Breathe

[The Delaney Twins]

12/10/05

Age: 14

He wasn’t moving.
Oh, sweet Jesus, he wasn’t moving.
Lynn ran over to the limp body that was lying on the floor a few metres ahead of her, ignoring the ache and coldness of the rough wood against her bare feet. She tripped over her own legs after a couple of steps, but that didn’t stop her; she clambered the rest of the way over to him and then grabbed Kennedy’s shoulder.
“Kennedy? Kennedy, what happened? Are you all right? Kennedy?” Her voice sounded unnaturally shrill, even to her own ears. She shook his shoulder, pulled him over so she could see his face. The unfamiliar features of his newly chosen face were pinched, paler than usual – too pale. His eyes were closed, his mouth fell open.
For a horrible moment, she thought he was dead.
Then his dark lashes quivered, flickering briefly to show his violet irises, and a hacking cough wracked his body into convulsions that it hurt Lynn to watch. She angled her body around to support him, his shoulders leaning back against her. She could feel the unhealthy vibrations of his hoarse breathing against her skin; the juddering terrified her.
“S-Sally,” he groaned, sounding as if he meant to go on, but he could barely speak through his wheezing. The effort sent him into another paroxysm, this one more violent: his back braced as if he had just been shocked by electricity, and his eyes grew wide and glassy with pain.
“Oh – Oh, God, Kennedy.” She turned around, looked down the empty corridor for some sign of life, yelled, “Help! Can somebody help us?”, but she was fairly sure that this action was pointless. It was after midnight; everyone was asleep – everyone needed to be in their dorms, and that was why she was down here, looking for her brother: his new roommate, Caspar, had come down to her dorm at eleven-thirty and banged against the door, waking up everyone in the room. The other girls hadn’t wanted to let him in, but the Australian one – Jamie, Lynn remembered, her name was Jamie – had said it was OK, that he was a friend of hers. (Later, she would discover that they were both in the same Physical Telepathy class.) He had stumbled into their room, all mops of blonde hair and glinting braces and black glasses knocked askew, and Lynn had been startled when he had asked for her.
Then, once Caspar had informed her in his thick, panicked Dutch intonation that Kennedy was missing, she had immediately pulled a thick woollen jumper over her pyjamas and run downstairs, not saying a word to anyone else in her dorm. She couldn’t be blamed for it. After all, they’d only been reunited – what? Three months before?
She couldn’t lose him again. She wouldn’t.
The only person who was going to hear her pleas for help was Caspar – he had run down after her, his super-speed enabling him to keep up with her more than easily. In a flash, he appeared in front of her, stopping her in her path, told her that she would get in trouble; she might get seriously punished for being out of her dorm at this time of night. She pushed him out of the way before she answered him, then called back that ‘I don’t give a flying fúck about being punished, you eejit, if I don’t know where my dámn brother is!’
She knew that he’d followed her after that. In some unspoken arrangement, they had managed to decide between them that he would search the rooms – the library, the assembly hall, the arena – and she would take the corridors. She found him collapsed just outside the entrance to the room that she had had her first teleportation class in, earlier that day.
Oh, God, Kennedy, oh God – what’s happening to you? she asked him through the waves, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be able to speak to her through the horrible rumbling that was coming from his mouth every time he tried to take a breath.
Can’t – I can’t – breathe. Even his waves were disjointed – he still needed to move his hands to be able to manipulate them, and the way they were shaking... oh, God, they were trembling like leaves. Every time he took a breath in, his left hand twisted harder on the handful of the black cloth of his coat that he was clinging onto, as if it was hurting him. It probably was, she realised, and then a residual ache started to throb in her own lungs as she saw this.
His waves couldn’t come through properly, because every so often, his right hand would shake harder – convulse with a twitch that threw off the wave patterns and had his words dissolve into a little trail of strange shapes that Lynn couldn’t decipher.
But how can’t you breathe? she asked, and lay her hand against his forehead, checking if he had a temperature. This was dreadful. She had no idea what to do in a situation like this – she knew that she’d be learning first aid in warrior training sooner or later, but she’d only been to three sessions so far. His skin was clammy, worryingly cold instead of warm.
“Caspar!” she shouted. “Caspar, are you there? I found him, I need you!” And as she spoke out loud, she continued to Kennedy, Is it – I mean, what happened?
I – I was – coming back – from the Common Room – and I sta- started – to feel – dizzy, and – I just – just fell.
Lynn shook her head, her features twisting into a grimace. The image of his falling down, the image of his – It hurt too much to think about.
But why is this happening? she asked, focusing on the waves. She didn’t want to see him as clearly as she had been doing; it was easier to go into her other vision, keep her attention on the bright coils of her other world instead of watching her brother suffering like this right in front of her.
But it didn’t help. She could still hear him. You’re not sick, she continued, or at least, you weren’t – you couldn’t have just – Oh God, oh God.
The panicking was even encroaching on the waves now, possessing her as she heard him hacking again. What could be causing this? Kennedy was fine – he had always been fine when they were small, anyway, healthier than she had been. He had been fine since he had found her, hadn’t he? He didn’t get sick, he couldn’t – she needed him to stay –
And if he had just fallen like that, it couldn’t be something small, could it? It must be serious. It could be anything – he could have had anything –
All at once, every single disease she’d ever heard of started whirring around in her mind, heart attacks and seizures and epileptic fits and diabetes and infarctions and oh God oh God oh God “Caspar!” she yelled, her voice cracking.
Kennedy started to shift at her panicked call, trying to pull himself up on his elbows weakly, and he managed to get out the words, “Sally – d – ” wheeze “don’t panic, it’s – it’s all – ” coughing fit “all right, I’m – ” shudder “I’m all right.”
One of his hands reached out to grasp hers, but when it did she could barely feel it; only a weak pressure, the faintest shiver of his freezing fingers pressing on hers. She knew he was trying to reassure her, but –
She bit her lip, breathed in heavily. Her eyes started stinging with the unfamiliar sensation of – tears? Apparently so. Emotions came hard and fast in Lynn, there was never much hope of disguising them – even now, when Kennedy was clearly –
He was clearly worrying about her, even though he was lying in a shivering wreck on the floor with ice-cold skin and trembling hands and with that horrible horrible horrible wheezing scraping out of his lungs with every breath he took. She was surprised he was still conscious; how could he possibly be getting enough oxygen to stop himself from passing out?
And what did she do? Caspar – that bloody Caspar what’s-his-face still wasn’t here yet, even though she had been calling for him – he’d probably buggered off back up to the dorm, hadn’t he? You couldn’t trust anyone. So she’d have to find some way of getting him to – to the hospital. It was hard to even think the words.
And how did she do that? She could teleport, yes, but that meant her finding some reflective surface for her and Kennedy to travel through, and she had hardly been at this school long enough to know where the nearest available mirror was. She could go metallic, but that wouldn’t really help anything, seeing as how she’d only been learning about that power for the sake of protection, not heavy lifting as such. And looking down at Kennedy, she knew that he’d probably be too heavy for her to carry – he had a good eight inches on her in this new face, and seeing as the face had been chosen from some actor, probably enough muscle to make it considerably difficult for her to carry him…
…but that was still what she was going to have to do.
“You’re obviously not,” she said, trying to make the words sound more light-hearted than she really felt, like she had just caught him trying to hide something from her, a journal or a photograph. She didn’t do too well; you could still hear the tears, the hysteria in her voice, and if anyone had seen her at that point they would have said her smile was more like a grimace.
Reverting to the waves – she didn’t care how hard he was prepared to try, he was not capable of speaking out loud right now – she continued, You said you felt dizzy, then you fell.
Yes. The waves were more jagged than usual, barely recognisable.
She started lifting him up as she continued, supporting his shoulders from behind with her left arm, keeping his head steady with her right. She wouldn’t go metallic unless she had to; she decided. It would probably bruise him.
Could – Could you breathe before you felt dizzy? And with these words, keeping his torso supported, she twisted the rest of her body so that she would be able to lift him.
I – don’t know. I th – thought that – I could. Probably if she lifted under his arms, that would be the best way – oh, but his head. He could barely support his own head as it was, and if she got him up that way he’d have to walk.
You thought? You must have been able to. You would have noticed if you couldn’t breathe, right? The breathing seemed to be coming slightly easier now that he was semi-sitting up, anyway. Maybe it would go away by itself.
It had to. She couldn’t move him, she could see that now. She could support him, but that wasn’t going to help him get to the hospital, was it? Not now, when he was barely even capable of staying conscious, let alone actually moving.
So he’d have to get better, because she couldn’t bear to consider the alternative.
So you felt dizzy and then you woke up and you weren’t able to breathe… she continued. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s a one time thing. I mean, I’m sure I would have heard of it by now if it was common, y’know? And then, you have to –
“You’re… panicking,” a wheezing voice accused her. “S-Stop.”
And all the hysteria that had been gathering in a little bubble in her chest burst with an almighty clash. “I think I have the right to dámn well panic, Kennedy! Look at you! How do you think it feels for me, finding you lying on the ground like you’re d –” Her tongue tripped over that word. “Like something terrible has happened, and you’re saying I shouldn’t be panicking? Wouldn’t you?”
A few seconds of charged silence, punctuated only by the rise and fall of Kennedy’s rasping breaths. “Yes,” a couple of moments later. “Yes… I’m s – sorry.”
The words brought her down from her angry pedestal, making her feel unbelievably selfish. Everything she had said was true, but…
Oh God, she was such a horrible sister. “Don’t be,” she said quietly, her voice falling lower than usual. “It’s not your fault. Just don’t tell me not to panic, either.”
He nodded, then his face contorted for another fit of coughing. When he settled again, he looked up at Lynn, and she was horrified all over again – his eyes were bloodshot. She’d heard of this before, but she’d never really thought it was possible; he’d been coughing hard enough to burst a blood vessel in his eye.
Eerie red-stained purple eyes looked beseechingly up at her, and he said, his voice even quieter – “I think I n – ”
Coughing fit.
“Use your waves, Kenny,” she said, and she glanced around her one last hopeless time to see if anyone else would come. Upon seeing no one, she could see what she had to do – she’d have to stay here with him for the rest of the night, of course, because she couldn’t physically leave him while there was a chance he might – And so the best case scenario was that someone would notice that they were missing from their dorms, and come down to punish them, and then they could help. The worst case scenario was that they’d have to wait here until morning before someone else came.
She refused to let herself think of the real worst case scenario.
I think I – need to go – to bed, he told her.
“You don’t need to go to bed, you need to go to hospital,” she said, pushing his hair back off of his clammy forehead in a smoothing motion that she remembered her mother doing when they were small – Margaret had been a great one for hair-stroking, even though Grandma Hannah had always said that actually fixing whatever the problem was would be a good sight more soothing.
He convulsed more violently at those words. No. No – no –
“No – hospitals,” he said, sounding like he was choking on his own voice. “Not – going to – hospital.”
She tried to hold him steady as the effort of those frantic words sent him into a fit of near-hyperventilation, his breathing getting faster and faster. “Kennedy – Kennedy, calm down, Chrissake! It’s not like those hospitals – it’s not like the CCC – ”
How – can you – know? he said, the wave equivalent of a shout shuddering against her vision. They lied – they all lied – how do – do you know – that these people –
“Because this is Orchid!” she said. “They’re against the people who did that to us! They’re fighting a bloody war!”
Against – Marius. The waves were only getting louder. C&C – aren’t Marius. Discharged.
“For God’s sake, Kennedy, you’re being ridiculous. Fine, ignore the fact that they’re fighting a war against the people who took us. Do you think that mum and dad would have let us come here if they thought that they were going to – ”
The look that he was giving her now (or attempting to give her, through his pain and lack of air) let her know exactly what he thought of their parents’ ability to make decisions.
“OK, Grandma Hannah, then. Think she would have let us come if she thought they were going to do the same thing as the those bástards did?”
Thing was, though, that she didn’t even really know what those bástards had done to Kennedy, and from what she was seeing, it was worse than she had thought. He would never tell her when she asked, just as she would never tell him the full details of what had happened to her. They didn’t want to hurt each other like that.
But Lynn knew that it was enough to have him share her thirst for revenge which had been the reason they’d gone to Orchid instead of the multitude of safe magic schools that were scattered throughout the world. She knew that whatever it was they had done to him, that was the reason that he would never go back to his original appearance, a fact that hurt her whenever she thought of it. She’d seen pictures of him when he was a child that had refreshed her memory of just how similar they had looked: same features that gave the overall impression of being just slightly too large for their faces, same coppery tinge to their brown hair that came from their flame-haired Irish ancestors, same big brown eyes, same smattering of freckles across their cheeks. They had even shared the same one-dimpled smile – where Lynn had only had one dimple on her left cheek, Kennedy had only had one on his right.
They had been true twins, back then.
And whatever had happened to him, that was what had changed him. Sure, he still acted mostly the same, even their relationship hadn’t really been changed by seven years of separation, so far as she could tell, and that was incredible in itself.
But still, when she saw scenes like this, scenes that showed the alien Kennedy who had been so scarred by what had happened, everything that had stayed the same fell away, and Lynn had the strange feeling of someone having pulled out the ground out from beneath her, gravity dissipating in a heartbeat – and she knew she was falling, but she didn’t even know where.
“And,” she continued, “Kenny, this place is a goddàmn school. You think they would get away with having the same sort of hospital as the C&C Association did?”
I – I know, he replied, after a moment. Then, a second later, the waves barely a whisper - But – I … I’m still – scared.
Lynn bit her lip, eyes stinging again. “You’re going to be fine,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as anyone else. “I promise you, Kennedy, as soon as someone finds us – ”
And as if God had heard her plea, she heard the Dutch voice that she had only known for half an hour echo through the corridors after her.
“Sally?” He wasn’t shouting. Probably didn’t dare. He was probably some snivelling brown-noser coward who was too afraid to get in trouble even when –
The more reasonable part of Lynn’s mind told her to shut up with those ungracious thoughts. He had still come, hadn’t he? And she didn’t know him, she shouldn’t judge him.
But that didn’t stop her from yelling, “What the hell took you so long? Where did you go?”
He appeared in front of her in a split second. Ignoring her questions, he asked, “You found him?”
“Obviously,” she snapped.
Sally – don’t be – so rude –
“Sorry,” she muttered to Kennedy, through gritted teeth, then directed the word back to Caspar as she said again, “Sorry. I’m sorry. I… I don’t know what to do, I’m just mad at myself.”
He ignored her apologies, too, but she took his still-concerned expression as a sign that he wasn’t angry. “Is he responsive?” he asked, bending down to sit on his knees on the opposite side of Kennedy to Lynn, and it she had to read the sound waves to understand his thick accent. “Has he spoken to you?”
After a brief cough, Kennedy said, “I – I’m still – ”
He couldn’t go on, but Caspar had gotten his answer. “All right.”
“What do we do?” asked Lynn, looking the boy over. Taking note of his scarily thin limbs, the way his shirt hung limply off what looked like a fairly sunken chest, and the fact that he had obviously had to punch another, tighter hole in his belt to keep his trousers up, she had to say that she still wasn’t inspired with a great deal of confidence in his ability to help her. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to lift him with two people, if the other was so obviously…
“We find out what’s wrong, and we fix him,” Caspar answered, and Lynn wanted to hit him for his facetiousness.
“Aye, I got that part,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “But how? We can’t get him to the hospital by ourselves – ”
“I’m a Carer,” he said briefly to her, his short, brusque sentences seeming almost paradoxical when compared with his worried expression. Maybe he just wasn’t much of a talker. He turned down to Kennedy, spoke loudly and enunciated as well as his accent would allow – “Kennedy, I told you about my power, yes?”
Lynn watched the waves. “He says yes.”
An enquiring look from Caspar. “We can talk to each other without speaking,” she said simply. There wasn’t time for a proper explanation now.
“OK. I can use it to find out what’s wrong with you now,” he said to Kennedy, “but I need your consent.”
…what? He was thinking about ethics, now? Lynn hadn’t a dàmn clue what Caspar’s power was, but she did know that if it meant that he could find out what was wrong with Kennedy, now was not the time for asking permission, of all things!
And why the hell was it taking Kennedy so long to answer?
“You can – can only see – inside if y – you do this, right?” Kennedy asked, his hoarse voice scraping painfully against Lynn’s own throat, which burned in sympathy.
Kennedy, what the hell are you playing at? Just say yes! she sent, trying to keep the waves from hurting his ears.
“Only inside,” Caspar said. It sounded like he was promising.
Another horrible second scraped by, and Lynn was ready to lie and say that Kennedy had consented via wave by the time that he managed to rasp out, “OK.”
Caspar moved so quickly that Lynn could barely see. The next thing she knew, the top three buttons of Kennedy’s shirt had been unbuttoned – and why under God hadn’t she thought to do that, if he was having trouble breathing? – and Caspar’s hand was resting against the spot where Kennedy’s neck joined his collarbone, long pale fingers against even paler skin. She looked at Caspar’s face, saw that it was completely intent on something she couldn’t see, his incredibly bright blue eyes flickering fast behind his glasses as if he was watching something darting around too fast for his eyes to follow.
After a few moments of this, he lifted his hand, “It’s asthma,” he said, but he sounded confused.
Lynn was, too. “Kennedy doesn’t have asthma.”
“He shouldn’t have asthma,” Caspar corrected. “I can’t see what’s causing it. There are no triggers, nothing started it – Hold on.”
He set his hand on Kennedy’s chest again, a little further down. Lynn kept stroking his hair while Caspar did his – whatever he was doing. She could tell from the quickness of Kennedy’s breaths that he didn’t like this at all.
A few moments later, the hand came off again, and Caspar looked even more confused than before. “There’s something in the lungs, but I don’t know what it is. There’s more in his right lung. It’s ruining his alveoli.”
“His what?” Lynn asked, terror gripping her again. Asthma was fine; asthma she could deal with. She’d already seen a couple of people going around here with inhalers and whatnot: on questioning, she had been told that most people didn’t see asthma as worth bothering the Carers about. She could deal with it if Kennedy had asthma, but –
“Have you heard of emphysema?” Caspar asked.
She had.
She couldn’t speak.
“It looks like emphysema, but it doesn’t make sense. Emphysema shouldn’t be localised – or at least, not this much.”
She found her voice. “Is that what’s causing the asthma? Emphysema?” She sounded like she was being choked.
People died of emphysema, she knew that much. There wasn’t a cure. It just got worse and worse and worse…
Caspar’s eyes met hers, his face deathly serious. “The emphysema didn’t cause the asthma.”
“He has them both?” Oh God oh God oh God oh God…
“Yes, but they’re still related. It looks like they’re caused by –” He thought, looking like he was comparing what he had – seen? Had he seen it? – to some list or something in his head. “I don’t know what it is. Some chemical in his body. More than one, I think, but this one is ruining his lungs.”
“Oh – oh my God…”
He set his hand back down as he spoke, evidently searching for something. “It doesn’t make sense. It looks like it was injected directly into – into the pleural cavity?... on the bottom right, and it’s spreading inward. The alveoli are worst around the outside, and –” He lifted his hand suddenly, as if he had been shocked. His voice was infused with a new urgency as he asked her, “Did he tell you what happened?”
“He said – he said that he was just walking along and he started to feel dizzy and he fell – ”
“Oh no...”
Lynn was white with horror, her hand now gripping Kennedy’s so hard that she was sure that it was hurting him. “Oh no what? What’s happening to him?”
“The chemical has spread up through his alveoli into the right bronchiole, and when he fell – that must have been when it got into the trachea.”
“What does that mean?” She wanted to shake him.
“The chemical is acting as an allergen. As soon as it got into the trachea, it contracted faster than regular asthma, and the lack of oxygen made him dizzy – ”
“Wait, but how can it be an allergen if it’s also what’s ruining his alveoli?”
“I don’t understand either.”
The first fat tear spilt from Lynn’s eyes, rolling over the contours of her high cheekbones to fall on Kennedy’s face. The liquid caused his eyes to flutter open again, and his hand gripped on hers a little tighter – a little. The faintness of the pressure still tore at her heartstrings.
“Is there – Can you – fix it?” Kennedy asked for her, his own voice revealing a substantial amount of fear, and Lynn felt so horrible and guilty and selfish for that that she just wanted someone to kick her. Why had she only been thinking of herself? She was a terrible person.
“I can’t,” said Caspar, and Lynn could feel her heart breaking, shattering into a thousand, no, a million tiny little pieces and falling uselessly away from her. “I only see diagnoses and cures, I can’t cure things by myself. But if we go to the hospital… someone who can heal can fix the walls of your alveoli, and someone with psychokinesis can draw most of the chemical out of your system, I think.”
Lynn couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “You… they can cure emphysema? You can…”
She laughed, the sound breathless with relief. “He’s going to get better?”
“Yes,” Caspar said simply, but the word was accompanied with a brace-filled smile that made Lynn want to hug him. He was going to be OK, Kennedy was going to be all right, he wasn’t going to…
“We just need to get him there first,” Caspar continued, and he stood up. Lynn would have done so too, but she didn’t want to let go of her brother.
“Right,” she said, still smiling inanely, even with her cheeks wet with the tears that she had shed mere moments before. “Right, OK, so how… how do we do that? I could take his head and you take his le- ”
“No,” Caspar said. “That would jolt him too much. This would be better.” And a gust of wind rushed down the corridor, the air seeming to collect below Kennedy’s back. She hadn’t thought of this – elements. If Cass’s power was to control air, then there was no issue getting Kennedy to the hospital.
Lynn let her hands flop uselessly by her sides, but Kennedy stayed elevated, a cushion of air currents below his back keeping him above the ground. He didn’t seem to notice the difference now – he was losing consciousness, but Lynn wasn’t worried, because Caspar didn’t seem to be.
She knew that in the grand scheme of things, he probably hadn’t done anything a regular Carer couldn’t do, but that didn’t matter to her. She was already giving him the credit for having saved her brother’s life.
She stood up, walked to Caspar’s side. “Thank you,” she said, quietly. “I, I just – it means – thank you.”
He smiled at her, the corners of his mouth rising lazily as he started to direct Kennedy’s body down the corridor that Lynn assumed led to the hospital. “It’s no problem, Sally.”
Her smile grew wider, despite the fact that that name usually never failed to irritate her. “Lynn, actually. Only Kennedy calls me Sally.”
“OK, then – it’s no problem, Lynnie.”
She raised her eyebrows at the unfamiliar nickname, then said, “You’re a lifesaver, Cass.”
He grinned. “I know.”

12/10/08

Age: 17

Lynn answered her phone at the first buzz, recognising the ringtone that she had set as Cass’s immediately. ‘I Can Hear Music,’ The Beach Boys. The song he had been singing the night that they had first kissed.
“Three years today, Lynnie,” he said, when she picked up. “Can you believe it?”
She laughed. “No way,” she said, and she was telling the truth. “No time at all, seriously. I feel like it happened last night.”
And sometimes she wished it had. Sometimes it felt wrong that all that time had passed so quickly, it felt wrong that now she was still sitting in Orchid while he sat at the Magical Academy of Amsterdam hundreds of miles away, it felt wrong that she was getting over him.
That she probably didn’t love him anymore.
That she was going to move on someday.
“Me too,” he said, laughing. It had gotten less awkward, at least. They had grown used to the idea of being away from each other, grown used to the idea of seeing other people.
They were just friends now.
And sometimes she thought that maybe, when she thought back to that first night, that was the way it was always supposed to be. Something about it… it fit.
It didn’t mean she didn’t miss him though.
“Kendra still bítching about his asthma, then?” he asked, and she laughed. Kennedy would never remember that night with the same pleasant connotations as she did, that much was obvious. Despite the fact that he had been cured of his diseases and that his life had been saved, he was always moody on the twelfth of October. The Day He Had Forgotten How To Breathe, as he termed it. He was just bitter because the asthma had never really gone away completely.
He didn’t really know how lucky he was.
“Oh, please, Cass, don’t even get me started…”