He shouldn't care. The thought is familiar, worn smooth from repetition, a mantra he's been reciting since the boy first knelt beside him and saiddon't worry.
But he does. He really does.
Zazyrus closes his eyes. The plan takes shape in the dark behind them, quiet and patient and deadly. He has time. He has purpose. He has something to protect.
He has never had something to protect before.
The difference is everything.
Chapter nine
Chapter 9
Fight days are the worst.
Lethe has hated them since his first week in the pits, when a creature he'd just finished stitching was dragged back to the arena before the wound had closed and came back missing half its jaw. He's hated them through six years of patching bodies that are sent out to be broken again, of setting bones that will be re-broken, of watching the creatures he tends walk into the sand and knowing some of them won't walk back.
Today he hates them more than usual.
He doesn't examine why. He knows why. He just doesn't want to look at it, the same way he doesn't want to look at the knot in his stomach or the tightness in his chest or the way his hands fumble, actually fumble, when he's packing his satchel for the pre-fight preparation rounds. He drops a roll of linen. Picks it up. Drops the tin of salve. Picks that up too. Stares at his hands and tells them to behave and they don't listen because his hands, for once, are not the problem.
The problem is that Zazyrus fights today and Lethe is scared for him.
Not of him. For him. The distinction has been clear in Lethe's mind for weeks now, so clear it barely requires articulation, but today it burns. Today it sits behind his sternum and radiates heat into his limbs and makes his fingers clumsy and his thoughts scattered and his carefully maintained partition between the voice that works and the mind that wants so thin he can see through it.
He descends into the deep kennels. The air cools. The lanterns flicker. His footsteps echo and he focuses on the sound of them, one after another, grounding himself in rhythm. He is a healer. This is his job. He prepares fighters for bouts. He's done it hundreds of times. There is no reason for his hands to shake.
He unlocks the cage.
Zazyrus is awake. He's always awake when Lethe arrives, sitting against the back wall with that contained stillness that Lethe has come to understand is not passivity but vigilance, a body that never fully rests because resting has never been safe. His dark eyes find Lethe in the doorway and Lethe feels the weight of them settle on his skin and it steadies him, which is absurd. The gaze of a creature about to fight for his life should not be the thing that calms Lethe's hands. But it does.
"Morning," Lethe says. He kneels. Opens his satchel. "I need to check everything before they take you up. Stitches, mobility, range of motion. Then I'll wrap your hands." He pulls out his supplies and arranges them on the clean cloth and his voice is professional and steady and betrays nothing of the cold fear sitting in his stomach. "Let's start with the ribs. Deep breath for me?"
Zazyrus breathes. Lethe watches the expansion of his chest, the way the muscle stretches over the healed wound, the absence of a flinch. Good. The ribs have knitted. He presses along the line of the old fracture and feels solid bone beneath his fingers and exhales a breath he didn't realize he was holding.
"Ribs are good. Shoulder." He moves around Zazyrus's side and checks the shoulder, probing the healed laceration, testing the joint's range by pressing Zazyrus's arm gently through its arc of motion. The muscle is warm under his hands and dense and responsive and Lethe focuses on the clinical data. Full range. No guarding. No crepitus. "Shoulder's good. Hip."
He doesn't hesitate this time. He hooks a finger into Zazyrus's waistband and pulls it down enough to expose the scar on his hip, fully healed now, a raised line of new tissue that catches the lamplight. He presses along its length and the skin is smooth and the muscle beneath is solid and Zazyrus doesn't flinch and Lethe's fingers don't linger. He pulls the waistband back into place.
"Everything's healed," he says. "You're in good shape." The words come out lighter than he intends, almost flippant, and he catches himself and swallows and refocuses. "Hands next. I need to wrap your knuckles."
He pulls the wrapping strips from his satchel. Long bands of linen, sturdy, designed to protect the small bones of the hand from impact. He's wrapped hundreds of fighters' hands. The process is automatic, mechanical, a thing his fingers know without consulting his brain.
Except.
To wrap Zazyrus's hands, he needs to be close. Closer than the stitching requires. He needs to face him, to sit in front of him, and Zazyrus's legs are drawn up and the space between them is the only space available and Lethe settles into it before he can think too hard about the geometry of it.
He's kneeling between Zazyrus's legs.
The position registers in his body before it registers in his brain. His knees are on the stone between Zazyrus's spread thighs, close enough that he can feel the heat of the beast's body on both sides, radiating from the heavy muscle of his legs. Hisown thighs nearly brush the insides of Zazyrus's. The space is narrow and warm and intimate in a way that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the specific, charged awareness that floods Lethe's body with heat so sudden he's dizzy with it.
He reaches for Zazyrus's right hand.
The hand is enormous in his. Zazyrus's fingers are long and thick and tipped with claws that curve in dark, deadly arcs, and his palm is broad and calloused and scarred and warm. Lethe turns it over and his own hands look small against it, pale and slender, and the contrast does something to his pulse that he doesn't have the composure to manage.
He starts wrapping. Around the knuckles. Between the fingers, threading the linen carefully around the base of each claw, leaving the tips free. Across the back of the hand, over the wrist, back again. The work is precise and he focuses on it with a ferocity that is entirely disproportionate to the task because the alternative is thinking about where he is and what he's touching and how close they are.
He can feel Zazyrus's breath on the top of his head.
