[complete] I'm home again, I won the war, and now I am behind your door.

[amberdrake]

Who: Amberdrake and Sanzo
What: Drake's been out Healing people since the riots began, and is finally hitting the bottom of his resources when a familiar face shows up. Sanzo always had a particular timing...
Where: Ludmead.
When: Very late on the night of the arena riots.
Warnings: A little gore and violence at the start.

Amberdrake's vision is finally starting to gray out, inkblots of darkness spreading at the corners and sometimes blocking the middle, making his balance skew way to the left, or way to the right. He doesn't have to see with his eyes to Heal, so here he is somewhere between Ava's place and his own little rental house, patching some poor sod up who couldn't quite make it out of the line of fire quickly enough.

There's a gunshot, and Drake barely has the presence of mind to flinch at the sound or at the burning line of white-hot fire slashed across the outside of his arm. He's too distracted by the fact that the man his Gift was threaded into just died. Bullet to the skull, his Gift informs him as it happens in such excruciating detail, millisecond by millisecond, that even the seasoned war-Healer feels supremely nauseated.

Just as when he was Healing Wolfgang earlier today -- when there was still light and his eyes still worked properly -- he can feel a gun aimed at his own head. And just as then, he doesn't really react. Later, he'll tell himself that he was too distracted by withdrawing his Gift from the dead meat beneath his hands, but right then...

He doesn't really have a reason to care, now does he? For one tiny moment of loneliness-fueled self destruction, he can't be bothered to so much as duck.

Get it over with.

Comments

[amberdrake]

But either Amberdrake has actually managed to stay off the radar, or the militia are too busy rounding up the injured people at the various hospitals. Or something else, who knows? Either way, the place is empty, and dark.

Drake holds his breath for a moment or five, then lets it out and reaches in to hit the light switch. Look at him, using modern switches and things.

It's a single story little place, and Amberdrake has turned the living room into a work room of sorts, in lieu of any better ideas. Most of the furniture isn't his, although there is at least a couch. Which, when he stumbles in and towards it, still leaning heavily on the monk, he makes sure to haul him down onto as well.

He's got his arm 'round Sanzo's shoulders and behind his neck. The priest isn't going any damn where until he lets go, too, at least not without injuring the kestra'chern.

[sanzo]

Sanzo doesn't fight it, doesn't argue, doesn't snap out insults; he's fallen into his gang's arms before when he'd finally been through enough, and he's considerate enough to offer the same.

He closes his eyes and breathes, accepting and acknowledging Amberdrake's presence as much as the feel of his body, if not more.

He's battered, too, though the kestra'chern might actually be in worse shape, especially mentally. It hasn't been a decade for him.

[amberdrake]

"I apologize for being so familiar," Amberdrake says while being so familiar. It's not just that he sat down and dragged Sanzo down with him, but because while he says it he actually reaches to touch the monk's face. He still can't completely believe he's real.

And he still can't see all that clearly, although the bright artificial light in here helps a lot. The fact that he didn't have to crawl here under his own power has helped, too, letting him recover just a fraction of his normal energy. Just enough that breathing isn't dangerously difficult now.

"You're exactly the same as I remember you. I must seem a stranger."

[sanzo]

Sanzo stares at him in his usual way: guardedly on the outside, and maybe even on the inside a little. He knows that Amberdrake has a family back on Velgarth!

What's one shitty monk by comparison?

"You're still the same grabby, sappy guy," he finally allows. That face has aged, but not unpleasantly so, even if the gap makes Sanzo even more of a young punk in Amberdrake's eyes... "Nothing's changed."

[amberdrake]

Amberdrake... should have something to say about all that unsaid stuff. He's a kestra'chern. He knows it's there, and knows he should have words to put to it.

But he's also a Healer who has effectively driven himself into the mud; his eyes won't focus properly and his hands have just a bit of a shake to them that has nothing to do with how emotionally taut he currently feels.

"I am not at my best just now," he laughs a little at himself, there. Way to understate things, Drake. "But I never took this off," and he holds up the hand with that silver lotus ring on it. "Never, except for giving massage."

How to put it? He's had a decade to get over a lot of his war trauma, and to pick up new trauma along the way. A decade to unwind a little bit and assess things.

"I told you before that I'm yours until you no longer wish to have me. That, too, has not changed, enar ves'tacha."

[sanzo]

Sanzo's hand jerks up in a little half-aborted gesture-- had he been about to reach up to Amberdrake's face? Or the hand that still bears his ring? It hangs there for a moment, and then shifts up to his neck.

He looks aside as he pulls out the amulet from the collar of his robes-- the one that the kestra'chern gave him. Just as silently, he stuffs it back in.

"Get some sleep," is what he finally says, inadequately but perhaps somewhat wisely. "We can discuss bullshit in the morning."

[amberdrake]

"Please still be here," Amberdrake relaxes his hold on Sanzo's shoulders, but doesn't remove his arm, "that's all I'll ask for now."

And he settles in place, quite prepared to just pass out right there on the couch. It beats passing out in any of the other places he almost did, today!

All isn't right with the world, not by a long shot. But if someone pointed a gun at his head right now, he'd have plenty of reason to duck. And that's something.

[sanzo]

"Shut up and get some sleep!" Sanzo doesn't look at him as he settles in, too: still sitting, his gun in his hand, ready to shoot anything that might come through that door.

He isn't usually the one who stands guard on bad nights anymore -- his companions usually took that job because he couldn't be bothered -- but he has in the past.

So it's just like old times, in a way, though those times had never included the man who slept on him now. But it sharpens Sanzo up anyway; he might be bruised and bloody himself from wading through the nightmare on the streets outside, but his head is that weird sort of clear that comes after a long battle, and his heart doesn't pound uncomfortably in his chest anymore.

Of course, by morning, he was asleep.

Nothing has crossed the threshold. Yet.

[amberdrake]

Drake wakes up extremely sluggishly, disoriented and not in the least bit recovered. 'It takes two Healers to fix what one stupid Healer does to himself', or so the saying goes... and there are no other Healers in town, that he knows of.

Thankfully, he didn't completely wreck himself. He'd still had some vision left by the time he'd gone to sleep, and he hadn't literally passed out. Both were good signs.

But he still feels like warmed-over crap in a cold bucket.

It takes a moment for him to realize that he's using Sanzo's bony leg as a bony pillow, having slid (or been slid?) sideways while unconscious. He turns his head a little so he can peer up out of the corner of his eye, though his vision is blurry (it is, at least, not still grey and blotchy).

Sanzo's bony leg.

Sanzo is here in Baedal; he didn't just imagine it in his haze.

He moves to sit up, carefully, although he suspects there's no way to avoid waking the younger man up.