Chapter 46: Quite A Shock
Theo had no idea how he slept off, but when he woke up, it was the delicate, complicated ceiling of the suite that he first saw, before noticing that he was laying where Uthed usually laid and there were a couple of the system’s messages hanging behind his view.
[Critical strain has been resolved]
[Limitless Body - Adaptive Evolution has processed the trauma sustained]
[Sternum: reinforced]
[Ribcage: reinforced]
[Adaptation resumed]
[You have gained +6 Endurance]
[You have gained +3 Physical Power]
’So I guess Adaptive Evolution just sort of repairs my body and gives it more power according to the situation. While Limitless itself affect the entirety of my body and mind.’
Theo still felt like the information he had about the Adaptive Evolution was incomplete but believed he’d find out more as time went on.
The panels hung there, patient and golden, waiting for him to be impressed.
Theo rolled his shoulder instead, and the joint that had been screaming twenty minutes ago rotated through its full arc without a single complaint, and something in his stomach turned over.
He had watched Thall’s fever burn through her for two days. He had watched Estea sit in a chair she would never get out of. And his own body was repairing a cracked sternum in the time it took to boil rice.
’That’s not fair. That’s not remotely fair.’
Theo washed in the spare bathroom of the suite by the side before going into the main room, because there was blood dried along his collarbone and Estea missed nothing.
She was awake anyway. She was in her chair by the partition with a blanket over her legs, and she watched him come through the door in a clean shirt with wet hair, and she let the silence sit long enough to be a comment.
She did not say anything for a moment long, which actually almost gave Theo the cold feet. Then she looked away.
Theo heaved a sigh of relief and then went to work, because there was work.
There was always work, and lately his hands seemed to find it a half second before his head did, which he was fairly sure was the [Domestic Manager] skill quietly running the household without asking his permission.
The tray by the door had been sitting since morning. The jug needed changing. Somebody had folded the spare linen the wrong way and it was going to crease.
Then he looked past the partition and stopped.
Sesan was standing at Thall’s bedside.
She had been there long enough that the chair beside her had gone unused. Frost-pale hair hanging loose down her back, both hands resting on the rail, her cold gaze fixed on the sleeping woman with the wires running out of her, and she was so still that the machines seemed to be the only things in the room drawing breath.
Theo came up beside her carefully."
She’s alright... she’s not in any pain."
Sesan did not look at him.
She reached down instead, took the blanket off her own shoulders, the one Theo placed on her as they journeyed to the hospital the night before and laid it over Thall. Thall already had a blanket. Sesan smoothed the second one down over the first with both palms, from the chest to the knees, very carefully, the way a child tucks in something breakable. Then she put her hands back on the rail and went on standing there.
’She thinks Thall is cold.’
Theo’s throat closed up on him. He stood beside her and he did not correct her, because there was nothing to correct, and because he had learned that Sesan’s world ran on a logic he was not licensed to argue with.
He noticed the water jug on the side table when he went to change it. A thin skin of ice had formed across the top of it, clouding the glass from the inside, and there was no cold anywhere else in the room.
Theo looked at it for a moment. He carried it out and brought back a fresh one, and he said nothing about that either.
"Feed her," Estea said from the other side of the partition. "She won’t eat while she’s standing there. She’ll stand there all night."
"I know."
"Then stop looking at her like that and feed her."
So he did. He brought the rice and the soup he had reheated in the ward kitchen and he sat on the edge of the low table where Sesan could reach it without leaving the rail, and eventually a hand came off the rail and took the spoon, and eventually the bowl was empty. Small victories. He collected them the way other men collected debts.
Afterwards he came back for Estea, and this was the part he had been putting off since the day the reward panels landed.
"I need your hands."
"For what."
"I got it as a skill. It’s a medical thing." He crouched by her chair. "You’ve been in that seat for eleven hours. Your fingers have gone the color of the sheets. Give me your hands, honey."
"Call me that again."
"Give me your hands, Estea."
She gave him her hands, which surprised them both but Theo more certainly.
’It actually worked!’
The skill moved into his fingers the moment he closed them around hers, warm and certain, finding the knots at the base of her thumbs like it had a map of her. He worked slowly.
He was aware of her amber gaze pinned on the top of his head the entire time and of the fact that she had gone very quiet and of the way her hair had fallen forward past her jaw, and he was aware of the shape of her wrist in his palm, and how the skin there was much softer than her personality had any right to allow.
’This is a medical procedure.’
’This is a medical procedure performed by a qualified professional.’
’You are a Janitor.’
’A qualified Janitor!’
"Your ears are red," Estea said.
"It’s warm in here."
"There’s ice in the water jug."
Theo moved on to the other hand.
Her legs he did last, and that was the part that was not funny at all, because the nerves in her spine were dead and she could not feel a thing he did. He worked the circulation back into her calves anyway, and she stared at the ceiling and let him, and when he was done she pulled the blanket back over herself without a word of thanks, which was how he knew it had mattered.
Then she said, in a flat voice, still looking at the ceiling:
"If anyone comes through that door for her, don’t let them. Go meet them yourselves. I don’t want to see anyone here."
Theo folded the blanket edge under her knee.
"Alright ma’am..."
’Sure got an attitude for a crippled dragon.’