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When Rose wakes up she has absolutely no idea where she is.
Lately this has become a more commonplace occurrence, but she's still not used to it, and she goes through the standard series of immediate responses: oh good all my limbs are still attached and I can move them, probably therefore my back and neck aren't broken, I don't think I'm bleeding, no one in my current field of view is pointing any weaponry at me, and there aren't visible tentacles.
There is, however, the hiss and crash of what sounds like surf nearby, and she's lying on something damp and gritty but yielding when she pushes her fingers against it. Her head clangs viciously when she tries to sit up, and she shuts her eyes again and thinks black calm thoughts until she thinks she can try a second attempt.
Ah.
Some of the recent past comes filtering back through the carillon booming in her skull. Right. Prospecting trip. New universe. Exploration. Ampora.
Ampora, she thinks, and rubs at the back of her head, where a lump roughly the dimensions of an egg is rising. She and Ampora had been selected because they were both magic-users and he was good with boats, and also frankly she was extremely clever and would theoretically be well-suited to exploratory missions.
They also hated one another relatively cordially. After his initial clumsy attempts at blackflirting, he had settled down into a platonic sort of hatred that fueled pointless but time-passing arguments over the nature of magic vs. science and the point where the two became indistinguishable. They'd spent, what. A week? Something like that--together on the boat and hadn't torn one another's throats out, which Rose considered a practical working relationship.
And there had been a storm, hadn't there? She has confused flickers of memory: pink lightning ripping holes in the sky, waves the size of houses, stutter-flashes of light revealing Ampora fighting the wheel with his jaw set and his poofy hair flattened to his skull by the sheets of rain, those ridiculous silver-purple eyes lurid, improbable. Yes, definitely a storm, and she can remember a terrible fibrous creaking-screaming-groaning noise, and then nothing at all.
Seabirds circle overhead, crying.
Rose takes her hand away from the lump on the back of her skull and is unsurprised to find blood-sticky sand staining her fingers. She wonders if she has a concussion.
The beach she's sitting on, separating the sea from a line of weird dark trees, is littered with sea-wrack of all kinds: knotted lines of driftweed and pale-scoured wood like gnarled bone, the glint here and there of glass, and what she recognizes after a hazy moment as a good few chunks of their boat. That right there, that thing, is obviously part of the mast, and that bundle of sodden cloth beside it is a sail.
Wait. The boat hadn't had purple-and-black sails, had it?
It's a lot more difficult to pull herself to her feet than she'd expected, and she almost overbalances and catches herself just in time, staggering: but she's up, well done Lalonde, a magnificent effort, verticality. The beach keeps wanting to undulate under her feet as if it's trying to be the ocean instead, but she manages not to let it tip her sideways more than she can help.
Flies are buzzing over the heap of cloth, and she thinks dully oh, Ampora is dead, and then oh, I'm probably going to die too and that's sort of a shame; but when she reaches out to prod the heap with a finger it shifts a bit and groans.
She feels for the edge of the purple cape and peels it back to reveal him: he's curled up in a lump with one foot at a weird angle and deep violet bruising all over the visible parts of his skin. There's something wrong with one of his horns, too, it doesn't look right.
"Ampora," she says. Her voice is raspy, clogged: she coughs a few times, tries again. "Ampora. Wake up."
He groans again, flinching away from the light. She glances down at the sea. "Tide's coming in. And it's daylight. You have to move into the shade or you'll fry."
"....Lalonde?"
"Who else? Wake up, you idiot, we're shipwrecked."
He blinks painfully up at her, and then rolls over, props himself up on an elbow, and is thoroughly sick. Rose waits, kneeling beside him. When he can speak he rattles off a string of curses that remind her of Vantas, and spits.
"...Help me up," he says. "Think...my ankle's shot. Possibly my arm as well."
"Your horn looks funny," Rose points out. He reaches up with his good hand and touches the jagged spike of the left horn, and hisses.
"Fffffuck. Fuck. Fuckin cracked it. Jesus fuck." His eyes close, welling with pain-tears, reopen. "What about the ship?"
"In pieces." Rose swallows hard. "Let's find out if you can get up, shall we?"
"God damn everythin to the deepest ulcerous pits of a horrorterror's squirmin intestine, I fuckin hate you, Lalonde," he says, almost conversationally, and she gets her arm round his shoulders, hauls on him despite his gasp of pain, and with the aid of the broken piece of mast manages to get both of them more or less upright.
"Of all the people I have ever met you are the very last I should wish to be stranded with on a desert island, Ampora. Bottom of the list."
"Feelin's mutual."
His ankle won't take any of his weight, and he goes an extremely unhealthy color when he tries it; she thinks maybe he hasn't broken the arm, though, judging by how he flails it around trying to keep his balance while he hops along leaning on her shoulder. He's heavy, dense, his bones made of different stuff than hers, and she can hear his breathing heave and rasp in his chest. Purple blood trickles down his face from a cut above one eyebrow. None of it feels real: Rose is conscious of a certain insulating layer of shock separating her from the situation, and is grateful for it.
The forest consists of tangled underbrush around much larger trees, some of which look enough like coconut palms that she thinks they might possibly even prove to have edible fruit. She props Ampora against one of the trees while she decaptchalogues one of the Thorns and spends a surprising amount of concentration and energy cutting back the underbrush; either she's hurt worse than she had thought or this place is fighting her.
Neither option is pleasant to consider. Still, there's a relatively clear area between several of the trees, and she eyes them, absurdly reminded of building out John's house in the very beginning of the game.
Ampora groans just in time for her to turn and catch him as he lists sharply to one side--well, at least slow his fall, she can't quite stop it entirely. She helps him lie down in the shade of the trees, and takes off his stupid cape and rolls it up as a makeshift pillow.
"There's....there has to be some useful stuff washed up," she says, looking down at him. His face is closed, grim, against the bright cloth. "I need to go looking."
He doesn't say anything, which is even worse, and Rose undoes her sash and adds it to the cape to make a more comfortable headrest. "I'll be back."
"Nnh. Lalonde."
"What?"
He looks up at her, eyes not really focused. "...Nothin."
"In that case." God, her head hurts, all the bits of her hurt, had she been bashed against the wreckage of the ship on the way to wash up on this shore? She feels like a pebble that has been tumble-dried.
She feels like a kid who hasn't got an adult to ask for help, is what she feels like, and that is stupid, that is no good at all, she repudiates even having thought that particular thought, and she gives Ampora's good hand a firm reassuring pat and hauls herself back upright to go looking for whatever she can find. Something to boil water in, assuming there's water. If there isn't, they're going to die.
They're going to die.
Rose hurries.
~
They're on what she assumes has to be an island based on the fact that there are clouds above them and nowhere else in the sky. Inland from the beach, the forest is as dense as physically possible, but it rises to a distant sort of humped green mountaintop, which makes her feel faintly hopeful that there might be some actual fresh water to be found somewhere. It's possible that she can desalinify seawater with the Thorns, but honestly it's more likely to turn the water into something unspeakable, and anyway she thinks her head might possibly crack open if she tried to do anything difficult with magic just at the moment.
The ship had foundered on what looks to be a fringing reef. The stern is still lodged on coral spires, jutting up at the sky (she is reminded absurdly of Dave's brother's disturbing plushes) and creaking gently as the tide comes in. The rest of it is scattered along the beach, tangled in rope and torn sailcloth, and as she heaves on the edge of one of the sail tatters she is surprised to find a familiar tin box half-buried in the sand.
Rose's knees give out and she plops inelegantly down to the beach, staring at it stupidly. It has WAVEBLADE stenciled on it in purple, and she remembers clearly staring at it in another setting, some days ago, and asking "really?"
"Really what?"
"'Waveblade'?"
"What's wrong with that? I like the name, and in case you hadn't noticed I'm the captain a this particular vessel, so I'm the one with namin authority, thank you very much."
She wipes wet sand away and starts to dig up the galley's storage locker.
It's half-full of seawater, but it's also still got the goddamn pots and pans in it, and--oh, God, it's got the brandy too. Rose's eyes sting, and that is because her head hurts, for absolutely no other reason whatsoever, she is not going to cry for stupid sheer relief at coming across kitchen utensils.
~
"What took you?" Ampora demands, pushing himself more or less upright with his good arm. She looks at him. Ripped sail pieces and the most useful of the galley stuff are slung on her back, and the empty tin box in her arms sloshes with gritty but hopefully potable water from a shallow stream leading out of the forest half a mile down the beach.
"I paused to sing a little duet with the wee tropical woodland birdies," she says. "They were very sweet and came to perch on my fingertips. Have you got your science wand, by any chance?"
"Fuck, you found water. Gimme, I'm fuckin dyin here."
"You want dysentery on top of that?" she inquires, nodding at his ankle, which is swollen enough by now to pull the fabric of his trousers shiny-tight. She's going to have to have a look at it, and by the stains on the trouser leg she isn't going to enjoy that. "We need to boil it first."
"Don't you just know everyfin," Ampora says, but he subsides again, sweating. "I don't know how your head fuckin stays in one piece what with all a the wisdom you got shoved in your pan."
"I lie awake each night wondering that very thing. Your wand?"
"What d'you want it for?"
"Starting a fire."
He closes his eyes, and she thinks he's about to say something else insufferable, but he just reaches out a hand and a slim white wand appears lying on his palm. "Splendid," Rose says, and sets about snapping underbrush into kindling and fuel.
"Could just use magic to boil the water," he murmurs. "Dunno why you're fuckin around with fire."
"Because, among other things, I don't know what else is on this island other than us, and whether it's hungry." She sets chunks of coral tuff in a rough fire-ring. "And if we're careful we only have to light this once, and keep it lit."
"We're gonna die, Lalonde," he says. "You know that, right?"
"Everybody dies." She twists the wand out of his hand and half-closes her eyes, feeling out the influence it casts on the standing magical field, how the lines bend and arc around the two poles of the wand. It isn't her magic. She can see it, but it isn't hers to use, and the Thorns hurt right now. "--You're going to have to do it."
He cracks open an eye and scowls at her, and she slaps the wand back into his palm. "What, not up to settin fire to shit right now?"
"I bow before your superior white science mastery."
"Fuck you."
"Not just now, thanks."
He hisses, and his brows draw all the way together and he points the wand at her pyramid of kindling and light blazes so brightly dancing purple afterimages block out everything from her vision--but she can hear the hungry crackling of the flames.
"Nicely done," she tells him, and sits back on her heels. The fire is well alight.
"...you meant to make me do that, didn't you."
"Whatever gave you that idea, Ampora? I need to look at your ankle, too."
He just closes his eyes and lies back against her makeshift pillows, and she sets a pan of water over the flames.
~
It's worse than she'd anticipated. Wworse.
It's very clearly broken, and not just because his foot is at a strange angle; there are...okay, yeah, those are bits of bone she can see amid the morass of violet blood. His ankle is very badly swollen, the skin taut and shiny, smudged with bruises. After a brief glimpse Rose covers it up again and looks very firmly at the horizon, swallowing hard.
"That...bad, huh?" he asks, and she jumps: she'd thought he was drifting again, after he'd drunk quite a lot of water.
"It's a bit untidy. I have to clean it." She looks at him, consideringly: he's pale and sweating (purple sweat looks bizarre, like those Gatorade commercials) and his eyes are almost completely dilated, only a thin ring of violet escaping the black. "You might want something to bite on."
"Fuck, Lalonde," he grits out, "just get on with it," and okay, yes, fine, getting on with it. She's slit the fabric of his trousers up to the knee, and pushes the blood-sodden cloth out of the way. Gruesome purple grins up at her. Right, she thinks, you've dealt with horrorterrors, you can damn well deal with a compound fracture of the left tibia and fibula in an insufferable fin-faced alien, and reaches for the pan of boiled water.
It turns out he does have something to bite on, but it's his lip, and purple blood is running down his chin in a steady trickle by the time Rose has finished cleaning the lacerations. There is...very little she can do to prevent infection except hope to hell that troll immune systems are set up to handle injuries like this as a matter of course. And maybe pour brandy over it, as well, like this.
Eridan screams. It's a bad noise, a terrible noise, thin and high and not remotely human. She keeps the brandy flowing just a little longer, and is aware that despite the screaming he is holding very still for her.
(What's the point? she thinks. We are going to die anyway.)
(We might as well die tidily at least.)
His screams die away into sobbing breaths. "I'm sorry," she says. It's not a phrase she employs very often. "I'm sorry."
He shakes his head, eyes still tight shut, fighting for control of his breathing. She watches a moment longer and then starts ripping up her skirt for bandages. There's no way she can set his ankle: the best she can do is try to keep the lacerations clean. The strips go in the pan of water which goes back on the fire to boil again.
There's fresh blood beading at his bitten lip when she finally rolls up a last bit of sailcloth to prop the bandaged ankle on and sits back on her heels. Her own head wound is still making itself very much known. That is not a thing that has ceased to be true.
Rose reaches for the brandy bottle--a third empty now--and pours a little into one of the tin cups she'd rescued from the wreck. She makes her way up to kneel beside him and wipes away the blood on his face; he looks up at her, eyes unfocused.
"You're in shock," she guesses. "Drink this."
"Lalonde?"
"Yes?"
"Do you ever stop tellin people what to do?"
"Only when they stop needing to be told." He's reaching for the cup but his hand is shaking so badly she just holds it to his lips; he closes his eyes and swallows, and lets his head fall back.
"So...that's a no," he slurs, and passes out.
~
She keeps the fire going as the day fades. There have been some vaguely ominous noises from the forest as various things move about their unseen ways; some bird or other has been shrieking monotonously in a series of dot-dashes she is irritated to find her brain attempting to translate into Morse, and a number of small flying things have bitten her. So has a crab. Or pinched, at least.
The crab actually tastes pretty good. She'd wrapped it up in one of the weird flat leaves of the local flora and balanced it over the fire for a while, and it had been very satisfying indeed hitting steamed crab claws with a rock to extract the sweet white meat inside. Pinch me, will you, thinks Rose, leaning back against a tree with her hands clasped round her knees.
They're going to die.
The question, Rose says to herself, is how they are going to die. Probably not of thirst, at least not right away, and if there are enough crabs wandering around inadvisably they won't starve. But Eridan's ankle is bad, really bad, and she thinks despite her rough treatment it's bound to get infected, and then what the hell is she supposed to do? It's not as if she has a full complement of antibiotics in her sylladex.
It's been...hours, only hours, since she woke washed up on the beach, and she could swear they've been on the island for days now. For a lifetime.
She misses the others so badly, suddenly, that it physically hurts: a sharp ache just under the end of her breastbone. John's irrepressible smile and his unquestioning support; Dave, who is still working out who it is he actually wants to be, and achingly vulnerable under the sunglasses; Jade, most sensible of all, whose mind contains a multiverse. And the trolls. All the damn trolls but above all Kanaya.
Oh, Kanaya.
She rests her face against her drawn-up knees and in the gathering dimness she's pretty sure he can't see her even if he's conscious, and she hurts all over and she's stupidly frightened and she wants Kanaya, damn everything, she wants Kanaya and she wants to go home.
She doesn't even realize she is falling asleep until a flare of brilliant actinic light, a bang, and a very-close-by squeal wake her with a violent start. Scrambling to her feet, she stares into the shifting afterimages to see that the fire's almost gone out and something...big...is shambling away into the forest at a decent clip.
Ampora is sitting up, Ahab's Crosshairs in his arms, staring after whatever had been investigating their campsite. The diamond tip of the rifle is still glowing faintly, and the air smells of ozone.
"What was that?" she demands.
"Dunno. It was sniffin around, though." He captchalogues the rifle again and rubs at his face with his good hand. "One a us should keep watch."
"I know," she says, and it sounds harsher than she meant it to. "I know. I was. I didn't mean to fall asleep."
"Fuck, you've been wrecked on a desert island too, Lalonde, even you can't be perfect all the time." Eridan sounds desperately weary. "There any more water?"
She shakes herself, going over to poke the fire and add more wood, coaxing the embers back to life. "Yes. Here." This time he takes the cup himself, steadier-handed, and in the dim firelight she can see his skin is dry. Maybe it won't get infected. Maybe he'll be fine.
Maybe a giant flying pink unicorn will swoop out of the skies and save us while talking in fluent Finnish.
"Go back to sleep," she instructs him. "I'll keep watch."
"Can you shoot a gun?"
"I've not had a great deal of opportunity to practice."
"Not what I asked."
Sigh. "Yes, more or less."
"Then you better take Ahab's. Don't use your powers unless you gotta, we're...low on energy reserves."
She has to admit he has a point. "Fine." The gun appears again in his hands and she takes it, a little surprised at how heavy the damn thing is. It's very unlike anything she's ever handled. "Now go to sleep. I promise I won't let anything happen to you or your storied maritime popgun."
The faint curve of his lips is only visible for a moment, in the firelight, but it's there.
Rose wishes she had a watch
(or Dave, what if you had Dave, what then, what if Dave were here)
or some dim way of working out the hours as they pass, because time seems to dilate and stagnate all around her. Twice she'd had to aim the Crosshairs at a moving spot of sound, but both times whatever it was had moved on, creaking and cracking tree branches and undergrowth in its wake. Those had been useful episodes inasmuch as they had jolly well woken her up.
Some interminable time later the thing that has not been going skreeee starts going skreeee again, and she notices that she can see the edges of things: that dawn is coming.
~
Ampora is definitely feverish.
The morning had been exceedingly unpleasant for everyone in terms of tiresome biological necessities; after those had been taken care of Rose had retreated to fetch more water and stare firmly at the horizon until she could feel the fierce blush begin to retreat from her cheeks. It was probably possible to die of embarrassment, but on the whole she'd prefer her demise to have come at the hands of something like mysterious night-crashing-around monsters than the memory of having caught sight of Eridan Ampora's naughty bits.
On the way back she'd stopped to fling a couple bits of coral at some likely-looking green coconutty objects on one of the trees, and was rewarded by nearly getting brained by one in its fall. Smart Rose, she'd thought, clever Rose, brilliant bloody Rose, and tucked it under her arm for the trip back to their campsite, where Ampora was inexpertly prodding at the fire with a stick and sweating heavily.
"Let me," she says, and puts down the pan of water and the possibly-coconut.
"I can do it." He pushes at her and then hisses because he'd used his bad arm, which probably could use a sling or something. "I'm not fuckin crippled."
Yes you are, she doesn't say. "Fine, fire-prodding duty is all yours. I have brought you a thing that may or may not be edible, you can thank me at your leisure once I've looked at your ankle."
"You're not a doctorturer," he points out.
"Well done! Neither are you. Although it's got a ring to it, I have to admit." Rose sits down with a thump. "I am, however, not the one running a temperature."
"It's normal. Seadwellers got a super powerful immune system." He sounds smug. "I'll be fine, you wait and see."
"Do seadwellers also sustain nasty compound fractures in a very non-sterile environment a lot?"
"We-ell, no, that I gotta admit is not somethin we find ourselves havin to deal with all that often." He looks at her glumly under a tangled curtain of hair. "It's at least takin my mind off a my horn."
"Fuck, I completely forgot about your horn," she says.
"Way to make a guy feel cared for, Lalonde."
"Shut up, Ampora. What can be done for cracked horns?"
"Sealant, pretty much. Sealant and careful monitorin. Sometimes you need reinforcin bands round the horn if the crack's real bad."
"I don't suppose you have horn sealant anywhere in your bizarre fetch modus," Rose says.
"You know what, actually, I don't? It's a crazy fuckin thing but I do not carry that particular item round with me as a personal habit."
"Consider me shocked to my foundation." She sighs. Her head hurts: it's probably going to go on hurting for ever, or at least for the rest of her life, which is not very long, come to think of it. "Would it help if I wrapped it very tightly with something to at least keep the cracked edges together and stop anything getting in?"
"...Yeah," he admits, "that actually would be useful a you."
She hasn't got enough pink or purple yarn to do it all in one color, so he ends up with a two-tone pastel woolen coat on one horn. It makes him look...bizarre, even more so than the lack of his usual fussy coiffure. Having it done was apparently uncomfortable enough to make him shut up and breathe hard through his nose, eyes squinched shut, but when she's tied off the yarn ends and let him go he does sigh in relief.
"Any better?"
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, that's...that feels less exposed."
"Good. Now. Ankle."
"Lalonde..."
"What?"
He looks up at her, pinched and tired and pale. "It's not gonna do any good."
"What isn't?"
"The ankle. You can't fix it."
"...I'm not going to not try," she says, eyebrow quirked. "Unless it's making things worse."
Head-shake.
"Then let me see how it's doing."
~
By nightfall there is no question that it's infected. Rose has another go with the brandy, but she thinks on the whole it's probably smarter to conserve that for putting inside them rather than on holes in their hides. Dredging up some dim memory of an O'Brien novel she digs a hollow in the sand, lines it with sailcloth, and fills it with seawater; soaking his ruined ankle does seem to help the pain a little, even if it's not doing anything more useful.
He's been talking a little. She's sitting beside him, watching the fire burn, watching sparks swirl up and disappear. Ahab's Crosshairs is balanced on her lap.
"....where did you go," he says, suddenly, conversationally. She looks down at him: he's sweat-slicked, eyes mostly shut, the ludicrous yarn-wrapped horn seeping a little at the base of the crack. She thinks he has never looked more pathetic in all the time she's known him, and yet for some reason the thought brings no contempt.
"I haven't moved," she points out.
"Where did you go? Fff. Fef. Feferi. It took me so long to catch up with you and then you were gone."
Oh, hell, she thinks. "Eridan?"
"It was a game...wasn't it? But I could never keep up. Never with you. Didn't go in the sea cause of it. What kinda seadweller sucks at fuckin swimmin." He rolls his head from side to side, lost somewhere in another time. "Catch me...if you can. I never could."
"Eridan," she says.
"I was lost. I was always lost. Sometimes you found me." His voice fades, and she thinks he's drifted off again, but "I never stopped wantin you to. Ever."
She can't bear this. Leaning over to dip one of the shreds of sail into their pan of water, she dabs the wet cloth at his forehead, his cheeks, his throat. He hisses softly and tries to pull away from the coldness. "Took me...all night an' day to find my way back home. Couldn't breathe really. Where did you go....Feferi, empress a the fuckin seas...queen a the deep.....queen a everythin under the sun an' moons. Help me to seek?"
"Eridan, stop," Rose says sharply, or she means to: her throat is clogged, heavy, with the threat of tears. "Please. Please don't." She presses the cloth to his forehead, feeling the sick heat of him through the clumsy weave.
"I'm on fire," he says: calm, musing, slightly amused. "My body's on fire. Did you burn me?"
"Jesus fucking Christ, Eridan Ampora, if you do not stop blithering right now I am going to summon the unearthly hordes of the Furthest Ring and have them sing songs to drive you barking mad, do you understand me?"
Under her hand he blinks a little, moans, turns to press against the relative coolness of the cloth in her fingers. "Mmhh."
"That's better," Rose says, swallowing hard, hard. "That's better. Stop monologuing. It doesn't suit you."
"...'m not monologuing," Eridan protests. "...want to sleep. Lemme sleep. Tired, Lalonde."
"No, goddamnit, I will not let you sleep, you're burning to embers, you have to stay with me." Her voice is spiraling higher and higher, and she hates it, she hates the threat of tears.
His good hand drifts clumsily over to whatever bit of her he can reach, in this case a knee, and pats at it. "'s okay, Rose."
"It is not fucking okay and you know it, Eridan, I...I...you don't get to give up yet, it's not fair, it's not fair..."
He's quiet for a moment: then when he looks up at her his eyes are clearer, if unfocused. "I want my moirail," he says, very clearly, very softly.
Something that has been stressed to its structural limits in her chest snaps and Rose leans over awkwardly, jerkily, to lift him into her arms and hug him, hug him as tight as she can manage, hold him tight here so that he can't drift away. He makes a soft little surprised sound, and then his arms sort of creep around her and his good hand spreads its fingers on her back. "I know," she says, her voice shuddering. "I know you do. I know. And she wants you. But...right now all there is is me, just, just let me help, damn you, let me help..."
Eridan's hot face is pressed against her shoulder, Eridan's shivering under her fingers, Eridan's breath is hot little uneven puffs against her skin. "Y-you already have," he says, or she thinks he says. "Lalonde. Rose. Of all the people....I could be stranded with...on a desert island, I'd pick you."
She sob-laughs. "That's not what you said yesterday."
"Past me is a fuckin idiot."
"No arguments here." She's stroking his back, his shirt slicked to him with sweat, and she can feel the flare and pulse of his opercula as his lungs labor to breathe, pushing against the delicate gill tissue. "I want....Eridan, I want to try to use the Thorns."
"To do what," he says into her neck.
"Heal you."
That surprises him enough that he sits up to look her in the face. "You can't."
"You don't know that."
"Yeah I do, those fuckin things are eldritch through an' through, there's no way they're gonna be any use for anythin other than destruction."
"You used to say they were bullshit," she points out. "That I was a charlatan."
"That wasn't me, you said that, that was all you."
"The fact remains that they are mine and I know how to use them, and I think I can use them to help. It's....it's not as if we have a great many alternative options."
Eridan lets his face thunk back against her shoulder. He is so hot, and he is shivering, and she thinks she can smell the thickness of infection in the air. "Will you let me?"
He says nothing, but after a moment he nods against her, and she swallows hard.
~
She has enough experience with the Thorns now that she knows what insulates tissue and organic material from their particular influence, and she has ripped the sleeves from the remains of her dress to wrap around his leg and foot above and below the injury. Silk is not as effective as silver, but they haven't got silver foil.
Eridan is obviously feeling very ill, but he's doing exactly as she says, and when she tells him to close his eyes he shuts them tight, tight. When she takes the Thorns in her hands she can feel her blood pounding in the heavy bruise at the back of her skull, in the canals of her ears, in the bone-hollows of her face, in her wrists, in her thighs, in her gums, the orbits of her eyes. It is probably not the hardest thing she has ever had to do, pulling her awareness and concentration back out of all those senses and funneling it entirely through the pointed wands in each hand: probably she had had to do worse, and bear worse, in the game. But it is bad enough.
The Thorns begin to glow dully, that black-light purple glow that is difficult to look at directly and impossible to focus on, and then a slow licking spiral of paler light snakes down the shaft of each from her fingertips to the pointed needle-ends. Rose does not know whether the roaring in her ears is her own blood or the magic itself flooding through her, nor does she care: she just closes her eyes, seeing not with them but with the force-lines of the fields she manipulates, seeing the weight on reality that is Ampora and Ampora's shattered ankle and the way each shard of bone reflects and refracts those fields as they move through it. She feels with the Thorns where the bones are broken, where the mast had crushed his leg as it fell, where each splinter of bone had come from and where it needs to go back to--and the nerves, and the blood vessels, and the tendons and ligaments making up the joint. She is very small now, floating in the void, and the surfaces of his ruined ankle are landscape-large to her.
Rose calls all her strength and pushes.
She can't hear him screaming, which is perhaps a kindness to them both. She can't hear anything at all but the roar of her own blood and the low rhythmic thrum of the Thorns' influence interacting with the standing magical field, nudging and arranging and pushing and guiding, settling the splintered ends of bone back together, sinking into the canals and spaces within the bone and sending out reinforcing little spurs to keep the break in place. She cannot replace each splinter perfectly: some of them will need to come out. But she mends, and she sets, and when the bones are whole she sinks her consciousness into the softer yielding medium of blood vessels, nerve tissue, connective tissue, skin.
When she has done all she can, Rose pulls back, fading her consciousness back into her body, and when she's about halfway there a vast wall of blackness, strong but soft, hits her and takes her down with it into silence.
~
There are hands, somehow. Hands lifting her shoulders, her head: hands pressing the rim of something cold to her mouth, tipping sharp liquid between her lips. She swallows reflexively, and the hands ease her back down again, and she goes on falling away from consciousness, into the familiar soothing blackness.
~
Her skull is cracking open. An astonishing cage of pain encircles her whole head. She thinks she moans: again there are cool hands, and something bitter to drink, and somewhere a sharp little insinuating pain in her elbow, and coolness rushes up her arm and into her head and down she goes again, leaving the hurt behind as she submerges.
~
When Rose wakes up, she has absolutely no idea where she is; however, this time, she's lying in an actual bed, with covers draped over her and pillows beneath her head and shoulders, and above her rather than the great blue bowl of the sky is an off-white ceiling with a round light fixture on it.
She takes stock. Head: hurts, but not terribly: fingers and toes, all present and accounted for and appropriately responsive to commands to wiggle. Ow, though. Ow. Her hands feel strange, muffled, heavy, and when she tries to close them into fists there is a shrill unexpected pain that makes her grunt.
"Hey," says someone. "You're awake. Fuckin finally."
Rose works out how to turn her head on the pillows, and slowly comes into visual range of something purple and black and pretentious. "Ampora?"
"As ever was," he says. "Fuck, Lalonde. You gave us all a scare."
"Where am I?"
"Strider's. He's been holdin vigil beside your bed in a tireless and deeply romantic manner, except when Kan boots his cape-wearin ass out to sit with you herself. And me, a course. I'm here too."
"What...happened?"
"You moved reality or somethin equally uncouth and fixed up my ankle, is what, but you kinda went supernova while you did it, and I guess all the magical light-show hoofbeastshit caught the attention a Vris and Ter and Jade, who did some shit I can't even pronounce and found out where we were."
She manages, with an effort, to focus on him. Her purple and pink horn-wrap is gone, replaced with a series of very stylish gold bands set with little violet gems.
"You did your crazy fuckin lightshow and collapsed and I freaked out, like, what was I supposed to do, but then the cavalreapers arrived and hauled the both a us back to civilization. You've been out for a week."
Rose closes her eyes again and sags back against the pillows. "--Hey. Lalonde." He sounds uncharacteristically worried. "Rose. Don't go all floppy on me again, I can't take that shit, once was enough."
"I fixed you?" she asks, when she can make her voice work.
"Kan says you did a bang-up job. All the little bits and pieces right where they oughtta be. I can't...I can't thank you enough for that," he says, and his voice has lost a lot of the carrying nasal quality. "You fuckin saved my life."
"Wasn't....going to not try," she says. "You're a douchebag....Ampora. But you're also a friend."
He's quiet for a little while, and then very gently he takes her hand--by the wrist, she thinks, right, oh, right, the Thorns must have burned her, that's why her hands are bandaged and hurt like blazes--and a little soft touch she can't immediately identify is placed on the inside of her wrist. "I owe you, Rose," he says. "I owe you a lot."
Lips. Those were lips. He kissed her wrist.
Rose can't help a stupid smile, and very gently he replaces her hand on the coverlet. "Kan's all sayin you need tons a rest," he says. "I'm gonna quit botherin you--"
"Stay?"
"Huh?"
"Are you deaf as well as douchetastic, Ampora," she murmurs. "Stay. Don't go. Remain in place."
"...You mean it?"
"Yes," she says, and manages to open her eyes against the heavy liquid fatigue lapping at her. "Stay. There...might be things. In the undergrowth. Keep watch?"
To his eternal credit he doesn't start babbling that she's delirious: he just makes a soft little noise and pulls his chair closer to her bed. "I'm on it," he says. "I got you. Nothin's gonna come close."
Rose nods a little, and sighs, and lets herself fall backward into sleep again--comforted, and safe, and not alone.