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Blade’s laughing.
The motion makes petals in his chest unfurl, each one sharper and redder and more beautiful than the last. If he laughs long enough and hard enough, he could bloom a garden of them inside his ribcage.
The presence above him smells like a storm warning. “Stop,” it says. “You’re hurting yourself.”
That’s the point, Blade wants to say, but the words won’t fit between the laughs. A hand presses over his mouth, pale and cold like white jade, and the shock of it against his feverish skin stills the noise crawling up his throat. He quiets.
The hand moves away. As if dreaming, he watches it pick at the shards in his chest, delicately, like the pliers of a surgeon would.
Even dyed in blood, those hands are still as memory. A nightmare or a hundred ago, he’d seen them shake: the first time they’d pulled a spear from out between his ribs, dripping long ribbons of gore. They did not shake for him again. He wonders if they still remembered how, or if that was just another thing he’d taken and buried on unconsecrated ground.
It barely hurts when the last shard is pulled out. Those hands whose tremors he’d robbed touch him so gently that it must ache. He wants to kiss them. He wants to wrap them around his throat.
A compromise: he does neither. He says instead, as if the answer isn’t obvious, “What are you doing?” His voice comes out scraped raw, like fish-scales beneath a fillet knife.
Dan Heng’s lashes flick up. There’s a mark on his bottom lip, a fine wet splinter pearling red. Blade doesn’t remember putting it there, but he must have.
“Your wounds need to be cleaned and bandaged,” Dan Heng says. His voice is scrupulously blank. From his coat pockets he pulls out rolls of white gauze, tightly packed and pristine. Distantly, Blade thinks it would be a shame to stain them.
He tastes saltwater in the back of his throat. Dan Heng’s fingers bow, cloudhymn dripping off their tips like sculpted ice left too long in the sun. When he presses the gauze to Blade’s chest, it is cool and damp against his ruined skin.
No one in the Stellaron Hunters is a medic, or even a good facsimile of one. Kafka does her best, but her field medicine is the kind that involves distilled whiskey and silk-tie tourniquets and stickers lifted from convenience stores. Silver Wolf lacks the patience to learn, and SAM’s hands are not a thing built for delicacy. What is happening now is an anomaly to Blade. He does not know where to look.
He says, a little helplessly, “It will heal on its own.”
“Yes,” Dan Heng says. He doesn’t stop. The gauze beneath his fingers stains pink, then poppy-red. The cracks of his nails are dyed with it, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He pulls another roll of fresh bandages from his pockets, and begins binding the holes in Blade’s chest with an aching kind of precision.
Blade’s hands twitch. The mark on Dan Heng’s bottom lip catches at the light, still wet and slow-seeping red. Sometime during his ministrations he’d caught it between his teeth and split it open again. Unthinking, Blade reaches out and up and runs the pad of his thumb across it.
Dan Heng stills. For a moment, he becomes an animal of prey, soft breath and shattered antlers and limbs locked for flight, in a way that no sword at his neck has ever made him.
Blade says, slowly, “You’re hurt.”
Shadows bloom like bruises in the hollows beneath Dan Heng’s eyes. He looks away, and then back again. “It’s fine,” he says, and he would say that, about a split lip or a severed arm or a sword through his heart. He doesn’t know how to be anything other than fine, just as Blade doesn’t know how to be anything other than this.
It’s because he is this that he doesn’t move his hand away. Dan Heng’s breath is warm on his knuckles as he presses his thumb lightly into the mark, enough to feel the tack of blood against his skin. I’m sorry I hurt you, he wants to say. Don’t let me do it again.
Dan Heng’s mouth parts beneath Blade’s hand like silk before a scalpel. A little more, and he would show his teeth, the needlepoint of his canines, but he doesn’t. There are only his soft animal parts, willingly exposed before a set of open jaws.
Blade’s hand falls away. There’s a strange thrum-beat pulse beneath his skin, no longer sharp like the petals. He feels nauseous and alive with it.
The part of Dan Heng’s mouth sutures shut, a wound closing in on itself. His hands resume their work and pause for nothing else. He braids the tail of Blade’s bandages into scrupulous knots, and leans back.
Overhead, the streetlights hum like cicadas at dusk. Dan Heng’s fingers curl into a fist, then open wide: in a moment they’re at Blade’s temple, brushing the fall of damp fringe from his forehead; in another moment they’re gone, tucked against his side as if they’d never moved at all. Blade can feel them still, the cool ghost of their presence like salt spray against his skin.
Dan Heng turns away and uncoils to his feet, the seams and folds of his coat shifting and resettling back into place. There’s a bloom of red oxidizing on his sleeve, the stain of anomaly on snowfall. It strikes Blade as wrong, somehow, but as right a wrong as he can make it. That’s fine, he thinks. That’s good. If there’s to be blood on your coat, it should only ever be mine.
Down a distant alleyway, there’s a shriek of something many-limbed and rotten with gold. They’ve lingered long enough. Dan Heng turns and extends his hand, palm-up and open. The grinning moon paints him in sickle-light.
“Come,” he says. Whether absolution or damnation, his voice is gentle. “I’ll be with you every step of the way.”