Evan Friave-Goodlace (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
evantuality) wrote2016-02-29 12:00 pm
evantuality) wrote2016-02-29 12:00 pm
Entry tags:
Closing the book
Who: Evan, mostly
When: The end of Evan Reed's life: Evan is about a hundred and thirty years old
Where: Earth, mostly
There was little that Evan would have wanted to say about the end of his second life. In one sense, it was a quiet affair: when he had been told with grave solemnity by his doctor that, barring extreme treatment, the end was near, he had not spread the word amongst his social circle. That plus the fact that his only family knew well enough that this 'death' was not due to be a permanent state for him meant that Evan was spared goodbyes and mourning that would have been agonizing to him.
It was different, this time than last. At the end of his last mess of a life he had been ready to go, ready to start over. Seventy was not old, and now it was even younger proportionally, but at the end of that first life he had had very few people who would miss him. John had died a few years before Evan had left, a tragedy of a loss, but after a lifetime of frustration and strife he had been happy enough to disappear.
This, though... until the targeted virals had been so disastrously ineffective, Evan had been seriously on the fence about letting this be the thing that had ended his life. The virals had been agonizing, had attacked and destroyed systems that they shouldn't have, in a one-in-ten-thousand chance that chalked up to dismally unlucky genetics. Modern advances that seemed to him like medical miracles would have been able to replace his damaged liver and his decimated kidneys with ones his immune system wouldn't reject, but old age was its own beast and multiple surgeries had been as likely to do him in as help him even with modern advances. Worse, the virals had not cleared his system of tumors before they had had to abort treatment, and so at best he had been bought a respite from his original illness. Chemotherapy, archaic but still in use in extreme cases like his, had been the option offered. With his system already in dire straights Evan knew better than to be hopeful.
In one way, the decision to let it end had been his choice. He could have faked his own medical miracle. In another, he was old. He hurt and his mind moved slowly and he was tired -- and this illness had harshly and consistently reminded him just how tired. Was he to wait for the next part of his body to shut down? Or the one after that?
Did he want to wait and watch his friends die?
In the end, weighing the less visible tolls of illness and loss, he had slowly and softly realized that there was no question of it. Evan Reed was going to die of the side effects of cancer treatment. He declined further medical intervention.
Hospice care meant the best mobility aids, the best painkillers, the nicest medical institution he'd ever stayed at. Once the decision was made, he had finite time; his kidneys were in the process of shutting down, and he had a window of anywhere between two weeks and a month before he would have begun to need the dialysis he wouldn't get.
In a way it was a mercy that neither of the romances this lifetime had worked out, as he'd leave fewer truly broken hearts. He had said his goodbyes to Maddie long ago, and though there was some regret in him that he wouldn't see her again before the end, the pang was an easily manageable one. And Ryan, after they had spent some time apart, had gone back to being a good if distant friend.
Seeing him for the last time had been hard. Evan had always loved the man, and by now that was a fact that had settled into his soul with the ache of a badly lost chance. They had talked together when Ryan had come to sit by his bedside and hold his hand, had reminisced in quiet company, and it had been all Evan could do not to cry, knowing that Ryan would later cry for him. Ryan had told him of plans he'd made to visit the Netherlands for a gallery show he'd contributed work to, told Evan he'd find something absurd to bring him back. He had ended that visit with a creaky hug and a kiss on the papery skin of his friend's cheek, and then had locked the door to his room for a while and sat in the dark.
Others were hard, but after Ryan, nothing stung quite as badly. A small handful of friends from his years after college, amicable colleagues from the university -- he'd even had his editor stop by and they had nattered back and forth about late edits to his book for a while.
And then, when he had said the last of his oblique goodbyes, he had called Allayn to bring in the corpsecrafter.
He had absented himself once the creature had begun her work. She was some variant of vampire, one who had mastered a kind of blood magic that Evan had never run into and that she was closed-lipped against sharing details, as so many of these old relics seemed to be. She had taken a vial of his blood, a strand of his hair, and then he paid Allayn the ornate chalice he'd acquired for this hefty fee and had disappeared. He did not want to see the simulacrum of his own corpse: it was enough to know that he'd left explicit orders to eschew autopsy, to immediately cremate.
"I'll go to the cabin," he told Allayn when the dragon had asked his plans in low tones. "I'll probably stay there for a few weeks. Tell Cassie not to visit, if you see her." Then he had turned away and, with effort borne of painkiller fuzziness, crafted the teleportation. In the dark of the hospice room, Evan Reed's life ended.
The cabin was a respite, was intentionally difficult to find if a body didn't know where it was. There was ostensibly a road that led up to it, but it had lately overgrown and that was for the best. He would not be interrupted. Crisp, sharp-edged mountains rose up in the twilight around him and the cabin, nestled in a little valley in the Rockies. This time of year, snow lay deep enough to leave the world marshmallow-shaped. The crackling cold bit Evan's old bones immediately, and he summoned up his internal fires to ward it off. Even then he felt the pinch of bad circulation behind his own corona.
He went inside. It smelled of dust... and if he could smell that now, with every sense dimmed, it would be all the worse in a week when he strode back in, young and strong. He took a deep breath and absurdly felt his heart lift, remembering the fiery vividness with which the world had returned to him after his first death. How bright everything had been! How that brightness had not hurt his eyes anymore. He looked forward to the smell of dust. He'd sneeze at it, and be able to do so without risking a rib.
Arduously, careful not to fall, he stripped down, folded and lay his hospital clothes on the dresser of the dark oak room that he'd claimed as his. Then he left the cabin again, a lone flash of color in the deep winter landscape.
He melted a slow path through the chest-deep snow to the wide firepit some distance from the house. His feet barely registered the odd thawed sponginess of the ground, or how it turned back into ice as the air's chill re-exerted itself. There was ritual to this, ritual as quiet and implacable as Evan's mourning had been, and when he had meticulously cleared every rock in the circle of snow he sat in the centre, ignoring old, wet ashes and sharp stones. Then, as he had the first time he had done this, he quieted his heat and he waited.
In his first life, when he had worked with his mother to learn the secrets of his nature, it had been the threat of death that had first caused his body to combust and re-form. He had tried to replicate that process independent of what was apparently a reflex, but had not found the trick to it. So he let the heat drain from his fingers, his toes, his limbs, his heart.
In the cold of a northern winter, in a naked body whose prime had long since passed, the warm fugue of hypothermia came quickly. He shivered for a time, stopped, felt his body drain of energy, felt his pulse slow, but all of it at a distance. He soaked in the cold he'd grown up in, he breathed out the pain and the sorrow and the joys and the triumphs of the last fifty years.
When the first licks of flame began from inside his old body, all feeling ceased.
The place of existing without a corporeal body was a strange one. Rarefied consciousness, devoid of the chemical signals and temporal anchor of a body, tended to turn inwards. Doubly so, as building back his human body took massive concentration, intense involvement with every step of the process. He traveled through the idea of nerves and vessels like they were roads in a city, climbed the code ladders of his own genetics with an understanding that he had never managed to match while existing within it. The world outside melted into inconsequentiality while he worked.
As it had been the last three times he had done it, when he had all the patterns for his new form down -- when he had something that felt in every detail right -- it came together all at once. Rebirth was a coalescence of intention and energy, and for all that it was less flashy than it had any right to be.
When the first sensations his new body experienced were of heat and wind rather than bone-chilling cold, Evan was thrown into disorientation. His closed eyelids bloomed red with bright light. Hot grit lay under him rather than shattered stone and ancient ashes; he smelled a very different kind of dust on the wind...
When he opened his eyes to the world, naked as any of the days he was born, he was not met by mountains and snow but by stones and dunes.
When: The end of Evan Reed's life: Evan is about a hundred and thirty years old
Where: Earth, mostly
There was little that Evan would have wanted to say about the end of his second life. In one sense, it was a quiet affair: when he had been told with grave solemnity by his doctor that, barring extreme treatment, the end was near, he had not spread the word amongst his social circle. That plus the fact that his only family knew well enough that this 'death' was not due to be a permanent state for him meant that Evan was spared goodbyes and mourning that would have been agonizing to him.
It was different, this time than last. At the end of his last mess of a life he had been ready to go, ready to start over. Seventy was not old, and now it was even younger proportionally, but at the end of that first life he had had very few people who would miss him. John had died a few years before Evan had left, a tragedy of a loss, but after a lifetime of frustration and strife he had been happy enough to disappear.
This, though... until the targeted virals had been so disastrously ineffective, Evan had been seriously on the fence about letting this be the thing that had ended his life. The virals had been agonizing, had attacked and destroyed systems that they shouldn't have, in a one-in-ten-thousand chance that chalked up to dismally unlucky genetics. Modern advances that seemed to him like medical miracles would have been able to replace his damaged liver and his decimated kidneys with ones his immune system wouldn't reject, but old age was its own beast and multiple surgeries had been as likely to do him in as help him even with modern advances. Worse, the virals had not cleared his system of tumors before they had had to abort treatment, and so at best he had been bought a respite from his original illness. Chemotherapy, archaic but still in use in extreme cases like his, had been the option offered. With his system already in dire straights Evan knew better than to be hopeful.
In one way, the decision to let it end had been his choice. He could have faked his own medical miracle. In another, he was old. He hurt and his mind moved slowly and he was tired -- and this illness had harshly and consistently reminded him just how tired. Was he to wait for the next part of his body to shut down? Or the one after that?
Did he want to wait and watch his friends die?
In the end, weighing the less visible tolls of illness and loss, he had slowly and softly realized that there was no question of it. Evan Reed was going to die of the side effects of cancer treatment. He declined further medical intervention.
Hospice care meant the best mobility aids, the best painkillers, the nicest medical institution he'd ever stayed at. Once the decision was made, he had finite time; his kidneys were in the process of shutting down, and he had a window of anywhere between two weeks and a month before he would have begun to need the dialysis he wouldn't get.
In a way it was a mercy that neither of the romances this lifetime had worked out, as he'd leave fewer truly broken hearts. He had said his goodbyes to Maddie long ago, and though there was some regret in him that he wouldn't see her again before the end, the pang was an easily manageable one. And Ryan, after they had spent some time apart, had gone back to being a good if distant friend.
Seeing him for the last time had been hard. Evan had always loved the man, and by now that was a fact that had settled into his soul with the ache of a badly lost chance. They had talked together when Ryan had come to sit by his bedside and hold his hand, had reminisced in quiet company, and it had been all Evan could do not to cry, knowing that Ryan would later cry for him. Ryan had told him of plans he'd made to visit the Netherlands for a gallery show he'd contributed work to, told Evan he'd find something absurd to bring him back. He had ended that visit with a creaky hug and a kiss on the papery skin of his friend's cheek, and then had locked the door to his room for a while and sat in the dark.
Others were hard, but after Ryan, nothing stung quite as badly. A small handful of friends from his years after college, amicable colleagues from the university -- he'd even had his editor stop by and they had nattered back and forth about late edits to his book for a while.
And then, when he had said the last of his oblique goodbyes, he had called Allayn to bring in the corpsecrafter.
He had absented himself once the creature had begun her work. She was some variant of vampire, one who had mastered a kind of blood magic that Evan had never run into and that she was closed-lipped against sharing details, as so many of these old relics seemed to be. She had taken a vial of his blood, a strand of his hair, and then he paid Allayn the ornate chalice he'd acquired for this hefty fee and had disappeared. He did not want to see the simulacrum of his own corpse: it was enough to know that he'd left explicit orders to eschew autopsy, to immediately cremate.
"I'll go to the cabin," he told Allayn when the dragon had asked his plans in low tones. "I'll probably stay there for a few weeks. Tell Cassie not to visit, if you see her." Then he had turned away and, with effort borne of painkiller fuzziness, crafted the teleportation. In the dark of the hospice room, Evan Reed's life ended.
The cabin was a respite, was intentionally difficult to find if a body didn't know where it was. There was ostensibly a road that led up to it, but it had lately overgrown and that was for the best. He would not be interrupted. Crisp, sharp-edged mountains rose up in the twilight around him and the cabin, nestled in a little valley in the Rockies. This time of year, snow lay deep enough to leave the world marshmallow-shaped. The crackling cold bit Evan's old bones immediately, and he summoned up his internal fires to ward it off. Even then he felt the pinch of bad circulation behind his own corona.
He went inside. It smelled of dust... and if he could smell that now, with every sense dimmed, it would be all the worse in a week when he strode back in, young and strong. He took a deep breath and absurdly felt his heart lift, remembering the fiery vividness with which the world had returned to him after his first death. How bright everything had been! How that brightness had not hurt his eyes anymore. He looked forward to the smell of dust. He'd sneeze at it, and be able to do so without risking a rib.
Arduously, careful not to fall, he stripped down, folded and lay his hospital clothes on the dresser of the dark oak room that he'd claimed as his. Then he left the cabin again, a lone flash of color in the deep winter landscape.
He melted a slow path through the chest-deep snow to the wide firepit some distance from the house. His feet barely registered the odd thawed sponginess of the ground, or how it turned back into ice as the air's chill re-exerted itself. There was ritual to this, ritual as quiet and implacable as Evan's mourning had been, and when he had meticulously cleared every rock in the circle of snow he sat in the centre, ignoring old, wet ashes and sharp stones. Then, as he had the first time he had done this, he quieted his heat and he waited.
In his first life, when he had worked with his mother to learn the secrets of his nature, it had been the threat of death that had first caused his body to combust and re-form. He had tried to replicate that process independent of what was apparently a reflex, but had not found the trick to it. So he let the heat drain from his fingers, his toes, his limbs, his heart.
In the cold of a northern winter, in a naked body whose prime had long since passed, the warm fugue of hypothermia came quickly. He shivered for a time, stopped, felt his body drain of energy, felt his pulse slow, but all of it at a distance. He soaked in the cold he'd grown up in, he breathed out the pain and the sorrow and the joys and the triumphs of the last fifty years.
When the first licks of flame began from inside his old body, all feeling ceased.
The place of existing without a corporeal body was a strange one. Rarefied consciousness, devoid of the chemical signals and temporal anchor of a body, tended to turn inwards. Doubly so, as building back his human body took massive concentration, intense involvement with every step of the process. He traveled through the idea of nerves and vessels like they were roads in a city, climbed the code ladders of his own genetics with an understanding that he had never managed to match while existing within it. The world outside melted into inconsequentiality while he worked.
As it had been the last three times he had done it, when he had all the patterns for his new form down -- when he had something that felt in every detail right -- it came together all at once. Rebirth was a coalescence of intention and energy, and for all that it was less flashy than it had any right to be.
When the first sensations his new body experienced were of heat and wind rather than bone-chilling cold, Evan was thrown into disorientation. His closed eyelids bloomed red with bright light. Hot grit lay under him rather than shattered stone and ancient ashes; he smelled a very different kind of dust on the wind...
When he opened his eyes to the world, naked as any of the days he was born, he was not met by mountains and snow but by stones and dunes.