Rightly Considered Inconvenience

Chapter 10: The Inconvenience

A/N: THE LONG AWAITED CONCLUSION.
Shitty ending, I know. However, this is the only way I could stomach ending this story without being completely overwhelmed by saccharine and completely out of control tripe.
Why did I ever think this was a good idea?

I hope you enjoy/ed. Maybe I'll eventually get around to writing something else; however I can 100% guarantee that it won't be as fairytale as this BS. /overturns table and marches off into the sunrise

There was a sensation of floating. A light, airy sensation that was actually rather pleasant. Kind of like floating in water, without the water. She wasn't sure how long she drifted on nothing, but she didn't want to open her eyes. She felt that somehow, opening her eyes might ruin the experience somehow.

However, a vague feeling began to crawl over her skin. She was being watched. Claryssa opened her eyes.

She was standing on nothing. At least, it seemed like nothing, but in fact she was nowhere. Everywhere was just a flat gray; no sense of depth, nothing to show that it was a three dimensional space. It was slightly disconcerting. She tried to shift and found that it did nothing to help her coordination. She flailed about in a manner that would ordinarily turn her around, but it didn't really seem to do anything. There was nothing to use as reference. She started feeling somewhat queasy, and gripped her stomach as it started complaining. Maybe if she actually did vomit, she would be able to tell which way is down.

"Now, now," a voice said, "there's no need for that." She couldn't tell where the voice was coming from. It seemed omnipresent. Suddenly, as if to answer the question she was going to ask, a light filled the space in front of her. Claryssa's mind readjusted itself and she felt much better.

"Where am I?"

"In limbo, for the moment," the light answered.

"Limbo?"

"I just said that. You should listen better."

"So I died?"

"Yes."

Claryssa sighed and closed her eyes. Of course she was. She opened her eyes again and looked at the light. "Who are you?"

"Who do you think I am?" There was an amused lilt to the voice.

Claryssa stared at the light. "I have no idea," she admitted after a few minutes.

"Come now, you humans worship me, don't you? How do you not know who I am?"

"The Light?" Claryssa asked incredulously. "Really?"

The steady light fractured into waves; a chuckle. "Yes."

"So I died after that fight with the dragon, then." She was kind of sad about that. She wasn't able to join in the relief and happiness to have survied the ordeal.

"Dragon?" the Light sounded confused. Then it rippled again, but its laughter was somewhat subdued. "There was no dragon, child."

"What are you talking about?" Claryssa demanded, suddenly angry. "Of course there was, I was there, I saw him, I-"

"That wasn't real," the voice said softly. "That was all a hallucination. All of it was a hallucination. Your friends, they don't exist."

Claryssa froze. Her stomach turned to lead. Even the thought of all of that hardship and all the trials...all the friendship and love and everything, had all been a product of her imagination. She balked. "There's no way that's possible. I could see all of them, smell all of them, feel all of them. They had to be real!"

"I'm sorry, they aren't. Not really. To you they are, but in reality, they never existed. Not even in reality."

"Then how...?" The girl's voice was hopeless and she felt tears brimming up in her eyes.

"In Elwynn. Remember that troll in the tree? He killed you. He dropped a lightning bolt on you as soon as you looked up. The past few years, in your perspective, were a result of neurons firing in your brain while you were electrocuted."

She didn't really hear the explanation of it all, let alone comprehend it. How could everything have not been real? She ran through her memories in her mind, the memories that weren't real. She remembered laughing with Jen'zin at his stupid corny jokes, panicking at Thal trying to murder her, getting close with Gat...it defied logic that none of that would be real. It all seemed so real when it was happening, there was just no way.

"Did you never question why nothing horrible ever happened to you? Did you never question how everyone came to be your friend, or at least amicable towards you?"

The girl struggled with the questions. It was true that her companions were friendly with her quickly, but there were plenty who were trying to kill her or her friends. Nothing bad happened? Makzi was pretty bad, she thought. If she let herself, she could still remember how his touch made her skin crawl and his awful smell. The more she thought about it though, the more she came to realize that her experiences, on the whole, were not really that bad, and all of the bad experiences, although they seemed awful at the time, could really have been much, much worse.

"In reality, none of that would have happened. You would have been killed several dozen times over if you were to make a similar journey in your reality."

"How did I know all that stuff about certain things, then?" she fired back. "Stories Jen'Zin told, places I've never been; how did I know what they were and what they looked like?"

"Your brain holds a lot more information than you think," the Light responded. "Even if you do not consciously listen, it stores information. You may not be able to consciously tap into this information, either. But in your dreams, or your dying breath, the floodgates open and all sorts of things you never knew you knew come to the surface."

She struggled with that concept. She didn't want it all to be fake. Somehow, even though the friends she had made weren't real, it felt like she was betraying them somehow by believing they never existed. Every fiber of her wanted to cling to them, except for that one little piece in the back of her mind. That one little piece was enough for her to wonder why she was clinging to them so desperately, and what they would think of her if they could see her now.

"You accept it then, that it was all just a hallucination?" the Light asked. There seemed to be some strange gravity to the question.

"Yeah, I suppose," Claryssa admitted. Even though she really didn't want to. For some reason, the fact that all of what had happened didn't really happen seemed to cheapen it, like a story she had heard before and knew the hero wouldn't die; all the trials and brushes with death were revealed to be trivial or just a passing nod of acknowledgement to the existence of death, albeit not to death itself. "What now?"

"That depends on what you want to do."

The question seemed to stick in the girl's mind. What did she want to do? What were her options? Her first choice, the one that popped into her head first, would be to return to Outland, pick up with her friends where her mind left off, but she was sure that wasn't even an option. It was fake. What other options were there?

"What are my choices?" she asked, her voice somewhat querulous. She was not really happy about having to make a choice without knowing what the choices were. Those sorts of things were the type of things adults with shallow minds liked to pull to make themselves seem smart when someone usually pulled the wrong answer out of the blue.

"Well, you can either continue on to the other side," the voice said, "or choose to remain where you are."

"What's the difference?"

"With one choice, you continue the process of life and death. There's no telling where you will go or what will happen; it is unique to each person. It is a leap of faith, so to speak. Your other choice is to stay put, never changing, never moving, both in spirit and mind."

Interesting choices, Claryssa thought. She could pull a fate out of a grab-bag or just sit down like a petulant child and mope. The more she thought about it, the more the latter choice seemed revolting to her. Maybe if she hadn't mentally traversed the globe and then some, she would have seriously considered drowning in her own misery in stasis, but that was just an unimaginable concept to her at the moment. She had already spent too long sitting in one place in her mental mud hole in Zangarmarsh; whatever was in store for her beyond the veil had to be more exciting, at least, than sticking her head in the ground and pretending everything was okay. Besides, she reasoned to herself, she would just wind up miserable after a period of time and wish she had gone on just to end the tedium. She wasn't sure that she would get a second opportunity to choose.

She opened her mouth to answer, but the Light had already started to glow intensely, filling the vaults of her mind with a shimmering roar that obliterated thought.

"You have chosen your path," the voice said, piercing through the roar. Without any further fanfare, the Light grew until it enveloped her completely, blinding her and throwing her off balance again. She floated in white, and her sense of time went out the window. How long had she been there? A minute? An hour? A day? A lifetime?

She eventually felt the sense of settling, lying down on her back. It was comfortable, and she felt as though she could lie there forever. She was still being blinded though, even through her closed eyelids. She grumbled and she raised her arm over her face to try to block the light. She sighed in relief as her eyes relaxed in the darkness under her arm.

She stayed like that for a few minutes until her brain rather sluggishly registered that fact, along with her position. She was laying in a rather fluffy bed, a bar of bright sunshine cast across her face. Why was she in a bed? What happened? She tried her best to try to get her brain together, but it stubbornly resisted her efforts, even though she was thinking just fine before she was engulfed by the Light. It was baffling, and distracted her even more from trying to sort things out.

Claryssa tried to shift her other arm, but found she couldn't. A brief moment of panic set in, and she wondered for a moment if she didn't have an arm at all, or it was paralyzed. After the moment subsided, she realized there was instead a weight on it. She removed the arm covering her eyes and winced slightly in the light. She groped out with that hand to find the weight on her arm, and found someone's head, covered in thick hair.

At her touch, the head twitched and moved. She squinted and tried to look at whoever it was, but that damned sun. There was a great deal of shuffling and the sound of a curtain being drawn, and the bar of light was cut off. Her eyes tried to adjust again, this time to darkness. More shuffling, and then the touch of someone's hand against her cheek. She jumped, and focused on the person the hand belonged to.

It was Gat.

She stared at him for a while, completely incredulous. He cocked his head and started to look rather irritated.

"You okay?" he asked finally, waving a hand in front of her face. She blinked, and her mind struggled with her current company's existence.

"You're real?" she asked finally, trying not to sound insulting. "Like, you exist?"

Irritation flashed over the troll's face. He pulled a small dagger out of his ankle wrap and gave her hand a swift poke. She jumped and gave a small cry of surprise at the pain, and clutched her hand to her chest. A small rivulet of blood poured out of the small cut. The troll grabbed her hand, wiped the blood away and started bandaging it up. "Dat be real enough for ya?" he asked, not looking at her.

She watched him finish up the bandage work, her lower lip quivering and tears starting to roll down her cheeks. He glanced up and looked surprised, then apologetic. He opened his mouth to apologize. Claryssa instead reached over with her other hand, took a hold of one of his tusks and pulled him forward so she could wrap both arms around his neck and start bawling into his jugular.

The troll was completely unprepared for the action, and rather awkwardly tried to position himself better and put a tentative arm around the girl's shoulders. "What's this?" he asked, rather wary.

She was about to come pouring out with the whole thing about the Light and her being dead, but stopped herself. He was here. Who cared why? She had been told that moving on was different for everyone, and completely unpredictable. Maybe this was simply her own private heaven, and she wasn't about to ruin it. She laughed despite her crying.

"I had this awful dream that none of you existed," she muttered.

He chuckled, moved her blankets off of her, and pulled her into his lap. He leaned back in the chair he was sitting in and hugged her tightly.

"Dat's a dumb dream ta be havin'," he said, leaning his cheek against her head. She laughed.

"It is, isn't it?"

The two of them sat there for a while as Claryssa's sobs quieted, each enjoying being in the other's arms for entirely different reasons. It was peaceful, enjoyable. She found herself wondering how her mind even put her into a relationship with him in the first place, but being in his arms like this made her completely not care. She doubted she could ever find a human guy who was this damn comfortable.

The girl dozed in the troll's arms for a while, becoming increasingly aware of how drained she felt, and how her limbs ached slightly as if they haven't moved in a while. She was about to ask Gat how long she had been asleep when the door on the far side of the room opened, and noise immediately exploded into the small room.

Jen'Zin had come in to check on his brother, and with a cry of delight at seeing Claryssa out of bed, ran into the room and threw his arms around his brother and the girl. Claryssa felt his tusk graze her neck and chills ran up her spine at nearly dying-again. The shaman, with a surprising display of strength, lifted the two in his arms up into a giant bear hug. Gat growled and his legs fought for a solid footing on the floor and chair to no avail. Claryssa was sure one of her ribs was going to pop from the awkward positioning and from a combination of pressure from Jen'Zin and Gat's thrashing against the unwelcome proximity to his brother.

The shaman finally let them go, and the pair crashed back into the chair, which almost slid out from under Gat. The rogue glared at his brother, obviously ruffled. Claryssa coughed and wheezed a few times, checking the integrity of her chest cavity. She looked up at the beaming troll.

"It's nice to see you, too," she muttered. Jen'Zin's grin got, if possible, even wider.

"Ya been out so long, we were worried dat ya' turned into a vegetable," he said, taking her head between his hands and pressing his forehead against hers happily. If there was any worry for her before, it had completely evaporated. He let her go and looked at her, beaming.

"How long have I been out?" she asked, now that she had an opportunity to.

"Two and a half weeks," a voice from the door said. Bhazrael had entered the room as well. Mostly. He was leaning cross-armed against the door frame. He stepped into the room all the way. "The fucking nurse bitch won't let more than three people in at a time," he said to Jen'Zin. "The others wanted to all barge in as soon as you started screaming. She originally was only going to allow two, but I convinced her otherwise."

The elf didn't have the wings or purple fel tint to his eyes from before. Maybe things were different here? Or maybe he simply found them an inconvenience. That was a better answer. Bhaz was never one to worry about what other people thought of him, but he was one to take the easy route.

Claryssa mulled over the time she'd been out. Two and a half weeks? No wonder she felt stiff and sore. She rested her head against Gat's shoulder, thinking about what had happened in her hallucinations. She knew what had happened in her hallucination, but it didn't quite feel the same. Perhaps because she knew that what had happened before was completely fake and somehow had developed a disconnect to it.

"What happened?" she asked.

"We killed a dragon an' you passed out," Jen'Zin replied. His response was only moderately unhelpful. It at least let her know that the Light had been nice enough to plop her right back where she was in regards to the progression of her hallucinations. "Why, whatchu think happened?"

She shook her head. "I had some weird dreams," she said. Gat put a comforting hand on her hip. "Just a little disoriented is all," she said, stifling a yawn. A thought came to her. "How is Vilzek?" she asked. Everyone suddenly looked a bit uncomfortable.

"He's still alive," Bhazrael said. "He's just missing an arm. He says its no big deal, and it's probably time for him to officially retire anyway. His dragon is in much worse shape. There's doubts if he'll ever be able to fly again."

A harried-looking draenei nurse came bustling into the room and started herding her two standing guests out of the room, saying the patient needed rest. Claryssa was definitely getting groggy, and felt it would take her a few days to get her body moving again.

That is, if this wasn't all some cruel joke.

The nurse turned the lash of her tongue on Gat, berating him for removing the patient from bed prematurely and to replace her at once. Claryssa waved her off.

"No, no," she muttered sleepily, "I want him here." She patted his chest and nuzzled into his neck. "I don't wanna go back to bed, I'm okay with being here."

The nurse clucked some more, but the girl stoutly refused to leave her current position, and the nurse finally relented with the provision that the rogue place her in bed after she fell asleep. Gat gave her a noncommittal wave, and the draenei strode out of the room and nearly slammed the door behind her.

"Everyone's got such a stick up their asses," Claryssa muttered, half asleep. She went to wrap an arm around his neck but he stopped her and lifted her to put her in bed. She struggled weakly, getting angry. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

"I'm not goin' anywhere," he said. She sourly let herself get put in bed, but then he started to climb in with her. She happily made room for him and then snuggled up to him as close as she could. "She said ta put you in bed, but didn' say I couldn' join ya."

"Sound reasoning."

Even if it was just a temporary cruel trick being played on her, and she would be cast into oblivion as soon as she fell asleep, she didn't mind her last sensations being against someone she loved. If she woke up, even better. If she did wake up, she promised herself she wouldn't take this place for granted. She could still bleed and hurt, after all; Gat had proven that. But what the hell, she could be happy here.