Avery Trent - Chapter 22

It was dark when Avery came to. He found himself on a cot, staring blearily up at the high stone ceiling of a narrow stone room. A faint stream of sunlight filtered in through a tiny barred window, lazily illuminating a wooden door to his right. His entire body was sore, and he lay confused for a moment before recalling the incidents prior to his lose of consciousness.

Jolting upright in a panic, he heard a series of cracks and a sharp, scorching pain coursed through his right leg. Gritting his teeth and groaning loudly, he instinctively curled up against the pain, but tumbled over the edge of the cot and slammed his face into the stony floor below. He groaned louder, leg almost numb with pain, as he peeled himself off the floor and clutched his face. His eyes were filled with tears now, but, glancing up at the cot, he noticed an ankle brace and chain securing him to it, as though his injuries weren't enough to keep him there.

“Great,” he mumbled, dropping his head and waiting for the horrible feelings in his leg and face to subside.

It dawned on him, as he laid gazing up at the window, that the sunlight outside was much dimmer than the lighting he remembered from before his blackout. He guessed that it must be nearing sunset, or that he'd been passed out all night and this was the sunrise. In either case, the farmer wouldn't be too happy. Hopefully Benny would know well enough to hide or run away.

The nerves in his leg had finally calmed down. He shifted around uncomfortably on the floor, trying to figure out a way to get up, but a strong prickling assaulted his leg with every wrong move and he eventually gave up. A jangling noise soon alerted him to somebody unlocking the door, and he craned his neck to inspect the visitor. As the door drifted open silently, it presented a tall, timid-faced girl, dressed in a dark blouse and with soft blue skin.

“Hello,” Avery said casually, staring up at her from the ground, ignoring the throbbing in his kneecap.

The girl gasped and jumped in shock, then set down the basket she carried and hastened to Avery's side. She struggled to help him back onto the cot, much to the dissatisfaction of his injuries. It took some trying, but they managed eventually; all the while Avery wincing and whimpering and the girl murmuring in a language he couldn't understand. He noted, distractedly, that it sounded simultaneously like and unlike the words of the farmer. Perhaps a different dialect, he considered between jabs of discomfort.

“Thank you,” he said, when he was finally sat on the cot correctly. “I mean, I was trying to get away, but this is fine too. This is good.” He leaned back and closed his eyes momentarily, hoping the stinging would disperse soon.

The girl looked at him wide-eyed and confused. Her face shifted as though she were trying to understand him, but it was to no avail. Avery began to wonder how common English was throughout the galaxy. So far he had encountered a somewhat inconsistent mix of aliens — and robots — who spoke it, and who didn't.

“Sorry, never mind,” he said.

The girl still stared blankly, but eventually turned and retrieved the basket she had put aside. Returning to the edge of his cot, she handed Avery an orange hunk of... bread? She then presented a tray, sitting it on his lap, and placed more strange food items on it. There were purples and yellows and reds. Avery thought some must be fruits or vegetables. One pile in a little bowl resembled blue scrambled eggs, sprinkled with a green dust. It all smelled quite wondrous, despite him having no clue what it was, or if it were safe for him to eat.

“Er, thank you,” he said, nodding to the girl.

Apparently nodding was universal, as she smiled and clapped her hands, then spoke some more of her language. The words were soft and pleasing, like vocal silk, and Avery wished he could just know what she was saying. He especially wished he could ask what was on the tray before him, or if she knew how extensive his injuries were.

Suddenly, another head poked through the doorway — a man, much shorter than the girl, but seemingly older. He had a broad face, skin a darker shade of blue, and wore a tunic. He cried something into the room and the girl spun around quickly, nearly dropping her basket. The man spoke some more, the girl nodded, and then they both made to leave.

As they began to pull the door shut behind them, Avery remembered once again what had happened before he'd passed out.

“Hold on!” he called. The door swung open again and the two peered in, expressions quizzical. He knew attempting communication was practically futile, but he had to try. “My friend,” he said, “where is he? The explosion-- is he alright?”

The man shrugged, then all of a sudden appeared sad. The girl's face was shadowed by sorrow as well. Avery's stomach tumbled and flipped as his heart sunk in his chest. The door closed again and locked with a soft click, leaving him with his thoughts, his pain, and his mysterious, bewildering breakfast.

* * *

It had been a few hours later, after dozing off, that Avery again awoke, this time to frustrated grumbles and a thudding against the door frame. Looking up, eyes bleary, he saw a large white blur attempting to push its way into his room. Rubbing his eyes and checking again, he found the blur to be--

“Jason! You're alive?” he cried, almost leaping out of his bed but quickly recalling his injured leg.

He resorted to just sitting up, though it wasn't much less painful.

“What the heck do you mean 'I'm alive'?” Jason said, dressed in a long white robe and too busy trying to maneuver through the doorway to look at him. “Of course I'm alive! Think I'm gonna go out in some dumb crash--? This doorway is broken, I swear!”

“The nurses, or doctor, or whoever they were – they kind of made it sound like you hadn't made it,” Avery explained. “Try turning left,” he offered as a side note.

“How could they 'make it sound' like anything if you can't understand a word they're saying?” Jason responded, ignoring Avery's suggestion. He paused. “You can't understand what they're saying, can you?”

Avery shook his head, suddenly feeling bad about not even knowing more than one Earth language and wondering how embarrassing a lack of bilingualism would be in a whole galaxy of different languages.

“Do you know what they're saying?” he asked.

Jason took a moment to respond, focusing all of his strength and attention on one big push, that finally tossed him through the doorway and up to the edge of Avery's cot.

“Woo! Take that, you dumb doorway! Nobody stands in the way of Jason Volks!” he said happily, turning in his wheelchair to flash some unrecognizable hand gestures at the door.

Avery assumed they weren't entirely polite gestures.

“What were you saying?” Jason asked, turning back to face him.

Avery now noticed, beneath the rim of Jason's robes, that both of his legs were in thick casts. He couldn't tell how high the casts climbed up his legs, but even what he could see didn't look good.

He frowned in concern.

“Oh, uh, can you understand their language?” he repeated, tearing his eyes from Jason's injuries.

“The blue guys? Yeah-- not really-- a little bit. I think they said 'food' at one point and I got really excited about that, but then they never came back.” He paused for a moment, thoughtfully. “Now that I think of it, maybe the food was for them...”

“If they never came back-- did you just let yourself out on your own?” Avery asked.

“Heck yeah, man! I'm not waiting for them to bring me food if it's already taking ten minutes! I'm going out there and looking for some myself!”

“And did you find any?”

“No... But I did find this sweet chair! Rolls around and all. Really gave my legs some relief.”

Avery's eye almost twitched at the thought of Jason walking or crawling around this unknown building on his broken legs before finding the chair.

“A-are your legs okay?” he asked.

“Never felt better, to be honest. I mean, it did hurt when they put these things on--” he clicked his casts together at the heel, making Avery wince, “-- but I didn't, like, cry or anything. Definitely didn't. Nope.”

“Mate,” Avery started, but was unsure of what to say to any of that.

“Oh whoa, you got one too?” Jason exclaimed, noticing Avery's own cast and poking it hard in the knee.

Avery screamed. Red-hot pain zipped through his body as nerves in his knee rioted, frantically shouted at his brain, and caused outright chaos.

Jason starred in horror.

“Dude, what the--?”

The doorway was suddenly filled with blue nurses, both male and female, and Jason was wheeled from the room before he could say any more. Avery heard him shout from somewhere down the corridor as they took him away – “How did you guys get this thing through that door so fast? That was amazing! Do you know how long I was stuck there trying to get in?”

Darkness gathered at the edges of his vision again, threatening another black out, but he fought to keep conscious. If he weren't so busy being in pain, he'd have been embarrassed beyond comprehension in front of all of the nurses, but they seemed more concerned with whether he was dying or not. One held what appeared to be some kind of defibrillator set. Another rushed in a table on wheels, decked out with all sorts of syringes, scalpels, and a mass of unrecognizable alien medical gear. The pain quickly drained away at the sight of those, as his brain filled with questions of these nurses' legitimacy. He really didn't want to become familiar with any of their medical tools either way.

“I'm- I'm okay now, guys,” he spluttered, earning an audience of confused looks. “N-no need for, y'know, all that stuff, haha.” He nodded to the table and the defibrillators and the large metallic machine someone else had just wheeled in.

One of the male nurses, tall and light blue, barked something at the others, and they all began to slowly file out, dragging their various emergency equipment with them. When the last nurse had left, aside from the tall man and the girl who had brought him breakfast earlier that morning, the man turned to him.

“What are you?” he asked, his voice strong and capable of kindness but displaying none at the moment.

Avery was flabbergasted both at the question and the fact that this man spoke English.

“I, er--”

“Yes?” the man prompted firmly.

Avery wasn't sure what to say. He recalled Jason's warning about people finding out he was human, back on the platform at Filthy Beau's. He also realized that he was missing his helmet once again – he wasn't quite sure how that had happened – but his face didn't seem to give his species away to the nurses. Perhaps the helmet wasn't as necessary as Jason had indicated.

“I'm, uh--”

All of a sudden Jason whipped back into the room, standing tall on his cast-bound broken legs, wheelchair nowhere to be seen.

“Is he okay?!” he cried, then saw that Avery was no longer screaming. “Oh, okay.”

Two more nurses appeared behind him and seized him by the shoulders, pulling his arms behind his back.

“Hey, hey! Sneak attacks are unfair!” Jason shouted at them, trying to rip free.

Avery just felt bad for Jason's legs.

“What is the meaning of this?!” the tall blue man said, voice booming in the tiny room.

One of the nurses restraining Jason began to speak in their alien language, but Jason butted in, shouting above him.

“I'll tell you what's going on! I escaped, that's what! Now what're you doing being all scary-looking in front of my friend, huh?”

“Your legs are broken, how did you--?”

“What are you doing to Avery?!”

“I simply asked what he is!” the blue man shouted louder than before.

His hair had somehow become incredibly disheveled in all the yelling, and he no longer appeared as respectable as Avery had first perceived him. His temper was clearly poorly-maintained.

“Avery, you didn't answer him, did you?” Jason hissed in a low whisper, as though no one else would be able to hear.

“No. You do know they can still hear--”

“Okay, good, don't tell them!” he interrupted, still whispering. “I've got a plan, just hang in there.”

He looked up at the angry blue man and squinted abhorrently, then glanced at the girl and winked. Suddenly he whipped his head back in an attempt to smack one of his captors in the face, but he only managed to pinch a nerve in his neck and thudded to the floor. The two nurses previously holding him hurriedly pulled away from Jason's body and starred on in a mix of confusion and shock.

“I should have worded my question differently,” the tall blue man said. “What the hell are the both of you? We tried to show you hospitality by nursing your injuries while the day of your execution drew on, but this is ridiculous!”

Avery's brain whirred in an attempt to come up with a reply, but his thoughts all stopped on the mention of their execution.

“Er, execution? Um, why are we being executed?” he asked, nervously glancing between Jason's body on the ground, still breathing thankfully, and the blue man.

“If you weren't being executed before, I'd demand your execution now. But as it stands, you are to be executed for your crimes against the town. Specifically, destroying the stone depiction of our treasured founder.”

“The-- the statue?” Avery asked, vaguely recalling what he had collided with on his space bike.

The blue man sighed and made an attempt to fix his hair with his hands.

“I suppose such brash crudeness must be expected of criminals, but yes, if you must disrespect us even further, the 'statue'.”

“But we didn't mean to destroy it! Don't we get a chance to defend ourselves?” Avery, for some reason, found himself looking pleadingly to the girl, but she remained silent.

“Defend yourselves when we had no chance to defend ourselves? I think not. The elders have decided and declared your fate. You shall die by next sunrise, or the sunrise after that if it happens to rain. Rain always messes up our executions.”

“But-- but Jason didn't even crash into the statue!” Avery blurted, then froze, unsure of why he'd bothered pointing that out.

He glanced over at the unconscious body again and realized that Jason had called him his friend. Perhaps that had been why, or maybe he just felt bad about Jason spending his final day in a coma. He couldn't figure out the true reason, but it didn't matter, he'd already made his decision to clear Jason's name.

“No, he crashed into another depiction of the wonderful founder. You're both to burn at the stake at sunrise — or next-next sunrise.”

Avery's heart sunk. That's where the rain comes in, then, he thought.

The blue man made a clicking sound to the nurses behind Jason, snatching their attention from the body in the doorway.

“Take them to the cages. They've caused enough havoc, they no longer deserve our hospitality.”

The nurses nodded and both hurried to leap over Jason and grab Avery, not wanting to be stuck with his dead weight, and seemingly fearing him as well. Avery didn't blame them – Jason could be terrifying. He shuddered, thinking again of how he'd walked on his broken legs.

One of the nurses was quicker and made it over the pile of robes, casts, and Jason, and roughly pulled Avery off the cot by his upper arm. The other nurse whined quietly as he held Jason under his arms and dragged him out of view.

The girl spoke up to the tall blue man in their native language and he responded in kind, face contorting angrily at whatever she had said to him. Avery wondered halfheartedly, wincing against the pain in his leg, whether the girl was attempting to defend him and Jason. The nurse dragging Avery paused for a moment to watch the confrontation, perhaps awaiting a changed order, but the tall man waved him on and he continued removing Avery from the room. The doorway fell immediately on a long narrow corridor, built with rough cement bricks and adorned sparsely with tiny, high windows. Jason, still twitching here and there along his body, and his own captor, looking terribly uncomfortable, were not far ahead.

Avery fought his body's yearning to blackout again as being forced to walk on his injured leg set fire to its interior. Soon enough both his leg and senses numbed, and he drudged along blankly behind the nurse. He considered making an escape attempt like Jason had, preferably with better results, but he wouldn't be able to fight off both nurses and he couldn't leave Jason alone with them. Instead he tried to keep track of where they were headed, but there were too many turns and his mind was beginning to go fuzzy. 

He soon tapered off into his thoughts absentmindedly and only barely noticed when the nurse released their ironclad grip on his arm, sending him tumbling into a dank, stony, iron-barred cell. The door slammed shut with a grating and a bang, and he was left alone with several questionable puddles, a pile of filthy hay to lay in, and Jason's unconscious body. Almost instantly after gazing over his new surroundings, he fell unconscious as well.