Chapter Text
The first time they meet, Grace can’t say she’s impressed.
He stumbles into the apothecary, and she jolts from her place at the register because he’s bleeding. Don’t get her wrong—she isn’t squeamish, and the people who do utilize her service in the apothecary usually are hurt in some way. However, they don’t usually stumble in alone, their hand clasped over their bleeding shoulder, and their mouth agape with absolutely zero sound coming out as they stagger over to her.
And they certainly don’t pass out.
She springs into action, calling out for Addy to take her place at the register so she can fix the boy up. Addy doesn’t ask questions during the process—as healers, they understand the importance of doing a task first and asking questions later—and she’s quickly able to assess the damage.
Grace eyes the boy’s body, noting that the blood is originating from the wound in his shoulder, and makes quick work of his shirt before she elevates his feet and collects the necessary materials to dress his wound. His eyes flutter open as she kneels beside him, and as she applies slight pressure to his shoulder, he yelps. She pauses, assures him that it’s going to be okay—after all, the cut was shallow and the blood already clotting—and tells him she's just going to bandage him up. He takes a shallow breath through his mouth, biting his lip and nodding, and she presses into his shoulder again before he tries to pull away, insisting all the while that she was killing killing killing him.
On her place at the floor, she shares a glance at Addy, but her coworker isn’t looking at her. She’s staring at the boy, her eyes darting to the door every once in a while, her mouth in a twisted, worried line.
“Maybe try working on him in the back, Grace?”
But she shakes her head, insisting that she couldn’t do that because he just fainted, and Addy should know that you shouldn’t try to force people who just passed out into moving around. Besides, she was almost done, and if someone walked in, it would be a familiar sight to see Grace Tynol tending to a wounded patient.
“Please stop,” the boy begs as she wraps the bandage around his shoulder, writhing away from her. “Holy shit, please stop, please please please. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts; please stop, I feel like I’m dying.”
Call her cruel, but Grace suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. She’s encountered plenty of patients who had to bite down on nothing but their own tongue as she stitches their intensities back into the rightful place in their body, but this boy can’t even handle her wrapping a bandage around his arm without throwing a fit?
But then she remembers that everyone handles pain differently, so she goes a little slower than she normally would as she patches him up.
The boy sniffles as she puts her supplies away, standing up from his place on the floor with shaking legs. “Thank you.”
“That’ll be 5.95,” Addy says, voice laced in slight annoyance. Grace bristles, but the last time she pointed out that Addy’s customer service wasn’t great, she received a lecture from her parents that Addy was apparently more qualified than sixteen-year-old Grace purely because she was a mere two years older. (Addy still can’t stitch in a straight line to save her life, though, so maybe age doesn’t equal skill.)
“What?”
“5.95,” Addy repeats wearily. “Do you have 5.95?”
It’s then that Grace realizes that she knows this boy. Well—kind of. They’re both in the same grade, but they’ve never really talked—never had a reason to, seeing as he’s from the Seam. His large, gray eyes bore into Grace’s blue ones, as if imploring her for a simpler explanation. She watches as the tear on his cheek glistens in the fluorescence of the shop’s lights, flicking her eyes down to his trembling fingers.
“Are you all right?” She takes a step forward, trying to look him full in the face, because maybe something occurred beforehand that’s making him act this way. “What happened to you?”
“Oh—well.” The boy studies the floor, his shock of black hair falling into his eyes. “Let’s just say that I need to learn how to be more careful. Do you accept payment in the form of animal intestines?”
“Get out,” Addy says flatly.
The boy doesn’t hesitate to fumble out the door, struggling to pull his shirt over his head, and disappear into the crowd of people.
***
Ever since that encounter, Grace starts to notice him everywhere: the hallways in between classes, darting out of the Hob and through the Square, and passing by her parents’ apothecary shop in a flock with other Seam kids. She learns his name is Kolton.
“What are you staring at?”
She snaps her attention toward Nickel Mellark. She wasn’t aware that she was staring, but it feels wrong to admit she’s watching the Seam boy juggle three rocks in the air as his friends cheer him on. (How did he do that? She tried doing the very same thing with the bread rolls in Nickel’s parents’ bakery, and she’d had zero luck; it must be because bread is more slippery than rocks.)
“Nothing.” She takes a small bite of her sandwich, forcing herself to meet her boyfriend’s eyes. He smiles as soon as she does this, and she lets him take her hand. “What are you doing after school? Do you want to go to Tommy and Blaine's house for dinner tonight? They asked me about it today. Maysilee and Marley are going to be there too.”
Nickel shifts in his seat, and Grace’s heart droops because she recognizes this move by now: he shifts, as if he’s sitting on pin pricks, and then says something he thinks she’d like to hear. Case in point: “That sounds great.”
She picks at the wooden lunch tables, dragging her fingernails across her seat, and allows herself to flick her gaze back toward Kolten. He’s added a fourth rock. “You don’t have to go.”
Shifts. “I want to, though. Dinner sounds great.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, because his face goes pink—another sign that he’s not being truthful. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
After some probing, he finally relents and tells her what’s on his mind. “I was kind of hoping we could spend the day together. Alone. For once.”
The last bit makes a weird feeling arise in her chest—it’s bothersome, burning, so she pushes it away and doesn’t dwell on it. “Oh. Maybe later in the week, when we don’t have school. My parents probably wouldn’t let me today, anway, since we have school tomorrow.”
He grins, and it’s so genuinely smug Grace actually does roll her eyes. “Your parents love me. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
But I do.
Saying that would cause a problem, though, so she shrugs. “True, but we hardly get to see Marley and Maysilee and everyone at one time. It’ll be nice to be together, right? Like… Well, it’ll be like a triple date.”
This makes Nickel grin. “Oh. That’ll be fun. We’ll go, then, and I’ll bring sourdough bread—you still like sourdough, right?”
She nods. “Could you also bring four bread rolls?”
***
She runs into Kolten on her way to Tom and Blaine’s house.
Or, rather, he runs into her, and she flies into the ground.
“Shit.” Eloquent as always. He offers her his hand, and her pale fingers wrap around his tanned ones. His skin is calloused. “I’m really sorry. Are you okay?”
Her cheeks bloom in embarrassment. He was able to knock her down like she was nothing more than a ragdoll. “It’s all right. I’m fine, just surprised.”
She didn’t realize how tense he was before, but his shoulders droop in an intense sense of relief at her statement.“What are you doing here, anyway? You know this is the Hob, right?”
The question makes her bristle. “Where do you think we get half of the drugs in the apothecary?”
If he senses that she’s irritated, he doesn’t comment on it. Instead, a wide, amused grin spreads on his face. She doesn’t understand it. “That seems a little illegal for a family of apothecaries.”
“Well.” She struggles for something to say, which irks her. “We all have to make ends meet somehow.”
“That’s true.” He cocks his head to the side. “Are you getting tesserae, too? I’ll give you some of my portion, if you want, as a way to make up for my behavior the last time we saw each other. I have squirrels, too, if you want them. They make for good stews.”
She’s momentarily confused—what could he possibly be paying her back for?—before she remembers their encounter a week prior. “Oh. Don’t worry about it. I’m actually—” She shifts, uncomfortable. Would it be right to admit she’s eating dinner with the mayor’s sons? It was the farthest thing from getting tesserae, and she didn’t want him to think she was bragging. “—I’m just going to a friend’s house. Besides, I only bandaged your shoulder. How’s it doing, by the way?”
“Oh.” His eyes light up in surprise, as if he forgot about the circumstances surrounding their encounter. (Based on the fact he fainted, maybe he actually did). “Really good. It doesn’t even hurt. Did you put any healing salve on it, ‘cause my friend Rosie says you guys have that type of stuff.”
She struggles on keeping her mouth in a straight line—it wasn’t his fault he had a low pain tolerance, and she didn’t want him to feel shitty because of it. “No. Although we do have a lot of salves that soothe cuts, I didn’t have to use any. Also, please don’t worry about payment; I don’t even think my parents noticed that I used any of the bandages.”
“Are you sure? Because I could—well, I have a knack for finding rabbits.”
This makes her laugh. “Like a nature fairy?”
“Something like that.”
She tries to imagine this: his lanky figure curling up in a patch of grass at the fence bordering the Meadow, beckoning the rabbits to slip through to the other side and find refuge in District 12. Her smile vanishes once she realizes he probably brings the rabbits back dead.
“Do you think that lowly of me?” He demands lightly as she voices this concern to him, but the hand that jumps over his heart is so ridiculously theatrical that the smile is back on her face again. “Between you and me, Grace, I give away every animal I come across as pets. Ask Greasy Sae.”
The surprise that he remembers her name is overshadowed by the implication of his statement. Her mouth drops—Greasy Sae was notorious for incorporating anything into soup; even shoes— and she finds herself chortling in laughter a second later. “You’re awful!”
He laughs along with her, but it quickly trails off as he glances at her dress. “I’m really sorry about tackling you.”
“Hm?” To be honest, she’s already forgotten about that. She looks down, absentmindedly brushing herself off. “Oh, it’s fine. Just a bit of dirt. What had you in such a hurry, anyway?”
Before he can answer, the shadow of another person’s body looms over theirs, and Grace’s posture straightens as she looks over at Nickel.
“What are you doing?” But he’s not looking at her—he’s glaring at Kolten.
Again: if Kolten senses Nickel’s irritability, he doesn’t comment on it. “Just on my way for some tesserae.”
“What does that have to do with Grace?”
“Nickel,” she demands, appalled by the hardness of his voice. “Kolten came into the apothecary the other week; I was just checking in on him after we ran into each other.”
Nickel’s arms tighten around her shoulders, his expression softening once he looks over at her. “Okay. Well, let’s go. We don’t want to be late to Tom and Blaine’s house.”
She can’t ignore the way Kolten’s brows escape all the way up his forehead. “The mayor lets you eat at his house?”
Nickel laughs, and the same feeling—bothersome, burning—returns in Grace’s chest, and she expresses it through a glare in her boyfriend’s direction. His smile quickly fades as he explains himself. “We’re his sons’ friends. Of course we do.”
Grace feels her face heat up at the tone of Nickel’s voice alone, but Kolten doesn’t show any signs of embarrassment as he replies. “Still. I didn’t know he invites other district people over for dinner.”
“Do you want to come?”
For a moment, Grace gets the urge to look in the direction Nickel was facing—he looked absolutely flabbergasted— before she realizes that he’s looking at her, because she’s the one who asked the question.
Kolten’s reaction is much more relaxed as he waves his hand around as if he’s swatting at a fly. “As much as I’d like to see Undersee’s face, I couldn’t do that. I’ll stick to my rabbits. Domesticated, of course.”
Grace laughs. Nickel pulls her arm, and she shuffles to keep up with his pace as they walk to the mayor’s house.