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“You’re crying.”
Is he? Finn brings a hand to his face, fingers brushing across tear tracks.
“Am I hurting you?” Lachesis retracts her hand from his shoulder. Her cool touch is replaced once again by numbness.
“No, you’re doing fine. Keep going.” He’s almost impressed with how steady his voice is. He feels another tug on his spine as Lachesis chips away at the mottled mass that the fire has made of him. It had nearly knocked him from his horse at the time, the pain easily the strongest he had ever felt in his young life, but somehow, he’d held on and made it back to camp before passing out.
Lachesis tuts slightly before scooting closer to get a better look at her work. Finn buries his face into the pillow, curling his arms underneath. He tenses up as she brushes her hand over one of the less burned areas; one of the places alive enough to actually feel pain.
“I’m sorry… If we were at a castle or somewhere with a proper bath... this would be much less painful…” she apologizes, lifting her hands again and replacing them with the light touch of a medicated cloth. “It’s so much easier to lift off dead tissue in water… but this will have to do for now…”
Finn grits his teeth. The medicine stings on the edges of his burns. “Is it- is it really so bad?”
“You’re lucky to be alive… You need to be more careful around mages. You’re just not built to withstand magic like this…” She answers, picking up something metal from a nearby tray. Finn dares not to look. Whatever tool it is, it probably looks terrifying, and he’s already having a rough enough time without the burden of such knowledge.
“I have to remove the worst of the burns… I don’t have any sleep staves on hand, but I can numb the area… you’re going to feel a bit of discomfort.”
“I’m already feeling discomfort,” he mumbles into the pillow, unsure if she can hear him.
“Well, here goes…”
The numbing salve has a strong scent to it, almost like mint. Finn wrinkles his brow against the pillow as she begins to apply it to his shoulders and upper back. It doesn’t quite hurt, but it does feel cold- unnaturally so, as if she’s doused him in ice water.
“You’re shivering.”
“It feels weird.”
“Oh… well, sorry. I have to use it, otherwise this will hurt a lot.”
“I know… keep going.” He turns his face away from her. Is he still crying? He can’t tell.
The sensation of her pulling off unsalvageable skin off his back is… upsetting, to say the least. It doesn’t hurt, but whether that’s due to the salve or total nerve death, he doesn’t know. It mostly feels like someone tugging on the back of his shirt, but the fact that she’s not peeling away fabric makes him nauseous. At least the mint still hanging in the air covers the smell…
“Oh…” Lachesis mumbles. Finn raises his brows.
“Oh..?”
“Well… the good news is that you’ll live.”
“... I suppose that is good news, yes.”
“The bad news…” She clears her throat, and Finn can see the light of a healing staff reflecting off the walls of the tent, “is that this is going to leave a really big, really ugly scar.”
“That’s not so bad. I have plenty of scars.”
“From behind, people will mistake you for some sort of overgrown tortoise.”
Finn wheezes a bit at that. Whether it was supposed to be a laugh, a word, or the remains of a pained sob, he isn’t quite sure. Maybe a bit of all three. “I’ll just h-have to wear a shirt when I go out then. Nothing I don’t already do.”
“Fair enough. Just don’t wander into any public baths with people you don’t know.”
“I… I don’t think I’ve ever been to a public bath in my life, Princess…”
“Really?” she asks, voice returning to a more conversational tone. “They’re actually quite nice; not nearly as embarrassing as you would think.”
“Er… well that’s good to know, I guess.” He mumbles. He could live with an ugly scar. It’s not like he had anyone he was trying to impress as far as looks go...
“I wouldn’t be too self conscious about it,” Lachesis continues. She’s much more hung up on this than he is, but then again, most of her patients are royalty, and they tend to care about this sort of thing a lot more. “Girls like interesting scars like this. Shows you’re a survivor.”
Finn’s heart skips a beat as Lachesis puts her hand on his shoulder again. “Is… that a personal opinion..?”
Lachesis’s hand stills for a second before continuing her work.
“Pipe down. You’re squirming around too much.”