KOTLC Sokeefe One-Shots, Alternate Endings, etc

Roger Alcot (part 2 of 3)

They spent the rest of the morning talking through all the other complications they'd skipped over before. For lunch, they made starkflower stew.

Or rather, Sophie made starkflower stew while Keefe did everything in his power to pester and distract her just so he could tease her for it.

He quickly found the best way to distract her was to reach over and kiss her, or lean in really close and stare at her with an intense gaze, letting those ice blue eyes of his bore into hers and making her heart trip over itself.

He really enjoyed that.

She had a feeling he'd be bragging about it for a long time.

But as they ate, and poured the rest at the base of the tree--remembering Calla as they did so--Keefe turned more thoughtful.

"Did I tell you about the family I saw at the cemetery in London? When I went to visit the graves of Ethan Benedict Wright II and his daughter?"

Sophie looked up at him. "No, you didn't."

"There was this young mom with three young kids, the oldest kid couldn't have been older than six. They came and brought flowers to this grave that looked pretty new. It was actually really awful to watch, they were crying so much. I went over after they left and saw the name on the gravestone--Roger Alcot. I just couldn't get them out of my mind. So I looked Roger up later. He was so young, he was only twenty-nine, and died of this illness called cancer."

"Oh, that's awful. Cancer has killed a lot of people. And it's probably something the elves could help with if they hadn't written off the whole human race." Sophie found that her heart was breaking for this family she hadn't even met.

Keefe smiled at her, feeling her emotions. "I know. It made my heart break too. That family was his wife and three young kids. I found all these pictures online, they were so happy before he got sick, and..." he sighed. "We have everything we need here, you know?"

"What do you mean?"

"We don't have to worry about disease, for one thing. But also...money. I have never even thought about money being an issue. Money is just...there. We all have it, plenty of it. Not until my time in the Forbidden Cities did I realize how much the humans depend on it and how so many of them really don't have enough. And this family...all of his medical bills--which is a term I had never even heard of until recently--it's crazy how much debt this family is in. I realize I've infringed on this family's privacy, but I just...I had to know everything about them that I could. He went through all of this treatment, which was crazy expensive by human standards, and it didn't even save him. So now, her husband is dead, and she's still trying to pay for the medicine that didn't save him. And I watched them. They're struggling. She's having to try to make enough money to support the family without him there to contribute, and she's trying to pay off these medical expenses, and they're all grieving, and..." Keefe sighed. "I don't know. I just...it isn't right."

Sophie reached for his hand. "It's awful. And it's something humans deal with all the time."

"I can see, now, why you went through such a culture shock when you first came here," Keefe told her. "And also why it has made you so angry that the elves stopped considering humans to be intelligent species and claimed it was the humans when really it was the elves doing terrible things."

"Things would be so different for the humans if they still had the help of the elves. That bothers me a lot."

"Well, now it bothers me too. And I just think...I could pay off that man's medical bills, and give that family enough money to live--very comfortably--for the rest of their lives. And I wouldn't even notice the money missing. Like...it wouldn't cost me hardly anything." He looked at her, his face completely serious. "Is it crazy for me to want to find a way to do that for them?"