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The cave smelled like rain.
Stormz stood at the mouth of it, his wings half-furled against the damp mountain air, and watched the figure huddled in the dark interior with an expression that he would have denied violently, was anything close to guilt. He had his arms crossed. His jaw was set.
He was doing this because Dol9hin had asked him to, because Dol9hin had said "I need someone I trust to handle this, and you know Dumb better than anyone,".
The demon hadn't noticed him yet.
Dumb was sitting with his back against the cave wall, knees drawn up to their chest, ruby horns catching what little light filtered in from outside. He looked smaller than Stormz remembered. That was probably the alienation—it had a way of hollowing things out, of leaving a creature technically functional in ways that were hard to name. Stormz had seen it before. He'd seen the particular quality that came over an alien-infected being when they thought no one was watching.
He'd been told the potion had to be administered soon, or it would never reach Dumb, and that he should do it now, when she was still somewhat weak.
Two days, he thought. It had been two days since the betrayal—since he had chosen Dol9hin's team, Dol9hin's mission, Dol9hin's vision, and in doing so had left Dumb standing on the other side.
He had told himself it was strategy. He had told himself it was necessity. He was still telling himself that, very firmly, as he reached into his pocket and withdrew the small green vial that Dol9hin had pressed into his hand that morning.
Get him cured, she'd instructed. I don't want any mishaps. And Stormz—be careful. He's going to be volatile.
Right. Volatile. That was one word for it.
He moved.
Stormz was fast when he wanted to be—it was one of the things that had made them good teammates, once, the way he could cross a distance before you'd registered he'd started moving.
He crossed the cave in four long strides and had his hand over Dumb's mouth. His arm across the demon's chest before she'd done more than flinch, and then there was a brief, sharp struggle—Dumb's elbow driving back hard toward Stormz's ribs, a sound that was half snarl and half something much more frightened—before Stormz pressed two fingers to the base of the demon's skull at the precise point that temporarily disrupted consciousness, and Dumb went limp.
He caught them.
He stood there for a moment in the dim cave, holding the unconscious demon, the green vial in his other hand. The smell of moisture was stronger here. He could feel the wrong-temperature quality of the alien infection in the demon's skin—slightly too warm, slightly too still.
I'm sorry, he thought, which he also would have refused to say aloud.
He uncorked the vial and pressed it to Dumb's lips.
The base was three hours of flight away, which meant three hours of carrying an unconscious demon through low cloud cover while simultaneously hoping no one looked up and noticed. Dumb was not a large person, but dead weight was dead weight, and by the time Stormz landed on the roof access and maneuvered through the hatch, his shoulders ached and his wings were complaining loudly.
He put Dumb on the bed in the spare room—his own bed, technically, which meant he was now planning to sleep on the couch, which he was absolutely not thinking about with any particular feeling—and tied the demon's hands behind their back with a length of rope, not tight enough to hurt.
He wasn't stupid enough to think Dumb would wake up grateful, and he didn't particularly want to find out what a demon with full motor control and reasons for grievance would do in the first thirty seconds of consciousness.
He set the spare key on the bedside table. He closed the curtains. He left a glass of water on the dresser, thought about it, and left a second one.
Then he went and sat on the couch and stared at the ceiling.
Dumb came back to consciousness like something being dragged up from depth.
The first thing was sensation—the pressure of something around his wrists, the soft give of a mattress, the absence of stone against their back. The second thing was smell. The room smelled like—
He was awake before he'd processed why that particular scent made every muscle in her body go rigid.
Feathers.
The room didn't smell like feathers, exactly. It smelled like whatever Stormz used to clean his things, that particular scent that she had catalogued without meaning to over months of proximity, that had lived in the back of her memory doing absolutely nothing useful until right now, when it was doing the extremely unhelpful work of identifying exactly whose space she was in.
Dumb tried to move his hands and found them fixed behind her back.
For a moment she was perfectly, completely still.
Then the panic hit, and it hit the way a wall hits—all at once, with full force and no warning.
Dumb threw himself sideways, which accomplished nothing except rolling her off-balance on the mattress. His wrists pulled against the rope. He got his legs over the side of the bed, tried to stand and the room swam. She sat back down hard, breathing through her teeth.
Think. She needed to think.
He was in Stormz's space. Stormz had her tied up. They didn't have their armor—he was in his clothes, nothing more, which meant nothing between her and whatever came through that door. He didn't have his weapons. He had horns, a tail and hands if she could get free from this damn rope and whatever he could improvise from the room, which was a bed, curtains, a dresser, two glasses of water she desperately wanted but was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of watching her drink.
Stormz had him. Stormz, who he had trusted. Stormz, who knew exactly how to fight her, who knew every habit and reflex she had, who had been there for the building of those habits and reflexes and had therefore been present for all the information he would need to counter them.
He's going to kill me, she thought, and the thought was absolutely terrifying. That's what this is. He's going to kill me properly, not on a battlefield with witnesses, he's going to do it here where no one can—
The door moved.
It moved slowly, carefully—pushed open with the particular gentleness of someone who did not want to startle what was on the other side—and Dumb scrambled back against the headboard with a sound he was going to spend a significant amount of time later pretending she hadn't made. Stormz was in the doorway.
It was the look of someone who was extremely tired and had been expecting exactly this reaction.
"I'm not—" he started.
"Don't," Dumb said, and his voice came out high and shaking, which he fixed immediately by converting it to fury. They sat up straight, glaring. "Don't—Don't you dare stand there and you tied me up—"
"Yes."
"In your—I'm in your room, you tied me up in your room, what is wrong with you—"
"You would have attacked me the second you woke up."
"I'm going to attack you now—"
"Your hands are tied behind your back."
"I have horns, Stormz, I have a tail, I will headbutt you into the next—"
"Dumb."
"Don't say my name, don't say my name like that, don't stand there with your—looking all—" He stopped. She was breathing too hard. Her chest was doing something complicated.
"What do you want," she snarled, and hated how small that came out, so he said it again, louder: "What do you want from me, just—just say it, just tell me what you're going to do, stop standing there—"
Stormz let him talk. He stood in the doorway with his wings half-folded, his arms at his sides, his face doing nothing in particular, and he just let her rant.
He yelled. They cursed at him in three languages that he’d picked up from teammates or enemies during all the years of being in servers, two of which she was fairly certain he didn't speak, although he had always been annoyingly good at picking up vocabulary.
She told him exactly what kind of person he was and exactly what they thought of his choices and exactly how he felt about white-feathered treacherous backstabbing—
He ran out of breath.
Dumb sat on the bed with his hands behind his back, her face flushed, his horns glinting in the dim light from the curtained window, breathing deeply, and glared at him.
Stormz was quiet for a moment. Then he sighed—a long, tired sound—and said: "This is temporary. I'll release you tomorrow."
They stared at him. "I don't believe you."
"I know."
"You expect me to just—"
"No. I don't expect anything." He shifted his weight slightly. The wings settled. "I'm telling you what's happening. You can believe it or not. You'll be out of here tomorrow regardless."
She searched his face for something to be angry at and found only exhaustion, which was infuriating in a completely different way, because he knew how to fight anger and had no idea what to do with someone who was simply, flatly, bone-tired.
"The ropes," he started again, after a moment. "I'll take them off when I'm sure you're not going to go for my throat the second I'm in range."
They pulled their shoulders back. "I don't need you to untie me."
"Okay."
"I can manage fine on my own."
"Okay, Dumb."
"Stop saying my name like that—"
"I'll be outside," he murmured. "Sleeping on the couch. If you need anything, shout."
She opened her mouth.
"Food, water, anything," he said. "Shout."
He closed his mouth. She glanced at the glasses of water on the dresser, which was approximately eight feet away and which he could not reach with her hands behind her back, and felt a complicated surge of feelings that she immediately buried under more glaring. "I won't need anything."
"Okay," he nodded again, and pulled the door shut behind him.
They listened to his footsteps move down the hall. He heard the couch creak—that particular low sound of someone settling their weight onto something that wasn't quite long enough for them. He had been in this base before, he remembered, when they were… before. She knew the couch. They knew it was not comfortable.
Dumb sat with his hands behind her back and the silence of the room around her, trying to feel satisfied about this.
He didn't manage it.
An hour later, his wrists started to ache.
The rope was not rough—Dumb would give Stormz that—but soft rope didn't mean it didn't cut circulation when you were sitting at an angle that put constant low pressure on the binding.
They'd tried several times to work it loose and succeeded only in pulling it tighter, which he was going to be very angry about later when they had the cognitive space for it. Right now she was focused on the dull throb radiating from her wrists up through her forearms and trying to decide how long they were willing to sit here before—
Before nothing.
He was not asking for help. He is fine.
Their hands had graduated from aching to a very specific prickling numbness that he recognized as the early stages of genuine circulatory complaint, and just because they were a demon, did not mean they were invincible, and he could just—he could just shout, it wasn't like it meant anything, they could—
She kept her mouth shut.
The door moved.
It was barely a movement—just the door swinging inward an inch, two inches, enough for one eye to look through the gap and take stock of the room.
Stormz did this with the expression of someone performing a routine check, studiously not making it into a thing, and his gaze traveled from the window to the dresser to Dumb still on the bed to their wrists.
He pushed the door open.
"I'm fine," He spoke immediately.
Stormz glanced at her wrists. He studied their face. He said nothing.
"Don't—"
He was already moving, two long strides, and Dumb pulled away instinctively, ready for something to happen. They didn't know what, they just knew that she had flinched when Stormz moved and they were furious at themself for it.
The angel was suddenly in front of them, he was tall compared to them, he'd forgotten that, or they'd stopped registering it when it was normal, but standing directly in front of Dumb now, and as he blocked the light from the window, she felt the cold edge of genuine fear. Stormz was going to hurt him and—
"Calm down." he said flatly, not unkind, just matter-of-fact in the way that their heartbeat could stop doing what it was doing because he wasn't raising his hands. He was reaching for the rope.
Dumb went completely still.
He couldn't have said why. Some weird mixture of exhaustion, adrenaline and the strange frozen-out quality of having your body's threat-response overwhelmed and defaulting to stillness.
Stormz worked at the knot with careful fingers—she felt each movement telegraphed through the pressure on their wrists—he sat there, completely frozen in place.
It took him maybe two minutes to work it loose. The rope fell away, and they felt the blood rush back into their hands in a long, stinging wave, yet he couldn't quite suppress the small sound of relief that made. He stepped back without comment.
They shoved themself into the far corner of the bed, back to the wall, and looked at him. Their hands were still tingling. He tucked them against their chest.
He looked back at them, and they recognized the expression—or she had once, when he'd known how to read him—as the end of something.
The specific look of someone who has decided this particular exchange is over. His wings shifted, a small involuntary adjustment, and he turned and walked out of the room and the door swung mostly shut behind him.
They sat in the corner and stared at nothing for a while.
Then he pressed their hands together and waited for the feeling of numbness to die down.
Nighttime arrived slowly.
The light behind the curtains went from amber to nothing. Stormz sat on the couch, doing nothing in particular and listened to the muffled sounds of Dumb in the other room—moving occasionally, the creak of the bed, the sound of the glasses of water being picked up, which he tracked with more attention than he would be willing to acknowledge.
He had the cloth ready. He had the bucket ready. He had two water bottles and a second cloth as backup because he'd been through this himself and he was not going to be caught without resources.
Dol9hin had held a bucket for him. It had been one of the more acutely uncomfortable experiences of his life—not the sickness itself, but being sick in front of someone, being helpless in front of someone, especially someone who kept saying it's alright in the particular gentle tone that made everything worse. He had not handled it with grace.
He had no expectation that Dumb would handle it with grace either.
What he was not prepared for was the sound.
It was quiet at first—a cough, then another—and he was already moving when it escalated, already across the hall when the sound of retching reached him. He pushed the door open and Dumb was on the floor, on their knees and shaking.
Bright green on the floorboards that turned Stormz's stomach in a way that had nothing to do with squeamishness—he recognized the color, he had produced that color himself, twelve hours after his own cure, and he knew exactly what it felt like from the inside.
He crossed to her and held the bucket out.
They tried to pull away from it. He made a sound—not quite a word, something lower than that, something that was mostly pain and partly the humiliation of not being able to stop—and he held the bucket steady, keeping his mouth shut. After a moment Dumb accepted it, because they didn't have a choice, and the next wave came and she couldn't do anything except endure it.
Stormz stayed behind them.
He hadn't decided to be close, exactly. It had been a functional positioning choice and he had meant to maintain a certain detached efficiency about the whole thing, the way Dol9hin had, the way a person managed an unpleasant medical necessity without making it into anything more than that.
Then he heard him crying.
Not loud. They weren't doing it loudly, which somehow made it worse—the small sounds she was making were the sounds of someone who was trying very hard not to make sounds and was losing the fight badly.
He was trembling. Stormz could feel it from here, the long waves of shaking that went through their whole body, her tail was wrapped around nothing, and he looked—
He looked so tired.
The demon standing in front of him looked like someone who had been surviving on pure stubbornness for a very long time and had just run out of the last of it.
"I know." he heard himself say softly, which was not what he had planned to say, but it came out anyway. "It passes."
She didn't respond.
"It peaked around hour two for me," he continued, keeping his voice even, trying his hardest not to wrap his hands around Dumb, stroke his hair and kiss his forehead, and to reassure them that everything would be okay, instead of this... cold distance. "It—It gets better after that."
Dol9hin had told him the same thing and he hadn't believed her either. He said it anyway.
The waves came and went. He held the bucket steady and he stayed where he was. Stormz watched them shake and he did not let himself do anything else because they were enemies now, this was a medical obligation, this was Dol9hin's request, this was—
"Do something," Dumb begged, and their voice was wrecked, completely wrecked, and she was still crying, and his hands were shaking—"Please, please, do something, it hurts—"
Stormz froze.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to understand what he was about to do and make the conscious decision not to stop himself.
He reached for Dumb.
He got his arm around her steadily, and they made a sound that wasn't quite a word when he made contact, a small wrecked sound, like an abused animal who didn't know what to think of this physical touch, but she didn't pull away.
Stormz brought the cloth up and cleaned Dumb’s face—vomit and tear tracks, carefully and gently, aware one wrong move would cause the demon to flinch and back away.
He was cupping their face to clean it, one hand on his jaw, the cloth moving gently across his cheekbones, and Dumb leaned into his hands, just a slight tilt, a small instinctive press of their face against his palm, the reflex of someone whose body had bypassed conscious objection entirely. He whimpered, low in the back of their throat, and he turned their face slightly into Stormz's hand like he was the only thing keeping her grounded.
Oh.
He pressed the water bottle into their hands. She drank it—both hands around the bottle firmly, shaking as if he was afraid to drop it, getting through it with sheer determination—and when he was done, they gradually lowered it.
Stormz reached up and put his hand in her hair, because Dumb was still trembling, and because he knew from experience that having something steady to lean against helped. The angel moved his fingers slowly and he felt some of the shaking begin to ease.
Dumb let out a small whine, and it made Stormz's heart break into millions of little pieces.
Then she turned and pressed themself against him, fully, without warning—grabbed onto the front of his shirt with both hands and pushed his face against his chest and trembled there, crying softly. The grip on the fabric was white-knuckled and so incredibly desperate, yet they were so cold, somehow, despite the fever-heat of the sickness. He was cold in the way of something that had been alone and fighting for a long time.
He wrapped his arms around them.
Stormz sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling Dumb with him, his wings coming around the both of them without quite being directed, an involuntary response, and he settled her against his side, keeping his hand moving in Dumb's soft hair and letting her cry into his shirt.
He was whimpering quietly into the fabric, just small sounds of misery and exhaustion, that pressed somewhere behind his sternum and made breathing slightly harder than it should have been.
He could feel her press closer every time his hand moved through Dumb's hair—could feel the unconscious way Dumb kept closing the distance he hadn't decided to close, moving against him without acknowledging they were doing it. Her hands stayed knotted in the fabric of his shirt.
"I know, Dumb. It hurts. It will be okay." Stormz murmured, keeping his voice low to prevent startling the other.
They cried themself out eventually, tears running dry, and the trembling eased degree by degree, his breathing slowing, and the grip on his shirt didn't loosen but stopped tugging. He kept his hand in her hair, and his wings protectively around Dumb. The room was quiet.
Stormz felt the exact moment Dumb fell asleep—the complete giving-up of tension, the way his whole body finally just stopped fighting—and he sat there in the dark and exhaled a sigh of relief.
The demon was still tightly pressed against him. She had not chosen, not consciously at least, to be here. Stormz was aware of that. He was also aware of the way they'd leaned into his hands, the small sounds she'd made, the way their body had tracked toward warmth with the helpless precision of something that had been without affection for too long.
Touch-starved, he thought to himself, and then immediately hated his very being for noticing.
The angel shifted carefully, afraid to wake Dumb, until he could lie back against the pillow without disturbing him. Dumb moved with him without waking, curled against his side with his tail wrapped around Stormz's leg and her face still pressed into his chest.
Stormz pulled the blanket over both of them with one hand. He kept his hand where it was, fingers resting in their hair.
This is temporary, Stormz told himself. He don't know he's doing this. Tomorrow Dumb would be furious.
Both of these things were true.
He closed his eyes anyway and let sleep take him.
Morning came through the curtains.
Dumb woke up, and they were warm. Their face was pressed against something solid, and for approximately three seconds he was simply comfortable in the animal way of having been deeply unconscious and having woken up surrounded by affection.
Then they remembered everything.
The sequence took less than a second: where am I, what is this, what is against my face, and then the dreading thought erupted: I am against Stormz's chest.
Fuck.
He had cried into Stormz's chest. He had held onto the angel, clinging onto Stormz, begging for help. She had let herself be touched, comforted and soothed like something miserable and pathetic. Worst of all, some part of them had wanted it. Some awful exhausted traitorous part of them had leaned into his hands and followed warmth like a starving animal.
Humiliation hit so hard it made their stomach twist.
Dumb needed to get up. He needed to get up immediately, needed to put distance between himself and—
They tried to move.
He had an arm around her.
Dumb hadn't noticed what position they were in—she was curled into Stormz’s side, or he was curled around her, Dumb wasn't sure which, and his arm was across their back and his wing was over both of them and she couldn't extract herself without waking him and they needed—God, they needed a second to think—
Their first instinct was anger.
Not at Stormz. At himself.
At the humiliating vulnerability of this. At the way her body had apparently decided that being held was safe enough to sleep through. At the mortifying realization that sometime during the night she'd stopped bracing for attack and simply... relaxed in his grasp.
The thought made heat crawl up his neck in pure embarrassed fury.
Dumb squirmed a little, trying to find a spot where he could escape.
Stormz stirred, arm tightening.
She froze instantly, every muscle locking up.
The angel made a sound akin to a soft chirp, similar to a bird’s, and then his hand moved unconsciously, and his fingers went into their hair, stroking slowly, exactly the same way he had the night before.
The sensation hit him like a physical blow.
Not fear. Worse.
Comfort.
Dumb’s body reacted before their pride did: shoulders loosening by a fraction, breath catching and then leaving them in something dangerously close to a whimper of relief before she managed to stop it. Heat spread slow and awful through his chest, the unbearable relief of being touched gently after too long without it.
No, she thought immediately, furious. No.
His face moved against the top of their head, nuzzling. Dumb could feel it—the pressure of his forehead, then his cheek, then the soft exhale of breath against her hair that accompanied—
"I love you.” Stormz murmured.
She stopped breathing.
The words hit him so hard he felt physically dizzy for a moment.
He probably didn't even know he'd said it. His breathing was still slow and even. He was still mostly asleep.
Dumb stayed perfectly still.
Their heart was pounding so hard it hurt.
Because the worst part—the absolute worst part—was that she believed him.
The truth of it was everywhere now that they looked directly at it. In the careful way he'd cleaned vomit and tears off their face without making Dumb feel disgusting. In the fact that he'd prepared water and cloths. In the way he'd held them all night without asking for anything in return. In the wing still curved protectively over both of them even in sleep.
And God, that made her angry too.
Angry because Dumb wanted to hate him cleanly. Angry because it would have been easier if his kindness had felt manipulative instead of genuine. Angry because some exhausted, horribly vulnerable part of them kept melting under every absent-minded stroke of his hand through their hair.
She could leave right now.
She should leave right now.
Instead they stayed there listening to his heartbeat.
Dumb’s face was still against Stormz’s chest. They could feel the warmth of him surrounding her from every side—arm around his back, wing over him, fingers in their hair—and after the sickness and and the endless exhaustion of the previous day, their body reacted with gratitude.
Safe, something deep inside them whispered.
The realisation made him want to crawl out of his own skin.
He had spent so long surviving by refusing softness that now his whole body was clinging to it traitorously, like it had finally found water after a drought. Every slow stroke through their hair pulled another fraction of tension out of them despite their desperate efforts to stay angry.
Stormz shifted slightly in his sleep, tightening his hold without waking.
Dumb's immediate instinct should have been to pull away.
Instead she felt herself instinctively settle closer for one awful half-second before catching themself.
Humiliation flared again.
What is wrong with me?
But underneath the embarrassment and anger was something quieter.
Relief.
Relief at not being alone last night. Relief at being held while everything hurt. Relief at waking up warm instead of cold, sick and abandoned.
Outside the curtained window the morning carried on indifferently, sunlight creeping slowly through the fabric. Dumb listened to the outside’s morning calls in silence.
Later, Dumb told himself, Later, I’ll yell at Stormz.
They meant it.
Probably.
For now, though, they couldn't quite make themself move.
Slowly, almost resentfully, she closed her eyes again.
The hand in her hair didn't stop.