Work Text:
corin observed the boy laying on the cold table.
he was asleep for now; corin could tell, because whenever he was awake, it wouldn't take long for him to start sobbing.
he reflected on how they'd met, for the third time in just the two days they'd been together.
a dark and foggy bridge, all quiet except for the rain, until the silence had been broken by coughing.
the situation had been rather frightening, in retrospect; corin knew that a battle had been fought there just a week before his trip, and the remnants of it still remained. splatters of blood, here and there. broken bottles.
but when a coughing and wounded figure had crawled towards him, all he'd felt was fascination.
the boy, silco as he called himself, had looked completely miserable then.
covered in mud and silt, clothes torn and bloodied and completely soiled, a heavy stench of unclean river water making corin's eyes water as he approached him.
but the most concerning part was his face. a deep gash covered one half of his face, his eye closed despite the torn eyelids.
the rest of him was not much better, covered in bruises and cuts, as if he'd been in an intense physical fight that he's never quite recovered from.
he'd been terrified, barely clinging to life. he'd grabbed at corin's clothes with very little strength, trying to choke out words but only managing to cough out weak pleas.
in a moment of strange fondness for this pathetic river creature, corin had picked him up into his arms, and carried him all the way to the cave he'd been keeping his equipments in for months now.
he'd strapped the boy to the table and gotten to work on the most lethal of his injuries. the boy had thrashed around, screamed, wet himself, and, eventually passed out, which had made the rest of corin's treatments much easier to conduct. he'd bagun by cleaning the wounds. removing any foreign objects (primarily dirt and river water) from them, disinfecting them, carefully picking ointments to slather on scratches and burns.
then, he'd do the rest of it.
sutures, bandages, two splints on his ankle and wrist.
the eye had been the most interesting, from a medical perspective.
silco no longer seemed to have any control over the eyelid of his right eye, as corin had to move it manually. his eye was in horrible condition, having been eaten by an infection as well as repeatedly punched. the white of the eye had been filled with blood, his pupil appearing deformed.
when the boy had finally woken up again, corin had delivered the unfortunate news that there was no way for him to regain vision in the wounded eye.
unless, of course, he was willing to try a more experimental approach.
ever since that conversation, corin had been hard at work building a device that could administer shimmer directly into an eye.
and silco had been...well, resting, mostly.
over the last two days, corin had learned quite a lot about the boy. for one, he'd learned that his name was silco, and that he was from the undercity.
he'd learned that he'd taken part in the riot. he'd even admitted to quite possibly starting it.
he'd learned that a man named vander had then turned on him, attempting to drown him in the river. silco cried the most often when speaking of him in particular.
he'd also learned that silco was very quick to both anger and misery. he'd use all his existing energy to curse the very memory of his brothers and sisters who had so cruelly abandoned him, only to deflate a second later, begging for death.
he very rarely looked at corin, and when he did, his expression was one of immense grief and shame, even when he tried to hide it.
corin understood, of course, that his emotional state was a natural response to his current circumstances. and though he'd always struggled with empathy (especially expressing it towards others), he tried his best to help the boy where he could, by helping him wash himself, by giving him new clothes.
today, though, he'd decided that a more drastic change in appearance might help him accept his new form.
"what are you doing with those?"
"i thought that perhaps you'd like a haircut."
"...why did you think that?" it sounded almost like an accusation.
"personally, i have found that a physical change can often help one through a psychological one. you say that you're not that man anymore, the one who drowned? then i see no reason why you should continue to look like him."
silco didn't argue with this logic.
soon enough, silco was sitting up on the table, with corin behind him, cutting his hair.
it was a strangely intimate moment, especially with the hoodie corin had given silco pulled down to his elbows, revealing the boy's pale back, shuddering slightly in the cool air of the lab (or, more realistically, the cave).
corin placed his hand gently on his back, in a motion almost comforting.
he got to work.
//
it had been a few months now.
the two of them had grown close, in a manner of speaking.
physical intimacy had become a semi-regular occurrence between them, if only out of a mutual convenience.
most of their time spent together consisted of working on their shared project in comfortable silence, though.
it hadn't taken silco long to come around to the idea of shimmer.
after all, he'd given his own eye up as the first human experiment of its effects.
the first injection had been a struggle.
corin had allowed him to thoroughly inspect the device first, to help him get more comfortable with it, but it didn't exactly help, as the device itself looked rather intimidating.
in the end, corin had had to tie silco's hands behind his back so he wouldn't slap the device away as soon as it got close to his face, an instinct that embarrassed silco and frustrated corin.
despite the battle to actually get the device positioned onto his face, corin had eventually managed to inject silco's wounded eye, though the sheer volume of the cry the boy had let out once the needle actually pierced his cornea had nearly distracted corin from the task at hand.
even when he feigned courage, corin still saw the way his hands trembled with the effort of staying still when it came time to do the injection. he often reassured him that it would get easier with time, which silco often misinterpreted as condescension.
which was alright.
corin was all too used to being misinterpreted.
"aren't you worried they'll find you? since you've still got the same name, and all."
corin considered this for a second.
"i have been thinking of that myself. i believe you may have a point. should i change my name?"
"i think it'd be a smart move." silco shrugged.
there was a small pause.
"then you may call me...hm...singed."
at his own words, he spotted a highly rare phenomenon happening in real time; silco smiled, just a little.