Cider by Candlelight

[Cherny]

He heals well. His wounds remain clean, and with time and luck and patient care will close entirely; he'll bear the scars for the rest of his life, etched into his skin, but at least he lives.

She makes her request - offers an explanation that he must struggle to follow - and he thinks on it, blinking slowly as he teases meaning from words which threaten to dart away from his grasp like silver minnows.

A message. A message for the Governor, and once he understands that he nods easily enough, docile and accepting.

"'S important." He's gleaned that much from her talk of trust and from her solemn tone, murmuring to show that he appreciates the responsibility she bestows upon him. A notice of investigation by the Inquisitory is puzzling, but he presumes it to be some matter of government business - some vital report, maybe, to be delivered to the Governor's hand.

"Alright." He nods agreeably, though the better part of his attention is on the unhurried winding of fresh bandages around his arm.

[Rance]

Her fingertips were smeared with his blood. There were little beads and droplets of red that still squeezed out from the lips of his wounds. The roll of gauze in her gloved hand spun circuits around his wrists, her bare thumb doing an inchworm's crawl up his wrist to be sure the bandage stayed firmly in-place.

Each blossom of blood that smeared across the white fabric teased her--

I am your doing.

I am because you hesitated.

I am because you made the wrong choice.

Her eyes flicked up to the boy. For a long stretch of moments, there was a dearth of words, a silence as she examined his face. It was easy to see the tiny emotions scrawled across her features at this range -- the wrinkle of her hawkish nose, the faint parting of her lips that showed a glimpse of brittle teeth, the brightness of the stony gray in her eyes, a blind near-whiteness that was not so dark as the rest of her. Her voice slithered out of her like a percolating burst of steam, a hesitant admission that could not be bound behind the barrier of gums or tongue.

"If you died," the girl said, unbidden, "I don't think I could -- could ever move again. But I watched what was happening to you. I watched, even if for a half-second, when I know I ought to have been running for you, or -- or finding a solution. Helping you. Getting you away from that thing's jaws, and--"

She completed, with quivering and imprecise hands, his mummification. He wore half-sleeves of woven bandages. Gloria surveyed her work, even as her fingers smeared blots of copper-colored wetness along her skirt-knees.

"And Son. Son."

The girl relied on half-sentences and incomplete thoughts.

"He is eating things he ought not be eating," she said.