Chapter Text
It’s been a long time since Tighnari has tried shadowing someone, following from a distance.
Then again, Cyno had always been much more suited to that kind of work.
The alley’s dark, the rain making it much harder to navigate and see what’s in front of him, and the surroundings of varying shades of darkness contrasted with a few but irritatingly bright neon signs don’t make the task any easier.
But if there’s one asset still useful to him in the rain, it’s his ears, and the uneven, heavy footsteps are audible enough for him to follow. If he concentrates, he can hear a slight delay in the taps of the stranger’s feet: a limp. His throat tightens with concern and frustration, the lecture just waiting to be told. But he holds his tongue.
Whoever this stranger is, they clearly had no care for their own well-being. They didn’t even have an umbrella.
It’d been a long day at the Amurta’s training seminar, and while he was glad the students felt confident enough to ask questions and come up with ideas, that meant he was held up answering them for a few hours extra, and he knew he’d be called back for a few more guest lectures. While he was always happy to teach, the conservatory back home wouldn’t maintain itself (Well, scientifically speaking, it would, but not without a lot of vicious interspecies competition—and he really didn’t want to lose the rarer herb cultivars he’d spent the last few months nurturing). And he needed to catch up on…quite a few hours of sleep, if how sluggishly he’d crossed the road was any indicator.
And it seemed he wasn’t the only one who didn’t have the energy to look at the road while crossing.
The sight of the stranger once beside him, then suddenly thrown backwards onto the rain-soaked tar, burns itself on the back of his eyelids.
But even before he’d lunged forward, even before the cry of shock and concern could escape his lips, the stranger got back up and began to walk forward at an abnormal, almost inhuman pace.
So Tighnari did what he did best.
He pursued the idiotic stranger.
Shaking the memory away and focusing on the present, he tries to piece together what he remembers of the stranger’s face: pale skin, choppy dark hair with vague highlights of blue.
His mind flits through his options as he hears the footsteps slowing down.
He desperately hopes it was an accident. It was very late; almost 11 pm, and lack of sleep could be a factor. He really doesn’t want to think about what the alternative reason for someone to throw themselves in front of a car could be. Every time he tries to remember, he’s assaulted with the memory in traitorous flashes.
It’s scary, in a way.
He’s dealt with medical emergencies before. He’s lost count of the number of times Cyno has waltzed into the back entrance of his home or the conservatory with gunshot wounds and gashes deep enough to warrant a stay in the ICU. He’s lost count of the number of times Collei has relapsed and recovered every time her Eleazar decides to make a reappearance. There are the patients Collei, Kaveh and Alhaitham bring to him occasionally: ranging from children with scraped knees to careless tourists to drug addicts.
He’s rarely been fazed too much by most of their ailments, slipping into the professional demeanor of a healer with the sole duty of saving lives.
This is his first time actually witnessing such an event, seeing a potentially catastrophic accident for the first time. The helplessness of being nothing but a spectator and not being sharp enough to be able to intervene leaves him with panic woven beneath his skin, choking on his own breath.
And yet the stranger is still casually walking ahead, despite the magnitude of the blow.
The footsteps stop, and Tighnari takes his chance. He decides to give up on the stealthy approach and moves forward, turning a corner to see a figure standing under one of the dimmer, dingier neon signs. Upon seeing the familiar choppy haircut, he moves into the shade, folds away his umbrella and walks toward the stranger, ignoring the sudden feeling of apprehension nipping at the base of his spine.
Although it’s half draped in shadow, he finally sees the stranger’s face, and frankly, they’re beautiful: delicate, high cheekbones and eyes hued violet in the colored light, dark red eyeliner drawn over pale skin.
He stops in his tracks.
Something is wrong, but he doesn’t know what, not yet. Something is wrong, something in the surroundings or the pattering rain or the almost looming hunch of the stranger’s posture.
Something nagging at the back of his mind, but he can’t bring it to consciousness.
“Who are you and what do you want?” the stranger snarls, the voice a distinctly masculine tenor.
“Archons, calm down,” Tighnari says, trying not to come off as obnoxious to someone who may as well be a future patient. He raises his free hand in surrender and backs away a bit. “I saw you get hit pretty badly back there, and wanted to make sure you were alright. That’s all.”
The stranger clenches his jaw, shoving his arms into his pockets. It’s then Tighnari notices the smudge of something on his cheek; probably a streak of blood, or a bruise. “I’m…somewhat of a doctor,” he continues, still eyeing him for any other visible injuries. “If you’re injured, running around in the rain will only make things worse.”
The stranger suddenly laughs; a broken, abrasive sound. “Why thank you, Doctor,” he hisses, venom imbued into the last word in particular. He walks backward, leaning heavily on the wall. “Quit the saintly act and just fucking leave. Don’t you have other patients to handle?”
The profanity doesn’t make things better; Tighnari bites down the urge to retort in kind, though his tail irritatedly swishing about is already doing a splendid job of giving him away. Lashing out was often a sign that the person was in pain, so he takes a deep breath and softens his words instead, placing his hand on his hip. “If you count about fifty plant species as patients, then yes.”
The stranger just stares at him in dry confusion. “If that was your idea of a joke, it was horrible.”
“It wasn’t. And if you think that was horrible, I have a friend whose sense of humor is practically beyond saving. Do I have to threaten you with his jokes to get you to admit if you’re hurt?” he cocks his chin at the stranger’s foot. “Because I could hear you limping.”
The man grimaces. “I said leave,” he repeats. “And if I leave and I see you following me, I won’t feel as inclined to pull my punches.”
Their shared frustration won’t take long to reach a boiling point. He tries to compromise. “Do you have to go anywhere urgently?”
“And why the fuck should I tell you that?”
“I have a small clinic set up at my place–” Tighnari tries, but before he can continue, the stranger’s face twists into abject disgust. “No. I know what you’re planning, and it won’t work.”
“What—I’m not–”
The stranger steps forward, and Tighnari hears the footsteps.
Rain-soaked boots step onto pavement, the clear clink finally reaching his ears and slamming his senses into a restrained yet distorted panic. The feeling of wrongness that had previously jolted him returns with full force, making every hair on his tail stand on end.
The heavy rain dulls away to a mild drizzle, and with it, the other sounds return. But not all of them.
There is no heartbeat.
For a long, agonizing moment Tighnari wonders if there’s something wrong with him, if the rain had clogged his ears somehow. Or if the accident truly was as lethal as it seemed to be, and he was talking to a ghost.
The accident, his mind screams. The accident, the accident.
The sound attached to the cursed memory finally catches up to him in all the shock, and it rolls in his head like a broken tape reel. The screech of brakes, and the keening tires scraping endlessly against the road. The sound of impact.
The impact. It had resounded like a death echo in the empty air. And yet it did not resemble the crunch of bone or anything remotely similar.
Instead, it had been the crisp, sonorous clang of metal against metal.
Tighnari staggers back, his heart thundering in his chest, his nails digging into his palm. He’d been up for far too long. Getting too little sleep. Archons, he really needed a nap.
The stranger rises and steps forward again, and he’s too dazed to move as the man closes the distance, a deeply unnerving glow in his eyes. “Cat got your tongue?” he says.
The movements, the sounds of his shoes and the silence of his heart speak louder than his voice, though, and Tighnari’s barely able to scrape together his own voice to respond.
“...No,” he rasps, shaking his head, gripping his umbrella.
His eyes find the smudge of what’s revealed to be a bleeding cut on the stranger’s cheek, and with his face fully in the light now, he can see a few more cuts on his face and neck, and tears in his sleeves. It’s immeasurably difficult to connect that sight with all the lack of sound, but the actual sight of physical injuries is familiar enough to get his instincts and his brain working again. Tighnari takes a deep breath and forces the paranoid portion of his brain to shut up for once.
“Your face. There’s a few cuts,” he finally manages, his voice hoarse. “Can I treat them for you? Just—for my own peace of mind. Please.”
The stranger lifts his hand and brushes his fingers against the area as if even he hadn’t realized, and examines the smeared blood. He shifts his weight between his feet, and seems to think about it. “Fine, if you’re going to be this fucking insufferable about it,” he huffs, after a long moment. “But after this, you better leave me alone and mind your own business. Understood?”
Tighnari nods, and sighs in relief. “Understood.”
The stranger still refuses to share the umbrella as they walk back out into the alleyway, and for once, Tighnari is far too preoccupied on other matters to warn him against catching a cold. He finds that his own steps are still stiff, conflicting thoughts bouncing around in his skull, just barely stopping from breaking through the surface of his calm mask.
“What’s your name?” he asks, if not to distract himself from his inner turmoil, and to try and make friendly conversation with the source of said inner turmoil.
The stranger’s clear steps beside him— clink, clink, clink, like heavy pipes hitting the ground—slow down, and the man lets out a long sigh. When he doesn’t follow it up with words, Tighnari tries the open-up-first-and-hope-they-reciprocate approach. “I’m Tighnari. I’m a botanist.”
The stranger unfortunately does not reciprocate. “I thought you were a doctor?” he retorts instead, and shoots him a brief glare.
“Now and then, when it’s required.”
Tighnari tries not to mention that he doesn’t really have an official certification; he’s dancing dangerously close to being arrested by the Akademiya for illegal medical practice. Not to mention most of his experience with deeper flesh wounds and fractures comes from treating the consequences of Cyno’s investigations. “However…I’m less than equipped to deal with fatal injuries. Hopefully yours aren’t too deep.”
“They aren’t. Don’t get your tail in a twist over nothing.”
The memory jolts Tighnari’s mind again. “That—that wasn’t nothing. You could’ve–”
“Whatever,” the stranger interrupts him and casually waves an arm in dismissal, which only induces more frustration from his to-be doctor. “Save it. You can see for yourself later.”
Suddenly, he looks away and swallows, not quite meeting Tighnari’s eyes. In the faint glow of the streetlights, Tighnari sees the cut on his cheek oozing blood with the clench of his jaw, and pushes away the urge to dab it with a handkerchief. Not everyone responded well to abrupt touch, even if it was with the gentlest of intentions; he’d learned that the hard way with Collei. He decides to change the topic, and press for answers on his own.
“You still haven’t told me your name, you know.”
“Feel free to call me whatever you want.”
So much for pressing. Tighnari keeps his mouth shut from then on.
---------------------------
This fox-botanist-doctor, he learns, is extremely fucking pushy.
Truth be told, the only reason he’s going to his so-called clinic with him is because despite being (only slightly) taller than him, the fox’s frame is slender and lithe. If he wanted to reach out and snap his neck right now, he could do it with one hand and a single stroke. But only if the fox tried anything, that is. That time, he’d spent half a day cleaning off the Doctor’s blood from his hands and then disposing of the body, and he’d rather not go through with the annoying process again.
Technically, it had been one of the Doctor’s segment’s blood. But that technicality nullified the sense of victory entirely, so he prefers not to think of it as a segment but as a part of the Doctor himself.
The cover of night and the rain help mask them from any Fatui eyes. It’d be a crying shame if he got caught now: after two years of running; two years of freedom.
Was it really freedom? the tiny voice in his head never fails to whisper.
Freedom, he’s realized, only had meaning if there was somewhere to go. Without that, there was just endless wandering, detached from mortal society as a whole.
It had been at least somewhat amusing at first—seeing people go about their daily lives, scurrying around like hamsters in a cage. Then it all fell apart, day by day, the same routine repeating over and over. Everything slowly and surely became dull and lifeless, a mirror to the emptiness in his own chest. He just kept wandering around, oblivious to everything, not caring what happened to him at all; it wasn’t like he was as fragile as regular humans, anyway.
But he regrets it all now. Because it brought him here, being dragged along by a human. A doctor, no less.
Tighnari’s home-slash-clinic is—is that even a clinic?
He stares blankly at the building they’re approaching; it’s made completely of glass panes welded together with a metallic framework. What kind of delusional idiot would possibly live here, physically sheltered but fully exposed to the outside world? he thinks. He’s briefly considering walking away when they finally reach the building and he’s able to see the interior through the haze of raindrops on glass. An interior full of plants.
He bites his lip, thankful he didn’t humiliate himself by saying anything, and pretends he didn’t just jump to conclusions. He’d forgotten that the fox was also a botanist.
Just past the back of the greenhouse lies what finally looks like a proper residence, and Tighnari unlocks the door with a quiet click. Too quiet. He tenses up, keeping himself ready to lash out, but the fox doesn’t try anything; he just sets down his bag and umbrella, wiping the tips of his ears and his tail with a nearby towel and handing him one too. He takes a tentative sniff—there’s no telltale waft of chloroform or any other chemicals, so he uses it to dry himself down as much as he can.
“This way,” Tighnari murmurs once he’s done, beckoning for him to follow him to a door across the hallway, beside what seems to be a storeroom of some sort.
His guard rises up once again as he enters the room, and once the light flicks on, he takes a moment to absorb it all in.
He doesn’t know what he’d expected.
Well…he did know, to a certain extent. He’d expected something along the lines of sterile whites, metal tables and restraints, and sharp instruments. This? This is nothing like it, a deeply unfamiliar setting: sheets of cream and beige, large potted plants beside a few restraintless beds, a few decorative pieces hanging on the walls, and various boxes and bottles stacked on mundane wooden shelves and cabinets. It leaves a jarring sensation in the pit of his stomach. It feels so wrong.
Tighnari pulls an off-white disposable sheet over one of the beds and gestures for him to sit, and he does.
He doesn’t really know why he’s being this compliant. Perhaps it’s because his programmed instinct to follow orders is finally kicking in, or because this is his first human interaction in years, or maybe because he just wants to get it over with. Probably the last option.
Human contact was a relatively new sensation, and he steels himself for it when he sees the hand drift towards him. He tenses like coiled wire at the touch: ready to spring, to tear through flesh and bone at the slightest provocation.
Tighnari’s eyes are narrowed in slight concentration. They’re a strange color: a deep brown fading to vivid green with pale pupils, and he decides to focus on that instead of the foreign sensation creeping up his skin. So far, it’s just Tighnari slowly turning his chin from side to side, examining the various cuts on his face as promised.
When he finally turns his focus to the touch, the difference is amplified till it leaves his skin feeling raw and almost burning at the contact—it’s soft; much softer than he’d expected. His core twists further.
Is this what human touch is like? Natural skin was softer than metal or any synthetic alternative, after all. He finds it hard to keep breathing evenly when he realizes that it feels…calming? No, that wasn’t the right word.
Tighnari nods to himself, his ears bobbing about when he lets go, and a stab of mortified horror fills him when he realizes that he’s unconsciously leaning forward to follow the touch.
Tighnari blinks and stares at him for a few seconds, but he thankfully doesn’t say anything. He just turns and wets a cloth with a few drops of something from a bottle. “The cuts aren’t very deep; I’ll disinfect them first. This may sting a little.”
The sting he’s warned about turns out to be just a few pricks across his skin under the cloth. He exhales in response, but this just gives the fox the wrong idea. “Is something wrong? Does it hurt too much?”
“No,” he snaps. “This is nothing.” The feeling of wrongness tugs at him more and more with every second he spends like this. “Just do your job.”
The fox pauses and takes a deep breath, and he flinches.
He closes his eyes.
He knows the drill from here. He can almost feel the routine procedure: the restraints applied, the sedative injected into him, the cleaning of his skin and the nooks of his joints. There’s a bitterness building at the back of his throat and he swallows it down, and waits.
When the touch so much as grazes him again, he jerks back violently, teeth gritted and heavy exhales pumping through his system. His arms jolt upward and shove Tighnari away; the sounds of clattering and a hiss of pain resound throughout the room. Through the gaps between his fingers, he sees Tighnari stir and push himself up from the floor, and he curls up into himself, moving back further on the bed, waiting.
Tighnari’s breathing is equally labored and his ears are turned back. There's a few beats of palpable tension in the air; however, he does not retaliate: he doesn’t lunge at him or swipe at him. He slowly reaches out, but then he stops with a hitched breath and just as slowly pulls his hand back instead; sinking back down onto the floor, massaging his temple. “I –” he whispers. “I’m sorry…”
As for him, he finally manages to peel his shaking hands away from his face and tries to make sense of what’s happening. It ends in vain—nothing makes sense at all.
This is a clinic, and yet there are no needles. There are no scalpels. There are no restraints or sedatives.
This is a clinic and yet there is no pain.
Even if nothing goes to plan in his life, pain is still an old friend, after all. There is no pain here, and the realization that there’s a deeply buried, mangled part of him that wants the pain, scrambling for the essence of anything familiar, sends him spiraling into a frightened trance.
Tighnari stands up again, his movements steadier now.
He speaks, and his voice is impossibly soft.
“Do you want me to stay or go?”
He stays silent. He’s still trying to wrap his head around Tighnari’s motives, but sitting alone in an unfamiliar clinic makes his stomach turn.
“...Don’t touch me,” he finally croaks. “But…stay.”
Pale brown-green eyes shift in understanding and Tighnari steps away, opening a drawer and taking out a towel.
“Here. Wrap this around yourself. You’ll feel better, I promise.”
Promises are meaningless, he thinks, but accepts the towel nonetheless, halfheartedly draping it around his shoulders. He feels boneless and pliant, like the doll he was treated as. However, the towel smells pleasant—like flowers, and the fuzziness in his mind becomes slightly easier to tolerate.
Tighnari sighs, and in the meantime he brings another cloth to wipe across broken skin visible along his elbow; a skewed combination of swirling, unpredictable emotions and nausea flares up in his gut at the sight. However, the fox still doesn’t say anything—not even an accusation, or a scolding. He finishes dressing his own arm and speaks up again after a long while, and although his eyebrows are furrowed, his posture remains absurdly lax. “You should get some rest, but your wounds still haven’t been completely disinfected. Will you be alright with me continuing?”
He works his bottom lip under his teeth, fingers digging into his arms.
He hurt Tighnari, and yet he was still trying to treat him. Not even just that—he was still concerned about him.
It’s weird. Outlandish, even. Of course, there was the possibility that he was asking because he didn’t want to be pushed to the floor again. But still…his voice sounded so soft. He’d never heard anyone speak like that before, let alone someone he’d hurt. It makes the air so much heavier, in a mixed, unsteady pleasant-yet-unpleasant way.
Was listening to his voice also counted as human contact? If it was, he’d honestly be fine just listening alone.
“Get it over with,” he ends up saying.
“Okay.”
This time, when the cloth touches his cheek, he wills himself to stay still, closing his eyes and hugging his knees close to his chest under the towel. With no more distractions, Tighnari finishes his task quickly and leans back. “I would like to see your arm as well. Is that alright with you?” he requests again in that soothing tone, gesturing to the torn fabric of his left sleeve.
He shrugs the towel off as a reply, and holds in a flinch as Tighnari pulls his sleeve up, and pauses. He feels a soft sigh, the breath making his skin bristle a little, and the rub of a slightly stinging cloth there too in slow, careful strokes, the warm breaths still fanning on his shoulder. For some reason, the motion makes the tension in his body change. It doesn’t fade away but it feels different—like he’s had something akin to an outer layer peeled off, leaving him vulnerable and exposed. But even more strangely, there’s no sense of danger accompanying it anymore.
After he’s cleaned up and bandaged here and there, feeling like a limp, ragged washcloth, Tighnari lends him a spare set of clothes to change into, then makes him lie down and leaves him to rest.
For the first time in two full years, he drifts off into a sound, dreamless sleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.
This fox-botanist-doctor, he realizes, is…alright.