Chapter 136: The Tragedy Of Damian Baines

Damian Baines had been born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on the third of July, 1999.

Paul Baines had been an HVAC technician who could diagnose a dying compressor by sound alone, while Angela Baines taught at a nursery school and possessed enough patience to somehow tolerate both twenty screaming children and her husband attempting home repairs without reading instructions.

Between Paul’s trade income and Angela’s salary, the Baines family had never been rich, but in the relatively forgiving economy of Damian’s childhood, they had been comfortably middle class.

More importantly, Damian had been happy.

Their home was not enormous, their cars were not new every year and international vacations were rare enough to become major family events, but young Damian never felt deprived.

There was always food in the refrigerator, presents appeared beneath the tree every Christmas, his school supplies were bought without arguments over price, and the living room accumulated enough game consoles that Angela occasionally accused Paul of purchasing them for himself and using their son as an excuse.

She was probably right.

Damian still remembered sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a PlayStation controller in his hands while Paul leaned forward beside him with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb.

Whenever his father lost, he blamed input delay, the television, the controller, work fatigue or Damian cheating in roughly that order.

Minecraft became their real bonding game once Damian grew older.

They had two ugly Dell computers set up in the same room, neither powerful enough to deserve the word ’gaming’, yet father and son spent countless evenings building ridiculous houses and digging tunnels with almost no understanding of efficient progression.

Paul once spent an entire weekend constructing what he proudly called a castle, only for Damian to inform him that the square stone block with three windows looked more like a county jail.

Paul had been deeply offended while Angela laughed until she started coughing.

That cough had immediately killed the joke.

Angela Baines had sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder that caused some of her red blood cells to deform into rigid crescent shapes rather than remaining flexible.

Those malformed cells could obstruct small blood vessels and deprive tissues of oxygen, producing painful crises, anemia, infections and organ damage that made seemingly ordinary illnesses considerably more dangerous for her than they were for most people.

It was the reason Damian remained an only child.

Pregnancy had already been dangerous enough once, and after several serious discussions with her doctors, Paul and Angela decided that one miracle was enough gambling with her life.

Damian did not understand any of that as a child, only that his mother tired more easily than other mothers and occasionally disappeared into the hospital for several days before returning home with a smile.

To him, Angela was simply Mom.

She was the woman who woke early on Saturday mornings and somehow knew the exact moment cartoons began, appearing in the living room around six with a tray balanced against one hip.

Scrambled eggs, fluffy pancakes drowning beneath syrup, crispy bacon and a glass of juice became so tightly connected to childhood in Damian’s mind that even decades later, the smell of pancakes could drag him backward through time.

"Don’t spill syrup on the couch," Angela would warn, setting the plate into his lap before looking toward the television.

"And if that funny watch turns him into the ugly one again, call me."

"It’s the Omnitrix, Mom! And Wildmutt isn’t ugly!" Damian would answer with immense seriousness.

Angela would stare at the orange creature currently biting something on screen.

"...Your generation is very accepting."

Young Damian had rolled his eyes so hard he nearly spilled the syrup anyway.

Saturday afternoons usually belonged to Paul.

Sometimes the entire family went grocery shopping and Damian rode inside the cart long after he had become too large for it until Angela finally refused to keep pretending not to be embarrassed.

Other weekends meant visiting relatives, barbecues, hardware-store runs that somehow lasted two hours or Paul dragging his son around while explaining the difference between compressors, evaporators and condensers to a child who mostly wanted to know when they could go home and play games.

The evenings were quieter, though.

Paul loved football and basketball, Damian considerably less so, and there were countless nights when the boy fell asleep across his father’s lap while commentary droned from the television.

Paul would continue watching with one hand resting against Damian’s back, then eventually carry him upstairs despite complaining the next morning that his son was becoming too damn heavy.

Those were the memories Damian treasured most.

Breakfast while Ben 10 played in the background, Minecraft on terrible computers, falling asleep while his father watched a game and hearing his mother laugh from another room.

That was home.

School had been similarly ordinary.

Damian was never the genius who effortlessly topped every class, but he was intelligent, curious and particularly strong wherever numbers connected to something practical.

Mathematics made more sense when attached to engines, machines or structures, and years of watching Paul work gradually pushed him toward mechanical engineering.

His original dream had been laughably normal.

Graduate high school, earn an engineering degree, get a stable job designing actual machinery instead of repairing it, buy a decent home somewhere quieter and eventually make enough money that his parents never needed to worry about retirement.

Paul joked that Damian would become the first Baines in history paid to tell technicians why equipment they’d never touched personally was designed correctly.

Damian had fully intended to prove him wrong... then he turned sixteen.

Angela caught what initially appeared to be an ordinary respiratory infection.

Within days, doctors identified invasive pneumococcal disease caused by ’Streptococcus pneumoniae’, an encapsulated bacterium particularly dangerous to people with sickle cell disease because repeated damage to the spleen could severely weaken the body’s ability to clear organisms of that type.

The infection spread into the tissues surrounding Angela’s brain and became bacterial meningitis.

It happened horrifyingly quickly.

First was the fever and headaches, then vomiting, then a neck so stiff she could barely move it.

After that were bouts of confusion and brain fog severe enough that she looked at Damian one evening and asked why he wasn’t at school despite it being nearly ten at night.

Then came the seizures.

Damian remembered hospital staff running past him while Paul held both shoulders and prevented his son from following them through the emergency doors.

He remembered seeing his father cry openly for the first time while doctors explained words like intracranial pressure, cerebral hypoxia and vaso-occlusive complications.

Treatment was immediate and brutal.

Powerful intravenous antibiotics such as ceftriaxone and vancomycin attacked the infection while dexamethasone attempted to limit the inflammatory damage inside her skull.

Angela required intensive care, transfusions, respiratory support and constant management of the sickle-cell crisis triggered by the infection, with every additional complication seeming to create another team of specialists and another line on the hospital bill.

The bacteria eventually died, but the damage did not.

Between meningitis, prolonged oxygen deprivation and multiple small ischemic injuries created during the crisis, Angela’s brain suffered catastrophic damage.

She entered a prolonged disorder of consciousness and never properly awakened.

One week became one month, one month became six months, and six months soon became a year.

The woman who once brought Damian pancakes on Saturday mornings now lay inside a hospital bed with feeding support, medication schedules, nurses and machines maintaining the body that stubbornly continued living.

America was extremely good at keeping a body alive, but was also extremely good at sending invoices for doing so.

The initial ICU hospitalization alone consumed a frightening portion of the Baines family’s savings, followed by rehabilitation attempts, specialist reviews and long-term care.

Eventually, Angela’s ongoing care was quoted for a shocking amount each month.

Paul and Angela had saved for Damian’s college, and that disappeared first.

Then came their emergency savings, then retirement, then whatever investments Paul had accumulated.

The Baines household shifted from comfortable middle class to financial crisis with frightening speed, and by the time Damian finished high school, Paul was borrowing from relatives, negotiating medical debt and carrying balances he once would have considered unthinkable.

Damian entered college anyway on Paul’s insistence.

Mechanical engineering remained the plan, and for roughly two years Damian tried balancing lectures, part-time work and constant hospital visits while pretending that everything was temporary.

He still studied thermal systems with particular interest because of his father’s trade and still gamed when time permitted.

Then disaster returned.

Paul had spent most of his adult life working around refrigerants, compressor oils, degreasers and older cooling systems containing compounds that modern technicians increasingly handled with far greater precautions.

Years of accidental exposure to leaking chlorofluorocarbons and related industrial chemicals had already damaged portions of his lungs and connective tissue, but nobody expected what followed.

At twenty, Damian watched his father begin complaining that his hands were always cold.

Paul wore gloves indoors, then two pairs.

Soon his fingertips became stiff despite normal circulation tests, followed by patches of tissue throughout his arms and torso whose temperature remained several degrees below surrounding areas for no understandable reason.

Doctors found abnormal protein structures inside affected cells.

Several biopsy samples displayed bizarre somatic DNA changes that did not fit any recognized hereditary disorder or known cancer, and worse, those altered tissues appeared to absorb thermal energy from surrounding cells without releasing it normally.

Paul’s body was quite literally beginning to freeze from the inside outward, one patch of tissue at a time.

Nobody had a name for it, and that frightened Damian more than any diagnosis could have.

Government doctors appeared within weeks, then military researchers.

They asked strange questions about Paul’s decades of HVAC work, the refrigerants he’d handled, particular CFC compounds used in old commercial systems and whether he had ever worked at certain industrial sites.

Samples were taken, results classified and eventually several men in suits sat across from Damian and Paul inside a sterile conference room.

Their offer was simple.

Paul’s condition was terminal.

Once the freezing reached enough cardiac, pulmonary or neurological tissue, there would be no meaningful recovery.

But his body was medically unique.

If Paul consented to donate his remains and permit unrestricted postmortem research, a military medical program would assume the majority of Angela Baines’s continuing treatment costs for up to twelve years.

Damian nearly overturned the table.

"Fuck No!"

Paul looked at him deeply.

"No! They are asking to buy your corpse, Dad!" Damian repeated, voice shaking.

"They’re paying for your mother."

"But... but you’re still alive!"

"...for now."

That answer silenced the room.

Paul eventually signed.

Damian fought him for days afterward, but his father never changed his mind.

Instead, Paul spent whatever active time remained doing painfully ordinary things with his son.

They played Minecraft again.

The ancient Dell computers were long gone, replaced by cheap laptops, but Paul insisted on rebuilding the same ugly stone castle he remembered from years earlier.

Damian called it a county jail again, and Paul laughed until his increasingly rigid chest forced him to stop.

They visited Angela together.

Paul sat beside his wife for hours, holding her hand while talking about things that had happened before Damian was born.

Sometimes Damian remained in the room, while other times he stepped outside because listening to his father speak as though Angela might answer became unbearable.

They ate badly, watched old movies, and even played one final Dungeons & Dragons session with Paul’s brothers.

Then, Paul became too stiff to walk without assistance and the military took custody shortly afterward.

Damian was not permitted to witness what happened at the end.

Officially, Paul Baines died peacefully while receiving palliative treatment after consenting to an experimental research program.

Unofficially, Damian understood perfectly well that the doctors had ended his life before the disease completed whatever grotesque process was turning living tissue into something cold, rigid and scientifically useless.

There was no funeral body, only paperwork.

Paul had traded even his corpse for Angela.

Damian dropped out of college not long afterward.

He had already graduated high school and completed roughly half of an engineering degree, but halfway did not produce a diploma and unfinished credits did not convince employers to pay engineering salaries.

There was no inheritance waiting either.

Whatever Paul once owned had already been consumed by Angela’s care, household expenses and years of medical debt.

His military agreement removed a huge portion of the continuing burden surrounding Angela, but it did not erase old loans, private debts, uncovered expenses or the simple cost of Damian remaining alive.

So Damian worked, and for roughly a year he took whatever he could find, whether they were moving jobs, delivery work, temporary warehouse shifts, or even construction cleanup.

Anything that paid quickly and did not care that his resume contained an unfinished degree and a family history nobody wanted to hear during an interview.

Then he found Apex Meridian Logistics.

The job was brutal but steady.

Damian became a loader, spending his days moving freight, operating warehouse equipment, stacking pallets and gradually learning exactly how much weight a human spine could tolerate before beginning negotiations with God.

His salary eventually settled around thirty-two hundred dollars before taxes, and most months the money seemed to disappear before it properly entered his account.

There were debts, minor hospital expenses, his food, rent and transportation.

And so on.

Five years passed like that.

Damian grew leaner, stronger and more exhausted.

The hands that once held engineering textbooks became rough from straps, pallets and loading hooks, while the young man who once dreamed of designing machines became extremely good at moving boxes containing machines other people could afford to buy.

He did not become bitter toward his parents, never.

If anything, Paul and Angela became the reason Damian kept going.

Every overtime shift bought another little piece of stability.

Every loan payment removed something his father had left unfinished.

Every visit to Room 144 meant sitting beside Angela and telling her about his day as though the woman beneath the blankets might suddenly open her eyes and ask whether he’d remembered to eat.

Damian never stopped talking to her, even after he could barely remember the sound of her voice, even after he realized almost every memory he possessed of her speaking came from childhood, and even after responsibility had swallowed practically everything else in his life.

Then came August of 2026.

Damian had already been injured at Apex Meridian when a damaged warehouse rack collapsed, leaving his ribs and side badly bruised.

The company denied responsibility, offered an insulting compensation arrangement and nevertheless dangled another one hundred and twenty dollars of overtime before a man whose entire life had trained him to calculate pain against money.

Damian went back to work, because of course he did.

Late during the shift, exhausted, injured and moving freight when he had absolutely no business doing so, Damian lost his footing.

There was a brief sensation of falling, a violent impact against his head, then darkness.

Damian Baines died on the warehouse floor, and when awareness returned, Earth was gone.

He had arrived in Valoria.