Chapter 35 #2
“Task!” She doesn’t recognize her own voice, the guttural scream that is ripped from her throat. It’s like watching it happen in slow motion — the surge-saber dragging across his chest, the look of shock on his face, the blood soaking through his uniform.
“Kit,” he moans, hands pressed to his chest where blood spills from him, the wound long and deep. She drops her knees next to him before she can think, oblivious to the assailants who Voss is now engaging directly overhead.
“No, no, no,” she says, her hands running over his chest, pressing on the wound as she tries to staunch the bleeding.
It’s no use, it continues to spill over, and what good is having this fucking power if she can’t use it when it matters?
She’s a Vitalis, for Aaris’ sake — she can fix this, if she could just take a minute to gather herself.
And then there are arms around her, dragging her off him and she’s shouting, kicking and screaming, wriggling in the arms that are clamped around her.
“Easy, princess,” a voice says in her ear. “We need you in one piece.”
“Get off me!” She’s crying, tears streaming down her face as she bucks in her captor’s arms, watching Task lay on the floor, blood pooling around him as his face pales. “Let me go!” He can’t die, she won’t let him. Not from this. Not from her own damn stupidity.
Her hands squeeze at the arms that are tight around her neck and chest, and she feels an unexpected sensation.
Instead of the warmth flowing out of her palms, she feels the opposite — like she’s inhaling the sun.
The grip around her loosens, the man letting go.
She falls to the ground on her hands and knees, glancing behind her, breathing shaky.
The man who held her is crumpled on the floor, gray and unmoving, and Kit gasps. Had she done that?
She doesn’t have time to think, scrambling back to where Task lays, his eyes half-lidded as he looks up at her. “Kit,” he says, a slight smirk at the corner of his lips.
“Don’t die on me, Task.” She kneels in the blood next to him, pressing her hands to him.
She can do this. She needs to do this. They’re too far from the medical bay, and if she can’t make this happen, she’s not sure he’ll survive.
And Voss — where did Voss go? She notices the room is suddenly quiet, no thrum of surge-sabers, no more shouting, no panting.
She’s afraid to look up from Task, but she forces herself to scan the small room. She finds Voss slumped against the wall, his hand gripping his thigh. Fuck fuck fuck. She tries to concentrate, wishing time would just stop for a minute so she could focus on making this happen.
And then Voss is shouting at her, weakly, “Kit, look out!”
The final assailant is coming at her, and she’s entirely unarmed.
All she can think about is saving Task. She needs to protect him, but she’s also realized the reason they’re here is her.
And they want her alive. If she was just able to use her power on that other man, maybe she can make it happen again.
She lets him get closer, pretending to be unaware of him despite Voss’ shouted warning, gambling on the fact that she will actually be able to use her power again. She remains bent over Task, hands on him, letting the assailant think she’s distracted with healing him.
She feels him reach around her middle, wrapping his arm around her and tugging her backwards. “You’re not getting away again, girl,” he growls in her ear.
Instead of fighting, she goes limp, forcing him to drag her as she places her hands on the forearm pinning her.
She takes a deep breath, focusing, trying to understand how the power works.
She thinks of Task, laying wounded on the floor, and she feels a tug again, a rush of sunshine pouring into her. It’s working.
She doesn’t want to kill him, though, wants to take only enough to mend Task.
She removes her hands as she feels the man’s grip loosen enough for her to squirm away, and he drops to the floor, face pallid, chest heaving, and skin suddenly wrinkled and gray.
“What did you do?” he gasps, holding his hands up in horror as he slumps to the floor.
She rushes back to where Task lays, eyes closed and breathing shallow.
She presses her hands into him, thinking of sunshine and pine and his smile and the way he looks at her when he thinks she’s not looking, like she’s the very best thing in the entire Consortium, and she feels it pouring out of her, a stream of golden light emanating from her hands and flooding into Task, illuminating his entire chest as it wraps around the wound.
“Task,” she whispers. “Task, please. Wake up.” Her eyes are filled with tears, and one slips down her face as she wills him to wake. “I need you to come back.” He’s quiet, blood still pouring from his chest. Then more softly, “I need you.”
And then, she sees his skin slowly knitting itself together, the stream of blood slowing, and she breathes out when he blinks at her, his azure eyes coming back into focus. She cups his face in her hands, looking at him. “Can you hear me?”
“Kit?” He sounds confused and tries to sit up.
She presses him back to the ground. “No, stay right there.” She pulls up her Chronogram, dialing the Captain, Caelinus, and Luminary Oswald at once, requesting backup in the vestibule. “Just stay there. Help is coming.”
Task
He wakes up groggy, the room illuminated around him. It’s very bright on this floor, all fluorescent white and silver. He feels a pulse down his side, from his armpit to his hip, and he winces. What the hell happened to him?
“Task!” Kit whisper-cries. She’s curled up in the chair next to his bed, as if she’s been keeping vigil.
“Kit,” he says, his voice raspy. “Thank Odite.” A flash of Kit running to his side, pressing her hands to him, flits through his mind.
“I’m okay,” she says. “You’re okay, too.
Or you will be. They got you good with the surge-saber.
” She gestures to his side, where the pulse is emanating from.
He tries to shift his position, sit up more, and his skin tugs.
He feels gauze wrapped around his ribs. Something is beeping beside him. “Try not to move.”
Task ignores her and pushes himself up anyways. He remembers Voss lunging in front of someone, taking a surge-saber to the thigh. “Voss?” he asks.
“He’s down the way,” Kit says, gesturing somewhere beyond the curtain. “I patched him up, don’t worry. You got the worst of it.” There is fear behind her eyes and something else he can’t place. “I’m not going to ask you about it right now, but I want to know who they were.”
Who was she talking about? Task’s memory is foggy.
He remembers a flurry of people dressed in black, fighting in the ship’s entry chamber, the hallway leading to the main floor.
He tries to force himself to piece it together, but things aren’t making sense.
As soon as he grasps on to something, his mind seems to slip away from it.
He takes her in, her white scrubs covered in blood. He’s grateful that whatever happened, she’s alright. Unharmed. That it’s his blood on her scrubs, and not hers.
She comes around his bedside and lifts his blanket. He tries to stop her, but she swats his hand away, peeling the gauze away from his ribs with light fingers. “Relax. I just want to check the wound.”
He braces for her touch. Healing has always been difficult with the pain echo, because inevitably, some of the healer’s pain transfers to him.
Although they are in theory, trying to take pain away, he always has to be prepared to absorb a little more pain in the process.
He feels her fingers on his skin, pressing into him, and he sighs.
There isn’t the pain he was expecting, just a pleasurable sensation of warmth flowing into him. “What are you —”
“Shhh,” she says, moving her fingers down his abdomen, muttering indecipherable words under her breath.
He’s in pain, yes, and the relief is welcome, but her touch is making him shudder for entirely different reasons.
There is a palpable tension in the air. She slides her fingers lower, tracing along his hip bone, and his entire body clenches.
Fuck, he thinks. He is not in control of himself right now.
He is wounded, and probably on some type of pain relief potion, possibly mildly concussed, and he is going to do something reckless.
He feels as though he has been entirely unzipped, everything he normally keeps tucked away set out on display for her.
Her fingers move again and he grabs her wrist.
She gasps, her green eyes locking with his.
“Kit,” he growls. “Stop. Touching. Me.”
“I’m just pushing some light magic into the wound,” she explains, as if oblivious to the inner turmoil Task is facing. But she can’t be. The air between them is buzzing with electricity. There is a tension between them, and he knows he cannot be the only one feeling it.
“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s you.”
She ignores him and moves her hands again, closer to his lower abdomen, and fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. She must know what she’s doing to him. This is not routine healing, is it?
“Kit,” he growls again, his pupils wide. “If you don’t stop doing that…”
“What?” she asks, looking up at him from beneath her eyelashes as her fingers trail along his pelvis.
“Isn’t it a little irresponsible, as a Luminary, to take advantage of your patients?” Task asks, trying to focus on anything but where her hands are.
“Is that what I’m doing?” she asks. “Because from where I’m standing, I’m just healing you.” She forces a little more magic into him, to make a point.