The Deathless Trilogy

3.4. Winston

After Declan and I address the second shift of Deathless, we return to our work stations. He goes back to the Captain's dining room to meet with the new General, and I head back to the biology sector; but I decide to make a detour first. Armed with a bowl of oatmeal, I type in the code for the infirmary.

Winston looks up from where he's been waiting at Phoebe's side. "Hey," he croaks, as if it's the first thing he's ever said. No smile. There's not even a shadow of the man he used to be. Even his face looks unfamiliar, sunken and gray in the fluorescent light.

With my free hand, I pull a stool up beside him to sit and raise a spoonful of oatmeal to his mouth.

"You don't have to feed me," he says.

"If you're not going to feed yourself...."

He slouches in defeat and opens his mouth. He swallows the first bite and feeds himself another, taking the spoon and bowl from me. Now that the oatmeal's syrupy scent isn't directly in front of me, I smell Winston. The odor stings my nostrils and I nearly gag. "When was the last time you bathed?" I ask, lifting my fingers to my nose. Anything to block out the stench.

He shrugs. "I haven't left her side."

"Not even to use the bathroom?"

He shrugs again, eating another spoonful of oatmeal. "Bedpans."

"Winston... we're all hurting, but you have to take care of yourself."

"When she wakes up. That's when I'll leave."

I glance at Phoebe. She looks like the painted illustrations of Sleeping Beauty from my now destroyed fairytale anthology back home. Her skin is like porcelain and her lips glow with balm. At least Winston has been taking care of someone. If she ever wakes up, Phoebe won't look any different than she did before her brain was compromised. But that's the troublesome part: Her personality will likely be completely different. Sure, Winston is preserving her body in the only way he knows how without the cryo chambers, but there's no guarantee the woman who wakes up will be the woman he loves.

"Declan's doing a great job leading," I say, scooting the stool just outside of Winston's body odor bubble. "In case you were worried."

He shakes his head once. "I wasn't."

He moves his fingertips over Phoebe's arm in a figure eight, and asks, "Do you know how long I have loved this woman?" Without giving me a chance to answer, he continues, "Gunther introduced us at Harvard. He brought us all together to create the cryo chambers after he and Alex made the antifreeze compound. She shook my hand like you would expect a man to, you know? Strong, assertive, powerful."

"That's kind of sexist, Winston."

"I don't mean it to be. I was never prejudiced against women or anything, it's just... a woman this beautiful... you don't expect her to have such a strong handshake. After that there were no other women for me. I waited for Phoebe. She was the ultimate, and in the back of my mind, I always imagined that one day, maybe when we were older, we would be together.

"She told me about her husband, about their relationship. Greg was a good guy, I liked him, actually. He and I would always end up talking by the bar at faculty parties. But he wasn't good for Phoebe. They met in high school, and she had Curie when she was a freshmen in college. It was a shotgun wedding, but even that didn't stop Phoebe. She'd never admit it, but being a woman in engineering and mechanics... she had a lot to prove, not only to her classmates, but I think to herself too. She went right back to classes within a month of Curie's birth, and Greg stayed home with her. I think he got stuck there, you know? Never really grew up after that. Curie...," he laughs to himself. "She named her daughter Curie, like Marie Curie. I used to fantasize about Phoebe leaving Greg, and dating me. Curie loved me, so it wouldn't have been hard to transition from fun Uncle Win to Stepdad Win."