Gregor The Cripple

While Gregor slept, Mildred wept, just a little. Very softly. There was nothing else to be done. Crying properly would hurt too much, and she didn't want to be loud. She might wake him, and then they'd both feel much worse.

Ahead, the afternoon sun was on course to collide with the horizon, just as it did every day, and Mildred was worried that today would be no different. In a while, night would come, and that would be a problem.

The wagon had no lamps, she'd noticed, and unlike Gregor, Mildred had a normal amount of trouble seeing in the dark. Gallingly, the night was not likely to be bright, being that the moon was on the wane and a herd of cumulus clouds were congregating distantly, perhaps meeting to discuss whether they should come over and ruin things.

If they did, or if the light of the moon proved to be insufficient to pilot the cart, Mildred would either need to halt for the night, which meant staying still and wasting the wonderful utility of their new mobile bed, thereby brazenly gifting their enemy the unearned advantage of time not spent travelling toward safety, or otherwise she would need to wake her wizard far too early so that he could drive instead.

Both would be bad, but not nearly as bad as having a horse stumble blindly and break a leg, or as driving into an ambush hidden by the opaque night, so she would need to choose between them.

Hopefully, she hoped, the sun would simply bounce off the horizon and go straight back up. It hadn't before, but why not now? Now would be good. Very opportune. Quite heroic, supposing that the sun was in the mood to be heroic, which wasn't impossible. The sun had allegedly performed miracles, and rare things actually happen all the time, so why not now, and why not to her?

Pouting and sniffling and scrunching her damp eyes, Mildred idly scratched the back of Randolph, who had scampered out from the ponderous pockets of Gregor's robe to sit upon her leg. In her other hand, she clutched the cure for all her pain.

She hadn't noticed, but Randolph's battle-halved ear had already healed to a clean scar. Ordinarily, this would have been a little strange, but she'd been rendered inattentive by current matters.

Perhaps noticing this inattention, or perhaps acting upon secret instruction from Gregor, or perhaps even just doing benign regular rat things, Randolph had taken up station atop her knee, sentinel over all he surveyed. A second pair of eyes, lest Mildred missed something in her sobbing distraction.

Ten drops of the laudanum would be enough for a while, Gregor had said, but he had also said that a while wouldn't last nearly so long as she'd like. Her doses needed to be low for her to stay lucid, but because they were low, they needed also to be often. That was where everything had begun to go wrong for him.

He had explained to her, with no horrible or horrifying detail excluded, how exactly he had attained his state of wretched disquietude by the time of their first meeting – those being his exact words – and also all of the circumstances preceding, and quite a few other unhappy details as well.

It had been a genuinely terrible hour-and-a-half, but that wasn't why she cried, not exactly. She wasn't weeping for the fates of his previous companions, or for his role in those fates, or for the small moments of peace inbetween that made things all the worse, but for something more.

Somewhat guiltily, particularly now, Mildred had never considered Gregor to be a truly tragic man. Perhaps, she thought, she'd been infected by his own attitude toward the points of pain in his life, which was an attitude coloured by bravado and arrogance and an urge to conquer, come what may – and perhaps for that reason, all his misfortunes had seemed… participatory, in a way, which was now an odious thing to hold in her head.

Gregor saw everything that happened to him or which happened because of him in the hard terms of failure and success, with success being worthless without the painful contrast of failure to give it value.

Living and acting was an exercise in risk and reward, he thought, undertaken in full knowledge of what might happen, and in fact precisely because of what might happen, even if (or precisely because) the consequences were likely to be extreme and unanticipatable. The worse the danger, the greater he must be for avoiding it, typically.

He had once explained this, and perhaps from then onwards, she seemed to have gradually subsumed Gregor's notion that his own pain was an accepted cost of him living the way that he wished.

But no longer. It was simply was not the case, not in her eyes, no matter how much it may be the case in his eyes, or eye, as it were. She still wasn't quite sure whether he had one or two.

It was clear now that all the worst components of his suffering hadn't been invited. They had been induced; caused by someone else. He was not some serial recipient of infandous comeuppance. Rather, he was a victim. This was something he'd never consider possible, or even actually consider at all, but it was true, and luckily, such considerations were instead the domain of Mildred.

She considered that Gregor had been driven mad by pain and poison, and that the calamities had come only from a simple and innocent desire to be free from an agony that he didn't deserve to suffer; inflicted ultimately and uncontrollably by the cruel acts and intentions of his master. For this one human urge – this singular normal vulnerability that he had probably ever possessed – his whole new life as an independent person had toppled and everyone in it had died, and it was all the fault of Kaius.

That was truly tragic. It wasn't participatory, it wasn't invited. It wasn't a consequence of his arrogance, not really, or a product of his disregard for goodness and life and risk, though those were all certainly elements of the tragedy, and nor was it a knowingly undertaken contingent risk of his being a wizard. He had been wronged by his master, and the far-reaching events of the tragedy had unavoidably followed.

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And so Mildred now knew that Gregor was a tragic man, but that was still not why she cried.

New information naturally gives birth to new perspectives, and new perspectives in turn shine new light on old information. And in this new light, Mildred found herself considering for the first time in a long time that Gregor was actually very young. He was not an old man, though he might hobble and occasionally say senile-sounding things. He was young, very likely younger than her, even if he didn't ever seem it.

He was too wizened to seem young. An unkind life and the designs of an evil master had cured him of any kind of mindset normal to young men, but that was was really what he was. A young man.

And so, Gregor's flight from the tower was really rather like a boy fleeing his cruel father and his dysfunctional home to go boldly out into the world and find work, seeking along the way to become a man, or some other such thing vital to the existence of a sense of self.

She sympathised with this, though the reasons for her own adventure away from home now felt trite in comparison. It was his bid for independence, his coming-of-age, whereafter he was to stand on his own two feet, and he hadn't floundered. He had gone out and tasted the crumbs of a future-to-be.

Just prior to the calamity, Gregor was Gregor, not just a project of Kaius. He had succeed in independence. All the pieces of a life were assembled, and he even begun to dispel the spectre of his master's influence. He was changing, and from what Mildred understood, if the Gregor of that moment had continued to exist, he might have one day become a good person. Certainly, he wouldn't have ever become the injured creature who had freed her from stone.

That was the outward trajectory of things, and the magnitude of the chance at life he had seized, but it wasn't a real chance. The sins of the master had placed him in a desert, bone-dry, no water to be found, and after a period of wandering, dying of thirst, he had found a large stock of wine. The need to drink was absolute, but the drink inevitably did him wrong. It was a false salvation. A cruel, injurious taste of what he actually wanted. Or at least, that's what she thought. He probably disagreed.

More than anything, Mildred found within herself a new hate for Gregor's dead master, perhaps even as great as her hate for her own persistent enemy. And in fact, she thought that she probably hated him more than Gregor did, given Gregor's strange outlook on life.

As the sun continued to dip down, the real tears stopped, but Mildred's mood remained fragile and the damp, leaky pouting persisted. Randolph was helping somehow, but it was all just so very sad.

He had been a boy once. He had been raised, and he even had fought with his father. In essence, Gregor was a normal human person, just abstracted to the extreme. These facts were thorns in her heart, and made all the worse the things that had happened to him, as well as the things he had done to himself for her, but still, this was not why she cried.

She cried because she knew why Gregor had decided to suddenly share. He hadn't told her why, certainly not, but she knew all the same.

It was a sacrifice; yet more self-flagellation for the sake of Mildred's wellbeing.

She, like he, was now host to a horribly distracting pain, and he couldn't abide that, naturally, so he had provided her a with cure. However, the cure was a trap, this he knew. Opium baits the sufferer with relief, as she now knew too, which can be alright for a little while, but if you linger in enjoying the bait for too long, or if you keep returning to tempt the jaws of the snare, it'll invariably slam shut and never let go.

He feared it, she felt, or very certainly feared what it might do to her.

So what could Gregor do? How could he ensure that Mildred never developed a taste for opium, and that she wasn't made worse by her medicine at the end of things?

He decided to scare her. Gregor had spared nothing, she was fairly certain, and had done his utmost to impress upon her how grandly and horribly laudanum had caused him to fail. He had expounded the depths of madness that it had eventually driven him to suffer, as well as the suffering that others had consequently endured – and would no doubt continue to endure, given that he had started a war – and he had even shared how very close he had come to suicide.

That was why Mildred cried.

Gregor had shared his greatest humiliations. For a creature so prideful, how much did a disclosure like that mean? For her sake – to warn her away from herself committing the mistakes of his past – he had volunteered himself for so extreme an embarrassment.

Truly, that was a sacrifice, and it wasn't merely duty. It wasn't transactional.

It was care.

***

"Gregor?"

He turned to look at Mildred, who sat sleepily on the bench beside him. He hadn't asked about the laudanum, but from the way she slouched, the pain mustn't be very extreme. A person's pain can always be seen in their posture.

"Why do bad things happen?"

He had woken after an incredible seven whole hours of sleep, and was now piloting their craft in the dim moonlight. According to a roadsign that it was too dark for Mildred to read, they were thirty miles from a town called Tonnerre, which should see them arriving just in time to catch the first train of the day, if indeed they were lucky enough for there to be a train to catch.

He frowned at the name, but didn't consider a detour. Even if there was no train, it would still be worth risking the omen. The place should have a newspaper, if nothing else, and the newspaper might have news.

Mildred probably wasn't expecting the answer to her question to be very simple, but it was. "Bad things happen," Gregor replied, "because things happen, and then we call them bad."

She thought for a moment.

"And what if I call those same things good?" She asked, wearing an expression of preformative contemplation.

"Then they will be good."

"It can't be that easy."

"You would be surprised."