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Seila dredges to consciousness under heavy eyelids. She’s in a hospital bed. Either that, or in the room of someone who keeps their home exceptionally disinfected. There is one complex lifeform beside her, her hand resting warmly between their own. With effort, she opens her eyes. Zarsori’s are there to meet hers.
“You’re awake.”
It takes Seila a minute to answer, throat dry and head pounding. When she speaks, the words come out slow, her thoughts disjointed. “And very…injured. I’ll have to…” she blinks. “How did I get here?”
“Revak flew you in,” Zarsori explains, then leans in very close. Seila feels her breath against her neck, exceptionally warm against the hospital-room air. If she wasn’t already dead-still, she would have been frozen to the spot. “As a civilian, don’t worry. Your secret’s safe.”
“Why did they let you in?” Seila manages, when Zarsori pulls away. Avenging Angel would be one thing- she carried some authority, even if public opinion was still deeply divided, but Zarsori was wearing civilian clothes.
Her grin leaves Seila deeply divided on whether she should have asked. “I told them I was your fiance.”
Seila closes her eyes again, grateful that there doesn’t seem to be enough blood in her body to summon a blush. “Surely you could have come up with a better lie…”
“It just took a little flexing.” Zarsori flexes with one arm to emphasize her point, before her hand returns to rest over Seila’s. She really doesn’t have the energy to think about that right now.
“What about the others?” Seila asks. The fight is coming back to her now, in shaded, dream-like sequence. They were getting close by the time she went down, but…
“We took care of it,” Zarsori reassures. “Honestly, you were the biggest casualty.”
Seila frowns, and Zarsori must mistake her tired frustration for just tired .
“You should rest.”
Seila shakes her head. “I just need to…” She closes her eyes, reaches out to her surroundings, to the plantlife, the insect and bacteria…or lack thereof. “Everything here is dead,” she huffs. “Sterile. I fucking hate hospitals.”
Zarsori pats her hand. “You’re okay. You’ll just have to heal the old fashioned way.”
“What’s the diagnosis?” Seila asks. She already knows. She can feel the centers of energy in her body, redirected from her core to the places of injury.
“Uh,” Zarsori leans away just long enough to pull the chart from the foot of Seila’s bed, keeping one hand under her own. “Fractured hip, cracked ribs…a punctured lung, ow.”
Seila sighs. Drop her in the middle of the woods, she’d be fine. But now it was on record- she’d have to spend the next few weeks pacing the healing between checkups, or being a very convincing liar. “It’s alright. Do you know when someone last came in?”
“A few…maybe an hour ago, I wasn’t really counting.”
The way her eyes shift implies that she definitely was, but Seila is more than willing to let it slide. It seems like she’s been doing that a lot lately.
Her nurse does come in eventually, and her doctor. Zarsori is surprisingly well-behaved through the ordeal, even helps her fumble her way through how exactly she sustained her injuries. “Civilian caught in the crossfire of the latest portal attack” really would have sufficed, but the doctors don’t seem to question it, so Seila supposes its fine. In any case, she manages to tease from them the most optimistic timeline for her recovery- certain it was their idea, not hers. It’s all she can do until she’s discharged.
The doctor leaves the room, and takes with them the most potent life energy in the vicinity besides Zarsori’s and her own. No comparison to Zarsori’s really- but she still feels the departure in her every cell, desperate to take, to heal. The absence leaves her drowsy.
“You thinking of getting back to sleep?” Zarsori’s voice is low, closer than Seila would expect. She must have leaned towards her when she’d settled back in bed, her eyes drifting closed again without her permission. She doesn’t know if her sound of acknowledgement comes out at all, or if all that leaves her is a sigh.
There’s warmth near her head, a familiar pulsepoint wrapped on either side of her hand. She feels Zarsori’s breaths as well as she can hear them, can practically see the breakdown of oxygen, could practically grab it…
Seila jerks awake, stomach turning as the energy rushes out of her almost as soon as it flowed in. Her eyelids feel thick, but her eyes are wide open, body suddenly tense. “Sorry.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I was draining you.” It shouldn’t need explanation. It wasn’t a subtle art, to anyone not falling asleep at the wheel. It’s not like it was something Zarsori was unfamiliar with.
“It’s fine,” she murmurs, leaning closer again, as if to make this even harder for her.
“It- definitely isn’t.” Seila chokes out.
“Why not? They’re not gonna do any more scans today.”
Seila eyes her wearily. “It’s not the logistics that has me contesting.”
“I can take it,” Zarsori insists, raising her hand over her heart as if to express sincerity, as if forgetting Seila’s hand was still clasped in her own. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before, right?”
Seila blinks back indignance. “When you were the enemy.” From a distance. From a lifeforce unwilling, stubborn, when Seila herself was at her most focused.
“Seila, I know you won’t take too much. You didn’t even take a lot when I was kicking your ass.” Zarsori lets their hands fall back to the bed, turning to hold her gaze. Eyes that particular shade of amber should be illegal.
“Just enough to fix your lungs? I can hear you wheezing from here.”
Never mind that here is a scant few inches from Seila’s side. She does her best to take deeper, quieter breaths. Hard enough with the punctured lung, harder still with the cracked ribs.
“Seila-”
“I’m thinking.”
She’s never had conviction, is the thing. Desperate to be guided, desperate to give and to take. All someone ever had to do was ask. Catch her on a bad day and they wouldn’t even have to do that.
Seila sits up suddenly, hand flying to her ribs as she does. “Fuck.”
Zarsori’s hands finally release hers, if only to hover around Seila’s shoulders. “What the fuck, Seila?”
“I need to focus.” Seila sits up straighter despite the stabbing pain, turns to Zarsori as she brushes her hair behind her ears. “I can have your hands back now.”
If Zarsori is deterred by her clinical tone, she doesn’t show it. Her posture mirrors Seila’s, and she places her hands over hers once more.
Seila takes another painful breath and counts the heartbeats resting at her fingertips, lets herself reach into the warmth she finds there. It would not be sentimental to describe Zarsori’s energy as exceptional. The power found in her was erratic, crowded, something unexplained that made her much more durable than most proportional lifeforms. Still, Seila takes care. It is rare for her to draw from people, rarer still to do so from so close, and into herself beyond that. Seila counts her pulse, and very gently, she pulls.
It is a simple thing, made complicated only by the concentration that must be shared, to balance the well-being of the person on the other end. So she goes slow. Seila feels heat gather in her right lung. Zarsori’s breath hitches. Seila feels a buzz there as the cells rebuild, awakened. Zarsori leans into her, as if drawn towards her own energy. She rests her head on Seila’s shoulder.
“I’m okay,” she says softly. “Keep going.”
The ribs would be easier, but she can already feel the growing discomfort of weight on her hip. Seila feels breath against her shoulder, and pulls it down. The bone builds from the inside out, less tangible than the soft tissue of her lung. She shifts, and there is no pain, so the job must be done.
Seila measures the warmth of Zarsori’s palms, and finds it quite similar to her own- far colder than it should be. With a sigh she lets go, pushing one last breath of energy back into her as she does.
Zarsori is wordless, her temple pressed against Seila’s neck. Seila counts her breaths until the silence is too much to bear.
“Are you alright?” she asks at last.
Zarsori finally lifts her head- laughing. “You’re still wheezing,” she chokes out.
Seila flushes. “I’d rather have a cracked rib when I walk out of here than a fractured hip.”
“Rookie mistake,” Zarsori shakes her head. “Should have gone with the ribs.”
Seila tries not to flinch as she lays back into the hospital bed, determined not to prove her right. “I can get both once they let me out of here,” she mutters. “Won’t you go get a fruit cup or something? You’ll need the sugar.”
Zarsori raises her brows. “You’re the one in the hospital bed.”
“I just absorbed the energy of a small sun to heal half my wounds. I’ll be fine.”
Zarsori smiles, and stands with a sigh. “I’ll bring you some too.”