â - Fen (aka, Wildblades)
(Â My museâs reaction to finding your muse beaten and bruised. TW: blood and violence. )
To say that ghosting about the Row was advantageous would be an overstatement. Often, Fisaliâs traversing the shadows bore no fruit. Things werenât like they used to be. There were no whispers worth remembering anymore. Either the real substance was being dealt in secret, or Silvermoon had become substantially more empty-headed over the last year.
That wasnât to say, though, that it wasnât interesting, or that it didnât have its consequences.
Todayâs was particularly nauseating.Â
It wasnât like she hadnât seen Fen in bad shape before. There had been more than one occasion during the several months they spent together where she had patched him up after an argument gone south. It had never been quite like this, though. He was lying on his back, near the post he always stood by, helm missing and armor nearly falling apart.
She crept closer to get a better look, and the gruesome sight made her brows twitch. Surely this hadnât been the work of just one. His breath was wheezy and ragged as he drifted in and out of some semblance of consciousness. Some of the skin on his face and neck that had been spared of bruises were instead tainted with blood and speckled with dirt. His left eye was swollen with a dark bag underneath, and the right side of his lower lip was entirely too red and too large. Although it was near its breaking point, his armor appeared to be intact, and she assumed that the bruises continued but the cuts did not.
Fisali knew that when she removed herself from the shadows, her expression was entirely too predatory. The first thoughts that came to mind were painfully obvious. Her shoulders trembled faintly and her lips parted as she imagined ending it, lettings her daggers say all of the words sheâd wanted to say for so long now until he was an unrecognizable pile. For a moment all of the aggression and feelings of betrayal that festered in her months ago came back to life, and the sudden shift in dynamic was dangerously enticing. The corners of her lips almost twitched at the notion, and her widened owl eyes watched as he opened and closed his mouth in frantic attempts to speak to her.
Had it been another mark, that panicked croaking would have either been infuriating or invigorating. With him, though, it was entirely different, and brought another old feeling back from before, snapping her out of her macabre reverie. It served as a reminder of something she had come to terms with for a while now, and she sighed softly, her posture hinting at faint slumps of defeat. Her malicious intent seemed to disappear from her features entirely and she slowly shook her head, some stray locks of snowy white hair spilling over her shoulders. She sat crouched like that for a moment, then carefully began to hook her arms underneath his. âAlways a fighter,â she murmured as his battered body tried to struggle. âListen, the more you squirm, the longer itâs gonna take for me to get somewhere where I can fix it.â
He continued using up what little energy remained as she dragged him all the way down towards the mail box, swerving slightly to stop behind the large artificial tree in a shabby attempt to hide him from prying eyes that didnât exist this early in the morning. By the time she had propped him up against the wall, his limbs had gone limp and his eyes had closed.Â
"Are you playing dead?" she asked, trying to comfort herself a little by making light of what was obviously a complete loss of consciousness with no success. Her hands quickly went to work and she set her pack down next to her to rummage through for supplies. The process was meticulous and, oddly enough, mind-numbing. Offhandedly she wondered what she must have looked like, to make him scared like that. Was it really her, or had he just been reduced to his primal instincts after being pummeled into a condition like that? She hadnât seen him scared very many times before. Part of her wanted him to be afraid, after everything heâd said about how weak she was, but part of her didnât, and she couldnât decide why. Everything from that moment gave her enough reason to want to scream "I told you so", but the idea of proving him wrong didnât feel satisfying anymore. She was happy now. She made it back to how it was before, and it felt good. She knew she had regained all of the qualities he fell in love with that crumbled during her lapse and knowing that was enough. Perhaps she didnât want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that, she didnât want to hear the "I told you that you would be better off without me" as if anything that had happened was for her. At the same time, she didnât want him to go about the rest of life not realizing what she thought he had missed. She wanted him to know how great she was, how the sly and cunning Fisali was back and even better than before. As it usually was when concerning Fen, she had too many emotions pulling her in different directions all at once.
Before she could follow her train of thought to its conclusion, her hands stopped and she blinked, realizing they had nothing else to do. She took a deep breath and eyed her handiwork, satisfied enough with the job she had done. His eye was bandaged, any cuts and scrapes had been covered and she nursed the bruises with herbs as best as she could after cleaning the blood off his skin. The rest of him still needed tending to, but those were things she couldnât do for him, not anymore. He would survive until she could get him to a proper healerâone he wouldnât be so uncomfortable with when he awoke without his leathers and covered in bandages.
"Now we wait, I guessâŚ" she whispered, pulling a canteen from her pack and moving to sit beside him until he awoke. She drew her slender legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around them, resting her chin on her knees and staring forward. "I really hate you sometimes, yâknow?" she breathed, her brow furrowing. "But it doesnât last. Ever. Because⌠youâre stupid, and Iâm stupid, and⌠youâre practically the only real weakness I have left, and now here I am talking to myself. Iâm fucking crazy whenever youâre involved, you jackassâŚ"Â
She buried her face in her knees and squeezed her legs until her knuckles became whiter than her skin. âWake up already so I can get away from you.â