Work Text:
Lauren:
Shouting. Sirens. Crying. Dragging. Someone was dragging her. Her eyes fluttered, her sides flared, she screamed in agony. Someone's hand covered her mouth. Her eyes started to fall shut, and the noise drifted away as everything faded to black.
Falling. She was falling. No, someone was carrying her. Supporting her weight on their shoulders as they limped forwards. Black.
A key in a lock, pain, someones shaking hands lowering her onto something. Dim light. Bandages. Moans of pain. Possibly hers, maybe someone else's. Black.
Her eyes fluttered open, pupils shrinking as she takes in her surroundings. An apartment. A tea kettle whistling on a stove. Footsteps. A groan escapes her lips as she tries to lift her head, heat radiating out from the back of her skull, crashing through her spine. Her ribs are on fire. She tries to lift her arm and she feels stitches pull in her shoulder. The bullet wound.
More groaning. This time, definitely hers. Footsteps. She hears footsteps. Footsteps coming toward her. She strains to see who’s coming, but her neck refuses to move a second time, and she gives up.
“Lauren?” The voice is soft, gentle, warm, Keiran. The footsteps stop a few feet away from her. Someone sits down next to her. Her bandages are unwrapped. Something cold is applied to her cuts. It burns. Alcohol. Her bandages are re-wrapped. Hands rough and fingers shaky. Not Keiran.
A grunt of pain comes from her left. She can’t turn her head. Another grunt. Deep, low, painful. The sound of a first-aid kit clicking closed. The smell of chamomile, flowers, rain, blood, gunpowder.
“Keiran?” she croaks, voice rough and throat sore from dehydration.
“I’m here,” a rough, shivering, calloused hand lays over her own. Keiran. Hand too rough. Voice too quiet. But Keiran.
She pushes herself up on her “good” arm. The one without the bullet hole. She flinches and tries to stop the cry that barely escapes her lips. He notices.
“ Don’t sit up.” His hand moves from hers to rest on her shoulder, next to the stitches. It doesn’t hurt. Despite his words, she pushes up on her arm. That hurts. She moves anyways. Moving herself back until she was against the wall and could lean comfortably against the pillow under her. Her ribs scream in protest. Stabbing, burning, biting. Her teeth dig into her bottom lip as she moves her arm back down. It hurts.
“I told you not to sit up, idiot” his voice is stern as he pulls the sheets back over her. A bed. They were in his bed. “How does your arm feel?”. Twisting, stinging, throbbing.
“What….happened?” her throat flares as she says the words, her voice crackling once again as she tries to ask the simple question. Water. He tilts a glass of water to her lips. She drinks. It hurts to swallow. She stares straight ahead, not trusting herself to look at him. Not wanting to know what he looks like.
“The bomb went off.” Fire, burning, screaming, shouting, pain, ringing, black. His voice is flat and dull when he speaks, the voice of someone scarred, someone broken. He shifts in the bed and runs his fingers along her wrist, checking her pulse.
“How did we get here?” Her voice is less rough when she speaks this time. She turns her neck slightly and waits for the pain to subside as she lets her head rest half lulled onto her shoulder.
“I carried you.” He clicks open the first aid kit again and reaches for something. “How does your arm feel?” Her head is spinning. Her brain has just registered a hot, prickling sensation curling around the left side of her cheek, up over her eyebrow. She whimpers and lifts her hand to touch it, to find out what's wrong, but Keiran pulls her hand away. “Don’t touch. Wait here.” She can feel him stand from the bed, leaving a cold empty spot next to her. She closes her eyes as she hears him limp from the room, the metallic sound of a crutch clinking along with his uneven footsteps.
Burning. Her face burned. Scorching, flaming hot. She fought not to touch, not to feel her inevitably burned and peeling skin. She opens her eyes as Keiran comes back through the door, holding a bag of ice and a wet washcloth.
He was using a crutch, the same one she had used the time she had stayed over with a sprained ankle. The end of a splint stuck out the bottom right side of the pair of dark grey linen pants he wore, riding low on his hips to avoid the ice pack he had haphazardly strapped to his side over the tendrils of peeling red skin. He was shirtless, bandages wrapping his chest and parts of his arms.
The worst part was his eyes, or, eye. Only one of his gorgeous azure eyes shone with colour. His right eye was grey. A pale, pasty, unfocussed grey that looked so out of place, so wrong on his perfect face.
He stood there in the doorway for a moment, letting his hair fall in front of his face before limping quietly over to the bed and sitting back down, pressing the cold washcloth to her face without speaking, the pain seeming to seep from her face into the cool fabric. Tears welled in her eyes as her head started to spin again.
It was her fault. He had jumped in front of her. Knocked the bomb out of her hands and took the brunt of the blast for her. And now he was blind in one eye and it was her fault. She started to hiccup then, small, choked sobs spilling past her lips as she sat there. Neither of them said anything for what seemed like minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades.
Keiran was the one to break the silence. He pulled the cloth away from her face and replaced it with the ice pack, sending a new kind of shivering relief and pain through her body. She hissed in discomfort.
“I know.” His voice came out a whisper, barely audible over the sound of her own breathing. She turned her head to look at him, ignoring the pain that flared in her neck as she stared at the face of her partner. His hair covered his eye now, and had she closed her eyes she knew she would have been able to imagine blue in the now grey socket.
“Keiran, you-.” She started to speak, to say something, to say sorry, but he cut her off, tilting his head further down as he examined the bandages around her ribs.
“I’m fine.” His voice broke, and he knew that even without her ability, she could hear the lie in his words. “At least, I’m going to be.” His fingers trembled as he held the ice to her face and his shoulders shook minutely as he steadied his breathing. He looked back up at her wearily, hair still half obscuring his vision as he stared at her. “How’s your arm?”
She barked out a short, bitter laugh, pain and heat flaring in her ribs as she did so. She turned her head so she was fully facing him and glared into his forehead, not able to look him in the eyes.
“My arm? Keiran, what about your eye” she sneered, words coming out harsher than she meant. He smiles softly, gently. He stares into her eyes. Looking for something. Discomfort, pain, rage, regret.
“I’ve had worse.” A lie. They both know it. She huffs out another laugh. Short, bitter, painful, exhausted.
“Fuck.” She grits her teeth and leans her head back against the wall. Hitting it one, two, three times before Keiran's hand reaches up, placed on the wall behind her head. Her neck and head now ache. Burn. Throb. Sting. She doesn't care. It hurts. He probably hurts more. “I’m sorry.” He looked up, surprised at her sudden statement. The pain in her voice was so thick he could have cut it with his sword. She hears it too. Her throat hurts. Her eyes hurt, probably in sympathy. Her ribs, legs, feet, hurt. “I’m sorry, Keiran”.
He exhales sharply and laughs. A low, tired laugh.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” It's not a lie. There's no pitch change in his voice, no red words swimming in front of her vision, no break or crack in the carefully constructed words that have to be lies because that can’t be the truth. She has everything to be sorry for. She agreed to the stupid deal that had almost gotten them killed on countless occasions, she had been the one to start their long-ago argument. She had screamed at him, called him a monster, broken his trust and thrown words at him that she knew were hurtful. She had attacked him at work, had threatened him time and time again, and now he was blind in one eye and it was because he had tried to protect her.
Drilling, cutting, stinging guilt. She feels like she could throw up, but she can’t tell if it’s from her ribs or her emotions. Her stupid, painful emotions.
She reaches up and takes the ice pack from his hands, holding it to her own face and allowing his arm to fall tiredly to the bed between them.
“Keiran can you… can you see?” The question is quiet, almost a whisper, but he hears it just fine. Sorrow, guilt, anger. He stares once more into her eyes, seeming to search for an answer, hoping the right words will magically flash in her eyes and he’ll know what to say. She stares at him, he stares back. His shoulders slump and he smiles dejectedly, knowing he lost the battle of wills.
“Yes, I can see,” he states simply, looking down again and fiddling with the edge of his bandage. Not a lie. But not the whole truth. She bites back a curse and lets her head fall against the wall.
“Out of both eyes?” She closes hers as she waits for a response, opening them again and turning to look at him when he doesn't respond.
“No, only the left,” he stares into her eyes with his one good one and smiles, a sad, tired, loving smile that she doesn't deserve.
“Keiran, I’m so fucking sor-”
“You have nothing to apologize for, Lauren.” And it’s not a lie. He fully and truly believes that it’s somehow not her fault. She still feels sick.
Keiran:
“You have nothing to apologize for, Lauren,” and he means it. She had shown him love, trust, hurt, beauty, humanity. He had lost that long ago. The baker's daughter. The father of two young children. Hanbury street. The tower. Hundreds of lives. Hundreds of people's blood dripping from his hands, spilling out of every seam on his clothes, and she stayed by him. Truly, he didn’t deserve her.
She opens her mouth to speak. He knows it will be more apologies. Apologies he doesn’t deserve.
“No,” he says quietly, not willing to find the energy to tell her off more firmly. “Would you like some tea?” The look on her face is that of pain, guilt, sadness. He can’t stand it. She opens her mouth to speak. He does not let her. “What type of tea would you like?”
She sighs and her lips turn up slightly. The beginnings of a smile.
“Do you have chai?” Her voice is weak in her throat. Guilty, rueful, regretful. He can hear her exhaustion. He doesn’t want to let her go back to sleep for fear she may never wake up.
“I’ll see what I can find, darling.” The way he speaks is cautious. He’s wary to use the old nickname at a time like this when she’s in so much pain, but she just smiles up at him, the ice pack slowly starting to melt in the plastic bag against her face.
He stands slowly, grabbing the crutch from where it leans against the wall next to him and uses it to support himself as he pushes up from the bed.
He limps out of the room and over to the stove, where he once again turns on the element under the kettle and then moves on to the cabinet. He pulls down two mugs and turns to place them on the counter behind him along with the chai Lauren requested.
His leg throbs, stings and bites as he moves around the small space on his injury, crutch left propped by the stove so as to have more space in the already cramped kitchen. He shouldn’t be walking without a crutch. Not yet, not so soon after the accident. If Lauren could see him she would be chastising him for walking on the broken bone. A smile tugs at the edges of his lips.
The kettle whistles once again and he pours the water, taking both mugs with one hand and his crutch in the other.
He limps back into the room and sets the tea down on the nightstand, lowering himself back onto the small bed. His leg hurts. He doesn’t show it. He barely feels it. He remembers the lashings and the torture. His painful cries as his legs gave out and his wrists were left to support his weight in the chains.
Until the cries disappeared, and he took the lashings silently. And then the lashings stopped. Because he started to execute orders. And then they started again because he refused to execute her. Still, he took them silently and without complaint.
“Keiran?” Her voice snaps him out of his reverie as he looks up at her from where he had been staring at the bed. He shakes his head slightly and rubs his eyes, taking the good part of 30 seconds to respond.
“Yes?”
“What do we do now?”