The light shifts from afternoon gold to gray to purple as the sun drops toward the tree-line. I should stop. Should admit this is beyond me, beyond anyone, should climb out of this ditch and keep walking toward the village and a warm bed and people who are actually savable.
I don't stop.
The bleeding slows. The infection keeps trying to creep forward. I keep pushing it back with alcohol and prayers and the sheer stubborn refusal to let another body go cold under my hands. His blood runs hotter than human, doesn't clot quite right, and I have to adjust, have to learn his body as I go. The blood loss is severe, but his heart is still beating, stubborn as mine.
I'm elbow-deep in his chest cavity, holding torn tissue closed while I try to stitch one-handed. I'm working blind, stitching what bleeds and hoping the rest sorts itself out. My hand slips against the ridge of a broken rib and the jagged edge bites into my palm. I hiss.
Blood wells up, mine this time, red and thin against the dark mess of his. It drips into the open wound before I can pull back.
His eyes snap open.
Gold. Bright and wrong and nothing human.
His hand moves faster than something that size should be able to move. Fingers close around the air an inch from my throat and stop there, trembling, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off his palm. One more inch and he'd crush my windpipe without effort.
I don't pull back.
“You're dying.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Surprise, that. “Hold still. I'm trying to fix that.”
His eyes track across my face. I watch something move behind them, something trying to make sense of what he's seeing. The hand at my throat shakes. Once. Twice.
It lowers.
“Good choice,” I say, and get back to work.
I finish the chest. Tie off the last stitch inside, pull my arms out, press a pad of bandage over the wound, and hold it until the bleeding slows. My palm is bleeding where the rib caught me. I wrap it quick with a strip of cloth and move on to the gash on hisshoulder, the one across his hip, the dozens of smaller cuts that need cleaning before the infection takes them too.
He watches me the entire time. His eyes never close, never drift. I feel them on my hands as I stitch, on my face as I mutter my way through the process.
“Cleaning this one now. It's going to sting.” I pour alcohol into a gash on his shoulder. He doesn't flinch.
“You talk,” he says. His voice is deep enough to feel in my chest, rough with disuse and blood loss. “While you work.”
“Habit.” I tie off a stitch, cut the thread against my blade. “You're not the first dying thing I've put back together. Probably won't be the last.”
“Most would have left me.”
“Most have better survival instincts than I do.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh if it had more air behind it. “Why didn't you?”
I don't have an answer. Not one that makes sense. Habit, maybe. The inability to see something broken and not try to fix it. A flaw, my father called it, back before it killed him.
“Seemed like the thing to do,” I say instead.
The moon is rising by the time I tie off the last bandage. My arms are covered to the shoulder in his blood, rust-red and black, drying tight against my skin. My back aches from hunching over him. My blister tore open hours ago and the raw skin has been grinding in my boot since. I'll be limping tomorrow.
Worth it. He's still breathing. The wet rattle is gone. His lungs are working.
I sit back on my heels. “Done. For now.”
He struggles to sit up. Gets halfway there and stops, muscles shaking, sweat beading on his forehead. The wounds pull but hold. My stitches are good. They'd better be.
“You saved my life.”
It's not a question. A fact, stated and certain. His voice has changed. Gone formal. Ancient. He looks at me, those gold eyes cataloging every detail of my face. I wonder what he sees. A tired woman in a muddy ditch, blood to her elbows, too stubborn to let him die in peace.
“You should have walked past. Left me for the crows. Your life was never at risk until you climbed down into this ditch.”
