Chapter Text
Her body feels rather like it’s ripping itself apart.
She’s dizzy - not in a fun, all the work-work-working I’ve been doing has finally paid off and I’m finally getting the recognition I deserve from everyone way. More like a something happened to me something bad and I don’t know what way.
She’s hurt. Some part of her body is hurt. She doesn’t know what’s been hurt but she knows that it hurts. Like crackling underneath her skin - like fire, trying to bubble up and out. It’s not often that she gets hurt - not often that anyone gets hurt, really - but she definitely has, and whatever happened is bad. And whoever did it?
Well, she knows that much, at least.
The bullet burning through her body is unmistakably human.
༄↟𖠰⋆☽˚.✩‧₊𖠰ᨒ ོ ˚
It’s really not often that Cassie takes time off. She loves what she does - like, seriously, she loves what she does. She’s not lying (most of the time). She wouldn’t give it up for anything.
Honestly, the only reason she’s even out here is Dana. Dana Evans, the damn hypocrite, charge nurse and Cassie’s tentative best friend; she’d all but forced Cassie to use some of her PTO like the Pitt wasn’t drowning enough without forcing some of their most experienced out in the name of “mandated self-care”.
“Cassie, you take any more shifts and I swear to god you’ll be our next patient,” Dana had said, a hand on her shoulder. Friendly, but trying to shake fear into her. Funny.
“You’re one to talk,” Cassie had snorted, arms crossed, and Dana just outright guffawed.
“Please. I’m different.”
Cassie hadn’t said anything else to her face, but if she passive-aggressively hummed you are not the exception whenever she got within ten feet’s distance of Dana? Well.
She can take care of herself, which is what she insists to Dana after hours, when they’re both smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. And Dana tells her that she knows that, but for all she knows it, Cassie doesn’t really show it.
Dana pleads with her to take some time off. If not for her, for the poor med students under her tutelage who can tell how she’s becoming steadily more irritable. And Cassie understands. Chad and his grating girlfriend have been getting on her nerves lately, and she knows that Harrison isn’t blind, that he can see the tension stirring between them. It’s not like Cassie doesn’t try to be cordial with her - she just makes it so hard. And she tries not to show it in front of Harrison, but she hadn’t considered that it might bleed into her work. With the patient satisfaction at a ghastly 8% and dropping, Cassie knows they can’t afford that.
So she agrees.
And that’s how Cassie finds herself in a nice, warm little cabin out in the middle of the woods with no one around for miles. It’s supposed to be peaceful, or that’s what the link Dana had sent her proclaimed. She’d said that she had a discount on it but she’d rather kill herself than spend a weekend in the woods. So Cassie had graciously taken it, trying not to act like she was any bit excited at the prospect on account of being very, very bitter about being forced to take time off. A week. A whole week.
The cabinets in the cabin are stocked full - bagels, bread, milk, cheese, cream cheese, honey, hot chocolate mix - anything and everything Cassie could want, basically. She puts some milk on the stove, since using a microwave feels wrong, somehow. She takes out the hot chocolate mix (Swiss Miss, which is objectively the best even though it’s the most basic one. Classic is good) and the marshmallows (almost so big it feels egregious).
Begrudgingly, it’s nice.
Harrison is spending the week with his father, so Cassie is all alone. She wishes at least that Harrison were with someone else, but, well, beggars can’t be choosers, right? She tries to have faith in them - it won’t be too bad, and this week is for Cassie to relax, not worry. She’s relaxing. She’s not worrying.
She settles into the couch, soft and a bit itchy. There’s a TV in the cabin with a bunch of different streaming services, and a small library of books underneath the coffee table.
Well. She’s been meaning to start a series, right? And Harrison has been loving Lord of the Rings lately.
She sighs. Contented. Maybe - just maybe - this won’t be terrible.
‧₊˚❀༉‧₊˚. 𐦍༘⋆
Everything is terrible, and she is for sure dying.
She’s figured out, by way of water, that her wing is hurt. Ripped through, to be exact, which explains a lot. Wings are not meant to be touched. Wings are intimate. Wings are special.
Wings, when in public with no backup, are meant to be hidden. But she can’t exactly retract when her wing is ripped.
She’s never been conservative with her wings. When she’s with other fairies, in her den, safe, comfortable, wings are fine. She’ll even peacock around, being all show-offy. Her wings are certainly not the most impressive thing about her - she’s a scientist! - but she knows they look pretty.
Looked.
They looked pretty.
Now she’s outside. She has no idea where she is. She hasn’t seen another fairy in god knows how long. And her wings should be away. She’s being reckless. She’s putting herself in more danger than she’s already in, defenseless like this.
God, she feels like she’s dying.
Her body burns from the inside out. Everything, everything, everything hurts, and her vision fades in and out and in and out and in. Her stomach rolls, and she would lean on something for support and just a second’s rest if it weren’t for her wings. But she can’t. She can’t.
She has to keep walking until she finds something, someone, anyone, anyfauna that can help her. Tears spring to her eyes as her feet, always bare, hit branch and thorn - without her wings, she can’t hover over the grisly forest floor. Away from home, there is no patch of it that is safe. She can’t protect herself - can’t even protect her feet.
God. She’s dying.
༄↟𖠰⋆☽˚.✩‧₊𖠰ᨒ ོ ˚
The book is nice, but Cassie can’t read for that long.
The cabin isn’t big, by any means, but there’s two bedrooms - probably meant for a couple or family vacation - and Cassie figures she can probably find something in the rooms to do. She hadn’t packed much with her, not really sure what people do in quaint cabins out in the woods. She has her sewing kit and some cloth, but she doesn’t really have much inspiration at the moment, and it’s a bit too cold outside for her to go looking for any.
She opens the door to the bedroom she isn’t using, just as bare. There’s a couple of drawers and the bathroom. She decides to go inside the bathroom, first.
The soaps are a lot more masculine - woodsy, musky scents and cologne free of charge. The ones in her own bathroom are more floral, sweet, soft. There’s a perfume bottle with a scent so sickly sweet she nearly keeled over when she’d smelled it. She figures she’ll probably take these into her own bathroom for later use. The drawers are mostly empty except for towels and toothpaste, yet no toothbrushes, which is a bit odd, but. Maybe they’d just forgotten to restock or something.
Moving back into the bedroom, she walks over to the drawers at the nightstand, hoping that maybe someone before her had left behind something - anything, really. But no, as she probably should’ve expected, it’s just an old, dusty Bible, and she’d bet a lot of money that it hasn’t been touched since it first hit the drawer.
Sighing, she heads back into the living room. She could cook, but she doesn’t have much of a craving for anything right now, and standing up for hours on end is low on the list of things she wants to do at the moment. It’s been so long since she’s been well and truly alone that she’s not really sure what to do with herself. Vaguely, she wishes she had a game to play, maybe the Animal Crossing game that her younger coworkers are obsessed with. And sure, she’d just pull out her kit, but she’s a bit too tired to focus on threading the needle and deciding what stitch a design requires and even what design to do.
She sighs and turns the TV on. It’s small, a bit slow, but Cassie doesn’t really mind. She never usually has the time to watch shows, and any movies she watches these days are with Harrison. She spends a lot of her free time at bars, not to drink - not anymore - but to pick up people, to rent out seedy motels, and, well.
So the point is that she hasn’t really watched anything in a while. And, she figures as she boots up HBO, there’s probably a show on there that’ll catch her interest. Just enough to turn off her brain and maybe even fall asleep.
There’s a thought.
‧₊˚❀༉‧₊˚. 𐦍༘⋆
Her eyes are nearly completely filled with tears of pain, sliding hot down her cheeks as she tries to suck in gasps of air. It’s hard to see anything at this point, and not for lack of trying.
She leans up against a tree and coughs up - something. She’s not aware of much of anything right now, much less what’s coming out of her body to fertilize the trees.
Her head is spinning now, but in the distance she can make out what looks to be a human cottage. She’s loathe to ask a human for help - a human did this to her - but where else will she go? Either they let her in and she can heal by herself, or they’ll just shoot her on the porch and she can be put out of her misery.
Either way, it’s the best choice she has right now.
It’s ironic - she was the last person she would’ve bet on that this would happen to. She’d heard the horror stories back home and she’d always rested easy at the knowledge that that could never happen to her, she’d never be that stupid. She was too focused on her studies, anyway, and then she was too focused on trying to get people to take her seriously, young as she was.
The one time - the only time she’d ever tried to just let go and have a nice time for once - and it happened to her.
That’s just her luck, she guesses.
༄↟𖠰⋆☽˚.✩‧₊𖠰ᨒ ོ ˚
Cassie is nearly asleep with boredom when someone knocks on the door.
Look, in her defense - she isn’t used to this kind of thing. She’s always in some form of work mode, whether it’s in the Pitt, watching over Harrison, or out in the field with Kiara (and Whitaker, lately). Being left to her own devices, with no one else around…
Well, she’s never claimed to be good at entertaining herself.
So she’s jolted awake at a loud knocking at the cabin door - they’re fairly secluded, so she doesn’t know who would be outside, especially when it’s so dark out. She checks her phone - it’s 11 p.m. Jesus Christ. Did she really leave the TV running for that long?
She hauls herself off the couch and forces herself to go check out whatever’s happening. She’s half-convinced she hallucinated it, especially when there’s no second knock, but she decides to check anyways.
She opens the door and -
when she looks down, what looks to be a maybe twenty year old girl is lying on the floor.
“Jesus-!”
There’s glitter all over her body, probably body glitter from a party. The girl is probably drunk off her ass, and Cassie frowns.
“Come in, come in,” she says, “let me get a look at you.”
The girl is deceptively light when she goes to pick her up off the porch, but Cassie still winces as she gets up. The girl is barely aware of what’s happening, maybe even barely conscious, and Cassie’s heart pangs. She doesn’t look like a typical party girl - her clothes are torn and she has no shoes on, her feet blistered. She can’t imagine what must’ve happened.
She sets her on the dining table, just so she can get a better look at her injuries. She’s wearing fake wings, so maybe a costume party? One of her wings is badly ripped, and Cassie moves to touch it, when -
She jerks back from her touch.
“No,” she moans.
It’s the only thing she’s said so far, and Cassie seizes the opportunity.
“Hey, what’s your name, honey?” she asks, but the girl is already zoning back out, and Cassie slaps her cheek a couple times, holding her face up. “C’mon, I just need your name, sweetheart.”
“V-Vic,” she stutters out.
“Okay, Vic,” Cassie smiles. She’s getting somewhere. “Do you know what happened?”
The girl - Vic - just moans in pain again.
“Okay,” Cassie says, mostly to herself. “I’ll get you some ointment for your feet first, okay?”
Cassie remembers before she got sober - getting blackout drunk, and the terrifying mornings after when she had a pounding headache, several items she had never seen before in her life, and no idea of where she had woken up. Usually, it was the bar or the street - she doesn’t want that to happen to this girl.
She digs in her bag for some ointment and comes up with Neosporin. She’d brought all kinds of medicines on this trip - better safe than sorry, right? She figures she’ll give Vic Aquaphor in the morning to soothe the pain.
Vic is still on the table, but she looks a little more sober and panicky now. She keeps trying to twist back to see something and wincing in pain.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asks.
“My - my wing,” Vic whimpers. “It’s ripped.”
Cassie hums in sympathy. “They’re really pretty,” she says. “I’m sorry about them.”
“Could you - fix?”
Cassie raises her eyebrows. “I - well, honey, first I need to put some ointment on your feet. And then, uh, you can take them off and I’ll try to fix them while you sleep?”
Vic shakes her head. “I can’t take them off.”
Cassie kneels on the floor and uncaps the Neosporin, squirting some into her hands. She coats her palms with the ointment and starts to massage Vic’s feet, and she sighs in relief. Her breathing gets back to normal, just a bit. It’s then that Cassie realizes how excruciatingly slow her breath had been, when she picked her up off her porch.
“I need,” Vic starts, then loses her train of thought.
“You need?”
“My wings - please,”
The girl is delirious and in pain. And Cassie has a sewing kit, and she figures it can’t really do any harm, so…
“Alright,” she says. She rubs the ointment into Vic’s skin, and steps into the kitchen to wash her hands off. She grabs her sewing kit from where her backpack is sitting on the kitchen counter (sue her, alright) and brings it over to Vic.
“I’m just gonna do stitches, alright?”
She puts the thread in her mouth and wets it so it’s easier to thread the needle, then starts on it.
Strangely, Vic’s wings tremble when she gets close to them. She tries to hold them steady, but every time she does, Vic jerks back again. So she keeps her hand dead steady instead, stitching the tear together, and it seems like the stress leaves Vic body as she does. Her wings stop shaking so much, and as Cassie knots her first stitch off, she realizes that there’s no strap on the wings. They’re just… on her body.
She figures they’re maybe connected to the shirt she’s wearing, but then, the shirt is a plain white tank, a stark contrast from the big, pink, shimmering wings protruding from her back.
It’s almost like -
But come on. Fairies aren’t real.
So Cassie ignores it and keeps stitching her wings, whispering affirmations and “you’re doing so good, hon”s every time she knots a stitch. Vic is white-knuckling the table, her head bent down, but she seems to be doing better and better, so Cassie figures she’s doing something right.
It doesn’t take long for her to be done, and when she is, Vic is in a considerably better state.
“Thank you,” she says, her breath having come back to her. “I can - I’ll just be out, right?”
“No you won’t,” Cassie says. “You’re still hurt. How are you planning on getting home, hon?”
Vic thinks about this for a few moments, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. “I…”
“Do you have a phone?”
“...no?”
“Is there anyone I can call?”
Vic’s face goes through several emotions at once before landing on defeated as she says, “no.”
“Then you’re staying here, at least for the night,” Cassie says, adamant.
She watches the fight leave Vic’s eyes, and she nods in agreement.
“I’ll get you a jacket, alright? You can take a shower in the spare room. I’ll get you soap. Or - wait, hold on.”
Cassie has some fuzzy slippers she’d brought with her, and she doesn’t think Vic walking on hardwood flooring would be ideal, so she runs and gets them from her bedroom. She’s never really used them anyways - they were a gift from somebody she doesn’t quite remember, and she’d only kept them because she didn’t know who else would use them.
When she comes back to the dining room, Vic’s wings are mysteriously gone. She decides not to comment on it. Not only does she not have the energy for this in the slightest, but the girl probably doesn’t want to be pestered with questions.
“Here, wear these, I’ll take you to the shower,” she says, and Vic tentatively slides her feet into the slippers, slowly sliding off the table. Cassie brings Vic’s arm up and over her own shoulders and lets the girl lean on her as she leads the two of them to the bedroom.
“The shower’s just in there, alright?” she says, pointing into the bathroom. “If you want, you can sleep now and shower in the morning.”
“I’ll, hm, the morning,” Vic mumbles. Her eyes are already half-lidded, and Cassie supposes she should’ve expected that.
“‘Kay,” Cassie says. She helps Vic onto the bed, and the poor girl falls asleep almost as soon as she hits the pillow. Cassie smiles, rueful. The girl is gonna have the worst headache in the morning.
If she was even drunk, that is.
Yeah, there’s something off about her. Cassie’s not stupid. In her 40-odd years, she’s never really examined the possibility of the supernatural, of other, more magical creatures living amongst them. But, seeing the girl fast asleep in the bed right now, she can’t really deny that they must exist.
Of course, maybe there’s a logical explanation for why the girl was so adamant that she fix her wing, and maybe there’s a logical explanation as to why the wings are suddenly nowhere to be seen.
Yeah, maybe there’s a logical explanation, but Cassie highly doubts it.
She pulls the covers over the girl, smoothing out her hair and pulling it off of her face. And, as if possessed by a bout of insanity for a moment, she presses a kiss to her forehead.
Sweet dreams, Vic.