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Temenos doesn’t know how he makes it back to the inn.
He’s not sure how he makes it out again either, nor how Osvald follows him without a moment’s hesitation, or even how Hikari manages to walk enough for the both of them, not a drop of anything left within Temenos to support his usual façade let alone his own weight. Strong of mind he may be, but strong of body he is not – and he has never been closer to cursing the fact. Partitio stays back, a hard set to his jaw. “Go,” he says, sans coat and hat. “I’ll wake the others. Don’t you worry about them.”
Temenos nods, grateful. “This way,” he urges, and Osvald strides forward with the resolution of an arrow in flight as he conjures up a lick of fire in one hand to light their way. The snow is ghastly pale in the silver moonlight – and Crick, when they find him once more, is even paler still.
The cold bite of Winter frost and quiet death; even Hikari’s warm support along one side isn’t enough to ward off how the chill spreads through Temenos’ bones and seizes his heart.
He doesn’t breathe for a long moment, not until Osvald stands with Crick collected in his arms, eyes grim but not without hope. “He’s still breathing. We need to hurry.” Temenos sags, Hikari faltering for a moment as he has to rebalance a new distribution.
“You have my gratitude.”
Osvald shakes his head. “Save it. It’s not over yet.”
He heads back the way they came, long strides covering ground in moments. Temenos, in comparison, must look quite the sorry sight, barely able to make it two steps without stumbling and the hem of his robes damp with mud-dirt-snow. Appearances, appearances – how else is he supposed to deceive?
“He’ll be fine,” Hikari says, pulling Temenos’ arm more firmly across his shoulders as they start the third trip in as many minutes. “Castti will know what to do.”
Temenos bites back the urge to question how Hikari can be so certain. If there’s ever been a time for prayer, now would be it.
Some cleric he is, never able to help all those he truly wishes to save.
Osvald shoulders the door open first, warm yellow throwing his broad back into darkness. “Step aside. We need to get him help, now.” True to Partitio’s word, everyone’s awake, lanterns haphazardly lit all around the inn. They draw back, curtains of anxiety preparing for a final call. Agnea worries at her dress, both hands fisting in the fabric there, and Ochette’s ears lay back flat against her head.
It’s Throné that steps forward, long used to the sight of much worse than this. “Castti’s in the back room, first door on the left. She’s almost ready.”
Osvald nods, firm, and sweeps through the space like the mass of metal and body in his arms weighs a grand total of nothing at all.
“I’ve done all I can,” Temenos says, following after with breath short and hands aching from the sheer amount of magic he’d pulled out of his heart to force back through his veins. His fingers sting like they’ve been burned, faint pulses of white still brewing under his skin. Even then, it had barely been enough to staunch the bleeding, to hold Crick together long enough to last through being carried to shore.
Castti, an angel through and through at the worst of times, turns to meet their arrival. “You can entrust him to me. I’ll save him, Temenos. I swear it.” Osvald stoops to deposit Crick’s altogether too lifeless body on the bed they’ve already cleared, shockingly gentle for a man of his size and with all the practice of a father who still remembers how to carry his daughter from room to bed. Crick groans, then, jaw tight with pain as his head lolls to one side, and it takes all Temenos has to not jam his staff into the lock and demand he be allowed to stay as Hikari moves to help him out and give Castti enough space to work.
The last thing he sees before the door swings shut is the resolute gleam of a pair of scissors as she readies them to sever the straps holding Crick’s chest piece together, to dig her fingers in so she can pull him apart.
That had been hours ago.
The door, for all intents and purposes, is rather ambivalent as doors tend to be, shut and silent and frigid as ice.
Temenos paces back and forth before it, counting seconds with footfalls. Nerves war with exhaustion, a jittery combination that drives his pulse faster.
Hikari watches him from the sidelines, back to the wall where he leans next to a sconce.
Partitio had shepherded off Ochette and Agnea some time ago, nudging them with gentle hands as he ushered them back to bed. “Cmon, you two,” Temenos remembers hearing from somewhere notably far away, “let’s leave Castti n’ the rest of them to it.”
If he knows Throné, she’s likely back outside with Osvald. They’re probably already looking the scene over for clues, ones that remain for now but might well be wiped away by the sunrise. Temenos should be with them, should have his nose to the ground while the scent of murder — attempted murder, his mind offers, though the thought is anything but comforting — is still fresh, but the very idea of putting any more distance between himself and the knight still locked in physical purgatory the next room over feels comparable to the prospect of cutting off his own limb.
What must be another eternity rolls by before the door unlocks.
Temenos is there in seconds. “Castti. Castti, how is he? How is Crick, is he…” He doesn’t think he can finish the sentence. He’s not sure he wants to.
Castti steps out into the hallway. She’s wiping her hands on a damp towel, and when she meets his eyes, an open book that he flicks through with haste, it’s — with a smile. A tired one, hard-won and utterly exhausted, but a smile nonetheless. “He’s alive.”
Temenos feels his strength leave him for an entirely different reason.
He hasn’t shed tears in years, not for any sake, but his throat tightens and his eyes heat up and oh, dear, he already may be beyond that if the way things have gone strangely misty is any indication. Has relief ever felt this heavy against his lashes?
Castti tucks her hand towel into a pocket. “His wounds were grave. He’s not well, not by any means, and he might not be for a long while yet, but he’s stabilised. It’s a miracle you found him when you did.”
A miracle, she says.
Funny – because Temenos, man of abject and unwavering faith that he is, finds himself strangely compelled to agree.
Behind them, Hikari moves away. His shoulders have softened, the hard lines of worry fading as he heads down the hall. He’ll update the rest, make sure they all hear the good news.
Temenos chuckles, a wet, miserable sort of sound that he only allows out once he’s confident Hikari is gone. “Heavens, Castti – why, in this moment, I genuinely think I could kiss you.”
Castti’s laughter is far more dry and far more weary. “As flattering as that is, we both know you don’t mean it.” Her hands seem steady where she holds them before herself, but Temenos doesn’t miss how her fingers spasm with muscle fatigue earned from what must be hours of ceaselessly grinding concoction after concoction to drip down Crick’s throat and to slather over his wounds.
He straightens, collecting himself in the same motion; clears his throat. “May I see him?”
Castti glances back over her shoulder. “Temenos, what Crick needs most right now is rest. You can visit him in the morning, once he’s—”
“Please.”
They fall silent. Temenos hasn’t– He doesn’t know when he last said that and truly meant it.
Castti searches his face, long shadows under candles short from burning down. She hesitates for a moment, then two; Temenos feels himself quaver in place with a want he hardly recognises.
“Alright. But I won’t have you waking him – it took all the herbs I had to soothe him enough to sleep.” She steps aside, the door unlatches, and the sight that makes itself known in the space between the frame and her hip, just visible in the puzzle-piece gap to one side, makes Temenos stop in his tracks.
Did Crick, sans armour, ever look quite so small?
Temenos scarcely recognises him. He’s propped up by pillows, a blanket tucked up to the lowest of his ribs. His sword lies to one side, armour pieces stained black-crimson and piled up in one corner where they’ve obviously been triaged to deal with another time. A water basin has been set on the ground nearby, brimming with hazy pink and white gauze – only matched in kind by the layers of the stuff that wind over and around Crick’s chest, his arms, just about all the skin that would lie otherwise exposed.
A careful step as Temenos crosses the threshold, then another three as he approaches the bedside.
Castti watches from the doorway. She says nothing.
Temenos, for the first time that night, allows himself the simple pleasure of merely listening to Crick breathe.
“It took… Longer than I expected,” Castti says, moving to join him in vigil. “Whoever did this – they knew what they were doing.”
The implication spells nothing but dread. Temenos has his suspicions (for he wouldn’t be Temenos if he didn’t), but he finds, for the first time, that seeking their factual basis seems of drastically low priority in the present moment. “Perhaps so – but I never doubted you for a second.”
Castti’s eyes narrow, just a touch, and he feels her stare on the side of his face. She hums. “Has anyone ever told you you're a bad liar, Temenos?”
Temenos blinks. The memory of a different voice, lower and discontented but no less kind—
He manages a smile dredged up from somewhere within, a rose on a gravestone halfway underground. “Given you’re the second person to tell me that in as many weeks, I suppose I must be.” It doesn’t last, slipping off his face as quickly as it had come. He sighs. “I apologise. I don’t mean to question you, truly, and I am well aware that he is only still with us because of your skill at your craft, but when I found him lying there I… Immediately envisioned the worst.”
His gaze drifts once more to Crick’s bandages, clinical white surgery already peeking pink at the centre. “There was… So very much blood." More than he even knew could fit in a man. All over the snow, Crick’s metal plates, Temenos’ human hands. If only he had gotten there sooner, if only he had been able to do more—
He’s drained, suddenly, hollow of everything – like it’d been himself left to die against the Sanctum walls, like each breath he takes is one inhaled on borrowed time.
Something touches his shoulder; a warm grip, a helping hand, a blessing of comfort. “Don't be,” Castti says, and he knows without even looking that she means it. “I know how it feels to be afraid for someone.”
Temenos takes care to school himself into neutrality before he faces her again. “Thank you, Castti.” It’s a unique struggle, to get the words out of his mouth. So used to waxing poetic, his tongue feels like the dullest quill against the back of his teeth, carving out letters and syllables from a truth he rarely tells. He hopes his eyes can convey the weight of what his words cannot. “I… Know not how I can ever repay you. I am in your debt.”
Castti smiles, her first true one of the night. “It’s what I do. I’ve helped him as far as I can – it’ll fall on you to keep him safe from here on out.”
Temenos tightens his grip on his staff. “With my life.”
“Good. I’ll leave you be.” She makes for the door, picking up the basin along the way and propping it against one hip. “Make sure to get some rest, Temenos – there’s no point in running yourself ragged. It’ll be worse for us all if we have to worry after you too.”
Temenos tips his head in acknowledgment. “You as well, Castti. You’ve burnt yourself at both ends tonight – and for a man you hardly know, no less.”
They both understand she’d do it again in a heartbeat, as naturally as breathing, but she nods all the same as she pulls away. There’s something a little raw in her expression, dug up by fatigue, and Temenos wonders what put it there, who left it behind. “I'll try.”
He turns back to the bedside, leaning cheek against knuckles where his hands curl around his staff.
The door shuts behind him—
and Temenos, finally absent of any audience, drops his head to his hands. “Flames, Crick.” His lamb, his knight, his partner in solving crime. “You’re a fool. An utter, absolute, and dogged fool.” The adrenaline is fading for good, the rush of panic and fear making way for a tiredness that drags at his very core. “What, pray tell, am I supposed to do with you?”
Crick, naturally, doesn’t respond.
A rhetorical question, then.
Temenos sighs. He traces the planes of Crick’s face with his eyes, then his fingers when that no longer feels like quite enough to commit it to memory. The slope of his forehead, the bridge of a nose made slightly crooked by what must be a break from youth, the soft, consistent inhales that show he is, indeed, still alive. Still breathing. Still here.
Something stirs, deep in Temenos’ chest.
He chances another glance to the door. All is quiet across the hall; the others have likely turned in for the night with the reassurance that their new friend yet lives.
He deliberates for a moment longer. His choices have always been dictated by what information the outcomes may draw, the inevitable domino consequences of selection. Without those to bear witness, what justification can he offer but his own selfishness? It’s an unwise one he’s making, a senseless move driven by nothing more than a dawning awareness of how very close he came to being left behind. He’s always enjoyed seeing just how much he can get away with, toeing the line of propriety and acceptability with every word and gesture.
This, he thinks, shucking off his shoes and leaning his staff against the wall, may as well be throwing the whole system out the window.
My oh my – what has become of him these days.
Squeezing himself in next to Crick on a bed made for one turns out to be a rather difficult endeavour. Wherever he sets his hip is already occupied, his arms find no purchase on cushioned blankets, and that bony jut that digs into his thigh must be Crick’s knee. He huffs, shifting about. “Even without trying, you truly do take up far too much space.”
Eventually, though, he finds place for himself between Crick’s arm and the edge of the bed, legs slotting between two others. It’s not exactly comfortable, given the strange angle his neck must maintain, but far be it from him to complain. This close, he can hear each exhale for himself. This close, he can see the way Crick’s eyelids shift as he dreams. This close, anyone who tries to go after Crick will have to go through Temenos himself first.
His hand drifts lower, over the flutter in Crick’s throat, over wrapped cloth and bare skin, until it comes to a careful stop over the flat breadth of his sternum and over where Crick’s heart must surely be. Temenos’ fingers make landfall, then his palm, and it’s only when he focuses and locks onto the resolute rhythm of a thudding beat that he feels his own finally, finally, ease.
How comforting, to feel the pulse of life. It’s no doubt as tenuous as Castti promised, brought back from the proverbial edge, but it nonetheless thrums under his hand. A good heart. A strong one, too, steadfast in belief and value; he’s always thought that about Crick, even when they first met and he was more wide-eyed anxiety than noble cause.
“Goodnight, Crick,” he murmurs, closing his eyes in earnest as he leaves his palm where it lay.
Temenos sleeps fitfully that night.
It’s a wonder, come morning, that he managed to get any sleep at all.