he’d heard of plenty of people catching a deadly disease after being shot with such things. He remembered it being called something along the lines of ‘tetanus’. From what he could recall, everyone who seemed to have come down with it died painfully about a week later.
Ritt had been made to be infinitely healing and regenerating, and of course the mages had also made him self-detoxing. They’d tested plenty of amazingly powerful poisons on him, and Ritt had managed to live through all of them. That didn't mean that he was 100% fine through the entire process, however; He’d had plenty of times that he’d been completely immobilized, just like this, while his healing factor did its utmost to fight away the poison that was invading him. Ritt was sure that this, too, wouldn’t be able to kill him so long as his healing was working. But so long as the bullet was still stuck in his body, constantly re-infecting him, then he would be stuck in this awful state forever.
