Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It started with a cough.

It was the Bad Kids first week back at Aguefort after their summer stint with the Night Yorb, and a cough was going around the school. Nothing serious, just a fluctuating attendance rate as students called out for a few days, then returned good as new.

As Jawbone recounted the decline in the student attendance since the cough over dinner, Sandra Lynn perked up. “Ooh, sounds like the school’s got a nasty case of dragon pox.” She winced.

“I thought dragon pox wasn’t like, a thing anymore?” Fig said, mouth half full.

“You are a barn animal, I swear,” Sandra Lynn chastised, tapping Fig under the chin in order to get her to close her mouth, to which Fig stuck her tongue out. “No, dragon pox very much is ‘a thing’, it’s just not as bad as it used to be, because most people get vaccinated when they’re babies.”

“Good fucking vaccine, too.” Jawbone said “That shit used to be deadly and nowadays you almost never hear about anyone dying from it”

“Wait so you can still get it even if you’re vaccinated?” Adaine asked.

“Well, sure.” Jawbone said, setting down his fork. “But it’s nothing like it used to be. I got it when I was a kid real bad cuz my folks weren’t into vaccine shit, they were weird anti-government types, and it felt like I was on fire. God, it was awful, thought my chest would never stop burning, definitely glad I’ll never have to go through that again.”

“Oh, so it’s like a one and done thing?” Fig asked.

“Some people can opt out of being vaccinated? Am I vaccinated?” Adaine panicked for a moment. “Oh my god, what if I’m not vaccinated?”

Sandra Lynn put her hands up “One thing at a time! One thing at a time. Fig,” she said, putting her hand on her daughter’s arm “you are correct, once you get it you can’t get it again, so me and Jawbone are safe, which means Adaine,” she reached across the table to put her hand over Adaine’s shaking one “even if you aren’t vaccinated, which I’m almost positive you are, we can take care of you, no big deal.”

Adaine took a deep breath before letting out a sigh of relief.

“Don’t worry kid,” Jawbone said, patting her on the back “I’ll look at what I can find on your medical files tomorrow, but either way you’ll be fine.”

Adaine nodded, blushing slightly since coming down from her freak out. She didn’t have time to be embarrassed though as Kristen came through the front door.

“Hey kid,” Jawbone greeted as Kristen set down her bag and started to fix herself a plate before sitting down “church go long? You’re back later than usual.”

Kristen just nodded, rubbing her eyes. “Something like that. Whatcha guys talking about?”

“Just the cough going ‘round the school, but it’s no big thing.” Jawbone said, patting Adaine’s back reassuringly.

Kristen nodded again and the conversation continued.

Chapter Text

Tracker and Ragh were still in Fallinell.

Tracker had told Kristen that it would probably take a while, Kristen just didn’t realize ‘a while’ meant more than a few months. But it was fine. Great even! Kristen was proud of Tracker for all the work she was doing in Fallinel but… Loath as she was to admit it, Kristen missed her.

She had the Bad Kids of course, and all of the family that made up Mordred, and a god who lived exclusively in her head, but still, with all of those people, for some bizarre reason Kristen Applebees found herself feeling lonely. After spending six months sharing a bed with someone, it was hard going back to sleeping alone.

She wasn’t totally cut off, though. Her and Tracker would text whenever Tracker had the time and service, and Tracker usually called the house at least once a month. And she was coming home soon anyway, just for a weekend, but that meant that she and Kristen would be in the same room for the first time in months. Which Kristen was totally normal about.

So, Kristen was fine. She was good and normal and totally not missing her girlfriend (ex-girlfriend) to the point of not being able to sleep because her stupid bed was so cold.

The Night Yorb had been a welcome relief. Being able to throw herself into something so wholly. God she was starting to sound like Riz. Riz was good though, because he was the only Bad Kid who wouldn’t pester her about sleep, and hanging at his office meant that she wasn’t stuck in her room.

It was also better now that school had started again. With school, she had class to do all day, plus running the GSA, as well everything that comes with being part of a successful adventuring party and being the singular follower of a forgotten god. So. She kept busy.

She was keeping busy in Riz’s office, fiddling with the Rubik’s cube that he kept on his desk as he worked on a case on his clue board. Something about a series of attacks happening in Aguefort’s theater. She wasn’t really sure, most of her attention going into not word-vomiting about Tracker for the nth-teenth time this week. Sue her, she was excited.

So, Kristen continued to work on the Rubik’s Cube, watching as Riz worked and trying not to think about it.

Riz did not seem to be having a good time. Usually, when Riz was working on something it was all sporadic movement and going from clue to clue rapidly in a way she usually couldn’t keep up with. Now, Riz was still. He was muttering to himself, going over the clues over and over out loud but seemingly coming up with nothing.

Categorically, this was what Fabian had previously labeled as a ‘category five Riz moment’, a common enough occurrence but still something that needed to be dealt with. Now, Kristen was not the smartest in their party, but she could at least give an outside point of view. She tuned into his mumbling, looking at his clue board to see if she could find any patterns.

“For six months it has been perfectly consistent. Not a certain number of days between each attack but always once a month but now twice? Is it going to keep increasing, or maybe it’s a break in the pattern cuz they know I’m on to them? Or maybe it has to do with people being back in the school?” Riz’s tail was whipping around, agitated “What the fuck is so different about September?”

“Two full moons.”

“Huh–” Riz whipped around to look at her. Kristen blanched. It was the first thing that came to mind, she had spent the whole last month being quietly stressed about it. Or maybe loudly but she tried to keep it to herself cuz she knew that Jawbone was also stressed about it and she didn’t want to add on. “What uh- what days were the full moon.” Riz asked.

“For September, the first and the thirtieth, then the third of August, and July was the third too, then uh–” Riz stopped writing down the dates and instead turned to look at her incredulously. “What?” Kristen asked.

“Do you just like, have all of the dates to the full moon memorized?”

Kristen was puzzled at the question. Of course, she had the full moons memorized. Her girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, Cass she needed to get better about that) was a werewolf and she lived with Jawbone, it would almost be inconsiderate to not know the moon’s cycle. “Um, yeah?” She said, “Why wouldn’t I?”

Riz looked at her in disbelief. “When’s my birthday?” He asked.

Shit. “Uh,” she started for a second before finding it in her memory log “between Solstice’s Eve and Fabian's birthday which is the second to last birthday before Spring Break so… January 7th?”

“January 12th, actually,” Riz said, a little impressed as Kristen was notoriously terrible with dates. “What’s today’s date?”

Kristen just shook her head, already over her small win of almost knowing his birthday as she realized she had no idea what the date was. “Ok yeah, I’m no good with dates, but like, Cass is? So, like, they remember the important stuff for me.” she explained.

Riz looked at her, his eyes moving back and forth like he was trying to scan her. “You use your god as a calendar?” He asked, incredulous.

“No like.” She searched for the words. “Ok yes, in some ways I guess, but like, ok. Galicaea is their sister, so of course the full moon is important to them as well, it’s like. I don’t know, it’s– it’s a sibling thing.”

“Sibling thing.” Riz echoed, seemingly content enough to accept that answer and not look into the fact that said sibling had been the reason that Cassandra had been banished and forgotten in the first place, which Kristen and Cass were working through together, thank you very much, and instead turned back to the clue board. “Can you give me the dates again?”

She began listing them again, watching as Riz wrote them down, and got all the way back to February before she felt her diaphragm collapse, gasping for a moment and then immediately coughing harshly, a hot sting coming from her lungs. It only lasted a couple seconds, but it left her wheezing slightly, scared to breathe.

“You ok?” Riz asked tentatively.

Kristen nodded. She tried to clear her throat before wincing, her throat burning as she tried to swallow. She tapped three fingers against her chin, looking at Riz and relaxed a little as he started rummaging through his bag by his desk, quickly producing a water bottle and handing it to her. Taking a sip, Kristen felt relieved as she could finally swallow and clear her airway.

“What the fuck was that?” Riz asked.

“Not sure.” Kristen said after a moment. “Must’ve swallowed wrong or something.” Slightly embarrassed over how scared she had been, Kristen turned back to the clue board. “Are the dates lining up?”

Riz, thankfully, took the bait. “Perfectly. I don’t know how I didn’t think about that before…”

Kristen listened as Riz went on about how it totally changed the whole case, choosing to ignore and forget the coughing fit, figuring that if it got any worse, she could just give herself a healing word. It was fine. She was fine.

Chapter Text

Two days later, still two days til Tracker and Ragh were supposed to come home, Kristen no longer felt fine.

The coughing fits were still sporadic enough to not be noticed by anyone besides Kristen, but the burning in her chest had become a throbbing constant. She knew that there was a cough going around the school, Adiane had been freaked out about it for whatever reason, but she hadn’t realized that it was this bad. Most kids just coughed and at the worst seemed a little tired, but Kristen was exhausted.

The worst part of it was that Riz would not get off her back. Any time she would so much as clear her throat in front of him, he would send her worried looks. He wouldn’t even let her come over to hang with him in his office, telling her she needed to go home and rest, which infuriated Kristen, cuz she already couldn’t sleep most nights, and now she felt like she couldn’t even lay on her back without her chest feeling like it might explode. So she just went home and holed up alone so that she wouldn’t freak out Adaine more than she already was.

Kristen was up on the roof, diligently avoiding everyone in her hammock and texting Tracker when the vertigo hit. The wind was rocking the hammock gently like usual, something Kristen typically enjoyed, but the movement all at once became too much. Grabbing the sides of the hammock to try and steady it, she over-corrected and pitched the whole thing over, dumping her onto the roof too dizzy to even breathe.

Her head spun as her eyes tried to refocus, coming together too late as she watched her crystal slide down the sloped roof and fall off the house all together. Great. It’s not like she hadn’t dropped her crystal off the roof before, it’s just that those times she wasn’t so dizzy that she feared she would follow the damned things fate if she tried to stand up.

She laid there for a few minutes, thinking through her options.

She could try and get back down on her own, but even standing was too scary at the moment, and she really didn’t feel like falling off the roof. Fig could definitely heal her, but if Sandra Lynn found out she fell then she wouldn’t let her up there anymore and the roof was the only real place she had to herself besides her room in Mordred.

For a moment she thought about just waiting it out, but as the wind continued to blow gently across the roof, Kristen realized that she was shivering. Laying on her side, trying to ignore the way the shingles were biting into the skin on her leg, she focused her eyes on her hands to try and quell the way her head was spinning. Oh right.

Calling on Cassandra, Kristen had to look away as twilight swirled around her, the light and movement making her head worse, only turning back when she knew they were there. Cass having a physical form was a newer installment of saint-hood, something that came out of shit like Kristen getting stuck on roofs without her phone and situations similar, and needing someone to go get help, which Cassandra did wonderfully. What no one tells you, however, is that old adage about being made in God’s image goes both ways when you are the sole believer in said god. So Cassandra looked like her. Purple and shadowy, surrounded by dusky stars, but they were definitely Kristen.

So Purple-Kristen, as Cass had been dubbed by the Bad Kids, sat across from her on the roof.

“What is the matter, my saint? Why are you on the ground?” Cassandra asked, their voice not traveling between the two of them but instead projecting into Kristen’s head.

“Fell.” Kristen said out loud. She could talk to Cass in her head if she needed to, but it made feel untethered and weird, something she didn’t need more of in her dizzy spell. “Wait, can’t you like, see everything, being in my head and stuff?”

Cassandra seemed to think about it for a second, tilting their head to the side. Kristen wondered if she did that, too. “You have not asked me to watch you when I am not called upon, I know only what you allow me to. Would you like me to be omnipresent?” They asked.

Kristen almost shook her head before thinking better of it. “Nah, that’s too much like a surveillance thing, but I guess that’s what I’m used to with Helio and all that shit. What we do now works, if that changes, we’ll change it, deal?”

“Deal.” They said, nodding their head and smiling. “Have you called upon me to discuss the matters of my godhood, or are you in need of assistance in another way? You do not seem well at the moment.”

Kristen groaned. “I’m fine, just dizzy. Can you go get someone to help me out?”

“I could call upon my sister and she could retrieve Tracker to assist you.” Cass said, looking eager.

“No, no need for that, just go get someone in the house.”

Cass looked put out, but disappeared in a mist of twilight all the same. One thing that Kristen had worked hard on with Cassandra was repairing their relationship with Galicaea. It was weird and messy and complicated because there was so much context missing from what their relationship used to be before Cass was the Nightmare King, but it felt important to not let go of that relationship. It also felt like a way for Kristen to help Tracker even though she didn’t worship her goddess, giving Tracker’s wolfy Galicaea another person on her side on the higher planes instead of just Sol and Helio for family. The only downside of the situation is that Cassandra took to their role as younger sibling like a duck to water, idealizing Galicaea as an older sister, and, to Kristen’s lament, obsessing over Tracker. As above, so below.

“Kristen? I've been retrieved by your ‘service god’, what’s wrong?” Fig called from the window below, pulling Kristen out of her theologic spiral.

Mumbling a quick ‘thank you’ to Cass, Kristen cleared her throat in an attempt to sound less hoarse. “Stuck. Got super dizzy and ‘m scared if I try to stand on my own I’m gonna fall. Dropped my crystal, so, ya know, Cass.” She rambled before wincing as her voice cracked and trailed off at the end.

“Dude, again?” Fig said, and Kristen listened as her voice got louder as she climbed out the window. “We gotta get you like a strap for that thing, maybe Gorgug can fashion something for you cuz I don’t know how many more mending’s your crystal can take.”

By the end of her spiel Fig was standing on the roof, face upside down above her grinning goofily, waiting for her to say something.

“Really? No strap joke?” Fig looked at her incredulously, her goofy grin dimming. “Man you must be really not feeling well, I set that up perfectly for you.”

Kristen gave her best effort at a laugh, but Fig was right. She did not feel well at all and even feigning alright was exhausting. “Just dizzy. Give me a hand up?”

Fig obliged, sticking her hand out. Kristen took a deep breath before hauling herself up, trying to ignore the way her head spun and instead focusing on staying on her feet as she clung to Fig’s side. Fig looked concerned as she wrapped an arm around her side. “You’re shaking dude.”

“Just cold up here.” Kristen explained away, hoping Fig would accept it since her gauge on temperature was so skewed from how hot she ran as a Tiefling. Fig just nodded, and Kristen focused on not swaying too much as they made their way off of the roof side by side.

Once they had crawled back through the window, Kristen had to resist the urge to fall down completely as Fig separated from her side. The ground seemed to spin underneath her and she wanted nothing more than to just lay down and close her eyes. Fig was saying… something, standing in front of her, but Kristen couldn’t really hear her.

“What were you saying?” Kristen asked, watching Fig’s lips as she talked.

“Are you out of heals?” She asked, emphasizing her words as she repeated herself.

Kristen laughed a little. Great fucking cleric she was, she didn’t think to heal herself. She had been feeling like shit for days and besides the initial cough, she hadn’t even considered healing as an option. “No, it totally slipped my mind, I guess.”

Holding both hands to her head she gave herself a healing word, stuttering slightly over the verbal components. Kristen sighed in relief as purple shadows swirled for a moment and the dizzy spell finally, mercifully ended.

“You’re such a fucking dumbass.” Fig said, wrapping her arm back around Kristen as they descended the stairs together. “You gotta get it together for Tracker this weekend, can’t have her coming back to you all weird and shit. You gotta win the breakup dude!”

Kristen scoffed, but held on tighter to Fig all the same as they made it down to the second floor landing.

“Me and Adaine were gonna watch the new Odd Fellows episode in the den if you want to join.” Fig offered, pulling her arm from around Kristen’s shoulders to instead holding her hand. “Feels like we haven’t seen you all week.”

Something sharp twisted in Kristen’s chest, hating that she had been neglecting her friends, wanting nothing more than to curl up with them on the couch and talk shit about trash television, but the burning in her lungs throbbed through her just the same, warning her of an upcoming coughing spell. Adaine was freaked out enough, and even if she didn’t understand why, she didn’t want to add to her friend's anxiety.

“I’m still kinda off, think I’m gonna try and nap it off, but maybe we can hang out after dinner?” Kristen offered, knowing that she would probably half to bail on those plans, too, but not wanting to disappoint Fig.

Fig nodded, squeezing her hand before continuing down the stairs to the first level, leaving Kristen to try and sleep off whatever had taken over her body.

Chapter Text

Coming home from a long day of work, Sandra Lynn was less than thrilled to find broken glass on the driveway.

She loved Mordred. She loved her partner and her daughter and the found family that they had made up together, but there were times, like when she was cleaning up what was most probably Kristen’s shattered crystal (the thing was destroyed past the point of recognition, but this was also not the first time Kristen had dropped said crystal off the roof) that she missed not living with 3/6 members of her daughters adventuring party.

Coming inside, Sandra Lynn spotted most of Mordred’s residents in the den. Fig and Adaine were draped over each other on the couch while Aelwyn sat in one of Lydia’s La-Z-boy recliners, the three of them watching some terribly cheesy soap opera that Sandra Lynn was sure she would be hearing about at dinner.

“I’m guessing this isn’t one of your crystal’s I found on the driveway?” She asked as she set her things down in the entrance way, holding out the shattered crystal.

“Kristen’s.” Fig said around a mouthful of chips, pointedly ignoring the Look her mother was giving her.

Adaine made grabby hands for the crystal which she carefully supplied, making sure not to let the glass catch her. Casting a quick mending, Adaine handed it back to Sandra Lynn, her and Fig clearly arguing over message all the while.

Sighing in what Sandra Lynn could only assume was defeat, Fig piped up. “She was being all weird on the roof earlier and dropped it. Think she’s anxious about Tracker coming home.”

Right. That was this weekend.

Sandra Lynn was not proud of how relieved she was when Tracker first announced she was going on a quest to Fallinell. She loved Tracker like her own, truly, but there are really only so many times a person can walk in on horny teenagers before they start to reach their breaking point. Relieved as she was, it was hard, seeing how hard Kristen took the separation.

She was not so obtuse to not recognize that she and Kristen had a… rough relationship to say the least. Before spring break and the forest, they didn’t really interact despite living in the same house together. Sandra Lynn worked most of the time and if Kristen needed something from someone older, which she rarely did, she went to Jawbone. After spring break though… things were rough. Sandra Lynn had patched things up with Jawbone and had even had a really good conversation with Tracker about the situation, but Kristen was a master of avoidance when she needed to be.

So, she lived in a house with a depressed teenager who avoided her at all costs. This would not be a huge deal except for the fact that said depressed teenager seemed to be avoiding everyone as of late and was now being weird on roofs if Fig could be trusted, which Sandra Lynn at least tried to believe she could be.

She had really hoped that Tracker coming back would maybe knock the weird fugue state that Kristen seemed trapped in but maybe it was making it worse? Sometimes she questioned letting her daughter’s friends move in with them.

“She in her room?” She asked, sighing as Fig nodded affirmative. Kristen avoiding her? Fine. Kristen avoiding Fig (a feat she had previously thought to be impossible)? Very much not fine.

Making her way upstairs, she thought out tactics. She had a clear in with the crystal, she just needed to use the conversation around it wisely, lest she lose her opportunity. Christ she was thinking about this way too much.

“Hey Kris?” She said, knocking on the door. “I have your crystal. Adaine mended it for you.”

Nothing.

She knocked again. They had a two-knock rule at Mordred. You get two knocks, or warnings before someone can come in. If you lock the door or say no, they can’t come in, but silence is not a no. The second knock didn’t garner a response either, so she checked the knob, the door unlocked, and went in.

Kristen’s room was messy, but nothing compared to what she had seen Fig’s room devolve into during the worst of her teenage years, so that was something at least. It took her a moment to even spot Kristen, who was sleeping, fully consumed in the bean bag by the foot of her bed.

For the flash of a moment, Sandra Lynn hesitated.

It had been a rough couple of months for Kristen. Standing in front of her, it was impossible not to see that. Even asleep, dark circles bruised the skin beneath her eyes and her hair looked worse for wear, tied into a half-fallen bun. She was so young. But she also looked just so uncomfortable, sleeping all folded in on herself, and if she was going to take a nap, there was a much better place to do it in.

Squatting down so that the teen wouldn’t wake up to someone towering over her, Sandra Lynn rubbed her hand up and down Kristen’s arm gently “Hey Kris, you wanna wake up for me?”

Kristen groaned, face scrunching up into a grimace before relaxing as she opened her eyes. Her eyes flashed with something that Sandra Lynn couldn’t quite place before her face cleared. “Wassup?”

Shaking her head, Sandra Lynn handed her the mended crystal, laughing a bit to herself as the teen lit up when she saw it. “Adaine mended it for you. You need to be more careful up there. I don’t mind coming home to a broken crystal on the driveway but wouldn’t be super pumped if it was a broken Kristen instead.” Gods she was so corny, she was starting to sound like her mother.

Kristen, for what it was worth, only shrugged, occupied fully now that she had her crystal. She shifted slightly, wincing like she moved wrong.

“Why don’t you nap on the bed, it would probably be more comfortable?” Sandra Lynn offered, completely forgetting her reconnaissance mission entirely. She saw the apple tea bags in trash in the morning, she knew that Kristen wasn’t sleeping through the night, but if she was at least taking naps that was something.

“Bed’s evil.” Kristen said shortly, glaring at it.

Ah. Of course. The bed was evil, only made sense. “Ok, you gonna try to nap some more or you wanna join us downstairs? The girls miss you.” She tried, not above guilt tripping.

For a moment she worried that maybe it worked too well, as Kristen’s face dropped before her mask went up again. She thought about it for a moment, seemingly considering something on her crystal, as if waiting for it to make the decision for her. “Yeah, ok.” She said finally.

Mission accomplished. Trying not to pay mind to the way her body protested as she stood from her squat, Sandra Lynn put her hand out to help Kristen up from the bean bag that was attempting to swallow her whole, which the teen took dutifully. Pulling her up, however, Sandra Lynn didn’t miss the way that Kristen swayed slightly. Moving purely on instinct, not even consciously aware that she was doing so, she reached up and put her palm to Kristen’s forehead.

Shit.

Kristen was burning up. Checking with her other hand she got the same result. Fuck this was bad. If Kristen had a fever that meant… she should triple check just in case, maybe she was just running cold. “Stay here.” She said, leaving the teen and trying not to run down the hall to the bathroom.

Grabbing a thermometer from the medicine cabinet she rushed back into Kristen’s room where she was still standing, looking confused. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re sick is what’s wrong.” She said sternly, handing her the thermometer, “Hold this under your tongue.”

Still looking confused, Kristen obliged, putting the thermometer in her mouth.

“Have you been coughing at all?” Sandra Lynn asked, dreading what she already knew was the answer.

“We–”

“Don’t talk, it will mess with the results.”

Rolling her eyes, Kristen just nodded. Gods this was so bad. The thermometer beeped and Kristen handed it to her. 101.3. Fuck.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone you were sick?” She asked, already going over what they needed to do in case Adaine got sick.

“I didn’t know? Everyone at school has been coughing. I thought maybe it wasn’t a big deal.” Kristen said. “Plus, I feel fine now cuz–”

“But you’re not fine.” Sandra Lynn explained, holding up the thermometer. “You’re running a fever, which means you’re still sick, and you are contagious. Which is a big deal, by the way, because if Adaine gets sick, that’s a big problem.”

“Oh.” Kristen stood there awkwardly for a moment, looking thoroughly chastised. “I didn’t– Does this mean I can’t come hang out downstairs?”

“Yep.” Sandra Lynn confirmed. “You need to quarantine in your room until you’re better.” Thinking up an action plan that included a lot of hand washing and figuring out if they had any other thermometers in the house, Sandra Lynn made for the door. “You really should have said something, Kristen.”

Closing the door behind her, she almost didn’t catch the “Sorry”.

Chapter Text

It had been a long summer.

Fallinel had been hard for Tracker. Sure, it was rewarding at times when they were able to make breakthroughs with a couple of folks, as well as the mass of teens at Kai Lumenura, but that reward didn’t make up for emotional exhaustion that came with being the only werewolf on the island. High Elves sucked.

Coming back, even for just a few days, was a relief. She loved Ragh, she literally could not have done any of what she had done to protect Galicaea without him, but she missed her uncle, and her family, and all the friends from her life before she got swept up with the Bad Kids, and she was looking forward to even a little time just to herself.

Her and Ragh had spent the whole day traveling. The plan was to teleport from Kai Lumenura to Mordred Manor, but that meant first getting to Kai Lumenura from Fallinel. Why they couldn’t just teleport from Fallinel was beyond her understanding, something to do with wards. Ayda had said something about it, but from what Tracker understood, it was just High Elves trying to make things harder. Once again, High Elves sucked.

They arrived at Mordred Manor a little before noon on Friday. Giving a goodbye hug to Ayda (even though Tracker was more than certain that she would be seeing her tonight at the family dinner if Kristen’s text about her and Fig were to be believed) her and Ragh finally came home to an unusually quiet manor.

Lydia greeted them at the door, immediately standing and pulling Ragh into a hug. Ragh went tearfully and Tracker patted his back as she side stepped around him and into the house. It was… a mess really.

The kitchen table was covered with homework and keys and forms for activities that needed to be signed and several different days' worth of the newspaper's crossword puzzles. The entryway was a mess of shoes and jackets and bags and signs of too many people living in one space, only cleaned so much so as to make a clear path for Lydia’s chair to be able to get through. It was so much home that she felt like she might cry. It smelled like garlic and meat cooking and coming around the corner Tracker was able to see stew cooking on the stove.

“Good to be back?”

Tracker jumped a little, not expecting anyone else to be home. Sitting on top of the counter was Aelwyn Abernant, looking bizarrely casual, especially since the last time that Tracker had seen her. She was wearing a worn down Aguefort t-shirt (maybe one of Adaine’s but potentially one of Fabian’s? Tracker couldn’t remember what Kristen had last said about their weird sex thing. She knew she said something about it changing last time they had called one on one but that was also right before she got chased out of the city by the Court of Stars so sue her for not remembering.)

“Yep,” she said, popping the p. She had never really talked to Aelwyn, despite being the closest to her age of the Mordred residents, their time had really just barely overlapped. Until now at least. “How’s everybody been? Any new villains on the horizon?”

Aelwyn chuckled, raising her eyebrows. “Not recently, no. That little adventuring party of ours has made it nearly a month without running into trouble, believe it or not.” Aelwyn took a moment to stir the stew. Did Aelwyn cook? Adaine couldn’t cook for shit when she first came to live with them, but maybe that was another neglect thing and not a High Elf thing. She couldn’t remember anyone in Fallinel cooking really but she also wasn’t welcomed in for supper in many places. She could ask, she supposed. Oh shit Aelwyn was talking, and she wasn’t even paying attention.

“Uh, sorry could you repeat that?”

“Oh, just that your little cleric has been hard at work on that church of hers. Think she’s trying to impress you or something, she’s always working on it.” Aelwyn said slyly, a look on her face that Tracker couldn’t place as her thoughts stopped all at once.

She texted with Kristen all the time and she hadn’t mentioned that anything new was happening with Cassandra. Apparently, she had been working on the church so that Aelwyn of all people took notice, but she couldn’t think of mentioning it to Tracker, who was her… well. Oh. It’s not like Tracker was her girlfriend anymore, she supposed.

Making up her mind, Tracker abruptly left the conversation. Was it rude? Probably, but she had been dancing around niceties for the last couple of months and now that she was home, she couldn’t be assed to keep up the charade. Heading out the door and across the lawn to the chapel, she felt herself begin to fume. If Kristen couldn’t even bother to mention the church to her then surely, she wouldn’t mind her looking. It’s not like Tracker had spent the whole year before with her spending all of her spare time and effort to convert the chapel into a place of worship for Yes! and now she was just ripping it down without even talking to her about it? What, did Kristen think she wouldn’t–

Oh.

Above the entrance to the chapel there had always been an inscription. When they first moved in it was an old Solesion adage, which was quickly replaced with a sign they made for the Church of Yes! when they fixed it up. Now, standing in front of the chapel, that sign was gone.

Tracker stared at the symbol that matched the one she had on her backpack, the one that Kristan had made for her to represent Galicaea, that now hung above the door in front of her next to a question mark. Underneath the symbols a plaque read: Sisters of the Night.

Gently, as if worried it might disappear if she grabbed it too harshly, Tracker turned the knob and opened the door to the chapel.

It had been transformed.

The windows, which had previously been broken and boarded up with plywood, were now full of stained-glass portraits of the night, Cassandra and Galicaea all made up in glass. It had been months of Tracker fighting tooth and nail for her goddess, trying to get these prissy High Elves to recognize who she truly was, and here she was, Galicaea, her Galicaea, made up in glass as a wolf. Not feral and frenzied, not tearing herself apart, but serene in a howl. It felt so fucking good. The altar had been made up for a sermon, but cushions still sat around it for prayer. So, Tracker grabbed a cushion, kneeled down and prayed.

She prayed every night, part of her routine, but most nights it was just that, routine. This was indulgent. She allowed herself to let go of everything that she had been worrying about, even just for a moment, and truly let her mind open and be free to Galicaea. She focused on the energy that she was putting out, not letting it get bogged down by her anxieties for the first time in a long time, and really, truly prayed.

She had lost track of time when she finally finished her prayer with a small ritual, finding herself clearer headed than she had been in a long time, still kneeling as she noticed the sun had moved further from its peak in the sky. Almost as an afterthought, she said a quick prayer to Cassandra before rising from her kneel.

Sharp spots of purple and twilight danced before her vision, the chapel’s window light dimmed as darkness pocked with starlight swirled around her, a reaction to even her small prayer. The darkness dissipated after a moment, the afternoon light returning, but Tracker now found herself accompanied by Cassandra, Goddexx of mystery.

Tracker had seen Cassandra before, of course, but she didn’t think interacting with the purple god version of her girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, or, well they probably needed to talk about it at some point because Tracker wasn’t actually positive where they stood at the moment) would ever be something she got used to.

Cassandra was looking at her intently, wringing their hands as they hovered in front of her.

“Oh, hey Cass, sorry, didn’t mean to summon you, you can go back to Kristen now.” Tracker said, trying to sound assuring. She had never summoned Cassandra before, but maybe it was just a side effect of not having many people pray to a god.

Cassandra shook their head, snapping their fore and middle finger down onto their thumb, signing ‘no’.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Tracker asked, growing concerned “Can you not go back? Is Kristen ok?”

Cassandra repeated the motion again, signing ‘no’ before putting their fist on top of their palm, their thumb sticking out the top and moving their hands from Tracker to themself, repeating the sign over and over again, their face pleading.

Help. Kristen needed help.

Chapter Text

When Tracker had asked Cassandra to take her to Kristen, she hadn’t expected them to lead her back into the house.

Cass led her up the stairs and for a moment Tracker worried that they were heading for the roof, before Cassandra swerved down the hallway on the third floor. Kristen’s room.

Tracker paused on the landing, taking a deep breath to slow down her heartbeat and feeling incredibly stupid as she took a second and became aware of her sense of smell. She could smell Kristen and she wasn’t dying or bleeding out, she just smelled sick.

The sense of smell that came with being a werewolf was a blessing and a curse. A curse in that it made her sensitive and easily overstimulated, but it did wonders on keeping track of people and, if she knew a person’s smell well enough, made it easy to keep tabs on how they were doing both physically and mentally. Embarrassed as she was to admit it, she was incredibly well acquainted with the ins and outs of how Kristen smelled. Downstairs she couldn’t smell it because of the stew, but standing down the hall from her, she could smell that Kristen was sick.

Standing outside of Kristen’s door brought back a wave of memories of sneaking in late at night and Tracker all at once felt awkward, not knowing where they stood. Whatever. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that Kristen was sick enough that Cassandra had summoned her and so she needed to check in on her, at least that’s what she told herself to convince her to knock on the door.

“‘m not hungry, Aelwyn.” Kristen called through the door.

Rolling her eyes, Tracker opened the door. “Not Aelwyn.”

Tracker laughed as she watched Kristen register her, yelping and sitting upright from where she was lying in bed, before doubling over coughing.

Rushing over, no long laughing, Tracker tried to reach out, but Kristen flinched away, pulling her quilt up over her head even as she continued to cough.

“Come on, stop it Kris you’re gonna suffocate!” Tracker chastised, pulling the quilt off of her face.

“No,” she said, still struggling away from her “no, I’m gonna get you sick, you have to leave.” The words came out between coughs, lacking any real force as Kristen struggled to catch her breath.

“Hey,” Tracker said, grabbing Kristen’s wrists so that she couldn’t push her away anymore, “hey, Kris, I need you to take a deep breath and cough as hard as you can.”

Kristen tried for a few seconds, shaking her head as she struggled to take a deep breath without coughing, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

“C’mon, try again, you gotta breathe or you’re gonna pass out.” This time Tracker demonstrated, taking in deep breaths, pressing Kristen’s hand to her chest and trying to get her to replicate it.

Taking as deep of a breath as she could, Kristen coughed, hard and barking, but it seemed to work as after she finally was able to breath, all but collapsing onto Tracker as the fit finally ended. Pressed with her head against Tracker’s shoulder, Kristen radiated heat. Her hair was a knotted halo around her head, frizzy and bunched from where it had been laid on. Gently, as not to pull on the knots, Tracker carded her hand through her hair, scratching at her scalp in a way that she knew Kristen enjoyed, ignoring how sweaty her hair was and grinning to herself as Kristen hummed in satisfaction.

“I was s’posed to be better by the time you got back.” She said, finally looking up at Tracker. Her face was pale, the only color being the bright angry red of her cheeks. Her eyes were unfocused as she looked at Tracker, her under eyes dark from lack of sleep, head still nuzzling into Tracker’s hand.

“You’re not supposed to be anything, Kris, that’s not how being sick works and you know it.” Tracker said, adjusting them so that she was sat up against the head of the bed and Kristen was laid with her head on Tracker’s chest, her hand still brushing through Kristen’s hair. Kristen went willingly, malleable in the exhaustion following her coughing fit.

“Everyone else at school gets dragon pox and they're fine in like, a day.” Kristen said.

Dragon pox. Yikes. That would explain the coughing. “Don’t gotta worry about getting me sick then, cuz I’ve already had it.” She said, moving her hand from Kristen’s hair to instead press against her forehead before wincing to herself. “You’re burning up Kris, you taken anything?”

“Uh, um.” Scrunching up her face, Kristen thought about the question for longer than Tracker would have hoped, seemingly having a hard time processing, which was not a great sign. “Haven’t uh, taken any medicine but I’ve given myself a couple heals.”

Fuck. That was really, really, not what Tracker wanted to hear. Ignoring Kristen’s whines, Tracker quickly extracted herself from the bed and rushed down the hall to the bathroom. No wonder Kristen’s temperature was so high. She wasn’t an expert on dragon pox by any means, but having had it herself she knew it fed off of magic, and if Kristen had been giving herself heals… Why was no one taking care of Kristen? She knew that Jawbone and Sandra Lynn had to work but how many heals had Kristen given herself because she didn’t know not to? Why was no one getting her medicine or even just doing the simplest thing to make sure she was ok?

Part of Tracker, the part that didn’t want to break up with Kristen, didn’t want to leave for Fallinel, felt heinously vindictive. She knew this would happen. She was Kristen’s person. Not Jawbone, not Sandra Lynn, not even the Bad Kids. They were supposed to take care of each other and instead, Tracker left for Fallinel and now Kristen was sick and no one in the house even seemed to fucking care. Standing in the bathroom, looking blankly at the medicine cabinet, it took everything in her to stay calm, not let the wolf take over. Wolves couldn’t undo childproof lids.

“Did I do something wrong?”

Tracker was angry. Tracker was exhausted and confused and very aware that something very wrong was happening, but that was all set on the back burner as she faced a meek looking Kristen Applebees swaying in the doorway. “No.” She assured her. “You didn’t do anything wrong, just, you can’t give yourself any more heals, it’s gonna make you sicker.”

“Oh.” She said, leaning on the door frame, arms curled around herself as she shivered in nothing but a pair of boxers and a shirt that Tracker clocked as her own. “‘m sorry, I didn’t know, just didn’t want to keep feeling bad. Wanted to be better by the time you got back.”

“Come here.” Tracker said, pulling Kristen into her arms. Tracker let Kristen collapse into her, grabbing onto the back of her thighs so that she was koalaed onto her front. “Don’t apologize, none of this is your fault.”

Moving her into the bathroom, she lifted her so that she was sitting on the bathroom counter. She whined when Tracker tried to move away to get into the medicine cabinet, so Tracker stayed with her hips bracketed between Kristen’s legs, reaching to the best of her ability with her limited mobility. “How many heals have you given yourself since you’ve been feeling sick?” She asked as she grabbed a bottle of antipyretic.

Head pressed into Tracker’s shoulder, Kristen just shook her head. “‘m not sure, started feeling bad on Tuesday so like… one that day and then, maybe one or two every day since then? It was the only thing that made me feel like, ok.”

Gripping the pill bottle so that her hands wouldn’t shake, Tracker tried not to panic. That was… so much magic. Kristen seemed ok for now, despite the fever and the cough, but with a magical illness things could take longer to manifest. Realistically, Kristen probably needed to go to the hospital, or at least have someone there to monitor her, and seeing as no one else in the house seemed to think to do so, Tracker took up the role. “What happened to the thermometer in this bathroom?” She asked as she opened up the pill bottle and poured a couple into her palm. Offering them out to Kristen, the other girl just licked them out of her hand, because despite everything, Kristen was still a weirdo.

Dry swallowing the pills, Kristen kissed her palm in thanks. “I got it all germy, so Sandra Lynn had to disinfect it.” She explained. “It’s prolly downstairs somewhere.”

Tracker tried to move for the door, a deep fear in her desperate to know exactly what Kristen’s temperature was outside the realm of just ‘feverish’, but Kristen crossed her ankles behind her back as soon as she tried to move away, hand fisted into the fabric of her shirt.

“Please don’t leave again?”

A wave of guilt crashed into her standing in that small bathroom, Kristen hanging onto her so desperately, because that was the crux of everything wasn’t it? She had left and this was what had happened.

Setting the pill bottle aside, Tracker pulled Kristen back towards her, scooping her up so that she was carrying her on her front and carried her back to Kristen’s room. Laying back down in bed with her, she adjusted them so that they were laying front to front, Kristen still on top of her, her head nuzzled into the crook of Tracker’s neck. Sitting up slightly to pull the covers over them better, Kristen groaned as she moved away from her. Shushing her, Tracker once again began carding her hands through her hair.

“Don’t worry, I’m staying right here.”

Chapter Text

The sun was throwing light, golden and horizontal across the room when Tracker woke up. Kristen was still asleep on her chest, the heat no longer seeming to be radiating off of her like it was before, but a hand press to her forehead confirmed she was still feverish. She was still too warm for Tracker’s liking, but the medicine at least seemed to be having some effect.

Slipping out from underneath Kristen, careful not to wake her up, Tracker stretched, wincing as her back popped. She carefully made her way out of the room, holding her breath for a moment as Kristen readjusted in her sleep, not quite waking up before Tracker was able to slip out the door. Her original plan to gather more supplies was immediately halted as her ears pricked up, excitement sending Tracker racing down the stairs as she heard him.

Standing in the kitchen in all his cardigan and jort clad glory was Jawbone. She tackled him into a hug, letting all the worry and anxiety and missing that she had pent up inside her fall away as strong, furry arms wrapped around and she crushed her face into his shoulder, soaking all of his warmth and the familiar smell of pack.

“Heya, kiddo,” he said softly, patting her head where it was buried in his shirt and rocking them side to side. There had been a million things that Tracker had missed when she was in Falinell, food with flavor, conventional plumbing, people other than fucking high elves, but none of that compared to how much she had missed Jawbone. They called and texted and did all that but there was nothing quite like being able to really feel and smell and be held in his arms. After a long moment he patted her twice on the back before holding her out in front of him to inspect her. “Ok, let's see… all limbs still attached so that is usually a good sign. Hmmm… any new scars to show off?”

Tracker laughed as she was picked over, quickly rubbing her eyes before showing him the new scar she had on the the outer length of her forearm, debating whether or not to spare him the gritty details (she had gotten clipped by a silver arrow while being chased out of some suburb of Falinell and no matter what they did it would not heal. It got so bad at one point that Ragh was convinced they needed to go home, or Tracker was going to lose her hand, but she refused. The only reason she still has use of her left hand is because somehow, they got their hands on some aconite and thank Galicaea that worked. Ragh was mad at her for a while, but they’re better now, and they always have aconite on them), but what Jawbone didn’t know wouldn't hurt him.

“Gnarly. What were you doing upstairs?” Jawbone asked absentmindedly as he turned her arm over in his hands, inspecting the scar through his half-moon spectacles.

“Oh, uh I was just checking on Kristen and I uh, fell asleep, it's just been a long day, you know?”

“She still wallowing up there?” Jawbone asked jokingly, rolling his eyes. “You’d better wash your hands then, don’t wanna be spreadin’ germs.”

Tracker allowed herself to be pushed to the sink, washing her hands slightly numb. Wallowing? Kristen was pretty miserable, but she had every right to be, she was sick. She knew she had been gone for a while but had so much changed that Jawbone was now flippant? What was she missing?

She was going to ask, going to finally figure out what was going on, when the front door burst open, letting in the rest of the Bad Kids.

“Tracker!”

All at once she was surrounded. Fig was hugging onto her front, Gorgug patting her back, Adaine asking a million questions along with Fabian who set down Riz who had been riding in his backpack. Overwhelming as they were, there was a soft satisfaction to the attention, a balm over the old ache that held over from spring break. The ache that worried she was only let along on the trip as Kristen’s girlfriend and nothing more. Wrapped up in Fig’s arms, however, she felt like maybe that ache was nothing more than some good old teen angst and she had nothing to worry about.

“Did you fix Galicaea yet? Are you gonna come home?”

“How is Grandpapa? He’s been treating you well, I hope?”

“Are the elves still just awful? Have you tried to tell them that you are backed by the Oracle? I feel like that could get you some credit to work off of, but also maybe it could make them hate you more? So maybe you shouldn’t tell them. Unless you think that will impress them, in which case you have my full permission to fully extort our relationship as much as possible.”

“Alright, alright! Let her breathe!” Jawbone said, shepherding them off of her and herding them over to the sink. “Everybody wash up for dinner and once we’ve eaten then we can all harass Tracker all we want.”

Tracker glared at him with no real malice, sticking her tongue out at him as he handed her a stack of plates to make up the table.

The Mordred Manor dining room table was a beautiful monstrosity of artificing, made to fit too many people into a too small space and fit even more if needed. As Tracker began laying out mismatched plates the table was stretched to its limit with seemingly every chair in the house set out to seat everyone.

“How many people are coming over?” Tracker asked as she ran out of plates.

“Little bit of everyone?” Jawbone said as he brought out another stack. “Everyone’s been missing y’all something fierce and they wanna be able to see you before you leave back Monday. All the kids' parents are coming round, and Ayda should be back round at some point, so ya know, the works.”

Looking at all the seats and plates set out, Tracker took pause, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people that she had acquired in such a short period of time. For so long it had just been her and Jawbone. She had buddies at the Pit of course, but no one she was really close to, not like this. Besides some people she met online, since she had turned Tracker didn’t really have friends, and now… now she had more than that, she had family. “All this just for me and Ragh?”

“Yep,” Jawbone said, setting out the last of the plates and pulling her into his side “We missed you, kiddo.”

The fact that Jawbone was more referencing himself in that sentence than he was the amorphous blob of people that would soon descend upon Mordred was fully understood, if unsaid. With the help of the Bad Kids they continued on their mission to set the monstrosity of a table. At one-point Adaine had to summon some cheap silverware through her jacket because despite having enough knives and spoons they only seemed to have around a quarter of the same amount of forks.

Dinner was a hectic affair, people slowly trickling as they set up. Ayda arrived first, using her door to the house and quickly helping out in any way she could. Sandra Lynn got home around the time that Lydia and Aelwyn finished setting up all the food, immediately jumping on Tracker to know how their time camping out outside of the major cities had been going. Gilear arrived soon after with Hillarial as his date, which she was frankly stunned that that still seemed to be working, Cathilda along with them. Tracker was settled in what she was pretty sure was Adaine’s desk chair, drinking out of a ‘Bastion is for Lovers’ coffee mug by the time that Sklonda and the Thislesprings arrived. She wasn’t sure when Zelda appeared, but by the time she was helping collect dishes to wash up, she was there alongside her.

The night had been full of questions, parents asking about how they were keeping safe, kids asking about all the ways in which they weren’t, but mostly just everyone enjoying each other's company. Tracker found herself smiling even as she did the heinous amount of dishes alongside Zelda, enjoying the chatter around her. Lydia was putting the food into tupperware containers when Tracker realized that despite everyone around her, there was one person missing.

Excusing herself from dish duties, Tracker grabbed one of the bowls she had just cleaned and ladled a fair helping of stew into it before it was put away.

“How are you still hungry? I can hardly think about food right now I’m so full.” Fig asked, popping up around her, nearly making Tracker drop the bowl.

“Ey, no food shame.” Jawbone said sternly from where he was talking to Sandra Lynn at the kitchen island.

“No, hey it’s fine, it’s not for me it’s for Kristen, she didn’t come down, so I thought I’d bring her some.” Tracker explained, fishing through the freshly cleaned silverware for a spoon.

“‘Course she didn’t come down, don’t want her getting people sick, plus, it’s not like she’ll eat it anyway, she’s been all mopey and ‘s been refusing to since mom made her quarantine.” Fig explained.

“Wha– Kristen hasn’t been eating?” Tracker asked, mind racing. “Also, since when is everyone so afraid of germs? Like, I get that she’s sick but quarantine? That feels extreme?”

“I had to,” Sandra Lynn explained “She had been going around pretending she was fine when she was already sick, and I know it seems extreme, but there are no records on whether Adaine or Aelwyn or vaccinated or not, so we really don’t want them getting sick. Kristen’s strong, she'll be fine.”

Kristen was not fine. Kristen was feverish and not getting any medicine and giving herself heals that were making her worse because no one was taking care of her because, what? She was strong? What was this bizarre double standard with her and Adaine or Aelwyn? Unless…

“Do you– You know Kristen isn’t vaccinated, right?”

Chapter Text

Silence.

The kitchen, which had a moment ago been full of chatter, was now silent.

“What? She’s not–” Sandra Lynn scrambled for a moment “Why didn’t she tell us?”

“Why didn’t she– How did you not know?” Tracker was fuming. “She was raised in a fucking religious cult, her parents were Harvestmen for fucks sake! You what, just assumed? The Applebees suck in every other way, but sure, yeah, let's just assume that they were really into vaccinating their kids? You’re– You are the adults here, you should have asked! She hasn’t been taking any medicine, apparently, she hasn’t been eating, and on top of it all she’s been giving herself heals because instead of, I don’t know, taking care of her, you locked her in her room and just waited for her to get better. Well, guess what? She’s not better. She probably needs to go to the fucking hospital at this point, but you wouldn’t know, would you?”

Nothing. They said nothing. Everyone just stood there staring at her like she was the crazy one, which, fuck that. Brushing past as Jawbone tried to stop her, Tracker took the bowl and stormed upstairs.

Gripping the too hot bowl in her hands, there was a part of her that scolded herself. Why’d she have to blow up? Why’d she have to go and ruin what was a perfectly lovely dinner? Focusing on the pain of the bowl slightly burning her skin she ignored the anxiety, letting that anger wash over completely before it receded and she was left tired and hurting in front of Kristen’s door, palms red and aching. She could go and wallow later. For now, Kristen needed to eat.

Opening the door to the room, hand smarting against the nob, she nearly dropped the bowl as she realized Kristen wasn’t alone.

“Oh. Hey, Riz.”

The two of them were laying in Kristen’s bed together, Kristen wrapped around him as he was looking at something on his crystal. Too exhausted to question any of it, Tracker just set the bowl down on Kristen’s bedside table and crawled under the blanket with them.

“Guessing this means you’ve had pox before?” Tracker asked after a moment, anger and exhaustion ebbing slightly as Kristen moved from her spot spooning Riz to curl into her side instead. Laying with the two of them, it took Tracker a moment to recognize that Riz was… purring? Humming? Did Goblins purr?

“Yeah,” Riz said, voice warbling before he cleared his throat, the purring quieting down, “none of the others have though, so I’ve been hanging with Kristen. Don’t want her to be lonely.” He shrugged as he said it, but Tracker could see a flicker of self-recognition move across his face.

Kristen stirred as they talked, reaching back for him, grabbing his hand in hers. “Our little angel.”

“Hey there Kris.” Tracker said as she nuzzled into her, shivering slightly. “Can you eat something for me?”

Bleary eyes looked up at her. The flush in her cheeks looked worse, and if she was shivering that probably meant her fever had gone up again. “‘m fine, ‘m not hungry.”

Riz shot Tracker a look that meant that he too had fought this battle and, from what Fig had said, lost. “Babe, you gotta eat. If you’re cold, it’ll make you feel better, I promise.”

Kristen squinted at her, slightly suspicious, before nodding reluctantly and sitting up slightly, wincing and coughing as she did. Relieved at the victory, even if it was just an agreement to try, Tracker flinched slightly as she grabbed the bowl, her hands aching as she passed it to Kristen. She tried to ignore it and tuck her hands between her legs, but Kristen grabbed her arm before she could, turning her hands over to inspect them.

Tracker’s palms were red and angry looking, throbbing slightly as Kristen held them in her lap. Her eyes glowed slightly before she paused. “What’re, what are the uh, rules?” She asked, furrowing her brows, “can I do magic at all, or will that also make it worse?”

Riz laughed a little before pausing. “Wait, are you actually asking? Kris, do you not know how magic illnesses’ work?”

“Riz, I didn’t think Goblins had souls before I met you.”

“She’s been giving herself heals.” Tracker said, pulling her hands from Kristen and healing it herself. “You can do magic, but any magic done on you will feed all the shit that’s making you sick,” she explained, ignoring Kristen’s pout, from not being able to heal her herself.

“Wait, wait, you’ve been giving yourself heals? What the fuck?” Riz asked, jostling enough that Tracker had to grab the bowl off of Kristen’s lap so that it didn’t spill all over the sheets. “Do we need to take her to the hospital?”

“I mean–”

“No, ‘m fine.”

“I’m going to ban the word fine if you keep saying it–”

Someone was knocking on the door. The three of them went silent and Tracker realized that she was still holding the bowl, so she set it down on the bedside table before calling a “Come in.”

Jawbone stepped through the door and Tracker felt betrayed by her own body as she relaxed at the smell of pack despite still being upset with him. “Heya, girls. Oh, and Riz. Your moms been lookin for ya, bud, might want to head downstairs.” Jawbone said as he came in, sitting down at the end of the bed.

Riz shot Tracker another look before she nodded and he gave Kristen a small hug before leaving, looking back as he closed the door behind him. Tracker had no doubt in her mind that he would be swarmed by the Bad Kids once he got downstairs, but better him than her.

“Ok, I think it’s best if the three of us have a talk.” Jawbone said gently.

Despite his tone, Tracker felt Kristen freeze up beside her. She put an arm around her, trying to soothe her despite her own hackles rising slightly. Now he wanted to talk?

“Did I do something wrong?” Kristen mumbled; eyes unfocused but seemingly trying to search Jawbone’s face.

“No. No Kristen, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Jawbone said. “Me and Sandra Lynn messed up and I’m sorry about that, so now we are gonna try and fix our mistakes, so you don’t get any worse. That sound ok with you?”

Kristen started to nod before stopping, brow furrowed. “What’re– I’m confused. What are you apologizin’ for?”

“We should have been taking care of you. You shouldn’t have been having to deal with this alone and I’m sorry that you’ve had to. We should have known that you were more compromised and protected you better.” He explained, sniffing slightly, his eyes slightly glassy.

There was a longer pause as Kristen seemed to process what he was saying. “Compromised?”

“You’re not vaccinated, babe.” Tracker explained, picking up the question. “Dragon Pox is a lot worse when you aren't.”

“We didn’t know you weren’t, just that Adaine and Aelwyn might not be, so we were more worried about them,” Jawbone said, his lips pulled back in a snarl for a moment before shaking his head and adjusting his glasses, fidgeting with them for a moment. “We should have talked to you about it, kiddo, I’m sorry.”

“Eh, you couldn't've known my parents were anti-vax. Something about medicine corrupting the divine form. I’m pretty corrupt but I still think my form’s divine as hell.” Kristen laughed at her own joke, stupid as it was, but that quickly turned into coughing fit, leaving her hunched over Tracker’s lap, shivering worse than before.

Clearing his throat and wiping his eyes, Jawbone shifted, pulling a thermometer out of his cardigan and handing it to Kristen. “Let’s get a temperature just see what we’re dealing with, that sound alright?”

Kristen nodded, accepting the thermometer and sticking it under her tongue as Jawbone watched the two of them. Tracker kept her eyes trained on Kristen, still not quite ready to look at Jawbone despite his apology. It felt like eons before the thermometer beeped, Trackers heart sinking into her chest as she saw the number.

“Shit.” Jawbone said, looking at the glowing red 103.8 on the thermometer.

“Sandra Lynn said the same thing,” Kristen mumbled, curling closer to Tracker as the shivers continued. “That's gotta mean something good for the relationship.”

Ignoring Kristen, Tracker spoke to Jawbone instead. “I gave her some antipyretic earlier and that seemed to work but only for a little bit. She’s given herself at least a dozen or so heals since she’s been sick. I really think she needs to go to the hospital.”

Kristen shook her head at that, burying her face into Tracker’s chest. “It’s fine, I’ll be fine.”

“Banned. Fine is now a banned word.” Tracker said sternly, pulling Kristen’s head out from her chest and cradling her face in her hands. “You are sick, Kris, and without magic there is only so much we can do for you. You need more help than we can give.”

“She’s right, kiddo.” Jawbone said gently, putting his hand on her back and rubbing back and forth.

Kristen’s face crumpled, Tracker watching in distress as tears began to stream down her face. “I can’t, I can’t if– if I go to the hospital, they’re gonna take me away.” She cried, coughing and wheezing as Tracker pulled her closer, trying to understand.

Tracker wracked her brain for an answer as she held Kristen close against her while she cried, looking desperately at Jawbone to try and understand. Why would anyone at the hospital try to take her away? She knew Fig did some kind of illegal stuff at St. Owens, but nothing that would constitute kidnapping one of her party members. Maybe it wasn't the hospital? Then who else would… oh.

“Do you mean your parent’s, Kris?” Tracker asked gently as she realized what she was saying.

Kristen nodded against her chest, all cried out but now wracked with shivers.

Jawbone growled under his breath before taking a deep breath. “Of course. If we take her to the hospital, they're gonna ask for legal guardians cuz she’s still a minor, and since we don’t have any legal claim over her…” He growled again, standing up to pace.

“Don’t wanna go back.” Kristen mumbled.

“You’re not going to.” Tracker assured, trying to convince herself of the same thing. “We’ll figure out what we can do to fix you up ourselves, we’ll, we will figure it out, ok? You’re not going back.”

Kristen just hummed, finally relaxing into Tracker despite the shivers. Tracker held her close as she looked at her uncle, begging him to know what to do, only to find her own fear looking back at her.

Tired from her crying spell, Kristen’s breathing evened out soon after, sleeping soundly on top of Tracker, who, not knowing what else to do, followed suit, the bowl of stew being left untouched on the bedside table.

Chapter Text

Things downstairs were rough.

After Tracker had blown up, Sandra Lynn was left to deal with the aftermath downstairs while Jawbone went after her. Adaine, who had otherwise been doing alright with her panic attacks since she’d been on her current meds, immediately burst into tears and ran, Aelwyn running after her. Sandra Lynn would love to say that she trusted the two of them enough to let them handle it on their own, but she knew better. Aelwyn was still recovering from her time in the orb, both physically and mentally, and was in no state to be the one to take care of a panicking Adaine. She went to go after them but was quickly intercepted by a furious Fig.

“How could you not know?” Fig demanded, eyes fiery and blazing.

Sandra Lynn was asking herself the same thing, overwhelmed as she was faced once again with her daughter's anger, something that she had naively thought she had seen the last of. For a moment, however brief, the scared, tired creature that remembered that anger thought about shooting back, asking Fig the same question, displacing the blame, but Fig was right. She was the adult, she should have been better, but there was no use wallowing in that now. Gently, Sandra Lynn moved Fig out of her way. “You’re right. I should have known, but now I need to go take care of your sisters, ok, so just– I will be right back and then we will figure this out, ok?”

With that, Sandra Lynn left Fig standing slack jawed in the kitchen, following after Aelwyn and Adaine. She had heard the front door slam, so she quickly grabbed Adaine’s jacket from its hook and took one of Aelwyn’s canes she kept by the door just in case, already having grabbed Adaine’s meds from the kitchen. Luckily, she didn’t have to go far, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the front porch, Adaine curled into a ball in one corner and Aelwyn sitting dejected against the railing, legs folded at an awkward angle as she stared down into her lap.

Silently, Sandra Lynn handed her her cane, smiling wryly at her as she nodded in thanks. “Do you need a hand getting up?”

Aelwyn shook her head, glancing over at Adaine before taking a moment to stand. “Do you have her meds?” She asked, grimacing as she leaned off the railing. Seeing Sandra Lynn nod, she nodded herself. “Please fix this.”

That was all she said before she made her way back inside, leaving Sandra Lynn with orders she did not know if she would be able to follow. Once Aelwyn was gone, she slowly made her way over to Adaine, making sure to make her steps slow and deliberate so as not to scare her. Once she was close enough, she kneeled down, wrapping the denim jacket around Adaine, who immediately clung to it, head still tucked squarely in her arms.

“Hey, kiddo, can you take your meds for me?” Sandra Lynn asked, holding out the pills in her palm. “They’re gonna make you feel a whole lot better, swear.”

Adaine just shook her head, hiccupping slightly as she continued to cry. Dropping the meds back into their bottle, Sandra Lynn screwed the cap back on and set them beside her. Maybe not a panic attack then. Taking a deep breath, she felt lost sitting across from Adaine, not sure what she was supposed to do.

“Do you need company or space?” She asked after a moment, parroting something she had heard Jawbone say, feeling entirely out of her depth. Jawbone was better at these types of things, the girls responded better to him than they did with her, but Jawbone was upstairs, fixing the mistake that she had made, so she needed to step up.

She waited for a response, shifting slightly as her knees began to ache in her kneel. She thought about leaving, accepting silence as a response, but after a long moment, Adaine sniffled and cleared her throat. “Company, please.”

Sandra Lynn nodded, thankful at least that she didn’t have to just leave Adaine out on the porch. “Can I touch you?”

Adaine nodded almost immediately, scooting over so she was pressed further into the corner. Taking the hint, Sandra Lynn tucked herself into the space that Adaine had made for her and wrapped an arm around the girl, rubbing a hand up and down her arm as she melted into the touch.

The Bad Kids were a very tactile group and Adaine was not exempt from that trait, though she did not openly demand it as much as other members. Sitting on the porch with her, Sandra Lynn was incredibly thankful for that trait. She wasn’t great with words, not always saying or doing the right things, but she knew how to hold someone, how to make sure they felt loved.

Adaine was leaned fully into her, head heavy on her shoulder as she sniffled, no longer crying. “‘s all my fault.”

“No.” she shut that train of thought down immediately. “Blaming is… placing fault right now doesn’t do anybody any good, and even if it were someone's fault, it would be mine, not yours, so get that idea out of your head.”

Huffing, Adaine groaned, hands balled into fists on her knees. “No, but everyone’s been so worried about me and now Kristen’s gonna die and Aelwyn’s upset with me and even now,” she exclaimed, gesturing to Sandra Lynn, “you’re out here taking care of me instead of Kristen!”

Taking a deep breath, Sandra Lynn took a moment to digest what she said, too aware of the fact that her own thoughts were being parroted back at her. “So, I can’t be a hundred percent certain, I’m not the Oracle or anything snazzy like that, but unless you’ve gotten a vision otherwise, I don’t think that Kristen is gonna die. At least not in a way that’s gonna stick, if her track record is anything to go by.”

Shaking her head at Sandra Lynn’s sorry attempt at a joke, Adaine just tucked herself further into her side, refusing to look at her. “Yeah, but still. You shouldn’t have to be out here dealing with me.”

“I am not out here ‘dealing with you’, I am out here because I wanted to make sure you’re ok. Jawbone is upstairs with Kristen, if that makes you feel any better.” Sandra Lynn explained before remembering what she had said earlier. “Why do you think Aelwyn’s upset with you?”

“I yelled at her.” She mumbled, staring down at her lap.

“Yeah,” Sandra Lynn responded, letting her head fall back against the wall of the house, “I can see how that could make her upset, but I think she understands that you're a little overwhelmed right now. If you apologize, I don’t think she’ll hold it against you.”

Adaine just nodded, burrowing her head into her shoulder. They sat there together for a long while, Adaine tucked securely into her side, just basking in the quiet and the company.

She had lost track of time when the front door opened again, Zelda stepping out onto the porch with her bag and a large tupperware of leftovers in hand. With all the commotion Sandra Lynn had forgotten that Zelda, Ayda, and the rest of the Bad Kids hadn’t left with the rest of the parents, insisting on staying to help clean up. God, they were sweet kids.

“You leavin, Zelda?” Sandra Lynn asked from their corner, which turned out to be the wrong move as Zelda jumped a foot in the air, nearly dropping everything as she startled.

“Fuck! Oh– Oh, hey Ms. Faeth, didn’t uh, didn’t see you there.” Zelda said, laughing nervously as she readjusted everything in her hands.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Sandra Lynn apologized as Adaine stirred next to her, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

“No, no I should have figured, I knew that you guys were out here just, uh, wasn’t expecting you to be in the corner, which, totally my bad, shouldn’t have freaked out…” Zelda rambled as the two of them stood from their spot, Sandra Lynn getting up first before giving Adaine a hand up. “... and me and Gorgug got everything put away and cleaned so like, you don’t have to worry about that, but like it’s not a big deal, just wanted to make things easier cuz everyone's so worried about Kristen, which sucks. Not that it sucks to be worried, of course! Just, uh, ya know the situation–”

Zelda cut off as Sandra Lynn smiled at her, looking down instead at her hands. “Thank you, Zelda, it really means a lot.” Zelda blushed at that, making an aborted move to push the hair out of her eyes before she remembered her hands were full, blowing her hair instead.

“Your folks picking you up?” Sandra Lynn asked, pushing Zelda’s hair back for her, tucking it behind her ear.

“Sam.” Zelda said, nodding in thanks as headlights flashed across the lawn, Sam Nightingale flashing her brights at them.

Sandra Lynn and Adaine watched as Zelda made her way down to the car until it drove back down the drive. “Think you’re ok to go in?” Sandra Lynn asked her, asking herself the same question.

Adaine nodded and Sandra Lynn pretended like she felt the same, holding the door open so that she could go first. Everyone was congregated in the living room, Ayda and Fig tucked into an armchair while Fabian and Aelwyn sat on opposite sides of the couch, Gorgug sat between them. The energy in the room was tense to say the least, Adaine tucking in between Gorgug and Aelwyn, quickly exchanging apologies and seeming to make up quickly enough.

“Thanks for cleaning up, Gorgug.” Sandra Lynn said as she sat down in the Lay-z-Boy, trying to ignore the fact that everyone seemed to be avoiding eye contact with her.

“Is Kristen gonna be ok?” Ayda asked from her spot next to Fig.

Sandra Lynn didn’t know what to say, not wanting to lie, but also not knowing herself. “I’m not sure, but we’ll do our best to try to make sure she is.”

Chapter Text

It had been a rough couple days at Mordred since Tracker had come and gone. Her and Ragh had to go on Sunday, as much as everyone wanted them to stay, they still had work to do in Fallinel.

Things had calmed down after the initial blow up, but tensions held high as Kristen still couldn't seem to knock any of her sick. Fig was still giving Sandra Lynn the cold shoulder, though that wasn’t unexpected, but Adaine seemed better, still anxious but not blaming herself, at least. Jawbone had attempted to get off work, but Sandra Lynn felt more comfortable with him being at school where he could look after the rest of the kiddos. Luckily, she managed to get her shifts covered, able to stay home with Kristen to make sure she didn't get any worse than she already was.

Medicine seemed to be working in keeping her steady, the fever hadn’t been getting any worse, but it wasn’t going down either. So, Sandra Lynn figured maybe she could fix the fever the old-fashioned way: breaking it herself.

Kristen’s room was a mess, smelling like sweat and sick and stink and if Sandra Lynn knew anything she knew there was no getting better in a gross room. Luckily, the second-floor bathroom had a bathtub, and she was going to run Kristen a bath while she changed the sheets and aired out the room. She had a plan. She could fix the mess that she made.

She ran the water as hot as the old pipes would allow, knowing that it would cool down by the time she got Kristen in there. She pulled out every trick in the book, dumping heaps of epsom salt and eucalyptus into the water to try and break up all the shit that was burning in Kristen’s chest, and maybe, if she was lucky, get her to sweat out the fever. Bathroom sufficiently prepped and heated, Sandra Lynn made her way down the hall for the hard part: actually getting her out of bed.

Besides getting up to use the restroom, which she hadn’t been doing nearly enough because she wasn’t eating or drinking enough in the first place, Kristen had not left her bed since she had gotten sick to Sandra Lynn’s knowledge. She had not changed her clothes or moved from her bed in nearly five days and that absolutely had to come to an end.

Sandra Lynn knocked on the door out of habit, though she did not wait till she let herself in. It was only a little after 10 and she knew that Kristen would still be asleep. The rest of the kids and Jawbone had left for school about an hour before, so the house was quiet as she opened the door. The room was dark, the curtains drawn and the room smelling musty, the smell of something singed lying underneath.

“G’morning, Kristen.” She said, crouching down by her bed and gently shaking her arm.

Kristen, in response, shoved her head further into her pillow, groaning as she turned away from her touch. Great. This would be a fight then.

“Look, kid. I love you, but you smell awful. I ran you a bath that’s gonna make you feel better, but you gotta get out of this bed so I can change the sheets, cuz they stink.” Sandra Lynn said as she sat back on her heels, figuring if there was a time for brutal honesty it was now.

Kristen blinked at her with fever clouded eyes, trying her best to give a mean look with her miserable face, though it came off more pathetic than anything else. She didn’t, however, say anything, instead pushing herself up to a sitting position, struggling much of the way. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Sandra Lynn pulled the sheets out from around Kristen’s waist so that they wouldn’t get tangled, trying her best to make things as easy as possible without all but doing it for her.

Now that she was upright, it was hard not to see how poorly Kristen was doing. Her skin was sallow from dehydration, getting her to drink anything nearly impossible as her throat became more and more affected. She shivered as she sat hunched on the side of the bed, Sandra Lynn nearly regretting her decision of getting her up before remembering that what she was doing was helping Kristen, even if it meant she might be a little uncomfortable in the meantime.

“Do you think you can walk?” she asked, still crouched in front of her, trying to catch her eye as she stared down into her lap.

Kristen just shook her head, breath coming out wheezy and whistled.

Thinking out the best maneuver, Sandra Lynn stood, looking at the teen in front of her. Kristen wasn’t terribly big, but she was tall, taller than her at least, which would make walking with her difficult. Figuring out the best course of action, Sandra Lynn squatted down and picked her up so that their fronts were pressed together, Kristen instinctively wrapping her arms around her neck and legs around her waist, whining in surprise as she was suddenly picked up.

The whine, of course, led to a coughing fit which, due to their position meant that Kristen was coughing directly into Sandra Lynn’s neck. Great. Moving as quickly as she could while carrying a fitful teenager, Sandra Lynn maneuvered them down the hall and towards the bathroom, rubbing her hand up and down Kristen’s back as she continued to cough.

After a considerable amount of shifting and slight repositioning, she was able to set Kristen down on the toilet once they reached the bathroom, immediately rifling through the medicine cabinet as Kristen continued to cough. Pulling out a bottle of cough medicine and the antipyretics, she poured a capful of syrup before pushing it into Kristen’s hand. The teenager did her best to try and take a deep breath in order to stop her fit long enough to take the medicine, but wound up just taking it like a shot between coughs. Once she swallowed it, it seemed to do some good, the fit subsiding shortly after. Sandra Lynn handed her her pill and some water as she finished, which Kristen took dutifully, looking completely worn out from her coughing episode.

“Can I check?” Sandra Lynn asked, indicating Kristen’s mouth.

Kristen just nodded, opening her mouth as Sandra Lynn took a look. The insides of her cheeks were swollen and red, inflamed bumps covering the sides of her mouth down to the back of her throat. Sandra Lynn tsked, thumb stroking Kristen’s face as she looked, unable to ignore the way that she leaned into her hand and heat radiating off of her. The bath would help to break the fever but there wasn’t much they could do for the pox itself without taking her to the doctor.

“Ok, Kris, go ahead and get into the bath for me and I’m gonna go fix up your room and see if I can’t make some calls, ok?” she said, pulling back and sticking the medicine back into the cabinet. “You need anything you just call, I’m just gonna be right down the hall.”

With that, she left her in the bathroom, gently closing the door behind her. She pulled out her crystal as she walked back to Kristen’s room, stuck with Jawbone’s contact open, finger lingering over the call button.

Jawbone had been clean for some time now, having given up most of the heavy shit when he quit dealing. They had talked about it, between the two of them, Jawbone’s residual guilt around some of his deals and Sandra Lynn’s own rough history with alcohol, and she knew that Jawbone had said the dealing itself wouldn’t trigger him, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t worried it still might. But one of their kids was sick, and they couldn't take her to get the medicine she needed, so that meant back channels, and Jawbone was the one who knew the back channels.

Biting the bullet, she pressed call, putting her crystal on speaker as she set it down and began stripping the bed, channeling her anxiety through cleaning.

Jawbone picked up on the second ring. “Heya Sandy, you doing alright?” he asked, cheery as ever, though she could tell the call had scared him a little.

“Yeah, we’re ok,” she reassured, tossing the sheets into the hamper and throwing open the window so that the room would air out as she grabbed the crystal and hamper to take to the laundry room. “Could uh, are you ok to talk about something for a second?”

He took a second on the other end of the line, the sound of rustling and paper moving as she made her way downstairs. “Yeah, I’m ok to talk, something rough I’m guessing?”

‘Rough’ was the code word they had made for when there was something they needed to talk about that was hard for one of them. It was straightforward, and Sandra Lynn sometimes thought a little unnecessary, but she was also the reason it existed in the first place, needing something to help take the pressure off of hard conversations she would have previously just kept bottled up in the first place. “Yeah, something rough,” she confirmed. “Kristen’s mouth is fully pocced, and I might be able to get the fever down but…”

“But to get rid of the pox itself we need medicine,” he supplied.

“Mm-hm, which we need a scrip for, and since we can’t take her to the doctor, I was thinking maybe you could,” she took a deep breath, stealing her nerves “maybe see if you know anyone who could help us out?”

Jawbone took a breath, the line going quite for a moment, Sandra Lynn trying not to think too hard as she shoved the sheets into the washing machine, pressing her hands into balls as they shook. She was fine, she wasn’t in trouble, they would figure it out if he said no. “I think I still have Beamer’s number somewhere, he’s a good guy and he owes me one so he should be able to find us something.”

She let out a sigh of relief, thanking everything she could think of. “I’m sorry I had to ask, babe I just couldn't think of any other way,” she said, apologetic despite her relief.

“Hey, hey, none of that,” Jawbone chided over the crystal, “you’re just looking out for the kids, no need to apologize for that. I’ll be ok.” He tacked the last part on at the end, seemingly reading her mind. “How’s our girl doing?”

“Not great,” she admitted as she headed back upstairs with a new pair of sheets. “But, I got her in the bath and I’m changing the bedding so at least she won’t be just laying in her own germs anymore.”

Jawbone hummed over the line, a deep rumble as he chuckled. “Yeah, that’ll be good, she hasn’t been smelling too hot, don’t think she’s really been up too much since she got sick.”

“Or at all,” Sandra Lynn teased, grateful for the lighter mood as she walked into Kristen’s room, even if just slightly. “I think the mattress will have a Kristen shaped indent in it permanently after this. She wasn’t too happy with me,” she said as she made up the bed, having to wrestle with the fitted sheet, “but I did give her my good bubble bath so she can’t say I wasn’t trying to do something nice for her.”

“Oh, I see someone means business,” he joked back, “you don’t even let me use the good bubble bath.”

“That’s cuz it reacts badly with your fur,” she explained for the thousandth time as she finished making the bed, grabbing Kristen some new clothes from her drawers for when she was out of the bath. “Makes it all greasy, otherwise I would love to let you bubble bath.”

She paused as she left Kristen’s room, not paying attention as Jawbone joked back at her, eyes caught on the fact that the bathroom door was ajar. She was sure she had shut it as she left, wanting to give Kristen some privacy and shut in all the hot air and steam, but standing in the hallway she could see it was open.

Sandra Lynn tried to rationalize but could come up with nothing, watching as her feet carried her to the door, moving unconsciously, completely unaware that Jawbone was calling her name through her crystal. The only other people in the house were Zayn and Lydia. Lydia didn’t come upstairs, and Zayn wouldn’t go in the bathroom if someone was in there, and even if he did, he wouldn’t use the door, he would just shift through the wall.

She could barely push the door before it met resistance, Kristen laying in front of it unconscious on the bathroom tile, still fully clothed, the bath behind her untouched.

Chapter Text

The first thing Kristen noticed waking up in the hospital was that for the first time in days, it felt like she could breathe.

The lights were too bright, and it smelled weird, and the machines were too loud, but she could breathe, deep strong breaths without it her throat feeling like it was going to explode. The second thing she noticed is that she wasn’t alone.

Blinking away the too bright fluorescents, eyes feeling crumbly with dried sleep, she saw Riz. Sitting leaned up against the side of her thigh, he was purring at full capacity as he held her hand with one hand and his crystal with the other. He was wearing his glasses, which Kristen was happy to see, seeing as it was a fight to convince him to wear them for reasons other than spy stuff most days, Riz being adamant that he didn’t actually need them. Kristen liked it when he wore them because it made him less squinty, made his face seem less harsh, more relaxed. He hadn’t noticed she was awake yet, so she took a moment to take stock.

She wasn’t in a hospital gown, but as she looked down, she realized she wasn’t wearing the shirt that she had been the whole time she was sick, which was probably good despite the fact that that meant somebody had to have changed her. The hospital room was small, probably St. Owens, though she had never been in their long-term facilitiy before so she couldn’t say for sure. There were a myriad of machines attached to her, the most annoying being the sensor clipped to her finger beeping along with her heart, accompanied by an IV taped down on the back of her hand. Kristen also realized as she wrinkled her nose at the needle that there was a tube. A tube in her nose.

The whine broke through before she could stop it, the vibrations ripping at her throat till all she could feel was the hurt and the tube that should not be there. Riz looked up at the noise, immediately grabbing at her hands as she reached up to grab at the tube, trying to rid her face of the foreign object.

“Don’t Kristen,” he said sternly, grappling her hands in his own, pressing them to his chest even as she continued to scramble, distressed. “It’s helping you breathe, idiot so just– just breathe, ok? Here.” He took a deep breath as an example, looking at her intently.

She gasped for a moment, sputtering as she tried to breathe through her mouth, the air catching hot against her throat before following along, taking a deep breath through her nose and trying to force herself to calm down. Of course the tube was helping her breath. It was fine. She could use it to breathe, that totally didn’t want to make her want to die a little bit.

She made to speak before thinking better of it, pulling her hands away from Riz to sign, facing both palms up before turning them to point at Riz, pulling her face into a question. What happened?

Riz sighed, pushing his glasses up to rub at his eyes. “I’m not totally sure? All I know is that you passed out on Monday and you’ve been out since then. Your chart says they had to intubate you cuz your throats fucked up but I don’t know what the rest of it means, it’s all medical stuff.”

Out? She had been out? Like a coma? The last thing she remembered was Sandra Lynn and the bathroom. Bringing her hands together and running her finger up her forearm she asked How long?

“Three days,” he said, taking her hand into his own as she let it fall, her head pressed back against the shitty hospital pillow as she tried to process. “Sandra Lynn and Jawbone are here somewhere but they're having a hard time cuz, uh,” he looked away for a moment, suddenly fascinated by the weaving of the hospital sheets, “your um, your parents are here.”

Kristen couldn't even find it in herself to be surprised, a little part of herself knowing from the moment she woke up that that was the case. But the knowing didn’t stop the dread. She squeezed her eyes tight, trying to force back the tears. All at once she felt herself drift, becoming detached from her body as she tried and failed to will away the tears, hearing her fathers voice chastising her, threatening to give her something to cry about. Squinching up her face to try and keep the tears from escaping only made her more aware of the tube, breaking out in a sob as everything seemed to crash over her at once.

She had let herself become too happy, gotten too used to the freedom, had taken it all for granted and now this was her comeuppance. It was dumb to think that it wouldn’t catch up to her, to think that she had actually gotten out but for a moment she had. Had thought she could have it all, the friends and the freedom and the adults who loved her more than conditionally. But she couldn’t have it all. This was the way it was always going to end.

The bed shifted as she spiraled, only dimly aware of the feeling of Riz lying on top of her, head tucked into her neck, coming back to herself slightly as she felt him purring. Her breath stuttered as she breathed deep, relishing in the pressure and focusing on the weight, the feeling of him holding her to the world so that she wouldn’t fly away.

“It’s fine, it’ll all be fine, we’ll figure it out,” Riz assured, voice warbled as he purred.

Kristen just nodded, trying to believe him as she brushed her hand over his hair over and over again, focusing on the velvet soft of his shaved sides, the buzzy feeling it left in her palms.

“You’re petting me,” Riz teased after a long moment, the two of them laying in the quiet together, matching breath.

She huffed out breath, not daring anything more in case it ripped at her throat, the heat in her chest already increasing as it seemed to have been aggravated by her crying spell. Mean, she signed, knocking her fists together in front of where he was laying on her so that he could see.

“Mean? You’re saying I’m being mean?” he asked, sitting up to look at her, faux indignation all over his face. “I come all this way, break into the hospital, give you all my good healing purrs, do my duty as a weighted blanket, and I get called mean? Can’t believe this.”

There was a world in which she was surprised that Riz was in the room without permission, but this was not that world. If Jawbone and Sandra Lynn were having a hard time seeing her she doubted it would be easy for anyone else. Fig here?, she asked, finger spelling out her name, figuring St. Owens most infamous might be sneaking around somewhere.

“Nah, all the Mordred kids are on lockdown while you’re here. Jawbone and Sandra Lynn are stressed about them interacting with CPS. I’m keeping everyone updated, though,” he said, showing her his crystal.

Taking it from him, she recognized the Bad Kids group chat, scrolling through just about a million texts reacting to Riz informing them that she was awake. Pulling up the camera, she took a selfie, sending it before Riz could interfere, typing out i lived bitch.

The door opened before she could hand the crystal back to him, Riz disappearing in the time it took her to look away as a half elf nurse came into the room and look back.

“Good afternoon, Miss Applebees, good to finally see you awake,” the nurse said, far too enthusiastic for Kristen’s current state of being, “How are we feeling today, kiddo?”

Kristen stared at her, trying to understand the energy that she was being shot with. The nurse seemed young, a half elf woman with brown hair pulled back into a clip to show off her heavily pierced ears. Definitely not old enough to be calling her ‘kiddo’ when she had helped save the world twice in the last two years. She said nothing, both because she was not vibing with the intense pep energy and because she physically couldn’t.

Her lack of response didn’t seem to perturb the nurse at least, the woman bustling around just the same, checking her vitals and and her chart before looking at her expectantly. She scrambled for a moment before looking at Riz’s crystal, remembering his text to speech app for the days he couldn't talk. Luckily, he had presets.

“I can not speak right now,” the automated voice played out through the crystal’s speakers.

The nurse furrowed her brows. “It didn’t say anything about you needing an AAC in your chart…”

Kristen shook her head, fiddling with the crystal as she typed, having to go back and retype what she misspelled so that the voice would say the right thing. “Throat hurts,” it said, then pressing the preset again, it repeated: “I can not speak right now.”

The nurse nodded in understanding, eyes flitting away to look at the machines and marking someting down, before looking back at her expectantly. Struggling with typing, Kristen went out on a limb, pressing one of the other presets. “Do you know sign?”

She looked surprised at the question before shaking her head ruefully. “I don’t, I’m sorry kiddo, is that the way you would prefer to communicate? Cuz I might be able to find someone if you do…”

Kristen nodded, trying to ignore the feeling of the tube in her nose dragging and the growing heat in her chest and the fact that this nurse who really couldn't be that much older than her insisted on calling her kiddo.

“Ok, ok then, ok, lemme just…” she looked over Kristen, checking the machines attached to her for the hundredth time in the minute she had come in before seeming to remember something, face seeming to grow somehow impossibly brighter. “Let me just go talk to someone real quick, I think they might be able to help you out. I’ll be right back!”

And with that she left, Kristen still too foggy to understand what had happened or if she might have just imagined the nurse showing up in the first place. That was until Riz dropped down from above a ceiling tile, landing on the bed with a soft thud.

Kristen startled, jerking as she pulled her eyes away from the door. “Sorry, sorry. Man, she sure was uh, peppy,” he said, brushing dust off of his pants, Kristen swatting at him as he just got it on the sheets. Riz just batted her away, eventually tangling his hand in hers so that they lay conjoined in his lap. “Good thinking with the crystal.”

“Thanks,” the automated voice read out, Kristen giving him a tight-lipped smile as he turned at the sound, handing the crystal back to him. She only had one hand to sign with while he was holding her other, but she knew she was about to be interrogated as soon as Nurse Peppy came back in with whatever half assed interpreter she could conger up, so she basked in the moment where she didn’t have to say anything.

Time moved weird in the room, no window or clock to indicate whether a minute or an hour had passed of the two of them just sitting there, Riz saying something every so often but more for the sound of it than to make conversation, Kristen letting her eyes shift from the door to their interlocked hands, focusing on the feeling of Riz’s cool skin on hers so that she wouldn’t drift, watching and waiting for the nurse to come back.

Her eyes were watching her and Riz’s hands when the door did eventually open, this time able to see as Riz scaled the wall impossibly fast, tucking himself behind a ceiling tile without making any noise as the door to the room unlatched. The nurse was smiling, even brighter than before in a way that made Kristen wonder if her cheeks must hurt at the end of the day or if maybe they were just permanently stuck like that.

“You’ll never believe it,” she began, standing at the door, “but earlier, before you woke up, there was a man out in the waiting room being very sociable with the other guests and I overheard him say that he knew sign while I was doing my rounds. So, just now I thought I would ask him if he’d been exposed to Dragon Pox before and would be willing to help interpret for a young girl and would you believe it, he not only said yes, but even knew you by name!”

Kristen furrowed her brows, not quite catching the whole story as the nurse seemed to speak at lightning speed in her excitement. It only clicked into place when the man in question came through the door, relief flooding through her.

“Hey there, kiddo,” said Jawbone.

Chapter Text

The thing about having to take a kid to the hospital that isn’t technically yours is that you have to fight stupid hard to make sure no one kicks you out of the waiting room.

Day one had been fine. Well, day one had been hell because Kristen was unresponsive and Sandra Lynn had decided it was all her fault and the kids back home were freaking out, but no one had figured out that they weren’t technically Kristen’s legal guardians yet, so in that regard, it had been fine. Day two…

Well, day two someone at the hospital put together that the Human kid didn’t technically belong to a Werewolf and a Wood Elf, so things got a little rocky from there. Sandra Lynn had been in the waiting room when CPS came in and apparently tried to keep them from calling the Applebees but that didn’t work out and may or may not have put her on one of the social workers shit lists.

Since then they had been doing shifts, trying to keep themselves from being barred until they at least knew that Kristen had woken up and maybe less than ethically flirting information out of nurses. Jawbone didn’t feel great about that last part, but his kid was in the hospital and CPS was making it impossible for them to know anything the legal way. He was not above playing dirty.

Theoretically the Applebees were around somewhere, but if they were in the hospital he sure as hell hadn’t seen them. From what he knew from flirting with who he was pretty sure was Kristen’s lead nurse, a Half Elf with a bordering on disturbing amount of pep for someone who worked the hours she did, Kristen hadn’t had any visitors, though he knew CPS had talked to them at some point.

He was on shift in the waiting room on day three (maybe four, he wasn’t sure if they were counting Monday as a full day) while Sandra Lynn was keeping the rest of the kids locked down at home. As much as they may have wanted to interfere (and he knew they wanted to, Fig had snuck out three times before they had to have a Talk) he could not have them meddling in any way, especially with one of the social workers already having a mark against them.

So, he was sitting in the waiting room, as he had been for the last three (maybe four) days when Kristen’s nurse approached him. He knew her name at one point but there were only so many days that he could spend in a waiting room before information just started flowing out of his head never to be seen again. Good thing for name tags.

He had spoken with the CPS workers the hospital had called, he remembered their names, Hobbes and Gordon, only because he had to, and while they hadn’t outright told him that he couldn't go and see Kristen, it was heavily implied. But a nurse coming and asking him to help out wasn’t him going and seeing Kristen, it was him being a good samaritan, and it was his duty to do that service as an upstanding citizen.

Or that was what he was telling himself as he followed Nurse Cairi down the hospital hallway. Walking, he couldn't help but be too aware of the fact that he hadn’t seen Kristen since he had left for work Monday morning. Sandra Lynn had been able to sneak and see her when they had first come in, but as he was led further into the hospital's interior, the memory of the phone call seemed to loop in his head.

The silence, Sandra Lynn saying Kristen’s name, the sound of the phone being dropped and then the line going dead.

Over and over it played in his head. He had tried calling her, then called Lydia when he realized Sandra Lynn wasn’t going to pick up, and she told him they were going to the hospital, that Kristen wasn’t waking up. She had been in a coma for three (nearly four) days. Standing outside the door he realized he was scared to see her.

She had been intubated quickly after coming in, Sandra Lynn had told him that, that her throat had closed up and she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Nurse Cairi had let it slip after some weaseling that Kristen was dehydrated and suffering from acute malnutrition when she first came in but she was doing little better now, and she was awake. She was alive and awake and that’s all that mattered. He was scared, but she probably would be too, so slapping on a brave face he prepared himself to go in.

He stood off to the side as the nurse stood in the door, explaining to Kristen that she had found someone to help translate, laughing to himself as she feigned ignorance over Jawbone knowing her by name as if he hadn’t been asking about her every chance he could.

Realizing her spiel was over, he stepped into the room, eyes trained on the bed so that he had to look, not allowing the fear to keep him from seeing his kid. “Hey there, kiddo.”

He watched as Kristen’s face broke into a smile, focusing on it as he kept himself from being overwhelmed by how bad everything else looked.

She was connected to what looked like a dozen different machines, though the most distressing was the tube coming out of her nose, taped to the side of her face but not attached to anything in particular. She still looked pale, but the fever flush was gone for the most part, her cheeks no longer the angry red they had been before. There were still bags under her eyes, but they were bright, crinkled in the corner as she looked at him.

“Alrighty, Mr. O'Shaughnessey, if you wouldn’t mind interpreting as I ask some questions?”

“Can do,” he agreed, shrugging at Kristen as she raised her eyebrows at him, looking between the two of them. Don’t worry about it he signed to her as the nurse noted something down from the machines, pressing his palms down and giving her an assured face.

“All right, your readings are looking pretty good, can you tell me where you are?” Nurse Cairi asked, looking between the two of them expectantly.

Jawbone watched as she finger spelled out St. Owen’s, repeating it back to the nurse. He hadn’t noticed it before, but as Kristen signed he realized the phone on her lap wasn’t her’s. He mostly knew that because he had her phone in his bag for when she woke up, but looking at the club stickers on the back it wasn’t hard to deduce who it belonged to.

Interpreting as the nurse continued to ask Kristen general questions to figure out how she was doing with pain, he took a moment to casually sniff the air. He knew there was no way he would be able to find Riz if he was looking for him, the kid was way too advanced as a rogue for that, but everyone had a smell. It was hard, the smell of antiseptic and a million other people in the hospital pervading the air and making it difficult to parse through, but he knew Riz’s scent. He knew all of the Bad Kids scents, just in case something happened, in case of the worst happened, so at least he would be able to find them. And, sure enough, he could smell that Riz in the ceiling. Sneaky fucker.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey?”

“What was that?” he asked, realizing he had missed a bit of the conversation.

“I just got a page from up front. CPS heard that she’s awake and they are wanting to come and ask her some questions and I was wondering if you would be comfortable interpreting?” she asked, looking half apologetic as she looked between the two of them.

“Fine by me,” he said easily, knowing that even if CPS didn’t like it, the chances of anyone else in the hospital knowing Sign was slim to none. The fact that he would also be able to make sure Kristen was actually being listened to was an added bonus, but hey, if that was how it had to be he sure wasn’t complaining.

“Perfect,” Nurse Cairi smiled, clearly relieved, “I need to go run some meds, but they should be in in just a bit. Kristen, you got your call button?” she smiled as Kristen picked it up, showing her that she did. “Good deal.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey…” she looked out the door, seeming to contemplate before making up her mind. “Technically, I am not allowed to let non-family members stay with the patient, but… Kristen, would you say it would be better for your health and wellbeing if Mr. O’Shaughnessey stayed in the room with you?” she asked, looking at Kristen with her eyebrows raised.

Taking a moment to understand the question, Kristen stared in disbelief before nodding with both her head and her hands, a wide smile spread across her tired face.

“Well, I don’t need an interpreter for that, it’s settled then, I have to do what’s right for my patient, and if she needs you here then who am I to question that? Do not,” she turned looking straight at Jawbone, cheery smile gone as she pointed a finger at him, “make me regret this.”

The smile came back quick as it had gone, a thousand watts of terrifying cheer as Jawbone nodded dumbly, watching as she turned on her heel and shut the door behind her, leaving the two of them alone.

Letting out a huff of a laugh, he looked over to Kristen, a look of disbelief on her face he was sure was reflected on his own.

Spooky she signed, right arm gliding over her left, indicating goosebumps, wheezing out a laugh as he batted at her hands.

“She is not,” he scolded, letting her take his pawed hand in her own, “Nurse Cairi’s been keepin’ us updated and she’s lettin’ me stay with you so I will have no ill words said against her.”

Us? Kristen furrowed, before finger spelling out S-L with her free hand, her left still holding onto Jawbone.

“Nah, Sandra Lynn’s at home with the kids,” he informed her, “speaking of which… Riz, you wanna come on out for me?”

He waited a moment, watching as Kristen’s ears turned red before he heard the sound of the ceiling tile being pulled back, Riz landing unceremoniously on the bed next to Kristen, looking at him sheepishly before turning on Kristen.

“Why did you tell him I was up there?” he half whispered, tilting his head in disbelief as she shook her head.

Did not! she finger spelled out, looking desperately at Jawbone to defend her.

“She didn’t tell on you Riz, you left your phone out and I could smell you,” Jawbone told him, trying not to laugh as he hissed quietly at the offending item, stealing it off of Kristen's lap and sitting with a dejected thump.

Riz did a quick shake, ears flopping as he tried unsuccessfully to rid himself of the dust he had collected sitting up in the ceiling, Jawbone feeling a pull in his chest, glad his kids had people looking out for them.

“Thanks for looking after her for me Riz, but I think you oughta be on your way,” Jawbone said, halfway regretful.

“But–”

“Riz,” he interrupted, making his voice kind but firm, “I need you to go home. I know you’re lookin’ out for your pal, but this is one you gotta trust me one. Here,” he pulled his bag around, fishing around in the pocket before pulling out Kristen’s phone and handing it to her. “Kris’s got her phone so she can keep you updated as she sees fit, and you have my number if you need to reach me, but you’re going home, ok?”

Riz took a moment looking at Kristen, the two of them having a silent conversation back and forth before Kristen nodded, Riz sighing as he relented. “Yeah, that’s fair. Sorry, Jawbone.”

“No need to ‘pologize, I just need you outta here,” Jawbone said, ruffling his hair before pushing him towards the door, not feeling too surprised as he watched Riz crawl back up into the ceiling tile, presumably making a sneaky exit. In the back of his head he worried Riz might just camp out up there till he left, but he had to trust that the kid would listen.

Feeling a soft squeeze on his hand, he turned back to Kristen, smiling as he squeezed back, watching as she blinked heavily, eyes trained on him.

“I know she asked about your pain, but how are we doing in here?” he asked, tapping a finger on her head before pushing a hair back off her sweaty forehead.

Hate the hospital she signed, flicking out her hand before making a cross on her arm. Her nose wrinkled before she flinched, shaking her head as she felt the tube move in her nose, letting out a soft whine as she looked at him.

“I know, I’m sorry kiddo, I’d fix it myself if I could,” he told her honestly, rubbing his hand up and down her arm, letting her scoot closer to him and wrap her arm around his, head leaned against the flannel of his jacket. He would do anything to make her feel better, but for now this was the best he could do. He just had to hope it was enough.

Chapter Text

In the grand scheme of things, Kristen felt like after being asleep for three days she should have felt at least a little rested.

She knew she wasn’t the brightest, all things considered, and she knew that technically she wasn’t asleep, she was in a coma, but in her opinion three days of being out should have given her some energizing benefits. And yet, she had only been awake for an hour and she was already exhausted. No benefits. Go figure.

Curled up on Jawbone’s arm, she was doing her best not to fall asleep again and could feel herself flagging. His cardigan was a much better texture than the sheets she was under as she ran her fingers up and down his sleeve. She wondered vaguely if the hospital would let her have a weighted blanket if she had to keep staying there. Would she have to stay longer? She felt like shit, but that was nothing new, and at least she could kind of breathe now. Would she be allowed to go home? They couldn’t make her go back with her parents, could they?

As if thinking about it somehow manifested them into existence, she heard the door to the room open.

She couldn’t help it, the fear, just squeezing her eyes tight as if that would somehow make it all go away, childish as it all seemed. She had figured out pretty quickly that almost any noise she made would rip at her throat, but she couldn’t help the whine she let out as Jawbone pulled away from her, hands failing to hold onto his cardigan.

Throat grating, she couldn’t help it as tears ran down her face. She was tired, and her throat hurt, and she didn’t want to deal with her parents, she just wanted to hold onto Jawbone and go to sleep for a second but she couldn’t even do that. So, she cried, which made her throat hurt, which made her cry more, which was truly a cycle of evil that she couldn't seem to make her way out of.

“Ok, kiddo,” she heard Jawbone next to her, grabbing out until she could feel the knit of his cardigan again, holding it like a lifeline. “I’m sorry, I’m right here, it’s alright.”

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey, you and I both know this isn’t appropriate,” someone whose voice Kristen didn’t recognize said in the room.

“What I know, Gordon, is that a nurse came into the waiting room and asked if anyone would help interpret, so I volunteered,” Jawbone explained coolly, Kristen realizing that the people who had come in must have been the CPS workers the nurse had been talking about. “You got anyone else who knows Sign you go ahead and get them. But, until then I’m the best you got.”

“You have been asked to interpret,” the voice clarified, Gordon she guessed, though she still couldn’t seem to will her eyes open. “This doesn’t look like interpreting to me, Mr. O’Shaughnessey.”

Kristen managed her eyes open at that, the last of her tears rushing out as she stopped squeezing them shut, staring bleary eyed at the two people standing by the door. A Humanwoman stood closest to the door, mouth tight as she looked at Jawbone, a clipboard held close against her chest. Next to her was a halfling woman, eyes trained on Kristen. Looking at her, they briefly made eye contact before Kristen tore her gaze away, looking at Jawbone instead. Tissue? she asked, fumbling the sign for paper as she still held the corner of his cardigan in one hand.

Luckily he seemed to understand, grabbing a box of tissues from the nurses cart behind him, Kristen taking them thankfully. “Well, I’d say I’m interpreting just fine,” Jawbone said pointedly, sounding more than a little smug.

Kristen buried her face in the tissue, feeling slightly delirious as she snorted, a giggle bubbling up in her chest at Jawbone, always reasonable, there’s two sides to every story, Jawbone, being snarky. She regretted it almost immediately, chest aching as she laughed, whining pathetically, too exhausted to be embarrassed.

Tired she signed to Jawbone, finally letting go of his cardigan, trying to get him to understand that she really didn’t want to talk right now, childish as it seemed.

Jawbone huffed, looking between Kristen and the CPS workers. “She uh, she says she’s tired,” he told them after a moment.

The human woman raised her eyebrows, clearly displeased. The halfling took a different approach.

“Kristen,” she started slowly, speaking to her as if she was younger than she was, Kristen realizing that was going to be a pattern, “my name is Adry Hobbes, and I know you’re tired, but I would really appreciate it if you could answer a few questions for me.”

She didn’t want to answer questions, but she also didn’t want to be at a hospital or talking to CPS workers, but that was the situation she was in. A look from Jawbone let her know that the faster she answered their questions the faster they would leave, so steeling herself, she nodded.

“Perfect,” Hobbes nodded, taking a seat next to the hospital bed. “Can you tell me a little bit about what home is like?”

Good Kristen signed, not quite sure what she was supposed to say. Like all the people, like my chapel. Feels safe, I feel loved.

Hobbes furrowed her brows as Jawbone interpreted, looking between the two of them. “Your chapel?”

“We’ve got a chapel out back,” Jawbone explained for her. “Kris’s been fixing it up for her god over the summer as a project.”

“I– I apologize, I should have phrased it better. I meant your home with your parents, Kristen,” Hobbes clarified, shooting a look back at her partner. “Could you tell me a little bit about that?”

It was Kristen’s turn to be confused, not sure what she meant. Don’t live there she signed, looking to Jawbone for help.

“Like I had told y’all before, Kristen’s been livin with me for almost three years now,” Jawbone explained after he interpreted.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey, I would appreciate it if you would refrain from adding on,” Gordon interrupted, looking at him pointedly. “Just interpreting will do.”

Jawbone’s mouth snapped shut, hands tensing at his side as he seemed to want to say something before thinking better of it. “Like I told you, she said she doesn’t live there.”

“Kristen, I think I might have my wires crossed here,” Hobbes started, looking back at Gordon to take the clipboard from her. “From what I have on file, you have been living with your parents, all your mail, your paperwork, it’s all been going to them. I know you spend quite a bit of time with Mr. O’Shaughnessey and his family but–"

“Kristen is family–”

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey,” Gordon interrupted, looking at him in warning. “I know you may feel that way, but in the eyes of the law that is not the case at the moment. We have taken your statement, now we are trying to get Kristen’s. If you continue to interject we will have to ask you to leave.”

Kristen felt her stomach bottom out. If Jawbone left there was no way she would be able to communicate, and the dull hope that maybe the CPS workers wouldn’t be on her parents side had long faded, the disdain Gordon seemed to have towards Jawbone evident in the way she looked at him. She wanted him to look at her, to let her know it would be ok, but he was shut off, eyes far away even as he stood right next to her.

“Can you explain what you mean when you say you don’t live there?” Hobbes asked her gently.

I don’t live there she repeated, having no room for gentle. I live with Jawbone. Two years, she signed, making sure they could see her ‘two’ hand sign as Jawbone interpreted. Left she signed, hands stumbling, too tired to remember the signs to explain more.

“Did you leave voluntarily?”

Even if she knew the signs Kristen wasn’t sure if she knew the answer. What counted as voluntary? She wasn’t kicked out, not technically, but it wasn’t like she could have stayed either. She just shrugged, too tired to try to wrap her head around the right thing to say, the thing that would let her just go home and not have to deal with this anymore.

“Were you kicked out?” Hobbes tried again, looking at her expectantly.

She just shrugged again, flashes of her childhood home in flames dancing across her vision, her dads voice echoing through her head.

“The more information you can give, the more we can help you,” Hobbes explained, “when you left home, did you leave because you wanted to, or because you had to?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? The question she chose not to think about, cuz maybe if she convinced herself she left on her own it wouldn’t hurt so bad. But that didn’t make it true. Tired she signed at Jawbone again, hoping maybe somehow he could fix it.

“She’s tired,” he parroted, tone harder than before.

“Kristen, it would really help us out–”

“She said she’s tired,” Jawbone interrupted her, “if she could help you, I’m sure she would, but right now she’s tired, so I think it’s in her best interest that she rest.”

“Mr. O'Shaughnessey, I assure you we have Kristen’s best interest in mind,” Hobbes protested, offended at the implication and looking upset for the first time since she had come in.

“Well, I’m not so sure I agree with that,” Jawbone started, Kristen losing track of the conversation as it became more and more difficult to keep her eyes open. Jawbone had it handled, so really it was no big deal if she just shut her eyes, just for a minute.

It probably wasn’t a great move, arguing with CPS workers, but it meant that Jawbone had gotten closer to her bed, letting her grip onto his cardigan once again as she felt herself drift a little.

She only really tuned back into the conversation when Gordon finally said something, Jawbone and Hobbes falling silent as she spoke.

“Clearly, if Kristen isn’t able to communicate right now and we are getting the perspective of one adult, I think it is only fair we get the perspective of the other.”

It took her too long to process what she meant, sinking dread only solidifying as she felt Jawbone go stiff next to her. Too tired to think of anything else to do, too exhausted to deal with the prospect of having to interact with her parents when she could barely communicate, Kristen did the only thing she could think of, slamming on the call button on the side of her bed.

“I don’t think–”

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey I have had just enough with what you think,” Gordon interrupted calmly, “I think if Kristen is done talking then your services are no longer needed. You are excused.”

Kristen wondered if pressing the call button harder was making any difference, slamming it over and over with one hand, refusing to let go of Jawbone’s cardigan in the other. She couldn’t see her parents, not alone. She just had to call the nurse and this would be fine. It had to be fine.

“I am not comfortable leaving,” Jawbone stated, sounding more serious than Kristen had ever heard him.

“This is not a matter of what you are comfortable with!” Gordon said in disbelief. “This– this is highly inappropriate!”

“I know my kid,” Jawbone said calmly, “and she is clearly exhausted and scared. If you insist on bringing those people in here, I am not leaving.”

“That is not your decision to make!”

“Gordon, please.”

“No! No, this is not–”

“Alright!” Nurse Cairi interrupted, bursting into the room, eyes wide and manic paired with her ever present smile, Kristen thankful for its presence for once. “This is a hospital,” she explained slowly, eyes roving over the room, “and unless someone is dying, there is no yelling in the hospital. Kristen, are you dying?”

Kristen shook her head.

“Well then, I see no reason why you should be yelling.” She looked at the adults in the room, clearly displeased despite her megawatt smile.

“She’s been saying she’s tired,” Jawbone told her apologetically.

Nurse Cairi nodded, moving past the CPS workers to the look over the machines attached to Kristen, humming absentmindedly as the whole room watched her. “You tired?” she asked Kristen, crazed smile shifting into something softer as she looked at Kristen.

She nodded, letting the exhaustion crash over her as she leaned back against her pillow, Jawbone’s cardigan still gripped in her hand.

“Yeah, your body’s still fighting pretty hard to get you better, so you’re gonna feel pretty tired for a while,” Nurse Cairi explained gently before turning back to the adults in the room. “Since we seem to have a volume problem here, I am going to have to ask you all to leave so that our friends can get some rest.”

“If he gets to stay–”

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey is also being asked to leave,” she explained calmly, eyes intense as she stared down Gordon, “though I will remind you he does have as much permission as you do to be here, and just like you, that permission can be revoked.”

Gordon balked but Kristen just ignored her in favor of looking at Jawbone.

He just smiled at her, putting his pawed hand over hers so she was holding it instead of his cardigan. “Get some rest,” he rumbled quietly, “I won’t be too far, I promise.”

Kristen squeezed his hand before letting go, watching as he filed out of the room, the CPS workers leaving behind him, Gordon still clearly stewing as Hobbes sent her an apologetic smile before leaving. Kristen watched out the little window on the door as it shut behind them, eyes tracking to see if they would come back, convinced she would see her mothers face appear at any moment.

“Kristen,” Nurse Cairi chided her, “I wasn’t just lying to get them out of here, you need some rest.”

Nodding, she let her eyes fall closed, turning her head so she wasn’t faced towards the door. In a moment of doubt and fear, she sent a quick prayer to Cassandra before giving into the exhaustion.

Chapter Text

Jawbone was trying and failing to keep his head as he let the door close behind him, not letting himself look back at Kristen, knowing that if he did, he would break.

The CPS workers were walking down the hall ahead of him, Jawbone left to follow along, unsure what else he was meant to do, too focused on keeping it together to think of anything else.

If he lost it, he lost kristen. That was the plain and simple of it all. He just needed to keep it together. He could do that. If he just kept his mouth shut for a little longer, he could keep it together.

Following them out a set of double doors he at least had the peace of mind that he hadn't done anything wrong so far. Had being with Kristen alone been pushing it? Maybe, but he had been asked. That’s what he had to keep repeating to himself as he followed behind them. He had been asked to come translate. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

A growling, furious part of him that so desperately wanted to turn around and march right back into Kristen’s room didn’t care if he had done anything wrong. She was his kid. He had to see her and these assholes had no right to tell him that he wasn’t allowed.

He kept his mouth tightly shut, the words sitting right behind his teeth just begging to escape, moving on autopilot as the three of them moved towards the lobby of the hospital.

Hobbes at least had the decency to look like she felt bad, stealing glances back at him to make sure he was still following behind them. He couldn’t quite meet her eye, keeping his eyes trained down at Gordon’s ugly brown loafers, glaring at the space where the corduroy of her pants cut off at a too perfect line above her sock.

If he was thinking more clearly, he might have almost felt bad for Hobbes, recognizing the fact that she had obviously been given incorrect information and was just working with what she had. He might have even understood her situation, but all understanding went out the door when her partner threatened to take him away when he was the only way that Kristen could communicate.

Letting his nails dig into the pads of his hands he seethed for a moment. How could they not see how scared she was? How could they not care?

Hobbes ducked around a corner, opening the door to one of the side rooms Jawbone knew they had been using as a makeshift office for the few days that Kristen had been in the hospital. He hadn’t realized where they were going until he was already making his way into the room, filing in after them before he could think about whether he was meant to or not. Maybe he was meant to wait outside, but they hadn’t said anything, and he was too focused on tamping down the festering anger in his chest to pick up on what he was meant to do without words.

It had been growing since Gordon had brought up the Applebees. In hindsight he should have seen it coming, but feeling Kristen flinch at the mention of them and the two of them not even pick up on it? It was getting to be more than Jawbone could take.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey?” Hobbes asked, pulling him out of his head. “Are you here with us?”

He found himself nodding without even thinking about, adjusting his glasses on his nose while he tried to collect himself. “I’m sorry, was just uh, thinking there for a moment,” he told them, careful with his words as he pushed the burning in his chest down.

“Well,” Gordon started, disdain ever present in her voice, “we would really love it if you could tune in, you know, if it’s not too much trouble for you?” She smiled dangerously, the clipboard with Kristen’s case file gripped tight in her hands.

Jawbone nodded, not dignifying the question with a response more than that.

“It looks like we don’t quite have our story straight,” Hobbes took over, shooting Gordon a look over her shoulder. “So, I think it would be in Kristen’s best interest if we could go back through your previous statement, as well as Kristen’s parents’, to get a better gauge of what has really been going on.”

Ignoring the fact that this meant they would be discrediting the previous information he had given them, he at least accepted the win of still being allowed a statement at all. Whether the Applebees would try to undermine him, he couldn’t say, but at least he knew that his story matched Kristen’s. He was telling the truth. It was just the matter of whether or not he could get them to believe him.

“Sounds alright to me,” he told Hobbes, taking a seat in front of one of the desks they had set up. Rocking back and forth on the office chair he wondered if he would have enough time to call Sandra Lynn and give her an update.

Gordon was out of the room as soon as he sat down, most likely on the hunt for the Applebees, wherever they had been hiding out around the hospital where Jawbone had never quite managed to see them.

“I’m sorry about her,” Hobbes sighed, hopping up on the desk across from him, short legs dangling as she sat on top of it.

“‘s not your fault,” he deflected easily, knowing better than to say anything more on the subject. “Sorry they don’t have chairs for smallfolk, really a bit of an oversight for a hospital.”

She looked up at him as if surprised he had even noticed, though he supposed her partner probably hadn’t. “It’s not your fault,” she echoed back to him, shaking her head a little as she looked at him.

“You don’t have to apologize for her,” he amended after a moment, letting his crystal slide from hand to hand as he thought about what he would tell Sandra Lynn. “You’re just doing your job. I know how it goes. You’re trying to do your best by Kristen, I just hope you understand I’m trying to do the same.”

Lips tight, she didn’t quite look at him, seeming to consider what he was saying carefully. Good. Someone was listening to him for once.

Pulling up his crystal, he typed up a quick update for Sandra Lynn, sending it before he could think too hard, before he could worry that she would be disappointed he was doing it wrong. Shoving his crystal into the pocket of his cardigan, he forced himself not to think about it, instead going through the to-do list in his head.

In theory he was supposed to go to the store after he and Sandra Lynn traded off at the hospital, though that plan may be altered with the way things were progressing. Either way one of them definitely needed to go to the store at some point soon or else they were going to have a plague of hungry teens on their hands. There were other things, a few forms he needed signed off on, the fact that the manor was probably due for a deep clean, the bills that were coming up, but they all seemed silly in the grand scheme of it all.

Shaking his head, he pulled his crystal back out to remind Sandra Lynn that they also need to go in to grab Adaine’s meds from the pharmacy, perking up when he noticed she had already texted him back to let him know she had gotten his message and sending her love. Apparently Riz had let it slip that Kristen was awake and the girls were already planning a jailbreak that Lydia and Sandra Lynn were trying to put a cap on before it got too far.

Jawbone let himself take a breath at that and smile to himself, images of Fig and Adaine devising a way into the hospital too easy to conjure up. He wasn’t positive on why Fig seemed to know way too much information on the hospital for someone who, to his knowledge, had only been in once or twice, but that was a question for another day. He just sent Sandra Lynn a little bit of luck and love and left it at that, focusing on keeping his leg from bouncing as he waited.

The Applebees, wherever they had been hiding out, had either been farther away than Jawbone had thought, or were taking some convincing to come. Either way Jawbone spent a good half an hour forcing himself not to look at the clock on the wall before the door to the room opened again, Gordon not coming in alone.

It occurred to him as they came in that he had never interacted with the Applebees before despite knowing a good deal about them. It was an odd sort of familiarity, the kind that came with having never spoken to them but knowing both of their names, where they had grown up, small things about their routines like the way they folded laundry and raised their kids, all gleaned from taking care of Kristen over the last couple of years. Looking them in the eyes for the first time he was struck with the fact that these were the people who used to raise his kid.

He had seen pictures of them, Kristen still had a few of them tucked away in her room, but in person it was that much more noticeable how much Kristen took after them. Her mom, Donna he thought absently, connecting the name from the back of his head, had the same cheeks, the same strong jaw and deep red hair, though Donna’s was graying around her hairline. Her resemblance to Mac wasn’t obvious at first until he made eye contact with him, the same sharp green eyes he was used to staring at him with all the contempt in the world.

Jawbone made a point not to avert his gaze, just doing his best attempt at a smile as the three of them filed into the room.

Gordon took a seat behind the desk they had set up, the Applebees sitting across from her in mismatched chairs that Jawbone assumed were once in the waiting room. Donna kept a tight grip on her bag as she sat, knuckles white as she looked at Jawbone out of the corner of her eye.

If Donna was trying not to look at him, Mac was succeeding by leaps and bounds. Jaw set, hand tight gripped in his wife’s, Mac Applebees gave him a sneer as he came in before focusing all of his attention on Gordon, watching as she rifled through Kristen’s paperwork.

“Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Applebees,” Hobbes greeted, slipping down from her spot on the desk. “Thank you again for meeting with us.”

“Don’t see why we gotta,” Mac huffed, not quite looking at Hobbes.

Jawbone watched as Hobbes made a pleading look at Gordon only to get nothing in return. Taking a breath, the halfling put on a tight smile. “We just need you to answer some questions so that we can clear things up. Some of the information that you’ve given us was contradicted when we talked to Kristen so we just want to–”

“Kristen’s awake?” Donna interrupted. “Why are we just hearing about this? Why haven’t we been allowed to see her? I’m her mother–”

“Well, she was awake, but only for a short period, and she can’t speak right now so–”

“Now just wait a minute,” Mac raised his hand, Jawbone watching as the room fell quiet around him, “what do you mean you talked to Kristen if she can’t speak? That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“Kristen was intubated,” Gordon supplied, speaking for the first time since she had come back into the room, “she can’t speak verbally but according to the nurse she asked for someone to interpret for her, so Mr. O’Shaughnessey translated for her.”

“You mean to tell me he got to see my daughter before I did?” Donna was staring at him hard now, lip trembling as she spoke.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey understands Solesion Sign Language,” Hobbes explained, talking slowly as the room seemed to sit at the precipice of Donna’s tears. “Kristen can’t speak as she has been intubated in order to get her oxygen since her throat closed up, so we needed an alternate way to communicate with her. Mr. O’Shaughnessey was strictly there as an interpreter.”

Donna’s jaw clenched, but a deep breath later she seemed to calm down, her lip still wobbly but the tears in her eyes going unshed for the time being. Mac was grumbling something under his breath that Jawbone didn’t care to listen close enough to understand.

“I know that we have already taken your statements about Kristen’s living situation, but since talking to Kristen it appears that the information that you have given doesn’t quite match up with her story.” Hobbes spoke carefully.

“Are you calling us liars?”

“No, no,” Hobbes waved her hands, eyes wide as she shook her head, “not at all. I just want to make sure I’ve understood your statement correctly, is all.”

Mac and Donna looked unimpressed, Donna shifting in her chair to pull her bag tighter against her, her other hand still clasped in her husbands.

Sitting quietly on the other side of the room from them, Jawbone watched the scene play out. Hobbes asked all of the questions, Gordon writing things down as they went along and the Applebees restated their statement. He kept his thoughts to himself as they answered the questions, only keeping his ears keen to where their story clearly diverged from his own.

Where had Kristen been living? They didn’t answer outright, just mentioning that Kristen had a bedroom at their house, that they got all her mail, that she spent a lot of time out with her friends. Not exactly false, but not the whole truth either.

“I don’t see why we have to answer these questions again,” Mac huffed, crossing his arms. “We already told you this.”

Hobbes’ lips tightened, clearly weighing things in her head and trying to figure out the best way for her to call their bluff. “Mr. Applebees,” she started, treading lightly, “how many nights in a week does Kristen sleep in your house?”

Jawbone watched carefully as Mac’s jaw jumped for a moment before snapping shut, his wide eyes trained not on Hobbes, but on Gordon sitting behind her.

Gordon, for what it was worth, didn’t give him the out, just watching carefully over her clipboard.

“I– I don’t see what that–” he spluttered for a moment, brows furrowing as he crossed and recrossed his arms, seeming to try and make a barrier between himself and Hobbes. “What kind of question is that? She’s my daughter!”

“I understand that Mr. Applebees, I’m just asking you how many nights, on average, does your daughter sleep at your house?” Hobbes restates. “You say she spends quite a bit of time with her friends, sleeping over at their houses, so I’m wondering how much of that time is with them and how much of that time is with you?”

For all of his sputtering and topic changing, Mac was silent. Jawbone watched as Donna gripped his arm, willing him to say something, but he just sat red faced. He wasn’t lying, Jawbone would give him that much.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey?”

Jawbone hummed, keeping his face clear as Hobbes turned to him.

“How many nights in a week does Kristen sleep at your house?”

“She sleeps at my house most nights,” he answered coolly. “She has her own room and has been living with me for almost two years now.”

Now, there were plenty of reactions that Jawbone could have predicted from the Applebees, but truly nothing could have prepared him for the squawk of a laugh Mac let out. “Two years?!” he repeated, eyes bugged out.

“That is ridiculous,” Donna spoke for the first time since the questions had begun, “it has not been two years.”

“Kristen first started staying with me in November of her freshman year. I’m not great at math,” Jawbone humored, though he knew he was testing his luck, “but seeing as she’s in her junior year now, I dare that would make it about two years now.”

The astounded laughter faded from the Applebees' faces as they seemed to reckon with the information they had been giving. For a moment, however brief, Jawbone let himself feel for them. They really hadn’t realized how long it had been, had they?

“She bounced back and forth between my apartment and my partners home before we moved in together, but she has been living at the address I gave you since this last spring,” he explained, focusing instead on Hobbes so he didn’t have to look at the Applebees.

Hobbes nodded, reaching her hand out for the clipboard Gordon had been working on, the latter handing it over silently. She flipped through the papers, brows furrowed as she thought things over.

Jawbone did his best not to fidget, worrying at the loose button on his cardigan as he sat. He had told them the truth. That’s all he could do. What happened next was out of his control.

He almost mistook it for the air conditioning at first, the cool draft he felt sweep around him, only recognizing what it was as the scent of pine and end of day fog settled into the room. Hey there, Cass, he thought to himself, letting himself relax for a moment.

Making up her mind, Hobbes wrote something on the bottom of the sheet, handing the clipboard back to Gordon to look over. She took it, squinting, mouth pursed as she looked at Hobbes, then the Applebees, then at Jawbone. It could have been a trick of the light, but in the dingy back room of the hospital Jawbone would have sworn he saw a glimmer of twilight twist around Gordon’s head, her hair shifting just so, as if caught in a breeze.

“Though I have had my doubts,” she began, looking down at the paper again before meeting eyes with Hobbes, “but with the information we have been given, it is my belief that in the best interest of the child, temporary custody should go Mr. O’Shaughnessey until a further hearing is held.”

“I second this decision,” Hobbes said easily. “Congratulations Mr. O'Shaughnessey.”

The next few minutes passed in a blur of tears, and yelling, and threats to call security all on the behalf of the Applebees. Jawbone just sat through it as he basked in the relief of it all.

His kid was safe.

Sometime later, after the Applebees had been ushered away and the CPS workers had packed up their temporary office after telling him they would be calling sometime later in the week for a follow up, Jawbone was once again sitting back in the waiting room. He supposed he didn’t necessarily need to, he was no longer under threat of being kicked out, but still he sat. He would tell Sandra Lynn the news as soon as he got home, but he wanted to see Kristen again before he left.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessey?”

“How many times do I gotta tell you folks to call me Jawbone?” he quipped, smiling as Nurse Cairi approached him. “You’re making me feel ancient.”

“I apologize Mr. O’Shaughnessey,” she shook her head, smiling nonetheless. “I heard about the good news and just wanted to give some congratulations. I’m glad Kristen is in good hands.”

“That sure does mean a lot to me,” he told her earnestly.

“She just woke up if you wanna come back and see her. Oh,” she paused, as if remembering something, “she wrote this? I can’t quite figure out what it says, but she seemed to think you might.”

He chuckled to himself as she handed him a napkin that Kristen had chicken scratched on. It was fair she couldn’t read it, the ink had bled through the napkin and if Cairi wasn’t used to reading dyslexic writing it would be impossible to translate. “She’s asking for her weighted blanket,” he explained, reading it fairly easily, “I have it in my car if it’s ok for her to have it?”

She looked over the napkin again, clearly trying to understand how he had read it so easily before pausing. “Did she text you ahead of time?”

“What do you mean?”

“You already have the blanket in your car?”

“Oh, well sure,” he nodded, “I mean, Kris likes the pressure, I figured she would ask for it at some point or another, so I’ve just been keeping it in my trunk just in case. Do you think she would be all right to use it? I don’t know much about this med stuff besides first aid, but I understand if that’s too much pressure to put on her lungs right now.”

Cairi took a moment, staring at him as he rambled before she came back to herself. “No, no it’s fine,” she said, eyes shining a little before she looked away, “she can have the blanket if that’s what she wants.”

Nodding, Jawbone went to fish out his car keys before he felt a hand on his arm.

“Sorry,” Cairi apologized, pulling her hand back. “I just, I’m glad Kristen is in good hands,” she repeated.

And that was the truth of it all. Stepping out into the dusk of the St. Owen Memorial Hospital parking lot Jawbone was sure of it.

His kid was in good hands.

Chapter Text

It ended with a trip.

The month following Kristen’s stint in the hospital was a blur of doctor’s visits, trips to the pharmacy, and Sklonda Gukgak coming over on Thursday nights to walk them through next steps when it came to keeping Kristen in the house. Kristen was just trying to keep up with the never ending game of catch up she was stuck in coming back to school.

It didn’t help that she still felt like shit even after weeks of technically being better.

The blessing of being a cleric was that Kristen didn’t get sick often. She got hurt pretty constantly, that was just part of being an adventurer, but she could fix that. The aftermath of dragon pox was not something she could fix.

So, she was sitting, hunched over her desk trying to finish her essay on the ethics of evangelism and trying to ignore the lasting fatigue that she couldn’t seem to shake. Cracking her knuckles, she was knocked out of her reverie of staring blankly at the paper as Adaine knocked on her door. She knew it was Adaine on account of the fact that Adaine was one of three people in the house that actually knocked, and Sandra Lynn and Jawbone were in the incredibly bizarre old person habit of saying the words “knock knock” out loud when they did.

Humming, she turned over her shoulder as Adaine came in, pen bit between her teeth as she took in the fact that Adaine was standing in her doorway dressed and ready to go… somewhere.

“Are you ready?” Adaine asked, though Kristen could guess by the fact that it was pretty obvious she wasn’t wearing pants that Adaine knew the answer.

“Ready for…”

“The clinic?” Adaine filled in. “Kristen, we literally talked about it this morning.”

Kristen chose not to inform her that she didn’t remember them talking that morning until she reminded her, mind moving faster than she could focus on as she remembered why they were going to the clinic. Vaccines. Right. That was today.

Shit.

Essay forgotten, she grabbed the closest pants to her, tripping into a thrifted pair of cargos she had stolen from Tracker, slipping them over her boxers and sliding on her sandals as she rushed out the room. She ignored Adaine’s snort as she came out into the hallway, only smiling at her as she buttoned her fly.

“What, it’s not like there is a dress code.”

Adaine hummed. “No, but that won’t keep Aelwyn from making fun of you.”

“Shit,” Kristen paused, looking down at herself and her sleep shirt over cargo shorts and realizing how screwed she was. “Wait, I have time to change, right? Please?”

“Nope,” Adaine turned on her heel, already making her way downstairs as Kristen stumbled after her.

“Wait, Adaine, she’s gonna be so mean, I look dumb,” she whined as they made their way out of the house, Kristen barely managing not to trip on their way out the door.

“She’s not even that bad anymore,” Adaine defended, though she sounded more placating than confident in the statement, clearly just trying to get her out the door.

Groaning, Kristen took what she could get, hoping maybe Adaine was right as she trailed after her, the fatigue starting to catch up to her as she followed down the drive. Getting made fun of by Aelwyn was at least worth it if it meant she was sitting down, the reality of potentially collapsing in the driveway making itself more and more clear as they made their way to the car. She had had enough trips to the hospital for the time being, she refused to make it one more just because all of a sudden her body was too tired to walk from her room to the car.

Pulling herself into the backseat of Jawbone’s station wagon; Aelwyn already waiting for them in the front seat, Kristen rubbed her knuckles across her chest, trying to convince her lungs to take in more air. It was so hard hurting and for the first time in her life not being able to fix it. She had been instructed not to heal herself for at least another month if she could help it, but even then, it’s not like heals could help the fact that her lungs were permanently fucked. It wouldn’t change the fact that things that used to be easy had become exhausting.

Aelwyn, thank the gods, had the decency not to comment on her choice of clothing as she got in the car, Kristen avoiding her eyes in the rear view mirror. Adaine was also on her side it seemed, choosing not to notice the fact that Kristen was struggling to breath, instead just leaning her chair back so she could look back at Kristen as Aelwyn pulled out of the driveway.

“Not gonna show off your new driving skills?” she asked as she recaught her breath, feeling buzzy in the quiet of the car, needing to hear something other than her pulse pounding in her head.

Adaine huffed, giving her a look before looking at Aelwyn. “Well, I would have, but someone doesn’t trust me behind the wheel despite the fact that of the two of us only one of us got our license legally.”

“You have no proof my dear sister, and either way I’ve been driving longer.”

She let the two of them rib each other, Adaine going on about how she knew that Aelwyn had charmed her driving instructor. It had been an ongoing argument since Adaine had gotten her license. She had passed her drivers test with flying colors, something the whole house had celebrated (except for Kristen, who was still in the hospital at the time and totally did not feel a way about missing out on celebrating her friend. She was fine) though her passing was not totally unexpected as Adaine had spent all of her free time, the small amount she had, practicing driving with Jawbone and Aelwyn.

Kristen had little interest in driving. Her hand eye coordination was too abysmal to be put in charge of a ton of metal, especially when she had first hand experience with how much damage a car could do. No, she had no reason to drive, especially now that more of her friends could, looking forward to her future of leeching off of Adaine for rides.

“Kristen?”

Adaine was looking at her as she looked up, eyebrows raised in her ‘I just asked you a question and I know you weren’t listening but could you at least pretend?’ face.

“Wha?”

“I was asking if it hurt, your tattoo?” she said, clearly repeating herself. “I imagine that’s not too dissimilar to a needle so I’m trying to gauge how much it’s going to hurt.”

Her hand drifted to the back of her neck, fingers tracing over where she knew Tracker’s name was tattooed across her neck as Aelwyn snorted from the driver's seat. “Trust me, Adaine, a tattoo and a needle are vastly different,” Aelwyn told her, shaking her head

“How would you know, it’s not like you have any experience?”

The car was silent for a moment, Kristen looking anywhere but Adaine as the question hung in the air. She had healed Aelwyn before, was well trained in the clerical practice of analyzing a body quickly, noting cuts, bruises… scars.

“Aelwyn!”

“Oh please, I was in highschool, relax, it is not that big of a deal.”

“Injecting drugs into your body is not a big deal?” Adaine shot back, Kristen keeping nice and quiet in the back.

“Don’t act all high and mighty, I know your party does snuff, why else would your little cleric have her ex’s name tattooed on her neck?”

“She’s not– It’s compli–”

“That’s different!” Adaine interrupted her, Kristen shutting up quickly. “That’s not needles!”

“Pah, say whatever you want, they are classified the same when it comes to jail time,” Aelwyn responded, seemingly wholly unaffected by her sister's indignation towards the revelation that she did hard drugs.

Face shoved into her hands, Adaine groaned. “I hate that you know that.”

“I sold drugs, Adaine, I’m surprised you would think I wouldn’t.”

“Shut up.”

Leg bouncing up and down in the backseat, Kristen sat in the silence, staring out the window as she let her hand drift back to her tattoo. She hadn’t thought about the pain aspect, though that was pretty dumb seeing as the whole thing was that she was getting needles put in her arm. The tattoo hadn’t hurt that bad, but then again she had been high off her ass when she had gotten it.

It’s not like she couldn’t deal with pain, she was an adventurer, she was pretty damn used to getting hurt. It was fine. How bad could a couple of needles possibly be?

Aelwyn pulled the car into the clinic parking lot, Adaine pulling her head out of her hands as they parked, all of a sudden looking directly at her sister.

“What?”

“You have a tattoo?”

Kristen perked up at that, realizing that if Aelwyn had compared the two that Adaine was right.

“Some things are best left unknown, little sister,” Aelwyn said vaguely, pulling herself out of the car and slamming the door behind her before Adaine could say anything else.

She just shrugged as Adaine looked back at her, mouth hanging open. “Don’t look at me!”

“She has a tattoo!” Adaine told her as if that wasn’t abundantly clear from the conversation they were just having.

“Your sister has a lot of things, Adaine,” Kristen half whispered, not wanting Aelwyn to hear her from outside the car because even if she wouldn’t admit it, she was fucking terrifying, “I feel like a tattoo is really not the biggest issue.”

“But, it’s a tattoo that we can’t see!” Ears turning red, Adaine pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Oh gods, it’s a tattoo we can’t see,” she groaned.

As much as Aelwyn was terrifying, she was also terrifyingly hot, Kristen feeling her own cheeks blush as she reached the same conclusion as Adaine, who was wallowing in the front seat. “Maybe it’s a tramp stamp,” she thought out loud, half as a genuine guess and half to torture Adaine.

“I hate you.”

Kristen jumped as the door swung open next to her, Aelwyn staring at the two of them looking far from amused.

“Are you two just going to sit in here forever? We do have an appointment, you know?”

Knowing that her face was red, Kristen just avoided eye contact as she handed Aelwyn her cane from where it had rolled down to the footwell, the older taking it easily and either not noticing her blush or choosing not to comment on it for the time being. Kristen was thankful either way, trying to think of anything other than her mystery tattoo.

Adaine just scoffed as she got out of the car, coming around the other side to meet her so they were walking hand in hand up to the clinic, Kristen taking the hand easily despite the glare Adaine was giving her as she found herself staring at Aelwyn.

Out of the car though, Kristen could feel her nerves coming back to her as they walked up. The clinic was different from the hospital. Or, at least that was what she was repeating to herself, trying to ground herself in the feeling of Adaine’s cold hand in her own as they made their way in.

It was so dumb, there were so many more reasonable things to be scared of. She had literally died. More than once. She was a healer, hospitals were literally just places with healers and doctors, it didn’t make any sense for her to be so fucking scared. Sense, however, didn’t keep her stomach from feeling like it was dropping out just checking into the stupid clinic.

The check in process was relatively easy, simple and fast enough that she didn’t have to let go of Adaine’s hand the entire time, squeezing it gratefully as they took a seat in the small waiting room. Adaine sat close to her on a squashy loveseat, their hips pressed close together as they kept their hands intertwined, rested in Kristen’s lap.

Aelwyn rolled her eyes at the two of them as she sat in the chair across from them. Kristen figured it had something to do with what Aelwyn often referred to as the Bad Kids' clingy codependency issues, but she just kept quiet, shaking her head as she picked up a magazine from the side table next to her.

“It can’t be that bad,” Adaine reasoned quietly, not seeming to be talking to anyone in particular. “Babies get shots. It’s not like they would torture babies.”

Humming, Kristen just let her leg bounce and tried to convince herself that Adaine was right. She had to be right, she was one of the smartest people Kristen knew. That assuredness was tempered by the fact that she could feel Adaine shaking next to her. “D’ya need Boggy?”

“I feel like animals in a medical building might be discouraged.” Her voice was steady, reasonable, but Kristen could feel her gripping her hand tighter. Kristen bounced her knee, trying to let out the excess energy buzzing under her skin in an attempt to stay steady, not wanting to make it worse for her friend. She was fine.

“He’s magic and an ESA, if someone says something I will banish them,” Aelwyn said boredly, not even looking up from her magazine. “Summon the frog, Adaine. You can’t get your shot if you pass out from panicking.”

Rolling her eyes, her panic subsided for the moment in her need to be annoyed by her sister. Adaine huffed as she pulled her hand out of Kristen’s, needing it to summon Boggy. As soon as he was in her lap she was curled tight around him, squeezing him close to her chest.

Significantly calmer, Adaine shoved a hand into her jacket, pulling something out and shoving it onto Kristen’s lap before she could even process what was happening. Kristen picked up the tangle easily, collapsing it into itself and pulling it apart over and over again, letting out a breath she didn’t know she was holding as she let herself fidget.

“We are fine,” Adaine sighed, leaning her head on Kristen’s shoulder. “We’ve killed a dragon. And literally so many people. A shot– that’s nothing. We’re fine.”

“Abernant?” a nurse called from the front.

“Adaine or Aelwyn?” Aelwyn asked, setting her magazine to the side.

The nurse looked up from her clipboard, seeming to note the sisters. “Oh, well we can actually take the both of you back if you’d both be ok with that?”

Aelwyn raised her eyebrows, looking across at Adaine, clearly letting her take point.

“Yeah, sure,” Adaine nodded, standing quickly as she held Boggy in her arms. “See you on the other side?” she smiled at Kristen, eyes wide as she bounced on her heels.

“On the other side,” she agreed, letting a smile creep onto her face as the nurse gave them odd looks, already ushering Aelwyn down the hallway and into the clinic. Krsiten watched as Adaine followed after them, the warm assuredness slowly fading as she felt the smile slip from her face.

Groaning, she shoved her head into her hands, rubbing at her eyes as if that could assuage the anxiety she could feel creeping back up. It was so dumb. It was just a couple of shots and then she got to go home and she wouldn't have to deal with this stuff for a long while except… she would. She would have to deal with it because even if she hadn’t told anyone, she still felt like shit and could barely breath which made it hard to walk, let alone do the practical stuff she needed to do for adventuring, so her party was going to find out eventually. They would find out and rat her out to Jawbone who would look all sad and disappointed that she hadn’t just told him in the first place and then she’d have to go back to the doctor which is why she didn’t want to tell Jawbone, but it didn’t even matter because it was never going end.

“Applebees?”

It took her a moment to understand that her name was being called. Looking up from her spiral, the nurse, a different one than the one who had taken Adaine and Aelwyn, was staring at her, eyebrows knit together.

“Kristen Applebees?” she asked tentatively, as if scared to spook her.

Kristen just huffed and nodded, far too used to ‘scared baby animal’ treatment at that point. She stood, following the nurse as she led her back the same hallway she had watched Adaine and Aelwyn go down. In the back of her head she half wondered why it was less exhausting than just getting out of the house, though she figured the amount of adrenaline pumping through her had something to do with it.

The nurse led her into what looked like an exam room, only a little smaller, and directed her to take a seat in a chair. Kristen sat, leg bouncing as she fidgeted with the tangle, watching as the nurse went through her file, pulling things out as she did.

“Ok, looks like we are playing catch up today,” she noted, pulling out a number of syringes and snapping on a pair of gloves. It would be impressive, how fast and easy she made it look, if Kristen could feel anything other than the growing gnawing anxiety in her chest. “Better late than never, that’s what I always say, just gonna have a little bit of a sore arm tomorrow, that’s all. Looks like these are your first shot’s, is that right?”

“Yep,” Kristen nodded, tracking her movement as she pulled out vials. “I’m a shot virgin, so go easy on me,” she joked, feeling her shoulders relax even the smallest bit as she got a laugh from the nurse.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m a professional. It will be quick and easy, just a couple pinches, really. Now, do you know if you are prone to fainting, have issues with blood, get queasy easily?”

“No, I’m a cleric, I’ve dealt with my fair share of blood, I should be fine.”

“Ooh, an adventurer,” she cooed as she loaded up the shots, pulling from the vials and into the syringes. “Ok, just a run down, we have four shots lined up for you so I’m gonna do two in each arm, that sound alright?”

“You're the professional,” Kristen shrugged, figuring she knew what was best.

The nurse moved to Kristen’s right side, pulling her sleeve up as she wiped down her outer arm with an alcohol wipe, Kristen wrinkling her nose at the smell. “Relax your arm for me, ok?”

Kristen just nodded, doing her best to let her arm go limp, focusing on keeping her legs from bouncing to not mess anything up.

“All right, first shot, one, two–” There was no three, just a tiny pinch as Kristen felt the needle going into her arm.

It was fine. She had had worse a hundred times over, a little needle was nothing. She let herself breath out, relief washing over her as she watched the nurse pull the needle back out, eyes catching on the droplet of blood that had caught on the needle as it was thrown in the sharps bin.

The room felt hot, then too cold, Kristen only barely registering that she was sweating before her vision started to dot and she went down.

With the amount of times that she had woken up in hospital rooms within the last few months of her life, Kristen really thought she would be used to it at this point.

Groaning, she pinched her eyes tighter shut to block out the stupid, too bright lights that were trying to beat the headache further into her skull. It took her a moment to find her bearings, feeling the paper sheet under her and taking in the smell of antiseptic. The clinic. Right. She was a fainter apparently.

Squinting her eyes open, she took a deep breath as she looked around the room, Adaine and Aelwyn looking back at her with varying looks of concern.

“You have to eat the cookie or else the nurses get mad at you.”

They were in a different room than she was in before, this one bigger, a couple of beds lining the wall next to the one she was in, Adaine sitting cross legged in the one next to her. Looking to her side she also saw a small tray, a cookie and a juice box sitting on top.

“What’re you guys–”

“Adaine fainted,” Aelwyn filled in before she could finish, leaning over her sister to steal Kristen’s juice box. “Really, I get it from a squishy wizard but a cleric? For a party that is supposed to be world saving, your tolerance for your own blood is abysmal.”

Kristen was barely tracking, trying to follow and failing as the juice box was pressed into her hand, the straw put in for her.

“I’m serious about the cookie by the way,” Adaine told her, ignoring her sister’s remark. “The nurses here seem sweet, but they are… scary. Eat the cookie.”

She took a sip of her juice, shaking her head as the sugar hit her tongue, grabbing the cookie as well. “It’s different in battle,” she said after taking a bite, chewing slowly as she processed what they both had said, still feeling deeply out of it. “If I’m like, bleeding but my friends need to be healed I can deal with that. It’s different when it’s not life or death.”

“Sure,” Aelwyn hummed, rolling her eyes as she pulled out her crystal.

“Oh, good, you're awake!” The nurse swung into the room, eyes roving over the three of them before settling on Kristen. “Eat the rest of that cookie and you should be feeling better in no time. I called your emergency contact–”

Krsiten felt her throat tighten, choking on the bit of cookie she was trying to swallow.

“ –only to find that you all have the same one, so a Mr. Jawbone O’Shaughnessey is on his way.”

Looking up from her crystal, Aelwyn huffed. “I drove us, there was no need to call him.”

“All the power to you, but both of your sisters fainted, I don’t need you going down, too. Just a precaution.”

Kristen took a large sip of her juice, coughing as she tried to get herself not to choke, mind moving faster than she could follow as the nurse moved out of the room. Jawbone was coming. The nurse's words moved over and over in her brain, rotating them around as she finally got herself to swallow.

“Well, I’m driving myself home, I don’t need to sit through some sappy crap in the car just because the two of you can’t handle a needle,” Aelwyn snarked, knocking her shoulder against Adaine’s as her sister scowled at her.

“It’s not our fault we fainted,” Adaine huffed, curling around Boggy as he sat pleasant faced in her lap, staring his steady gaze at Kristen. “At least tell him to bring Sandra Lynn so she can ride in the car with you, he will be worse if he knows you're riding alone.”

Aelwyn made a face at that, typing furiously on her crystal under the threat of Jawbone doting on her any further.

“I just want to go home,” Adaine groaned, burying her face in Boggy.

Kristen felt a small smile cross her face despite it all, feeling her headache subside for a moment as she watched the two of them, Adaine leaning on her sister and Aelwyn, despite her standoffish look as she glared at her crystal, leaning back.

She had fainted. She had been through hell and back and then back again, and still had fire to walk through ahead. But she had her people in front of her. She had Jawbone and Sandra Lynn who were probably dropping everything to come and get them. Her friends were most likely going to tease them relentlessly when they found out they both had fainted, and Kristen was going to love every second of it. No matter what happened, she had them.

“Yeah, me too," she said fondly. She was ready to go home.