As he entered the hall outside his room, he saw a middle-aged woman seated next to his door. "Hi, are you the nurse?" he asked.
"Nurse?! Nurse?!" The woman walked off in a huff.
"Maybe you should be a bit more observant next time, Jarrod," a bemused voice said. "She's the reason you're here."
"Dad? What are you doing here? Who is she? Where am I?" Jarrod asked, in quick succession.
"When they found you in the academy, they weren't sure what to do with you. According to Lars, you've been in a coma for six months. As you hadn't accepted any research offers, as soon as you turned 18, the academy was forced to discharge you to a public hospital. Lars wrote to me telling me what he thought had happened. What were you thinking?""
Jarrod remembered the biblioteca room, and his quest to replicate Cromwell's study, but he couldn't recall what had happened. Was he successful? He searched his body for runes. He was disappointed to find nothing. "What happened to me?"
"Your body wasn't doing too well for a while. We thought you were going to die at one point. Lucky for you, Reena was available to help out. She kept you alive for three months until you started to show signs of improvement. I'm glad you're alive, Jarrod. Although it is beyond me why you attempted such a foolish experiment. If you had bothered to finish reading Cromwell's paper, you would have realised that knowledge of the procedure to acquire runes taints your mind, and immediately makes it impossible for you to acquire one. I thought you were smarter than that."
His father's mixed feelings for him, compounded with the realisation that he would never gain a rune filled Jarrod with despair. He feigned fatigue and pretended to sleep so that his father wouldn't see him cry.
After a few days, they were willing to let him leave on his own, but he was told to check in at home as soon as possible because his mother wanted to know how he was doing. Without having to attend classes anymore, Jarrod felt a feeling of freedom, but also emptiness. He still didn't know what he was going to do. He boarded the train to his house and went home. After eleven years, nothing had changed. The house looked exactly as he had remembered it, a testament to his mother's ability to avoid change.
"Mother? Mother, are you home?" Jarrod called.
"Jarrod, is that you? I'm upstairs. Why don't you get yourself something to eat while I finish getting ready?"
Jarrod went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and looked inside. There was a lot he wanted to eat, but it occurred to him that he didn't even know how to cook any of it. He decided to wait until his mother was done.
"Jarrod. Welcome home. How are you feeling?"
"Not too bad. Did Father go back to his platoon?"
"Yes, as soon as you woke up, he was required to head back."
"I'm quite hungry, can you make me something to eat?"
"I thought I told you to make something."
"Yes, but I don't know how to use any of this stuff. It feels weird not being able to-"
"Damn useless son." Jarrod's mother sighed and opened the fridge. She stuck something in the microwave and turned to him. "Don't expect me to do everything for you now that you're out of the academy. I have a busy day, and I don't have time to be picking up the pieces after you. Do you understand?"
This was the mother that Jarrod knew. It was one of the reasons he was so happy to be at the academy. His mother wasn't like any of the other mothers taking their sons to the academy. She didn't cry, she never sent him care packages, they only wrote on special occasions. But he was used to it, and as soon as he found a job, he would be independent.
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