Chapter 10 #3
I blinked, and across the silver table, smeared with fingerprints and the rings from mugs that had been set down and picked up, I saw Araxis. I looked at him – his pale face, washed to matte white, so stiff and still it was like a mask – and I heard, in the distance, a soft keen of distress.
Familiar. I let myself blink, just the once, and when I opened my eyes, he was still there, watching me, body curved forward just a little. "Hi," I murmured, and my mouth tasted like blood.
"Sashen." He rose to his feet, stepping around the table to draw to my side. His fingers threaded through my hair and he tipped my head against his chest. I could feel the rumbling beneath his skin, and all at once it was like I could breathe.
Except the breathing came as a gasp, desperate and shocked. "Oh fuck," I hissed. One hand – still streaked with blood, a mix of mine and the sephear's – rose and scrubbed my face. "Fuck, I – Did I –"
"You defended yourself," Araxis said, firm.
His fingers dug harder against me, the pressure reminding me to stay here, to stay here with him.
"The ward guards had to verify what happened.
I made sure it was done properly. It is done now.
You can come home. All is well, beloved. You defended yourself."
My eyes were squeezed shut, my hands shaking when they dropped to the dirty silver table in front of me.
"My hands –" I started, voice quavering, staring at my knuckles, then rotating my wrists so that I could look at my palms. There was a tiny scab at the edge of my pinky where the sephear had threatened to take the finger off.
"Let me," murmured Araxis and he must have spoken to someone who was listening, because a bowl of water and a cloth appeared in the time it took me to lick my lips and swallow against my dry throat, all while he just held me and stroked my hair and rumbled against me, soothing, and I continued to stare in horror at my bloodied hands.
But was it horror at what I'd done? Or horror at what I'd had to become, what I had unleashed?
The wolf, I thought distantly.
Araxis carefully set the bowl on the floor and knelt down in front of me.
He pulled one hand into my lap, supporting my elbow as he moved it, and then set to gently washing the blood from my skin, tracing the cloth along the broken hills and valleys of my knuckles, swiping the gore from my calloused palms.
He'd washed my hands once before, after our dinner on the ship before we'd fallen into bed together.
Back when he'd been lying to me. Back when I'd been falling in love with him.
I watched him do it now, and I felt sick for a reason I didn't understand.
Was it the line of tension in his jaw, the edge distress I could still hear in his throat?
Was it the way his stare darted away from me, like he couldn't quite look at me?
"I'm sorry," I said, breathless, my voice so small and quiet that I didn't even sound like myself. He shouldn't have to be here. He shouldn't have to see this. He shouldn't –
Araxis finished with one of my hands and pulled the other into my lap. "You have nothing to be sorry for," he murmured, gently dragging the cloth over the back of my hand. Rinsing the blood out. Raising it again to continue the slow work.
"I should have –" I stopped, unable to find the next words.
What should I have done? I didn't even know why this had happened, and – and I'd tried to talk my way out, I had, and then they'd pinned me and hurt me and they might have killed me, if – if –
My thoughts ground to a stop. "Where's Elethenn?" I mumbled, needing to know. How had he been there? Why had he been there?
Araxis's hands paused, just for a moment, before he turned my wrist so that he could rinse the final bits of viscera from my palm. "He had to speak with the guards at some length, but he has now been released. I’ve sent him ahead to the creche, where we will speak."
There was an edge of tension to his voice that made something throb in my chest, unpleasant, but I couldn't put words to it now.
Instead, I scrambled for details, anything that would make sense while Araxis finished wiping every fleck of blood from my skin.
"But – who were they? And why did they – Why? "
Araxis set the filthy cloth into the bowl, still kneeling before me.
His fingers traced the split skin of my knuckles, his touch cool and soft.
"We will speak at home," he said after a long moment, during which all I could do was stare as his unblemished fingers traced the broken skin of my hands, as he touched me with reverence despite the thing I'd become.
Araxis leaned forward, then, and pressed a kiss to each knuckle, one after the other, then rotating each hand so that he might press a kiss to the centre of my palms. He turned his head and rested it there, cradled in my upturned palms, and breathed in deeply, shakily, his eyes drifting shut.
The moment had the weight of something left unsaid.
My fingers tensed, just a little, where they cradled his face; I wanted to trace the pointed shape of his ear; I wanted to undo his braid and thread my fingers through his unbound crest; I wanted to sink down to the floor beside him so that he could wrap his arms around me and hold me tight.
I wanted him to love me like I loved him, and I wanted all of the bad things he'd done to be erased from our history.
Most of all, I didn't want him to be my client. I didn't want to do this anymore. I wanted it to be like it could have been, like it had been, like it should have been.
But –
But it wasn't.
"Let's go home," I said, voice hoarse.
Araxis made a soft, affirmative sound, his head shifting in my hands as he nodded.
Then, slowly, he eased his eyes open and pushed himself up, his hands steady and certain as he helped me up too.
I groaned as I stood, my body screaming in a thousand different places.
One hand jerked, unbidden, to my waist, and I had to smother another sharp sound as my elbow blossomed with furious pain.
I'd already been sore when I'd left Tam's; this was worse.
This was way beyond normal. This might be – catastrophic, if I wasn't careful.
"I might need a doctor," I admitted, breathless. Araxis moved so that his body was tucked against mine, my arm resting over his shoulder, and he shifted so that he was easily bearing some of my weight. Steady, upright, certain. "There's – ow, fuck."
"The ward guards did a medical scan before I arrived," Araxis murmured as I leaned on him more heavily, my head throbbing as dots of black ate at the edges of my vision.
"These injuries will not kill you, and you can travel in this state.
I have a ward shuttle waiting outside. Do you think you will be able to make it that far? "
I nodded, swallowing down the nausea that each wave of pain sent through my body.
I took a step, supported by Araxis, and tried desperately not to cry out.
Apparently, walking was going to hurt like a motherfucker.
And breathing. I forced myself to inhale deeply, breathing into the pain that crackled at the bottom of my lungs.
I inhaled into it, like I'd been learning from Tam, and it sang like lightning along my nerves.
I held the deep breath at the point where it hurt most, counting from five. By the time I got to zero, some of the sharpest edge of the pain – the part that had surprised me – had dulled, just enough to be bearable. "Okay," I wheezed. "Should be able to walk now."
One of Araxis's hands, which was tucked around my waist, stroked me gently, comforting. "I thought – I did not want to take you to the medical ward down here, not without knowing more about what happened. I can call a physician from another creche. Someone we can trust."
I heard what he was saying without saying.
I'd been attacked. I'd been attacked, on purpose, and until we knew who had done it or why, we couldn’t know who to trust. I nodded, head still ringing. "There's a doctor I've been working with, Rodil. They're crecheless, and they're good. Elethenn knows them. He could – He could get in touch."
To his credit, Araxis didn't ask me any follow-up questions, just nodding along and murmuring sweet nothings to me as I limped my way from the guard station – there was a procession of guards waiting in the hallways, glaring at me as I passed, which I would normally consider a victory but it felt, at that moment, cruel and unnecessary – and toward the ward shuttle that was waiting outside, just big enough for two people and piloted autonomously.
They were expensive: these shuttles could access the few interior tunnels reserved for in-station transport.
He must have been in a rush, I thought fuzzily; he must have come down quickly.
Araxis helped ease me down into the nearest seat, slipping over me to settle in on the other side.
The shuttle lifted up and I let my head tilt sideways, falling to his shoulder while he tapped away at his wristband.
Outside, the dim lights of Radiant Ward had cycled through to red shift.
I realized, with a start, that I'd been out for a long time. It was late. And –
"I do have to say sorry," I said distantly, the view outside the window nothing but flashes of reds and yellows, unfocused. "You should be – You should be sleeping."
"You do not need to apologize," said Araxis, firm.
"This is my fault. It never should have happened.
It is because of me that you felt the need to spend so much time down here, and I should have been with you, not a –" He stopped, flicking his wristband off, and when I looked up at him, I could see the tension in his jaw and in the way he was blinking, rapid.
"I had time off," I croaked, my throat sore and raw. Must have been from all the screaming. "Why would you be with me?"