Chapter Text
The house was far too big for one.
His wife had made all the decisions about décor, and after her death he hadn't wanted to change anything; but he was very much aware of how vast the space was, how many surfaces there were to gather dust and reflect echoes. Portraits hung in the hall; alabaster and granite statues stood in niches and windowsills, a tiny spotlight was focused on a wall case containing a magnificent parure of turquoise, lapis, carnelian, and gold that had last been worn by a Chantress of Amun a thousand years before the birth of Christ. He had bought it for his wife in Luxor as a wedding gift, and she had never worn it. Amunet Zahhak had been buried not with the jewels he'd lavished on her, but with a finely carved greenstone heart scarab laid on her breast. Heart of my being, do not rise up against me as a witness; do not contend against me in the court of judgment; do not make opposition against me in the presence of the keeper of the balance.
There were no pictures of Amunet, just as there were no pictures of their son. Equius had not come back to the house after their last quarrel. He knew Equius was working on his DVM, and from time to time he even managed not to wonder how his studies were going.
He had thrown himself into his work, after his son had left. Several major engineering projects, consulting for three companies, co-investigator on two robotics grants, and--the thing that eased his mind the most--his personal research and experimentation into prosthetic design. His basement laboratory was cluttered with prototypes like the aftermath of a particularly violent droid wrestling match, arms and hands and legs and feet trailing wires and tubing. The focus of his current work was on trying to approximate a sense of touch, and metal hands with their fingertips in various states of removal and replacement stood on his workbench under his magnifying lamp.
Horuss Zahhak had an exquisitely delicate touch. He had trained it into himself, slowly and painfully, beginning in his childhood; he had had to, because along with the black hair and brown eyes, the male Zahhaks each in their turn inherited a condition resulting in myofibrillar skeletal-muscle hypertrophy and hyperhidrosis. Learning to control his strength had taken years. As a child he had broken everything he touched, hurt people without meaning to, despaired of ever being normal--and when Equius began to show signs of the same condition he had felt that same despair all over again, because he knew what lay ahead for his son.
He sat down at the workbench, flipping the waist-length braid of his hair back over his shoulder, and closed his eyes for a long moment before turning on the mag-lamp.
And the doorbell rang.
Five minutes passed, and then the nearly-soundless footsteps of his old friend and butler Aurthour came down the stairs. "Sir," he said. "I believe you are needed."
"What is it?"
"A young girl, sir. Left on the doorstep. In what I judge to be a very seriously injured condition."
"Call an ambulance," he said, looking back at his work.
"I'm afraid that is not feasible, sir."
"Why not, for crying out loud?"
"The young lady is of the, ah, troll persuasion."
~
She couldn't be more than fourteen, lying like a broken and discarded doll on the doorstep. His first impression was that she was covered in bright blue paint, and then he realized it was blood--blood from the ruin of her left eyesocket, blood from God knew how many gashes and lacerations over her whole body. How much blood could a troll lose and live?
The fact that she was short an arm as well as an eye hadn't even registered initially, her blood-matted hair hiding the stump. Her tail was obviously broken in several places. Horuss knelt and ran his hands gently over her remaining limbs, determining if she could be moved, and then as carefully as he could, he lifted her into his arms. "Go and fetch my instruments from the attic and boil them," he said to Aurthour. "And a lot of water. Bring them down to the lab."
She needed a hospital: what she had was him and his long-ago MD. It had been at least a decade since he'd been in active practice. After Amunet's death and Equius's departure it had seemed...puerile, to go on attempting to repair people, and he had turned his attention to building and repairing things that could be fixed. Now he just hoped he could remember enough of his training not to make things worse. He carried her into the house, her vivid improbable blood soaking into his shirt from her ruined eye, her mouth, her overlapping wounds.
Under the brilliant lights of his worktable, with her sodden rags cut away, she looked even smaller. He had never seen a troll so close up before, and was aware of a distant curiosity even as he made a clinical examination. Her horns were at least intact, not loose, although she had clearly been hit over the head more than once. The touch seemed to rouse her, and her remaining eye slit open: blue iris, yellow sclera, with smudges of green where the conjunctival vessels had burst.
"Fucking hell," she breathed, staring up at him. "You're a huge brute, aren't you?"
Horuss was not entirely sure what he had expected, but it hadn't been that. "Er," he said.
The troll seemed to be about to add to her observation, but coughed violently instead, spreading blue blood liberally around the landscape. His heart sank.
"Aurthour! Where the hell are my things? --I do hope you haven't nicked a lung, miss," he told her, wiping his face, "I haven't got the wherewithal for laparoscopic surgery to hand."
She didn't reply, shutting her eye again, teeth gritted against the pain. He noticed that her dentition was very definitely different from a human's, including two long sharp fangs, and remembered reading somewhere that one of the blue classes had venom. A translucent blue trickled from the corners of her eyes, and he realized her tears were blue as well.
"I'll do whatever I can," he said, more quietly, and when Aurthour came in with his sterilized instruments and the long-abandoned black bag, snatched his stethoscope and listened intently to her chest. There were a few diffuse rales, but the breath sounds were good on both sides: no pneumothorax.
He took the scope out of his ears, hooked it round his neck with a sigh of relief. "Good. Splendid. Right, let's get you sorted out, miss."
It took over two hours of continuous work, with Aurthour assisting, to clean and suture and bandage all of her wounds. He left the wreck of her left eye alone apart from cleaning and dressing it, and winced at the rough sutures set into her stump. They were the kind of big careless stitches used to close Y-incisions, and again Horuss wondered how the devil she had come to be lying on his doorstep in the first place. He would have to redo the suture job.
When they were finished, she lay swathed in bandages under a foil shock blanket, eyelids closed, so pale under the grey that he could easily see the darkness of her good eye through the delicate skin. She needed a lot of things he couldn't provide--blood, for one, and failing that at least some plasma to try and make up the volume she had lost; he had done what he could, and hoped it would somehow add up to enough.
Horuss changed his bloody shirt and had a wash while Aurthour carried her upstairs and settled her in one of the empty bedrooms. Until now he'd been too focused on the task at hand to consider the ramifications of housing a troll, let alone a severely injured one, but as he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror he had to admit he was so far out of his depth he needed sonar to find the bottom.
She looked so tiny in the vastness of the bed. Abruptly Horuss was back twenty years ago, more, looking down at another small closed face on white pillows. Equius had caught the flu, which had turned into pneumonia, and for three days they didn't actually know if he was going to come through; for those three days in the beeping endless nightmare of the hospital Horuss had not left him alone, sat by his bed, watched over him, as if just being there would keep his son on this side of breath. There was a peculiar sort of misery in knowing that you had done all you could, that there was literally nothing more to be done but wait and hope.
He didn't know how long he'd sat there--only that Aurthour had come and set a glass of whiskey in his hand, with the silent understanding of long habit--when the troll girl's eye cracked open again. She lay still for a moment, and then with astonishing energy scrabbled at the bedclothes, flailing, obviously having no idea where she was.
"You're safe," he said, putting all the conviction he could summon into his voice. "It's okay; you've been badly hurt, but we're taking care of you."
The eye was suspicious. He noticed her eyelashes were blue as well. "Who are you?" she rasped.
"My name's Horuss," he said. "I'm a doctor. And an engineer, these days. Who might you be?"
"'m Spinneret Mindfang, the Scorpion, the Viper!" she announced, showing off the fangs again proudly; but then her mouth twisted in pain, and her voice dropped. "--Spinneret."
They really were good teeth, he thought.
"...Nettie." It was almost whispered, a child's tiny voice. His chest hurt suddenly, sharply.
"Well," he said, "Nettie, you are safe here. You've lost a lot of blood; can you drink some water?"
"'m thirsty," she admitted. He nodded, brought her a glass; she looked at him with that suspicion again. "This isn't daterape shit, right?"
Horuss blinked, stared at her. "No. It's...tap water. Devoid of date-rape shit."
She regarded him a moment longer, then took the glass and gulped it down, flopped back against the pillows. He took it away from her, pulled the covers up. "Easy now. You've rather obviously been through hell."
"'s my job," she told him. "My job."
"Your...job?"
"I told you," she sighed, rolling her good eye, "I told you, I'm Mindfang, the Scorpion, the Scourge! Spider Queen!"
She was entirely too young to be queen of anything. Horuss did some more blinking, and then a nasty certainty began to dawn on him. "Good God," he breathed. "You were in the fight ring. How...how did you come to be on my doorstep?"
"I...don't remember," she said. "I died, but I didn't want to be cut up."
He stared at her.
"So I punched the doors open--" she demonstrated, proud--"and went outside." There was that little toothy grin again, despite the appalling injury, despite the blood loss, and she bounced a little in the bed--and paled further, groaned, as the movement jostled her wounds, her broken tail. For a long moment she lay still, eye shut, gasping.
Horuss didn't dare give her anything stronger than ibuprofen for the pain, not with broken ribs and depressed breathing, but he went to fetch her a pretty strong dose. When he came back he was astonished to see her sitting up on the edge of the bed, dwarfed in the Turnbull & Asser shirt he'd given her for a nightgown. "--What are you doing?"
"I should get going," she said, horns set forward in a defensive stance. "Stuff t'do, people to see, skulls to crush. Thanks for the bandages."
"Young lady, you are in no condition to crush anybody's skull at the moment," he told her, and then added a particularly ripe Arabic oath when she pushed herself upright and promptly crumpled to the carpet with an awful cry of pain. Again he was vividly reminded of Equius, who had done exactly the same goddamn thing, with the addition of pulling out his IV and knocking over some fairly expensive monitoring equipment. He bent to lift her, and that obviously hurt her terribly as well.
"I'm sorry," he said, softly, setting her back on the bed. The energy she'd used to sit up was gone, and she simply spilled out of his arms onto the sheets, eyes closed. He tucked her up once more, aware that his hands were shaking, aware that he had crossed some barrier that could not be uncrossed, that whatever was happening was larger than himself and weighed so very much heavier on the skin of the world.