healing an injury starter for @nezhnosts
He presses the lancet to his forearm—the blood that slips from the vein is virulently red, red as the air. It runs over his wrist and Estel cups his hand to make a funnel of his palm, so that the river of his blood collects in the cup set on the ground below his arm. When the current slows, he presses the harmless flat of his knife to the skin beside the wound, applying pressure. More blood flows in the long silence that it takes for the cup to become nearly halfway full.
He watches, and tries not to think of his father.
“I was raised by immortals. Different than you, but just as strange to me. Every day I was changed, like a green shoot, but they were always the same—”
They are alone and the fire has gone down to embers. The dark is new and blue in the young evening, and Estel finds her pale skin almost glowing. Blue, too, but a cast shade of turquoise like the water on a white sand beach. There is something very terrible about her, something terrible like the moon, so that she reminds of a place he dare not think of as home. Perhaps that is why the story comes out of him, warm and low, with the easy intonation of a remembered song.
“I did not understand why they were so different when we seemed so much alike. My mother grew older. Her hair greyed, and the skin around her eyes grew thin. It frightened me, just as it frightened me to grow taller, when no one around us changed at all. It was not death that frightened me. It frightened me that I could not stay the same, that I could not understand or predict what I was becoming. I went to the elf who I secretly pretended was my father when I was at daydreams. He said to me: we are all part of the same Song. I suppose he meant that the same God made those lesser gods who made us both.”
Estel glances up at her through a sharp shadow of dark lashes and smiles a little. Something boyish at the corner of his mouth. The tale is easy for him to tell, as though he told a story of another boy, a boy who wasn’t him. He does not recognize himself in it, even as he is in most danger of doing so when he is doing this. A knot at the base of his heart tells him that when he is doing this, when he is making medicine, he is who he was meant to be.
“He was very wise—but more than I wanted his wisdom, I wanted him to love me like a son, so that I would not have to be so different.”
Weakness is less palling when paired with another weakness. He offers her a little intimacy to make the intimacy of her vulnerability less naked, to cover it up with his own like a blanket. Estel stymies the flow of his blood suddenly by bending his wrist upward and then licks his own arm clean, knowing his mouth is cleaner than his shirt. He rocks back onto the balls of his feet to offer the cup of his own blood up to her.
They say that all her kind are the servants of Sauron—but they say, too, that all men are cruel and full of greed. Here, in the quiet of the wood, when they are both now faintly drunk with lack of blood, it does not matter what scholars and poets and the sons of wise men say.
The cup is warm in his hand—or else his skin has grown a little cold. Estel’s beautiful brown and silver eyes are very earnest. “Take it, please. Food is the first medicine.”
