Chapter 9
Fight days are the worst.
Lethe has hated them since his first week in the pits, when a creature he'd just finished stitching was dragged back to the arena before the wound had closed and came back missing half its jaw.
He's hated them through six years of patching bodies that are sent out to be broken again, of setting bones that will be re-broken, of watching the creatures he tends walk into the sand and knowing some of them won't walk back.
Today he hates them more than usual.
He doesn't examine why. He knows why. He just doesn't want to look at it, the same way he doesn't want to look at the knot in his stomach or the tightness in his chest or the way his hands fumble, actually fumble, when he's packing his satchel for the pre-fight preparation rounds.
He drops a roll of linen. Picks it up. Drops the tin of salve.
Picks that up too. Stares at his hands and tells them to behave and they don't listen because his hands, for once, are not the problem.
The problem is that Zazyrus fights today and Lethe is scared for him.
Not of him. For him. The distinction has been clear in Lethe's mind for weeks now, so clear it barely requires articulation, but today it burns.
Today it sits behind his sternum and radiates heat into his limbs and makes his fingers clumsy and his thoughts scattered and his carefully maintained partition between the voice that works and the mind that wants so thin he can see through it.
He descends into the deep kennels. The air cools.
The lanterns flicker. His footsteps echo and he focuses on the sound of them, one after another, grounding himself in rhythm.
He is a healer. This is his job. He prepares fighters for bouts.
He's done it hundreds of times. There is no reason for his hands to shake.
He unlocks the cage.
Zazyrus is awake. He's always awake when Lethe arrives, sitting against the back wall with that contained stillness that Lethe has come to understand is not passivity but vigilance, a body that never fully rests because resting has never been safe.
His dark eyes find Lethe in the doorway and Lethe feels the weight of them settle on his skin and it steadies him, which is absurd.
The gaze of a creature about to fight for his life should not be the thing that calms Lethe's hands. But it does.
"Morning," Lethe says. He kneels. Opens his satchel.
"I need to check everything before they take you up.
Stitches, mobility, range of motion. Then I'll wrap your hands.
" He pulls out his supplies and arranges them on the clean cloth and his voice is professional and steady and betrays nothing of the cold fear sitting in his stomach.
"Let's start with the ribs. Deep breath for me? "
Zazyrus breathes. Lethe watches the expansion of his chest, the way the muscle stretches over the healed wound, the absence of a flinch.
Good. The ribs have knitted. He presses along the line of the old fracture and feels solid bone beneath his fingers and exhales a breath he didn't realize he was holding.
"Ribs are good. Shoulder." He moves around Zazyrus's side and checks the shoulder, probing the healed laceration, testing the joint's range by pressing Zazyrus's arm gently through its arc of motion.
The muscle is warm under his hands and dense and responsive and Lethe focuses on the clinical data.
Full range. No guarding. No crepitus. "Shoulder's good. Hip."
He doesn't hesitate this time. He hooks a finger into Zazyrus's waistband and pulls it down enough to expose the scar on his hip, fully healed now, a raised line of new tissue that catches the lamplight.
He presses along its length and the skin is smooth and the muscle beneath is solid and Zazyrus doesn't flinch and Lethe's fingers don't linger. He pulls the waistband back into place.
"Everything's healed," he says. "You're in good shape." The words come out lighter than he intends, almost flippant, and he catches himself and swallows and refocuses. "Hands next. I need to wrap your knuckles."
He pulls the wrapping strips from his satchel. Long bands of linen, sturdy, designed to protect the small bones of the hand from impact. He's wrapped hundreds of fighters' hands. The process is automatic, mechanical, a thing his fingers know without consulting his brain.
Except.
To wrap Zazyrus's hands, he needs to be close. Closer than the stitching requires. He needs to face him, to sit in front of him, and Zazyrus's legs are drawn up and the space between them is the only space available and Lethe settles into it before he can think too hard about the geometry of it.
He's kneeling between Zazyrus's legs.
The position registers in his body before it registers in his brain.
His knees are on the stone between Zazyrus's spread thighs, close enough that he can feel the heat of the beast's body on both sides, radiating from the heavy muscle of his legs.
His own thighs nearly brush the insides of Zazyrus's.
The space is narrow and warm and intimate in a way that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the specific, charged awareness that floods Lethe's body with heat so sudden he's dizzy with it.
He reaches for Zazyrus's right hand.
The hand is enormous in his. Zazyrus's fingers are long and thick and tipped with claws that curve in dark, deadly arcs, and his palm is broad and calloused and scarred and warm.
Lethe turns it over and his own hands look small against it, pale and slender, and the contrast does something to his pulse that he doesn't have the composure to manage.
He starts wrapping. Around the knuckles.
Between the fingers, threading the linen carefully around the base of each claw, leaving the tips free.
Across the back of the hand, over the wrist, back again.
The work is precise and he focuses on it with a ferocity that is entirely disproportionate to the task because the alternative is thinking about where he is and what he's touching and how close they are.
He can feel Zazyrus's breath on the top of his head.
That realization arrives and detonates quietly.
The beast is looking down at him. Lethe can feel it, the angle of the gaze, the proximity.
Zazyrus's exhale stirs the hair at Lethe's crown, warm and steady, and Lethe's skin prickles from his scalp to the nape of his neck and down his spine and he keeps wrapping.
He keeps his eyes on the linen and the knuckles and the claws and he does not look up because if he looks up Zazyrus's face will be right there, inches away, and Lethe is not confident in what his expression will do.
The tendons of Zazyrus's hand shift beneath the wrapping. Lethe smooths the linen over his knuckles and his thumb traces the ridge of a tendon and the hand flexes, slightly, under his touch. Lethe swallows. His throat clicks.
He thinks about these hands. About the clawed fingers that wrapped around his wrist with controlled precision.
About the strength in them, the devastating, restrained power that could crush bone and chose not to.
He thinks about how these fingers could wrap around both of his wrists at once and hold him still and he should not be thinking about that, not now, not here, kneeling between this creature's legs with heat crawling up his neck and pooling in his stomach.
Don't think about that.
He finishes the right hand. Ties off the wrap. Reaches for the left.
Same process. Around the knuckles, between the fingers, across the back, over the wrist. His hands move on autopilot and his breathing is carefully measured and the heat between them is a living thing, expanding with every second, filling the narrow space between their bodies until Lethe can feel it on his face, his throat, his chest.
"Be careful," he says.
The words are out before he can stop them. Not clinical. Not professional. Just honest and worried and entirely useless, and the moment they leave his mouth he rolls his eyes at himself. "That's useless advice. Ignore me."
He ties off the left wrap. Tucks the end under. His hands are finished but he doesn't pull away immediately because pulling away means leaving this space, this warm, close, charged space between Zazyrus's thighs, and his body is reluctant in a way that his brain finds mortifying.
He pulls back.
Or he tries to. He leans away, shifts his weight to his heels, and Zazyrus catches the edge of his sleeve.
Not his wrist. Not his hand. The fabric of his sleeve, pinched between the tips of two claws, a grip so light that Lethe could break it with a twitch. He stills. His eyes drop to the claw points holding his sleeve, the dark curve of them against the white linen, and then he raises his gaze.
Zazyrus is looking at him.
The expression is different from anything Lethe has seen on his face.
The flat, empty assessment is gone. The predatory focus is gone.
What's there instead is something that Lethe doesn't have a word for, something intense and searching and almost, impossibly, uncertain.
His dark eyes hold Lethe's and the cage is very quiet and the air between them is very warm and Lethe's heart is beating so hard he's certain Zazyrus can hear it.
He knows the fight is important. He knows Demos has been down here to see Zazyrus, has heard the guards talking about it, though he doesn't know what was said.
He knows the stakes are high and the money is significant and the pressure on Zazyrus to perform is enormous.
He thinks maybe Zazyrus is worried. The thought is strange, almost alien, because Zazyrus doesn't worry.
Zazyrus catalogs and calculates and endures.
But there's something in his expression right now, in the way he holds Lethe's sleeve with claws that could shred it, that looks terribly close to a creature who needs something and doesn't know how to ask.
Lethe covers his hand.
He doesn't think about it. He just does it. His palm settles over Zazyrus's knuckles, over the fresh wrapping, warm and firm and deliberate. He curls his fingers around the beast's hand and holds on.
"You'll be alright," Lethe says. Quiet. Sure. The voice he uses for frightened creatures, the voice that doesn't break, except this time it isn't technique. It's true. He believes it. He has to believe it because the alternative is unbearable. "You always are."
Surprise flickers across Zazyrus's face.
Lethe sees it, the brief widening of his eyes, the fractional parting of his lips, the way his entire body goes still in a manner that is different from his usual stillness.
This is not vigilance. This is shock. As though, in all his cataloging and calculating and reading of human behavior, he didn't predict this.
Didn't predict that the boy kneeling between his legs would reach out and hold his hand and tell him he'd be alright.
His claws release Lethe's sleeve.
Lethe lets go. He sits back. He picks up his satchel and packs it and stands and his knees ache and his hands are steady and his heart is doing something unsustainable.
"I'll be here when you get back," he says from the cage door. "I'll have everything ready."
He lets himself out. Locks the cage. Walks up the corridor.
He makes it to the top of the stairs.
He presses his back to the corridor wall and his hand flies to his chest and he can feel it, the hammer of his heart beneath his palm, violent and insistent and completely, thoroughly beyond his control.
His face is hot. His breath is coming too fast. He closes his eyes and presses the back of his skull against the stone and stands there, one hand over his racing heart and the other gripping the strap of his satchel, and he tries to assemble the pieces of himself back into the configuration that functions.
Don't get attached.
The command is familiar. He's been issuing it to himself for weeks, a standing order from the part of his brain that knows how the pits work and what happens to the things he cares about and how efficiently Demos weaponizes affection.
Don't get attached. Don't care. Don't let yourself want something that can be found and used and broken.
You can't trust anyone but yourself.
This one is older. Carved into him by years of evidence, by every kindness that turned out to be a transaction and every offered hand that turned out to be a leash.
Trust is a luxury. Trust is a crack in the wall that someone will eventually find and pry open and pour poison through.
Trust no one. Rely on no one. Keep the walls up and the distance maintained and survive.
He presses his hand harder against his chest. His heartbeat is slowing. His breathing is evening out. The wall is going back up, brick by brick, the practiced reconstruction that gets him through every day in this place.
But there is a crack in it now. A fissure shaped exactly right for a clawed hand holding the edge of his sleeve.
For dark eyes that looked at him with something that might have been need.
For the warmth of a wrapped hand beneath his palm and the way Zazyrus's expression broke open, just for a moment, into surprise.
He wants to trust. He wants it so badly it aches, a physical thing, lodged in his throat and his chest and the backs of his eyes.
He wants to let someone in, to have one person in this place who sees him and doesn't want to use what they see.
He wants it and the wanting is the most dangerous thing he's felt in years because the wanting is the thing that will get him killed.
He opens his eyes. The corridor stretches before him, familiar and dim. Somewhere above, the crowd is gathering. Somewhere below, Zazyrus is waiting to be led to the sand.
Lethe pushes off the wall. Straightens his satchel. Smooths his shirt.
He walks to the healer's alcove to prepare his supplies for the aftermath, and his hands are steady again, and his face is composed, and the crack in the wall is still there, and he is not going to be able to close it.
He knows this.
He prepares his supplies anyway.