Chapter Text
In the grand scheme of things, it shouldn’t matter.
It’s just broken glass. It’s just a jar of salve. It’s twenty or thirty minutes of work to replace. That’s nothing. That’s a drop in the bucket in the lifespan of an elf.
She has to strangle the scream of frustration, however.
Dalyria closes her eyes and takes one breath, gritting her teeth, and exhales.
When she opens her eyes, a fresh wave of rage and despair hits. The jar of salve had slipped through her fingers while she was carefully tying the label around its neck. She lets out a strangled half yell, half growl, and sweeps everything off the countertop onto the floor.
The shattering of more glass is satisfying in a way she hadn’t expected.
That brief satisfaction is followed by emptiness.
The bottles she had just destroyed will cost a small fortune to replace.
She turns away from the mess, carefully and quietly opens the workroom door, and steps out, shutting it behind her. It’s a problem for another time. She can’t deal with it at the moment.
She won’t deal with it.
She takes off her apron and walks down the hall to her office, where she carefully hangs it on its hook. Everything in its place. She pours herself a cup of water from the ceramic pitcher on her desk and takes a sip.
She’s about to sit when she hears the door open down the hall. “Hello?” she hears a male voice call.
When she steps back out into the hall, Dalyria sees a man in dark leather and a teen in cloth that is clearly red with blood. “He needs help,” the man says, and Dalyria strides down the hall and gestures to the door to one of the patient areas, where there are several chairs and two hospital style beds.
“Being him in here,” she says, reverting to Doctor Dalyria, the professional. The man helps the boy hobble into the room, and Dalyria helps the boy ease back onto the first bed until he’s lying down. “What happened?”
“Knife,” the boy manages to say, panting as he pulls his hand off the wound in his side.
Dalyria immediately rolls the shirt up and away from the wound, assessing the damage. “What’s your name?”
“Brann.”
“Hello, Brann, I’m Dalyria.” She gently touches her fingertips to the outside of the wound. It was still bleeding, but it seems to mostly go through the flesh and fat on the boy’s side, and perhaps some muscle. It doesn’t look like there is any more serious damage. Dalyria reaches to her right, putting light pressure on the wound with her left hand while pulling a thick pad of cotton bandages out of the top drawer under the counter next to the bed. Switching hands, she presses the bandage into the boy’s side to soak up some of the blood and stop the bleeding. The boy whimpers a little and tenses up, but stays still for her.
“What’s your name?” she directs the question at the man behind her.
“Evan.”
“Okay, Evan. Will you come here and hold this? I need to grab some supplies.”
The man walks up behind her and reaches around her to put his hand on the bandage, and she can feel his warmth even through the space between them, though she can also smell the blood on him. Dalyria swallows hard and steps away, retreating to the opposite side of the room from the door, where there are trays of tools for sterilizing and stitching wounds. She grabs another roll of bandages, carefully taking it all to set on the counter next to Evan.
He is taller than she is, and seems to be half human, though it is hard to tell with his brown hair covering most of his ear. She thinks she can see lightly pointed tips. From the way he easily towers over her, however, he can’t be a full elf.
Though, in hindsight, Halsin was a full blooded elf and was massive.
Her cheeks heat a little at the thought of the very large Druid.
Dalyria shakes her head to clear it. “Alright, Brann. Your wound needs stitches, but it doesn’t look too serious. You’re going to be just fine.”
She grabs a vial of a numbing medicine and pops the cork off.
“No!” Brann protests, trying to sit up, but falling back with a hiss. “I can’t afford… Can you just stitch me up?”
There was a time when that statement would have made Dalyria nearly weep with pity. These days, she hardly feels anything.
“The medicine is to numb you so you’re still for me. It’ll take less time this way and I’ll be able to clean it better, so you won’t end up with an infection and have to come back. I charge for my time, not for medicines.” It isn’t strictly true, but she is hardly going to charge a child anyway.
The boy seems to consider this, then nods, relaxing a bit. Dalyria puts her hand on the bandage, nodding at Evan to move, which he does. She pulls the bandage up a little, holding the lower part in place, and pours a little of the liquid from the vial directly into the wound. The boy hisses . She had known it would sting, but it will stop soon enough.
“How did you get stabbed?” she asks the boy as she counts to thirty to give the numbing agent time to work.
“I was tryin to take a shortcut to the market, through the big park, but I got caught by some men who tried to take my silver.”
Dalyria nods, carefully pouring slightly more of the liquid along the length of the cut. The boy doesn’t flinch this time.
“So,” the boy says, “I hit one of ‘em, and they didn’t like that much.”
Dalyria raises her eyebrows. “I would have just given them the silver.”
The boy shakes his head. “It’s not theirs.” He closes his eyes. “Anyway, they didn’t like it, and one of them pulled a knife. That’s when the big guy showed up and got into it.”
Dalyria looks to her left at the man. He shrugs. “They were ruining the peaceful atmosphere.”
She almost laughs.
Dalyria pours the rest of the vial into the wound, then steps back to grab a couple rags from the tray and the bottle of antiseptic.
The man watches her as she works. “So, you two didn’t know each other?”
“No,” the kid says, his eyes closed and his body relaxed against the bed.
Dalyria finishes cleaning the wound, then gets the thread and needle together to sew it up.
“Where can I find your family?” Evan asks the boy, and Dalyria realizes she hadn’t even thought to ask if the boy had a family.
The boy rattles off directions to Evan while Dalyria sews the wound shut. She hears the front door open and shut as the man leaves to go fetch the boy’s mother.
As she finishes sewing and bandaging the wound, she tries not to think about how she would have thought to ask, before Cazador.
—-
Aurelia is exhausted.
All of the things she hasn’t felt like doing have caught up to her now that she has a guest in her apartment, and she hadn’t realized how much energy it would take just to go through the motions every single day.
She could usually pull it together for the weekly nights out with the others. Now and then, she could even pretend she had it all together while teaching her class.
All day, every day, is too much.
Sebastian isn’t demanding in the least. In fact, she hardly sees him. He would appear to eat once or twice a day, then he would retreat back to the room she’d cleared out for him.
It is almost as if she doesn’t have a guest at all.
Unfortunately, she can’t forget he’s there. It changes everything. She has to get dressed every day, whether she leaves the apartment or not. She can’t leave dirty laundry wherever she pleases. She has to wash the dishes. She can’t leave paint palettes wherever she chooses.
It is exhausting.
The worst part, in her opinion, is the silence.
It hadn’t been a problem before, but now that two of them were living there, it was so obvious how quiet it was all the time.
It was going to drive her crazy.
It reminds her of Cazador’s worst punishments, when he’d thrown her into a dark room and locked the door and simply forgot she was there.
For weeks.
Maybe months.
She isn’t actually sure.
She’d asked Leon once, and he’d frowned, and then said he hadn’t realized she was missing until the week before.
She wonders if anyone would come looking for her now.
She thinks they probably would. If anything, she sees Astarion and Dalyria and Emerie once a week. She sees Leon about once a month. Her students would at least notice she was missing if she stopped showing up for classes.
It’s really the only reason she meets up either the others every week. She doesn’t want to be forgotten.
“I’m going out!” she announces to the closed door on the other side of the apartment. She knows Sebastian can probably hear her, but she also knows he isn’t going to respond and probably doesn’t actually care.