Midday, late January, a day like any other. Or, it would’ve been.

“You want to learn what?”

“But you’re busy, so you really don’t have to, like, unless you want to? But you really don’t have to.” He shuffled slightly closer to the door. “I thought that… The last time I showed you my stitching, you said it looked bad, and you seem pretty good at it, so I thought you might… But you should be resting.”

“To clarify, I said your stitching looked like ass, because it does. Have you never seen a straight line?”

He made a face. “Are we talking literally in the philosophical sense, or literally in the realistic sense?”

“I’m talking rhetorically,” she said. “Did your parents ever get you investigated for autism?”

“My school wanted to do one but my parents refused.”

“Right. Figures.” After a short pause, she gave him a once-over. As usual, he was wearing a tattered, poorly-sewn leather outfit. He used to come in in just loincloths, but she’d been able to convince him not to within only a day. “I get why you’d want to learn to sew properly,” she said. “But why stuffed animals?” And even more suspicious, why did he specify that it should be a rat?

“Well, they… It just seems more difficult, is all. Smaller parts to be done, more complicated layout.”

“Got it. And you assumed I’d be good at sewing, why?”

“You sewed that bunny, didn’t you?”

She glanced down at Mr Appât. She supposed she had at one point told him that she’d sewn him.

“Besides,” Kitty continued, “I’ve seen your work on the patients. Very neat. Especially with how difficult living flesh is to work on.”

Ruefully, she had to admit that he came to the right person. However… She looked down at her hands, folded neatly atop her lap. They felt cold, and when she clenched them, they didn’t entirely feel like hers. Like she was wearing thick gloves.

She looked back up at Kitty, at where he stood so close by, neither hopeful nor despairing. Whatever she said, he’d be fine with it. She looked down at her hands again, feeling a sigh crawl up her throat.

“Fine,” she said, finally. “I’ll teach you how to sew plushies.” His face lit up into a wide-faced smile. “However—” she said, feeling a twinge of guilt at the way his expression fell, “only on the condition that you don’t use them for evil, somehow.”

“How would I even do that?”

“I don’t know. Like, making stuffed bears using the skin of some kids’ parent, and then giving it to him.”

“That would be really messed up.”

She restrained herself from pulling a sword on him. “Yes,” she said deliberately. “It would be messed up. So don’t do that type of stuff.”

“Alright. I won’t.”

“Good. So, do you have…?”

In a flash, he’d pulled everything necessary from his inventory, including scissors, needles, thread, cloth, paper, and pens. He smiled slyly. “I do.”

She restrained herself from laughing at his drug-dealer-like antics. “Good. In that case, to start, we’ll make a sketch of what we’re kind of trying to make…”

Unfortunately, much in the same way he was obnoxiously obedient, she found that he was excellent at following instructions, as long as she was overwhelmingly obvious about the details. Draw this, cut it like this, pull the thread like this, sew it like this… He was beyond attentive. Even worse, whenever he made a mistake, whether it be big or small, he never showed any inclination towards giving up. He simply undid the thread, cut where necessary, and redid it as she told him. It was upsetting how good of a student he was.

Fleet as he was, it only took two days before the first of his many soft, fluffy monstrosities was completed.

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“It looks horrible,” Kitty said.

“Sure, but it’s good for a first try,” Myriam replied. “The next time will be much better, I’m sure.”

For a long while, Kitty stared at the little rat plushie, about the size of a real-life rat. Its lop-sided button eyes stared back at him. One of them was on the verge of falling off, making it look somewhat lazy-eyed. Kitty angled his face until his eyes were at level with it. “I think I’ll name it Sven.”

“Good name,” she answered. “Do you think he’ll want a friend?”

Kitty glanced over at her. For a full five seconds, she considered whether to explain what she was trying to say. However, through the power of his pea-sized brain, Kitty was able to decode her intention. He smiled at her. “Yeah. I think he will.”

And so, Sven went into Kitty’s inventory, and the work on the next yet-to-be-named rat began. She asked, and according to Kitty, he would only name it once it was complete, otherwise he’d feel bad if he failed to finish it.

“I mean, can you imagine? ‘Oh, yeah, Gunde was never completed. He’s named, he’s alive, but he’s not completed.’ That’d be horrifying. Stuck for eternity as a half-formed patchwork of threads and cloth and needles.”

The implication here was clearly that the naming of the plushie granted them life. She decided not to question it.

After a week of working on plushies together, her fingers became too stiff to help. Around this time, she also became too weak to walk much on her own. She never asked him to, but every day when he came with breakfast, Kitty would carry her over to the window, where he’d also moved her desk. She wasn’t sure where he’d gotten it, but at some point, he’d also found a human-sized, very soft armchair that wasn’t a strain on her body to sit in. In the evening, after she’d eaten her dinner, he carried her back to bed. When she messaged Mole about it, he said that he hadn’t asked Kitty to do any of it. He just did it.

She decided not to question him about it.

It was now February. It had been a little over two weeks since she’d been laid in. Kitty was in her room, putting the tray of food on her desk and dusting off the armchair. He moved over to her side.

He was just about to lean down and carry her off when she stopped him, hand raised. “No… no,” she said, drawing in a wheezing little breath as she did. “Not today. I need… to lie for a bit.”

Standing up straight again, he looked her over, cocking his head a little. For a moment, he appeared so much like an animal—a feral, untrained one. “Can I at least prop you up so you can sit a little?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Nodding, he lifted her upper body off the bed, pushing a few pillows behind her back until she was sitting at least somewhat. He frowned at her where she sat, breathing heavily, eyes half-lidded. “You probably shouldn’t do any work today.”

“What?” she said. “No, I… Please. I think I might be onto something. Mole’s last report, they—” Something horrible and thick and slimy lodged itself in the back of her throat, like a cold, dead slug, and she hunched over, coughing and hacking in a vain attempt at dislodging it. But as it left her airways, it promptly suckered itself in her upper throat. Her chest hurt with every spasm. Could she breathe? Was she able to breathe? Panic overtook her as she pulled in a tawny breath—yes, she could breathe. She wasn’t dying. This wouldn’t be the end of her. And still, and still…

Suddenly, a glass of water was held out to her. She took it and downed it in a single breath, the slimy piece of mucus going down with it. Once it was all gone, she tried to take a deep breath, but all she got was another wheezing inhale, barely enough to keep herself from going woozy. Futility, she massaged her throat. Her fingers hardly felt like her own anymore. The tips had gone white. Her toes were starting to blacken. She pushed all of it out of her mind. “—The reports. They… According to—hhrrggh—Mole, this sickness… The dragon plague… It’s not a virus. It’s not a bacteria. He can’t even…” Talking suddenly became very difficult, and she swallowed down another stiff lob of slime. “We assumed it must be a virus, because the penicillin was ineffective. But now… If it isn’t a virus, or a bacteria, and it’s not a fungus or parasite, then…”

How can we fight it?

She forced herself to look at him, if only to bring her thoughts away from what she was talking about. All she found on his face was a striking look of apathy. The despair clawing at her was suddenly replaced with confusion. Didn’t he understand what she was saying? She’d never taken him for a genius, but she knew he wasn’t an idiot. He should know the difference between pathogens. But if not…

“Does it matter?”

She blinked at him. Her eyes felt dry. “What?”

He threw a shrug off his shoulders. “Nobody’s survived so far. The easy solution here is to just quarantine all the sick people, and then kill half to save the other half. Or let them die off on their own.” His face was the very image of calmness. He didn’t seem to find a single logical fault in what he said—and neither did she. But morally? She felt a sense of disgust creep over her. Kitty, unknowing, easily continued, saying, “See, I told Moleman this idea a while back, but he totally refused it. I knew he would, of course, but it’s a silly thing to do. Sniffing them out is easy. Leave it to me. The issue would be in dealing with the bodies afterwards. Right now, there’s like fifteen thousand people infected. Half of those would be seven and a half thousand. That’s a lot of bodies. But I’ve got a solution for that too! It’s…”

Finally, he noticed the look on her face. Without fanfare, his enthusiasm mellowed out into resignation. “Of course, I can’t tell you. It’s a secret. It would be great for everyone involved, but I don’t think Moleman would like it. He can be a bit stiff on these kinds of matters.”

Turning his back on her, he moved over to the desk, grabbing the tray with her breakfast again. “Not that it matters much. It’ll all work out in the end, I’m sure.” He placed the tray on her lap. A sudden sense of vertigo took over her, and the sight of his bony, clawed hands—his eerily elongated fingers, subtly stained red, covered in albino scars only barely whiter than his corpse-pale skin… It made her feel sick.

“Please leave,” she croaked out.

“Sorry?”

“Please… please leave.” Her trembling eyes moved up to look at him. At his innocently confused face. “I need to be alone.”

He took a step back. And now he looked so pathetic, so pitiable, that the disgust churning in the pit of her stomach made her feel more guilty than nauseous. “Oh. Okay,” he said, in his little teenaged voice. Gaze falling to his feet, he shuffled towards the door. “Right, got it. I’ll be back for lunch, yeah? I’ve heard there’ll be hare in the gruel today!”

She couldn’t bring herself to answer him. Deep down, she was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she’d ask him to stay. Maybe out of pity, maybe out of loneliness. But she couldn’t allow herself.

Soon, he stood in the doorway, facing the room that smelled like rot and copper. Pausing, he glanced back at her, eyes shining oddly. “Oh, yeah, before I forget, um… Remember how you signed up as a donor?”

Hope reared pathetically in her chest. She looked up at him. Was this it? Her chance to be useful, before she had to suffer as badly as she’d seen so many do before?

A strange smile rose to his face. “I’m sorry, but Moleman used his monthly question to the god of knowledge to find out whether hearts could cross-donate, and apparently a goblin’s heart can’t be used to save you. A human heart would work, though. But I doubt you’d want anyone else to go and die for you, right?”

Now, she was certain. His smile was the most appalling thing she had ever seen.

“Leave.”

He did. As soon as the door had closed behind him, she leaned over the side of the bed and puked up a thin bit of yellowish bile, watery stomach acids and more mucus than she’d coughed up in the last hour alone.

For the first time, Myriam was happy that she couldn’t walk on her own. That meant Kitty would have to clean it up.

The thought brought a smile to her crusty lips.