Note: Yeah, sorry, this is going to be no one's favorite either lol I know, no one actually cares about Porlyusica. If it helps any, this is still really a character study of Gray, specifically from a different perspective than the normal guild. But anyway, I'm surprisingly fond of it. Porlyusica is a fun character, actually lol

Part 1

When the boy comes stomping up to Porlyusica's home and bangs on the door like he has any right to disturb the blessed silence, she almost chases him right back out. She has come to learn that Fairy Tail mages always bring trouble with them and are significantly more irritating than the average human. But if she turns the brat away and he tattles, Makarov might come storming down to wheedle and cajole. She has no desire to be sweet-talked into babysitting a guild of brats by that old geezer.

"Make it quick," she snaps, cracking the door open just enough for him to squeeze through but not enough to make it a comfortable fit. If he's bothered by the inhospitable welcome, he doesn't show it.

"I've been feeling kind of off for a few weeks," he explains. He's looking around curiously at the bottles lining the shelves, and Porlyusica seethes silently. She wants to tell him to mind his own business and keep his eyes to himself, but she holds her tongue so that he gets on with his story and doesn't waste any more of her time. "I'm not sure exactly when it started. I think maybe after this one job we went on where Natsu–"

"For the love of all things holy!" she bursts out, her resolution cracking apart at the seams. "Could you be any slower?"

He has the grace to look a little chagrined. "Sorry," he mumbles.

"Just get on with it. I don't need your life story. Just give me your symptoms already. I'm a healer, not a therapist."

So he clears his throat and rattles off a list of symptoms: dizziness, two brief but unsettling blackouts, odd muscle pains, headaches, occasional bouts of slippery control with his magic, delayed reaction times and random muscle spasms like he doesn't quite have full control of his limbs anymore. Porlyusica draws some blood, runs some tests, checks his vitals, inspects him for any magical abnormalities.

"It's probably not a big deal," the boy says as he's poked and prodded. "Just… I've never had those kinds of symptoms before. I thought maybe they'd pass if I gave it a few days, but I think maybe they're getting worse. I wanted to make sure I didn't, like, get hit with a curse or something."

Personally, Porlyusica is inclined to agree that this is a false alarm. She suspects that he's exaggerating the unfamiliar symptoms, either because he's a lying human or because he has no way of measuring how normal or abnormal they might be. Over the years, she has come to realize that she can't rely solely on the patient's perception of their illness. They can't view their own symptoms objectively and don't have the proper training to know how strange or dangerous they might be. It hurts, it's unfamiliar, they feel bad, so obviously something is wrong and it must be a big deal.

Still, the boy doesn't seem particularly concerned. He has the immortal nonchalance of youth. Young people, she thinks with a sniff. They always make everything far more dramatic than it needs to be or brush it all off because they're young and invincible and can just take a spoonful of medicine at bedtime to chase off their ills. Young mages are the worst, particularly a bunch like Fairy Tail that has survived the impossible over and over again.

It's better than having a blubbering mess on her floor, though. She hates the overdramatic ones the most.

Thankfully, the boy senses her foul mood and sits quietly while she makes her examination. She notes a couple slight abnormalities in the physical exam, but nothing too noteworthy.

Then she retrieves the test results.

She blinks down at them once, twice. She studies the samples with a frown and examines the data gleaned from them again.

She draws another blood sample.

"More tests?" the boy sighs, but falls quiet again.

She runs the tests again. The results are the same.

"Well?" the boy asks expectantly. He darts an impatient glance out the window, where the sun has peaked and is now softening towards evening. He has been stuck here for hours waiting for the tests to run their course, and even humans' patience wears thin eventually.

Porlyusica hesitates.

"Gray," she says, because she seems to recall that being his name.

He looks back at her, eyes wide and clear and innocent. Ignorant. Blissfully so.

She has never had trouble speaking her mind before, but now the words catch in her throat.

How do you tell a child that he's dying?

There's poison in his cells, eating them from the inside out. There's something in his brain, slowly shutting his body down one piece at a time. It will shut down his muscles, break down his bones, eat away at his magic, slow his nervous system, and, eventually, stop his heart.

"Degeneration," she explains with clinical detachment.

The boy—Gray—takes the news stoically. His dark eyes are shadowed, his expression shuttered. She eyes him cautiously, anticipating hysterics, but it seems he's still in shock. She hopes he's gone by the time that wears off. She can't abide hysterics.

"How long?" he asks.

"A while. It's been festering for a long time. Either genetic or a mutation or something provoked by magic. Possibly a combination of–"

"No," he interrupts. "How long do I have?"

She knew that, of course. Maybe it was selfish of her to make him say the words because she didn't want to.

"Six months, maybe? Possibly a little longer. Your deterioration has been gradual and therefore undetected this far, but it seems to be becoming more rapid now and has already made strides spreading throughout your body. This is a very rare condition, so I don't have a lot to go on. But I can make something to alleviate the symptoms and slow your deterioration. We could extend your life by a few months, maybe."

He stares out the window, eyes distant and mouth pressed into a tight-lipped frown. "Okay," he says finally, when the silence is growing too long even for Porlyusica. "I should go."

"Come back next week." She drifts across the room and pulls the door open for him. "I'll have something for you by then."

"Okay," he says as he slips past her. Then, almost as an afterthought, "Thank you."

Porlyusica shuts the door behind him, but she tweaks the curtain aside just a hair to watch as he slowly walks away, hands shoved deep in his pockets and eyes fixed on the ground. She wonders how it feels to thank someone for handing you a death sentence.

It's unfortunate, but she is not prone to sympathy. Everyone dies sooner or later. He will just be sooner.

But she does go hunting for any text or medical treatise that might shed some light on his mysterious condition. She does not believe it can be fixed, and did not offer such a pale hope to him. The damage is too pervasive already. Irreversible. But maybe she can do something smaller.

She finds relevance in only the most obscure medical tomes. She finds nothing but speculation and theory on the causes, but she pulls bits and pieces together to outline the coming decline and formulate remedies. They will be experimental, but she has reason to believe that they will help slow his deterioration at least a little.

She sets aside her potions and projects and hobbies to work around the clock brewing medicines, tweaking and experimenting. They will still be here in a year or two. Gray will not.

She collects an array of remedies for his individual symptoms and fiddles with concoctions that might just prolong his life a little if they're lucky.

Occasionally, she takes a moment to wonder why she bothers. Why put her life on hold to scramble around in the dirt and throw together a collection of half-baked concoctions that may or may not help anything? It's not like it will change anything in the end. She's a healer, meant to heal people, save people. This boy is beyond saving.

But as a healer, she will work at healing as long as there's a body alive to heal. Healing is all about nudging the frail human body a little further from death when it veers too close. He is nosediving, but she can nudge him back. Maybe it will count for something.

Maybe not.

Maybe it doesn't matter either way.

The boy returns exactly one week later, face blank and eyes fathomless as he listens to her instructions and watches the half-dozen bottles clink together. He asks no questions, displays no emotion. The shadows in his night-dark eyes could swallow the world, and it seems a tragedy that such eyes could be worn by a child.

The Fairy Tail children had to grow up quickly and have faced danger and heartache and hardship more often than they ought, but they are still children. They still burn bright with the hope of the young and innocent. They go into their battles believing they will walk out again on the other side, victorious.

These are the eyes of a child faced with his own sobering mortality. They hold the recognition of a battle that can't be won. He is a child who has never truly seen the dark side of the world until now.

He asks no questions and offers few comments. Porlyusica doesn't press him, because he must walk this path on his own and she doesn't much care for chitchat anyway. He eyes the colored potions like they're poison, thanks her, and carts them away.

"Come by once a week for now," she says as he heads out the door. "We'll see how you react to the medicines and tweak things accordingly. Once we get your regimen figured out, we can probably scale back to once every two weeks or so."

He only nods, but he shows up at her cottage the next week, and every Saturday thereafter like clockwork. The shadows are gone from his eyes as if they'd never been there at all, like the clouds have parted and the gloaming lifted.

And he never shuts up. Suddenly he's full of questions, comments, suggestions. What does this do? Would it help to up the dose of that? Could she find something to combat the nausea from this one? Is there an option with fewer side effects? Is there anything she can do about this symptom? If she adds more potions, would it help? Does he really need to take that one? Can she make this one taste better?

The last is so ridiculous that she loses her patience entirely and whacks him with a broom. She misses the days when he was quiet and sullen.

Maybe it should be encouraging that he's taking an interest and involving himself in his welfare instead of spiraling into darkness and depression, but Porlyusica is not reassured.

The one question he never asks is if she might find a way to cure him. Find a way to make him live. But his eyes are fever-bright with determination, and something else. Hope.

She pities him.

Porlyusica does what she can, experiments with medicines and dosages, lectures him on taking a break and acknowledging that he's ill instead of running around and pushing past his limits. But there is only so much she can do, and she has other patients.

Like Makarov, who is just as bad about running around like a spry young man instead of acknowledging his age and frailty. She visits the guild on occasion to check up on him or when he's not feeling well enough to make the trek out to her house.

It's on one of these visits, while she's chewing him out in the infirmary for overexerting himself yet again and ignoring the chest pains that have become more common as of late, that she hears an uproar out in the main guild hall.

She levels Makarov with a flat look. "Your brats are the loudest creatures I've ever had the displeasure of knowing."

He frowns, brows drawing together. "Something's wrong."

Porlyusica doesn't have enough experience to tell cries of distress from the normal raucous hubbub of merriment, but she supposes the master of the guild ought to know. She follows him out at a more sedate pace, not particularly concerned by guild drama. Her heart sinks as she realizes the concerned ring of mages is gathered around Gray, who is sitting on the ground.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he grumbles, waving them off. "I just tripped."

"You did not just trip," declares the red-haired girl with the glass eye, another former patient of Porlyusica's. "You passed out. Again."

"That's the same excuse you used on our job…" the blonde of the team adds. "I don't think you're okay." Her eye catches on the healer hurrying over, and she says, "Maybe Porlyusica can check you over while she's here."

Gray follows her gaze and groans. Porlyusica wonders if he'd be so nonchalant if she hadn't kept her visit on the down-low to avoid unnecessary human contact and he'd known she was here.

"Job?" she demands. "Were you fighting? I thought I told you to stop overexerting yourself. And you!" she adds, turning on his team with a fierce scowl. "What are you thinking, letting him go on your ridiculous fighting jobs in his condition?"

They blink back at her with big doe eyes, injured and innocent and politely puzzled.

"Condition?" asks the redhead. "What do you mean, condition?"

"Being stupid isn't a condition," the pink-haired dragon slayer adds with a snort.

Porlyusica stares at them in disbelief, wondering how they could be so dreadfully stupid, but then she catches Gray's wince and the way his gaze is fixed to the floor and gets an inkling of a suspicion.

"You haven't told them?"

The boy picks himself up off the floor gingerly. His hands shake slightly as he dusts his clothes off—the tremors have been resistant to her remedies.

"Does it really matter?" he asks shortly.

She thinks it does. Maybe not for someone like her who avoids companionship and finds solace in solitude, but for someone like him who has friends and thrives in the social sphere and could have the greatest support system in the world. Going it alone for weeks has probably not been good for his sanity. She respects handling oneself by oneself, but she thinks this boy could use someone to lean on.

Also, it would take away his cover for continuing to go on these ridiculous fighting jobs that she's convinced are shortening his lifespan. If she's putting all that time and effort into treating him, the least he could do is behave himself.

"Told us what?" asks the blonde.

The whole guild is drifting in, looking at the boy like he might be about to shatter and at Porlyusica like she has all the answers. The boy scowls at the ground and hunches his shoulders up around his ears, but she is not nearly moved enough by pity to keep his secrets for him.

"That he's dying."

If he could handle the news—if he had to handle the news—then she sees no reason to soften the blow for his friends any more than she did for him.

Everyone blinks at her in disbelief, confusion. The dragon slayer starts laughing, the sound echoing and bouncing off the silent walls in loud peals. He catches sight of Gray's face and stops abruptly.

"What do you mean?" asks one of the other girls in a wavering voice. The drunk one.

"Exactly what I said."

Porlyusica's voice is clipped and short as she fills them in with more detail than necessary, refusing to gloss over the ugliest bits. She is too angry to bother holding back. She is angry at them for being too stupid to see what has been staring them in the face all along. Angry that Gray has hidden everything and forced her to spill his secrets for him. Angry that she has to say such ugly things at all. Angry that she is the one who will have to fight for him until the bitter end when there's no real hope. Angry at the world, maybe, because it isn't fair.

And then she watches in stoic silence as Makarov's brats cry and beg and question.

"Surely there has to be something we can do?"

"Can't you save him?"

"Gray, why didn't you tell us?"

Porlyusica, unmoved by their grief or the boy's discomfort, avoids Makarov's gaze and leaves. They can figure themselves out without her help.

Even avoiding the guild, she's made painfully aware that everything changes after that.

Wendy tries everything she can think of to heal anything she can, but she's only healing symptoms rather than problems. And even those are a tangled enough mess, with their roots twisted deep in his brain and throughout his body, that there's only so much that can be done to tease them apart. Other guild members are reading through books or searching out charms and spells to try. The dragon slayer and his cat run off again and again, searching for the thing that will be a miracle cure. She's not surprised by that one—that boy doesn't seem like the type to sit at the foot of a deathbed and hold someone's hand. Unlike the girls, who barely leave Gray's side. The blonde follows him around like a kicked puppy, and the redhead accompanies him to just about every appointment he keeps with Porlyusica and asks far too many questions.

There is always someone walking with him, checking in on him at his apartment, monitoring his symptoms, watching to make sure he can't sneak out on jobs. She's not sure he's even been allowed out on small jobs within the city limits, or that he can walk the length of a street without someone following. And as his symptoms continue to worsen, as his limbs shake and his magic slips away from him and he collapses without warning in the invisible throes of the seizures rattling his brain, his leash tightens ever further.

He has grown quiet and resigned again. The more his friends fuss over him, the quieter he gets. The more questions the redhead asks about his medication, the less he seems to care.

Porlyusica sees them smothering him. She would be driven absolutely insane. But maybe this is the way it's supposed to be, when you have friends to worry about you. Maybe it's a good thing and he just hasn't quite realized it yet.

Still, she's starting to see why he didn't broadcast this.

The harder his friends fight for him and the more determined they are to win, the darker the shadows in his eyes deepen, snuffing the hope right out.

"Oh, just wait outside!" she exclaims finally when the redhead asks one question too many at the weekly check-up.

"But–"

"Shoo! You're smothering the boy. He can fill you in after. Or if you don't trust him to be honest about it, I will. Now go!"

The boy manages to keep the relief off his face until his friend is out the door. "Thanks. I can't even breathe without them freaking out anymore."

Porlyusica fixes him with a hard look. "I don't care. That's between you and them. But now that she's gone, you can answer my questions honestly without sugarcoating everything. I expect the truth. The whole truth."

She has quickly discovered that she will not get the answers she needs while his friends are lurking around. No matter how dark the shadows in his eyes or how deeply carved the lines of pain in his face, his smile is always the brightest and most plastic when they're hovering. She is not oblivious enough to have missed how his answers have become constrained and overly optimistic. When she asks how he's feeling, he does not say that his legs gave out underneath him in the shower or that he blacked out for a few minutes the day before. He says, 'fine'.

That might be all well and good for reassuring panicky guildmates, but it's the most useless kind of answer for a healer to figure out what's going on with your insides.

The boy hesitates but then relents. "I think the seizures are getting worse, and the numbness is still spreading. The medicines make me sick and tired and hazy. I can't focus on anything."

She hums in acknowledgement. His seizures are the invisible kind that rattle around in his brain to disrupt his thoughts and short-circuit his consciousness, but they're no less deadly for the lack of theatrics. Each one is damaging his brain further. And with the degeneration of his muscles and nerves, he's losing more and more sensation in his body, starting with the extremities and moving towards his heart. There is nothing she can do to stop this, but she makes a note to look for another option for preventing the seizures. Those are the root of a whole host of problems.

"I'll see what I can do," she says. "But honestly, what were you expecting? Medications have side effects. It's better than not treating the symptoms and dying earlier."

He's quiet for a moment as he looks out the window, eyes misty and distant. "Yeah," he says. "Of course."

Porlyusica eyes him but shrugs it off. She's not prone to sympathy and, honestly, she suspects that's the way he likes it.

From that point forward, anyone accompanying the boy to his appointments is made to wait restlessly outside the door. These meetings are sacrosanct, a communion between physician and patient. He's dying—the least they can do is give him a little privacy from time to time.

Nothing particularly noteworthy takes place during these brief handfuls of minutes. Porlyusica examines him, runs tests if she feels the need, assesses his collection of medications, and tracks his ever-changing—ever-worsening—constellation of symptoms. And he, for his part, obediently feeds her candid, painfully honest accounts of his physical complaints, any changes he's noticed, anything he wants her to check into. They talk little, exchanging no niceties and speaking only in terms of symptoms and illness and dosage. It's a transaction.

He says little after providing his update, just watches her silently with night-dark eyes that track her every move as she moves to and fro. Sometimes they are sharp and alert and catch the light to glimmer like spilled ink, like a hint of stars in a moonless sky. Sometimes they are dull and disinterested, or hazy and filmed over. That's when she knows the pain is especially bad or the small seizures shivering inside his skull are slowing his thoughts to a drizzle and making it impossible to focus. Or it could be the medicine, sometimes. He complains about it from time to time.

"It's better than dying," Porlyusica says curtly.

He nods and stays quiet and doesn't point out that he is dying either way. He never smiles.

Not until she shoos him outside again and he rejoins his friends. Then, suddenly, he finds his smile and words and good cheer again. Sometimes it upsets his friends more. Sometimes it reassures them until they can pretend he's not so bad after all, that he has time, and they can smile a little too and go back to almost normal for a few minutes.

He is a master deceiver, wearing his smiles like pretty feathered masks. It seems unnecessarily cruel of him to shut out his friends so completely and feed them spun-sugar illusions. But it's heartbreakingly sweet, in a way, that he will sacrifice so much of himself in a misguided effort to protect them from the darkness that clouded his eyes that first day. Maybe it is necessarily cruel.

Porlyusica watches from afar, then shakes her head and shuts the door after him. She has other duties and projects to occupy her once he leaves, and she need not fuss and worry over him like the rest. She does not mean to get tangled up with him. It's business as usual, and she prefers it that way. She might have taken a proprietary sort of interest in him, but he is just another experiment, just another nameless subject in a long line of patients who have knocked at her door.

She watches the last weeks of his short life slip between his fingers like sand with as much detachment as she can muster.

He lasts a few months before collapsing in a fit of violent seizures outside the guild hall. When Porlyusica arrives, hurrying after the panicked flying cats, he is still writhing around on the ground in the throes of a grand mal seizure. This is new. He hasn't suffered this type of seizure before, and she can't quite make sense of it happening now. His vitals have been depressed and his symptoms worsening as time wears on, but this is a curveball of a different variety altogether.

She does what she can, shooing the others back and trying to make sure he doesn't hurt himself with all his thrashing. It's only when he finally stills that she can sit back and let out a breath and clear her head. And as he's hazily swimming back to consciousness, the answer slaps her in the face.

His friends crowd around in worry and relief, but she sees red.

"Back off," she snarls. "I need to examine him." And, upon seeing their mutinous expressions, "In private."

She grabs his arm in a death grip and yanks him to his feet, where he sways and blinks at her blearily. She drags him inside the building and back to the infirmary, heedless of his shuffling steps and unsteady gate. It's not really a good idea to jerk him about so much when he should be recovering, but she's livid and figures he's dying anyway.

She slams the door shut behind them in a fit of pique and shoves him down on one of the cots, where he curls up like a child. His eyes are still hazy, but wary now as he watches her.

"How long have you been off your medicine?" she demands.

The groggy cloud softening his features melts away and he darts a glance at the door. "I'm not–"

"I did you the courtesy of not bringing this up in front of your friends so that they didn't flip out. Now do me the courtesy of not lying to my face."

He slumps back over in the bed. Stupid he might be, but not stupid enough to miss the very real threat in her words. She could still drag the truth out in the open, and his friends would freak out appropriately and never allow him room to breathe again.

"I take them sometimes," he mumbles. "Just…"

"Sometimes isn't good enough," she snaps back. "If you're skipping doses, they won't be nearly as effective."

"I know! Just… They make me feel awful and my mind gets so fuzzy that it's hard to focus on anything."

"At least you're alive."

"Barely! I don't feel like myself and I'm too miserable and disoriented to do anything and…" He trails off and takes a deep breath as his eyes cloud over again. "I appreciate it, I really do, but sometimes I hardly feel like I'm alive at all. Sometimes I'd rather just live a few days with a clear head as myself than a few weeks in a fog without the energy to do anything at all."

Porlyusica can't say she really understands him—she thinks she would do anything to fight for more time, because the time they do have is limited and precious—but she thinks she can sympathize with his impossible plight. A dangerous and undesirable feeling.

"Death is very permanent," she says. "At least if you're alive, you still have the chance to be with your silly human friends and think and feel and be. You'll have all the time in the world to be dead after. Take advantage while you can. You're too young to be giving up on your life so easily."

He stares at the wall for a few more seconds. "Yeah," he says dully. "I guess."

She eyes him sidelong, thinking he doesn't sound very convincing. "You will take your medicine."

He closes his eyes and looks like a child wilted in the bed, resignation heavy in his voice as he says, "Yes."

Porlyusica nods once. She will make sure of it.

She visits him more frequently now and always makes him take his medicine while she's there. As long as she's satisfied that he's taking his potions, she holds her peace and doesn't enlist his friends to monitor him.

But although his precipitous decline slows once he's taking his medication regularly again, it does not stop. Over the next few weeks, he grows progressively weaker until he begins struggling with the simplest things. His magic is slippery and dangerous, leaking between his fingers in wild bursts of power when he tries to summon it. At first he tries to work with it more, searching for a way to keep it under control and mold it with his hands again, but Makarov pulls him aside and speaks quietly while watching him with sad eyes, and after that he does not try again. And with the loss of his magic, he also gives up on pestering his team to take him out on jobs and no longer even wanders town alongside them. His existence is confined to his small apartment and the guild hall and, every once in a while, Porlyusica's cottage.

But that would have happened sooner rather than later even if his spirit wasn't broken. His muscles give out seemingly at random, sending him stumbling or falling or dropping what he carries when his fingers loosen unexpectedly. The numbness creeping from his fingers and toes up his limbs is not helping matters on that front. His nerves decay rapidly alongside his weakening muscles. Porlyusica suspects it can be traced back to the dozens of small seizures rattling around his skull every day. More frequently, he blanks out in the middle of a sentence and then blinks at them stupidly, unable to remember what he was saying. Twice more, he falls into full-body seizures, although not nearly as bad as the first.

The medicines make him tired and groggy and nauseous, and Porlyusica can see the fog clouding his eyes. His friends don't know what to do with the zombie he's become, although they never give up on him. They never abandon him or stop searching for a miracle cure to save him. Still, they are mere shadows of their former selves, quiet and grim-faced, exhausted and teary-eyed.

And then, finally, the boy is put on bed rest. His friends and guildmates come often to visit him and there is always someone in the next room or at his bedside, but he spends most of his time curled in his bed and rarely summons the energy and strength to venture out of his apartment.

As much as it pains his guild to see him like this, they accept it because they have no choice. With constantly losing snatches of time and toppling over and occasionally collapsing in seizures, it's not safe for him to be wandering about anymore. Especially not by himself.

Porlyusica still kicks them out when she visits—and she visits more frequently than ever these days—but they never go far. They wait just outside the door, curled up on his worn sofa. When she leaves, they're instantly pushing past her to get at him again. The blonde brings stories to read him, the redhead constantly brings food to tempt him despite his nonexistent appetite and ever-present nausea, the dragon slayer chatters brightly nonstop as if to distract him, and the blue cat snuggles up against his side as comfort. Other guild members come and go with gifts and comfort of their own, but those four never seem to stray far. They're all looking for a way to cheer him up, coax life back into his eyes, give him a reason to keep fighting.

Porlyusica leaves as soon as she can after the check-ups, barely staying long enough to update his worried friends on his condition. She doesn't want to see their depressingly futile attempts to make him okay.

And then one day, the boy holds up his hand when she tries to hand him one of his medications from the bedside table.

"I'm done," he says with a sigh. "No more medicines."

She scowls. "I thought we already went over–"

"Look, I've tried. And I've had a lot of time to think over the last few months…when my brain isn't too scrambled, anyway. I can't do this anymore. The meds always have me in a fog, and… I don't know that I want to keep dragging out the inevitable. It's so miserable."

"Better miserable and alive than happy and dead," she said tartly.

"Maybe, but… This could drag out my life for what, a month or two? And during that time, I'll be miserable and half-awake and in such a fog that I barely even know myself half the time. I'd rather live half that time alert and able to be myself than double it as an empty shell. I can't appreciate what time I have when I'm only half-conscious, and I can't make the most of it with my friends. I need this. I need to be alive or dead, not stuck somewhere in the middle."

She regards him for a long time and then puts the bottle back down. "Well, I'm not going to force-feed you if you're going to kick up a fuss."

Relief flashes across his face, and a tension she hadn't noticed seeps from his body. He has obviously prepared himself for a fight and is relieved she hasn't given him one. But she doesn't doubt that he would have fought tooth and nail if she had disagreed. Despite everything, he still has a glint of steel in his eyes.

"Thanks," he sighs. The steely determination fades from his eyes, replaced by something anxious and uncertain. Something a little bit small and lost and overwhelmed. He darts a glance at the closed door across the room. "Please don't tell anyone. They wouldn't understand, and I don't want them to worry more. I don't want them to think I've given up."

Porlyusica is not sure she agrees with his choice, but she respects it. She remembers the steel in his eyes, the spark that hasn't yet been snuffed out by the pain and fugue. No, she doesn't think he's giving up. Not exactly. He still has some fight left in him—he's just choosing what battles to fight with the last of his remaining strength.

But he's right—that is not something the eternally hopeful warriors of the guild would have an easy time understanding.

"I won't be able to do much for you," she warns. "I can brew a couple natural remedies that aren't as potent, but they won't be able to do much more than ease the pain a little."

"That's okay," he says quietly. "That's good enough."

Porlyusica nods once. "Fine," she agrees.

She tries to avoid his friends as she leaves, but they catch her as usual. Today it's the blonde and Wendy. Perhaps the others are out on foolhardy quests again.

"How is he?" the blonde asks, eyes wide and anxious and innocent.

Porlyusica hesitates. "He's alert," she says finally. "He seems to be handling the medicine better. Now go pester him yourselves and leave me in peace."

"Thank you," Wendy says as the blonde rushes past to speak with Gray.

She looks much older than her handful of years, face careworn and eyes ringed with exhaustion. She isn't used to illnesses and injuries she can't heal, and has exhausted herself trying everything she can think of. This boy is a lesson to her: not everyone can be saved, and even a healer can only do so much. It's a lesson she would have learned sooner or later, but it's a pity the first target is one of her friends.

Porlyusica waves her off. There is nothing to thank her for, and now she is not even providing the cold comfort of her potions and herbs. She is the most useless kind of healer: obsolete, skills exhausted, healing no one at all. She has done what she can and it is not enough, and sometimes that seems worse than never having tried at all.

"Go on," she says as she heads for the door. "Maybe you can dull some of his pain. Either way, take advantage of what time you have left."

Because that is what the boy has decided to do, and it would be best if his friends did the same. Porlyusica is not prone to empathy, but she understands, just a little.

She visits just as frequently as ever, because the boy practically begs her to. If she stops, if she gives up and washes her hands of him, there will be questions that he doesn't want to answer. She considers refusing—there is little else she can do, and she has never been fond of wasting her time—but he won't last another month at this rate. It won't cost her much to humor him for a few more days.

So, two or three times a week—later, three or four or five when things hit rock bottom—she visits his apartment and kicks his friends out. She mixes up herbal remedies that aren't so harsh on his system and passes them off as yet more medicines to add to his collection.

They say little. What words can be exchanged between a healer that cannot heal and a boy that cannot live? She finds his presence uncomfortable, an itch beneath her skin. She does not like sitting around and doing nothing, and there is nothing else for her to do here. But he begs her to stay for a handful of minutes here, a half hour there. To make it seem, to his friends, that she is still doing something for him. Or maybe because he needs a break from the hovering.

He's not often talkative, maybe because he has to be while his friends are around in order to allay their concerns. He usually takes the opportunity to lie quiet in bed, eyes closed while he focuses on his breathing and works through the pain. Porlyusica brings a book and settles in the chair in the corner to read, every once in a while glancing at him over the top of the pages.

One afternoon, as she is snapping her book shut and preparing to leave, the boy says something other than the usual goodbye.

"Do you pity me?" he asks.

She eyes him uncertainly, not sure where he's going with this or what he wants to hear. Something about the sharp glitter in his eyes makes her hesitate when normally she'd blurt out whatever is on her mind. Now that his mind is not as fogged by the medicines, he seems to see too much and it unsettles her.

"I…sympathize with you," she says carefully, because she does not think he wants pity. Who does? And, as an afterthought, "Just a little."

"Hm." The glimmer in his eyes does not change, but he watches her like she is a puzzle that needs solving and works at peeling back all her layers. She resists the urge to shudder and thinks, maybe a little uncharitably, that she preferred it when his mind was too hazy for him to pierce the soul. "Maybe that was the wrong question. You don't care about me, do you? You won't care when I die?"

She shifts uneasily and wishes she were anywhere but here. "Death is always a tragedy," she says, choosing her words with care.

"But you care only as much as you would for any patient. It's nothing you would lose sleep over."

She does not appreciate the interrogation, especially because she does not know what he wants. She does not know, and she hates not knowing. She hates how he seems to be trying to make her look small and ugly, as if she should be ashamed that he is not the center of her world and feel callous for not getting worked up over every little human thing.

She hates it, and it makes her words sharp as knives as she gives up tiptoeing around the truth and trying to spare his feelings.

"Of course not," she snaps. "You're just one human in billions. You are no more special than any other human. You are exactly the same—no more, no less. I'm sorry that you will die, but I will not grieve you."

She turns away and storms out of the room, thoroughly finished with him.

As the door slams shut behind her, she thinks she hears him whisper, "Good."

Note: Frankly, this was originally supposed to have more of a focus on how the team reacts to Gray hiding the whole dying thing, but I figure it's already been done to death and I can always do it in a different fic. This one didn't cooperate. Maybe because Porlyusica doesn't care lol

emmahoshi: Lol fair enough. It's a pretty ridiculous name. Yeah, she's pretty much a non-entity, but I'm a little fond of her. She popped in and out during the "Because" verse and "Recon" and kinda grew on me. Oh yeah, my mom has tons of health problems from fibromyalgia, migraines, stomach/gastrointestinal issues, etc., etc., and doctors have been pretty useless for the most part. It's annoying when they don't take you seriously. But yeah, COVID is definitely making everyone suspicious of anyone who's not feeling well. Yeah, I am not a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, but I know a thing or two. I didn't want to go into too much detail because I'm not an expert and also it's not the point of the fic (it's more important that he's dying than why this time around), but I kind of picked something that's more recognizable as incurable and pushed it to the extreme end of the spectrum. I like to think that medicine is a mix of science and magic in FT, although there's honestly no indication of that outside of Porlyusica. Mostly you see everyone get healed by magic (Wendy, Chelia), but Porlyusica came from Edolas and doesn't have any intrinsic magic, so I imagine she would have had to pick up more on the science/doctor side of things plus take advantage of available magic artifacts that don't require the user to have magic. It's kind of interesting, actually, but I've never delved too deeply into it. Anyway, hope you're well and stay healthy. Stay safe and have a great day :)