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"Close the door after you," Zari says, "you're letting all the warm air out. Did you use a condom?"
"Yes," Jean sighs, closing the door after him, "I used a condom."
He's moving too perfectly, the way he does when he's trying not to limp. Zari gets up and finds an old tablecloth to spread out on the floor. "You say that like I should take it for granted," she says, shaking it out, "and yet half the time the answer is no."
"It's not like I can get anyone pregnant." He takes off his coat and hangs it up neatly. Underneath, there's kind of a lot of blood.
"No, but it is exactly like you can catch something. Because it is in fact the case. Put that shirt in the kitchen trash and then come lie down."
"Oh, this?" Jean makes a show of looking down, hands already unbuttoning his shirt. "It's not mostly my blood."
"It's not going to come out of your shirt any easier for that, love."
"I meant that you don't need to worry." The shirt comes off and goes in the trash.
"I know what you meant. Lie down."
Jean stretches out on the checkered expanse of cloth, stomach down, braced on his forearms to peer up at her. He was telling the truth; the blood is mostly on his wrists and forearms -- he must have washed his hands -- and spattered across his chest, staining smooth pale skin. The injuries, on the other hand, are mostly on his back, which would be why he's settled himself face-down; he's bickering, not actually being uncooperative.
This is a more detailed window into her brother's sex life than Zari actually wants, but she doesn't say so, because if she did he'd stop coming to her for first aid, and then probably get an infection and run a fever of a hundred and eight and she'd end up dragging him to the emergency room while he recited the dagger speech from Hamlet while actually hallucinating. She can see it with horrible clarity. She's actually kind of surprised it hasn't happened yet.
Jean doesn't flinch when she runs a warm damp washcloth over his back, but he goes still, which is his equivalent. Zari tries to be more gentle, but she needs to be able to see what she's doing, and he's kind of a mess.
By the time Zari's finished cleaning off the blood and sweat (and possibly other things she doesn't want to think about, she's trying not to look too closely), Jean's laid his head down on his arms and closed his eyes, relaxing a little despite the pain. (How someone manages to be that perpetually touch-starved she doesn't know. She just provides the hugs.)
"Cigarette burn," he murmurs, as she dabs antiseptic onto the angry mark at the nape of his neck. "She had an aesthetic."
"I know what a cigarette burn looks like, love," Zari sighs. "Regrettably. And the knife marks. I'd say you had a type, except for how you really, really don't. You were limping earlier, do I need to get your pants off you too?"
"Trousers. 'm not wearing pants."
"Neither of us is British, and I did not need to know that."
"Anyhow. No, I just pulled something, I think. I know where the hot packs are."
And those he'll actually use, because he's idiotic and self-destructive but heaven forbid he should go about being less than maximally flexible. Of course. "Dear heavens, what happened to your shoulder? Did you not have a safeword?"
Jean shrugs with one shoulder, since she's currently disinfecting the other. "Don't know. She might have stopped for 'red,' I didn't try. That one's mostly my fault, anyway, I moved."
Zari makes a small, angry noise between her teeth.
"It doesn't matter, chérie," Jean sighs, deflating all at once. "She's dead."
"Yes," Zari says, mildly, "given the amount of blood, I assumed. Should I be packing?"
"No, I was careful."
"Okay." She blots more, fresher blood, with a new corner of the cloth. "Love, this one needs stitches. Hospital."
Jean shakes his head -- carefully, so as not to dislodge the bandaid at the base of his neck. "I've seen you sew. You can do it."
"I love you," Zari says, firmly, "but no. This, I did not sign up for."
"Chérie, please." He's shaking, Zari realizes, tiny aborted shivers that he's trying and failing to control. Shock. She puts her hand gently on an uninjured part of his back and then gets up to turn up the heat, returns with a stool to put under his feet, wonders idly at what point in her life all this became normal.
"If I stitch it wrong," she says, gently, "it'll scar."
"It'll scar anyway." His face is hidden in his arms; she can barely make out the words. "Please. Please don't make me."
This -- whatever this is -- is not a normal reaction. Not even for Jean. Zari falls back on simple logic. "We don't have a local anesthetic."
"At this point it hardly matters."
By which he means that he's in enough pain already that being stitched up without painkillers won't make a difference. It's kind of messed up, Zari decides, that that almost makes sense to her.
"Fine," she sighs, because her brother has just been by-any-reasonable-understanding raped, and then killed his rapist, and now he is lying on her floor shivering and bleeding, and she does not actually have it in her to drag him to the ER and make him take off his shirt and show the doctor what was done to him. "Don't go anywhere."
Wikipedia has the information she needs, because of course it does. Zari finds a spool of blue silk thread and a needle, a Shabbat candle and matches, painkillers and sewing scissors and a glass of water.
Jean tries to refuse the painkillers. "I'm not doing this on you without them," Zari says, flatly. "And if you say a word about deserving to suffer..."
"I made him sad," Jean whispers.
He's talking about a teenager whom he met once, a year ago. Zari resists the urge to strangle him. "Take the painkillers, Jean."
Jean takes the painkillers. Zari washes her hands, meticulously, sterilizes the needle, dips the thread in alcohol. Wonders why she bothers, when he's going to go out again tomorrow and probably not bother with the condom. Does it anyway, because he's her brother, even when he's a self-destructive idiot. Especially when he's a self-destructive idiot.
He doesn't move at all or make a noise while she stitches the wound, which means it hurts a lot. She goes slow, anyway, because she knows exactly how vain her brother is. Reminds him to breathe, at intervals.
After she finishes and slathers on antibiotic and covers it all with a patchwork of band-aids (and makes a mental note to put gauze pads and tape on the grocery list), she gives him a little pat between the shoulders to mean that she's done, and he rolls carefully onto his side and wants a hug, which she gives him despite his bloody arms.
It doesn't take too long after that to shepherd him into bed, washed up and with a hot pack on his thigh and a timer set for switching it out to a cold pack. He curls up against her, eyes already fluttering shut, while she looks up the local news on her phone to see if whatever Jean staged the murder as has made the headlines yet. (It hasn't.)
"She was gonna hurt Felix," Jean mumbles, clinging to her the way he does when he's half-asleep and can't hide everything as well as he does most of the time. "A lot. Safe now."
Zari pets her brother's hair. "Yeah. He's safe. You're safe. It's gonna be okay."
"Nope," Jean sighs, half-intelligible on an exhale, and falls fast asleep.