Almalexia. (arithmeticks) wrote in emillion, |
Rictor Cassul was a terrible patient. He’d woken up in the city clinic with no clear indication of how he’d gotten there after the battle, alone and disoriented. He opened his eyes to an initial wave of confusion, before understanding and irritation soon took its place—“Who brought me here?” he’d demanded through numb lips, the whole rest of his body aching. When they described the other knight who’d carried him here, the rest of him sagged into the cot in exhaustion and what felt like anger, bone-deep and poisonous. The doctors were enforcing bed-rest and a regimen of potions for the holy knight, the liquid cool and crisp and acrid in his throat, the cloying chemical taste drowning away the waves of pain. When he was awake and lucid, he was clamouring to be allowed out, for news of the rest of the attack, for updates on his friends and family. The doctors soon learned to tut and cluck and drown out Cassul’s protestations that he was ready to be back on his feet (he clearly wasn’t). He’d been half-crushed in his armour, bones jutting out of his skin, plate mangled and chest shredded. His left arm was bound and immobile for healing, tightly wrapped to hopefully heal and reattach to his shoulder, the magic knitting into the tissue, half of him feeling trapped and swaddled (and fucking helpless). A couple days later, it was only upon the insistence of Father Luscini that the church was adequately supplied with white mages, that the Korporal was allowed to be delicately transported back to the Grande Cathedral and its own in-house infirmary. Even that effort was too much in the end, however: he collapsed on the cot as soon as they dropped him there, falling unconscious with Amos’ soft whisper of prayer and homily in his ears, a thanks to Faram. Blessed are we, because we bear Your wounds and the sign of Your Blood on our countenances, Rictor thought blearily, dazedly, before he felt a cool hand on his forehead and then nothing. It was not long after when Lex found herself at the knight’s side, the Kaplan’s presence replaced with another and her hand reaching out to confirm Rictor’s presence. No longer a phantom to haunt the mage’s sleeping hours, a figment of concern run rampant by the forces of time and distance. Lex sat perched on the edge of the narrow infirmary cot, her eyes wandering along the slowly healing wreckage of the man she had, over time, grown to steadily care for (there was no perfect way to calculate the hours, the days at which this, they, had begun along this journey, and she was wise enough now to privately admit as much). During the course of the latest battle, the mage had found herself tethered by responsibilities to the confines of the Cathedral, waiting for those who had ventured outside the city walls to return for healing—those such as Rictor, who only now had found his way back (to her). It had not been a situation she had grown fond of over the course of recent months, and the mark which had been left from her days in similar purpose, during a time where she had felt even more helpless, burned like an opened wound in her memories. How far had she come, if only to repeat such a cycle? As a mage of the church, was this fated to be her lot? Was there not a greater path that Faram wished for her to take? These thoughts had worried themselves in circles, leaving behind them a deep-tread path as Lex moved about her daily tasks and responsibilities, doing as instructed to help with the others, alleviating wounds and feeling her own continue to seethe. But she had prayed, and she had waited, and now, as light fingers touched gently against Rictor’s cheek, Lex released a shaky breath and began to lift the burdens weighing heavy on her heart. “You are quite late, of course,” she whispered, the waves of her hair falling down to hide her expression. |