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Damissan’s temples throbbed.

His head hurt. His body tingled, skin prickling with pins of sensation when he moved as though half-numb, and he felt—lost? Disoriented? He shook his head, struggling to regain his bearings. Where—?

“Ey, Zaisa, look, look, he is moving—”

“I told you it wasn’t too much.”

“He looked almost dead at first after.”

Like a slow, building drumroll, progressing towards crescendo at a gradual but terrifyingly steady rate, Damis felt his pulse rate pick up in his throat, rougher by the moment as the details filtered into place. He had left camp. No, before that. He had argued—Xilarn had been cross with him, that was it. Xilarn had been cross with him, he had told him to leave, he had intended to retire to his tent, and then—not.

Damis stirred, reaching to rub at his face—except that he couldn’t. Because he could not move his hands. Because they were restrained. He coughed, shaking himself again and snapping his gaze out. He had not gone to bed; he had left the camp. He’d left it to take a piss, stood out in the night and then, nothing. Then this. Buggish black eyes inspected him.

Or, rather, he guessed they might have been inspecting them. Other than the angle of the head — several of which were turned his way now and approaching — it felt impossible to tell which way an alkidike was actually looking. Did they even see similarly? Before the thought finished itself, three of them — his ‘captors’ — were standing over him, peering down at him and by God they were tall. Red firelight backlit their figures, which unfortunately did nothing to make the entire scene intimidatingly unpleasant.

“Ah…” he began. “There must be some mista—aaack! Nnnh…”

The butt of a spear jabbed at him, stabbing none-too-gently to his lower stomach and causing him to curl in on himself instinctively—which, apparently, was worth a round of uproarious laughter.

“Like a little bug, he is, isn’t he? Coiling up like a new bud at a bit of a tap.”

“Do you figure they’re poisonous?”

“Do we figure what is? The—?”

“The earthling bud. Sheeira was speaking of eating him, but we don’t know where he’s b—” The speaker, off somewhere closer to the fire where Damis couldn’t immediately see, paused as one of the women closer to him, original wielder of the spear, moved the butt of her weapon in again, this time using it more like a prod to push at him despite his attempts to move away, and working her way dangerously close to his— “Iffi, what are you doing to him?”

Damissan’s face burned and he jerked, attempting again to maneuver out of range without success. “You don’t—”

“Have any of you ever seen one? An earthling man’s. They get so excited about them, and their women. I want to know what gets their women excited.”

“I don’t want to see it. Stop playing with him unless you’re ready to wash him and cook him up yourself, I don’t want the meat all bruised.”

“You don’t want the meat all bruised?”

Damissan had tried, but lost track of ‘who’ was who among the group, other than that the one directly before him—her spear end still lodged uncomfortably against his abdomen some half inch above his groin—was ‘Iffi’ or some variant. Iffi looked especially peeved as she shook her head at the other speaker, one of the women by the campfire. Then again, alkidike seemed to always look unpleasant and he wasn’t confident in his ability to read their expressions accurately.

“Yes, I don’t want the meat bruised after—”

Iffi crouched, and Damis, despite the noblest of intentions, squawked, all but yipping as she caught at the nape of his neck and his clothes and yanked him upward. “Wait, wait, don’t—” he began, but didn’t make it much further than that.

“Hushshush,” the alk said, and it was a disturbing sensation to be set — more or less — on his feet (despite them also being bound and making it near impossible to actually stand without her hold for balance) and have his face only roughly even with a disproportionately generous yellow busom barely covered by a thin strip of cloth.

“Ahh…” He stared. “Y—”

Then, she plucked at his belt, then below it, and then gripped. The sound he made was unseemly, and under other circumstances he might have been grateful there was no one of import around to hear it—except that it was still apparently enough to incite more laughter. And Iffi in particular looked distinctly and unnervingly amused.

“Doesn’t even feel like there’s anythin’ in there.”

“Are you sure that’s where they are?” one of the others piped up. Not the one who’d been speaking, but among the other two closest to him.

“It is—”

“And why do they insist on wearing so much. Can you even move?”

“They don’t fight well, maybe that’s why.”

Damissan had never seen anyone die.

Had never.

Until this moment, he had never given the fact much thought, either. Again a had, past tense, because as of that moment, both of said things changed with gut-wrenching abruptness and—Damissan stared, stomach lurching messily upwards into his throat along with perhaps his bowls and intestines and pulse and—there was a spear running through this woman’s throat and out the other side. And blood. And prickling white dots in his vision. And—

Being that she was more or less the only thing holding him up previously given the specific state of his legs as well as his state generally as a whole, when she died in front of his eyes—because that looked dead, very dead, and there was blood and—Damissan also collapsed. Far too close to her, he might add, and it was entirely possible that in addition to the startled yelp of pain that came from tumbling unexpected to the earth there was also a whimper of something else mixed in there because—she was dead.

Damissan groaned, squeezing his eyes shut as his pulse became a wild drum thudding now under apparently every portion of his body: his temples, behind his eyelids, under his skin, in his chest where it was attempting to batter its way out of his body. Drawing breath was at once a very quick and inefficient process, because no matter how much he managed to take in it still felt grossly inefficient, shallow, and unhelpful, and he was under the distinct impression his body was trying to knock itself out because there was surely no other reasonable explanation for sending itself into such overdrive.

But he also felt very, very convinced that this was not an opportune time to lose consciousness. So, warring with his body’s panic, Damissan squirmed, swallowing down the initial convulsions of his throat to keep the non-existant food in his empty stomach from spitting itself up regardless of the nonsensicalness of such behavior, and trying to distance himself from—

Ohhhh, she was still dead.

“Hhhhnnnnnnh…” His eyes, which at some point had opened again, shut again at the sight of far, far, far too much blood to be in any one place at a given time.

But Xilarn.

Turning his head, he focussed there and yes, it was Xilarn—not that he could have reasonably expected anyone else, but given that his presence was the single comfort in all of the situation as a whole, Damis mentally latched onto that and stuck with it. Xilarn was here. He wouldn’t be eaten, and Xilarn would—well, apparently fight, because he had opened with death and that more or less decisively took ‘peaceful negotiations’ off the table.

But watching it, Damis had never before more deeply regretted being bound up.

If Xilarn lost—to the very large, very angry, very armed women now up against him—

After, in the span of a half second, his mind helpfully provided him with an infinite number of ways he and his guard could be pieced apart, for they would definitely surely die certainly and slowly after this if he lost, Damissan opted not to think about it.

Xilarn just would not lose, that was all. He just wouldn’t.

And Damis would attempt, much like a worm, to move himself as far from the blood and the position of ‘underfoot’ as possible, because unfortunately that seemed to be the most and only remotely ‘helpful’ thing he could do. At least, he consoled himself dazedly through the repeated spinning in his mind attempting to drag him towards unconsciousness, if he did ignore the real possibility that Xilarn might die and he might die and it would all be horribly painful—the night couldn’t get much worse.

The thought did little to calm him.

While it certainly felt, moment by moment, as though he were processing it all—over processing, even—so much occurred so fast that by the time there was abrupt, almost strangled silence, Damissan was no longer sure at all what he had just witnessed other than that it was all clearly more than his mind had the capacity to wrap itself all around in that moment, and he couldn’t look at the bodies. The multiple bodies. All in various broken, unnatural states and pooled in—

He blinked rapidly, and refocused his attention: Xilarn, and Gadot.

Xilarn was hurt.

That, more than anything else, shook him closest to some rational, functioning state than he’d been in yet for the course of the ordeal. So much so that he even had a free moment to experience an unpleasant, knotting lurch of guilt. Xilarn was hurt, and this was all more or less his fault. People had died, were dead right now, this very moment, when moments before they had been breathing, and that was his fault. He had strayed too far from and stayed too long away from camp, and thus—

Xilarn yanked him up, and Damis found his tongue still largely non-functional. He did, however, manage to grip where he could to Gadot’s fur despite his bound hands and it must have been the most inglorious, hastened and uncomfortable of positions he’d ever been tossed into as Xilarn mounted behind him and the beast took off with a jolt.

But Damis couldn’t begin to care. He was alive.

He was alive, Gadot was alive, Xilarn was alive and present and still wounded, but by God, Damis could feel every breath and was never more aware of how much it meant to be breathing. He couldn’t have said how long they traveled and, in fact, it was entirely possible that he lost consciousness briefly, finally, once they were out of the thick of it since his body had built him up to that point. He stirred again, though, once the pace slowed, and it felt—disorienting, as though waking up from a dream or a long coma, all of his limbs and his mind and his tongue thick with dizzying lethargy. He shook his head, groaning as he shifted his position and then bunching his fingers again against the familiar, warm fur.

He’d never thought he’d be so happy to have his face stuffed against a live animal.

“I…” Anything he thought to say felt unreal. Insufficient somehow in the moment, and papery on his throat. Yet, the more urgency slipped out of the scene and the low thud, thud, thud of Gadot’s invigorated pulse beat against him, words came of their own accord, however inadequate. “I love…your dog. And you—you…you…” Damis wasn’t entirely sure where the sentence was headed, but his brow furrowed anyway as he shifted atop Gadot’s back. “They shoved a—you’re…” He managed, somewhat, to push himself enough to at least try to look at and gauge Xilarn’s sources of injury. Instead, without the angle or the maneuvering capability to do so properly, he ended up directing his gaze instead to Xilarn’s face—and feeling all over again a great swell of crushing responsibility. “I’m sorry…”

Gadot stopped.

Xilarn moved.

Only when his binds were cut did Damis fully note all over again just how tight they had been, freedom from them making his arms and legs feel like newly unrestrained goop, gouged by the lingering imprint of what had kept them together previously. He moved, but too quickly at first, and found that upon sliding down from Gadot, his legs were not quite what he expected from them yet, and he had to clutch again at the beast in the last instant to steady his weight, regain his balance, and force them to hold his own. He realized then, belatedly, that parts of him were still shaking, if less so than before, and that would pass.

More immediately pressing was Xilarn’s question, and he turned his attention that way.

Was he hurt?

His wrists hurt, but only from rope burn. There were bruises on him, surely, from being battered and dropped about. He could feel small stings on his person, scattered reminders of the incident that hadn’t been there when he left camp, and though all of him had calmed some, he still felt shaken.

But no, he concluded. Not hurt.

All of it, from the bumps to the piss-shitting terror, was very little in the long run as compared to Xilarn’s state. So he said so.

“No.” He shook his head, eyes dropping to better inspect the damage and brow furrowing as he took a step towards his guard. “But you are.” Though some things — like the gash in his shoulder and open nick in his arm — were visible at a glance, there was no telling with a perfunctory analysis in the dark whether or not there was more he ought to be concerned about. Thus, a moment later, Damis turned his focus forward: however much or little there was to be done, it couldn’t all be left until morning. “I can clean it,” he said, stepping towards the coals of their fire and crouching to stir it back to life. “And wherever else you’re hurt. Is there anywhere worse than the shoulder?”

With the remnants of an old fire there, it did not take much to stir the coals back to life and up again into small, licking flames with the addition of a few new tidbits of kindling and branches. It was just flaring to life when Xilarn crouched at his side, and he opened his mouth. Xilarn caught his chin. Whatever he might have said immediately was lost to a startled blink as the other man turned his head, inspecting him.

“I told you, I am not—”

The added reassurance died on his lips, though, as Xilarn’s hand moved down over him, tracing and inspiring a slow, rising burn of abashment in his cheeks. By the time their foreheads touched, it was a steady heat source, separate and distinct from the fire’s glow. He managed a partial nod. “I—” Somehow, though, ‘—was just going to take a piss…’ did not seem the most fitting of conclusions to that sentence, or eloquent or even necessary. So, he let that go, too. Until Xilarn pulled him in.

At that point, Damis became aware of a number of things simultaneously. Foremost in his mind, that Xilarn was still hurt, nagged powerfully at him, the concern further emphasized by the very close and potent scent of blood pushed near to his nose—but, that did not seem to be the primary concern on Xilarn’s agenda, and the second, overriding thought came next: he was fairly certain he’d never been this close to his guard in all their weeks spent sharing space. Under the scent of blood were much more familiar ones now ingrained in his association with the man and this close, he could feel him, from the heat of his body to the tight press and clutch of all the same muscles that had strained in fighting off an entire camp of warriors larger than he.

In an unasked for flood, his guilt returned, but with it this time came a renewed surge of relief — neither of them were dead — and gratitude: his beating heart was thanks to the man before him. So, breath tripping out of him shakily, he reached, maneuvering with enough care not to jostle any injuries, but quick enough to loop his arms around Xilarn properly before the man changed his mind. And to cling, fingers pinching to the cloth at the back of the man’s shirt. While his concerns for the other man’s health lingered, the entire situation could have gone for the worse in an infinite number of ways.

That they had made it to this moment instead seemed reason enough to let it last.

Damis blinked, more than mildly surprised by the slow train of admissions. After the initial bit, that it ‘wasn’t worth his safety’, he opened his mouth, intending to point out that it was partly his fault. He oughtn’t have strayed so far and lingered, even if it hadn’t been egregiously so on either part. Then came the apology. And the rest of it. And Damis found that he didn’t have any words after all, for once, his pulse instead overriding and thudding to a messy tempo for a mesh of overlapping reasons.

I think it would be best if we put a bit more distance between ourselves and…everything else.

Robbed of anything better to say and dealing with more than enough to think about regardless, Damissan settled for taking that as his cue to get to business, and nodded without a word, ignoring the steady heat in his cheeks—and a great portion of all the rest of him, for that matter—as he moved over to their supplies. In the dark it took some fiddling, but he managed to locate the pack generally dedicated to medical supplies and brought over what he needed, putting on a small pot of water to hang over the fire while he prepared the rest. A clean roll of bandaging cloth. A stoppered vial of disinfectant. A basin for the heated water, and a wiping towel, for clearing up the wound and seeing to it that it was clean before binding it.

When the water had heated enough, he poured what he needed, wetting the hand towel and wringing it before notching his head towards Xilarn’s shoulder. “Take your shirt off.” In the pause after the words, he hesitated, fingers pinching into the whetted cloth, because he hadn’t said much of anything yet despite all that Xilarn had, and while he felt as though there were an infinite number of things he could voice, he wasn’t sure which — if any — would be better said aloud rather than left unspoken. “And thank you…” he said at length, “…for coming for me. I had never…” He adjusted his grip, thumb pressing against the hot towel as he frowned. “I’d never seen anyone die before now. I can go as far as you think we need to sleep safely.”