DETAIL WORK
Written on August 11, 2019 (♌︎)
Author's Notes: Written for FireEye for the 2019 Pining Exchange.
Agrias held her broken hand as still as she could, trying to avoid looking at the baffled young apprentice as he prodded the bones along the back edge of her palm. The cramped offices of the healers were thick with the scent of smoke, herbs, and alcohol, and there was plenty in them to distract her. Vials of mysterious tinctures and powders and whatsnot—which she assumed every apothecary, Gougish or not, needs must have—covered every surface. Alongside and in between them were a motley of papers, potted plants, half-opened books, crystals of dubious value, and glass and metal instruments of indeterminate use. Prosthetics hung from the ceiling. An articulated skeleton covered in no doubt instructive symbols grinned at her from across the room. Somewhere behind her, something with a motor was rapidly succussing some sort of fluid at a speed that made her uneasy, letting out a thin whine as it rattled the table beneath it.
"It seems fairly minor," the spectacled youth finally said. "It would have probably set in an instant if you'd had one of those fast-acting potions."
Agrias grimaced. Ramza had not, for whatever reason, had any supplies with him—hence the whole debacle of dragging Mustadio through several tight city blocks, cradled in the arms of whatever that thing was.
"Is it really true that you broke it punching a..."
"Yes. I broke my fist punching a metal man," Agrias said with a sigh.
It was a story that she had already had to recite and explain to more people than she wished, starting with Ramza, who had apparently had difficulty parsing why she might find grievance with a monstrous, walking suit of armor appearing rather suddenly with the badly burned body of his friend in hand. It had not occurred immediately to him, in the strangeness and panic of it all, that she might mistake their new, unintroduced travelling companion for some sort of threat.
The healer's apprentice had been looking at her expectantly, hoping she'd explain more. When she did not, he started applying a poultice, splint, and bandages, giving her a fairly standard talk about how magic or alchemy could probably mend her faster, but there was always a risk of scarring and misalignment once too much time had passed from the initial injury. He mentioned she should definitely refrain from overusing the hand in the meantime, which gave her the sobering thought that she'd need to procure a new sword by the time she was in fighting shape again. Her previous one had been snapped clean in half before she'd resorted to attacking the allegedly non-malevolent automaton with her fists.
"Mustadio, the young man who came in with me, is he..." She winced as the bandages drew the heat of the poultice close to her bruised flesh. "Will he be alright?"
"I wouldn't know," the apprentice said. "I imagine he'll live if you got him here as fast as you say you did, but he's going to take a bit to sort out. He'll probably have a handsome scar or three to show off though once he's patched up."
He finished tying the bandage, neatly securing the loose ends around the edge of the hard apparatus he'd used to immobilize the back of her hand. She turned to glance out the window where Ramza and the others were milling in the street. A small gaggle of pedestrians—mostly children—began to join them, eager to watch the already much talked about metal man benignly carry out another order to dance.
"Can I see him?" Agrias asked, not wanting to be a source of unneeded awkwardity as regarded... whatever that thing was.
"Sure. He's still unconscious, but he's a lot prettier than he was when he came in at this point."
Agrias gave a polite bow of acknowledgement and followed the young man toward one of the back chambers that honeycombed out from a hall adjoining the main storefront. Pushing through a cloth door hanging, she stepped into a comparatively spartan room, where the actual head of the practice knelt over Mustadio's supine, sleeping form.
She looked to the healer, a greying man in his early fifties, for any indication that she ought leave, not wanting to intrude despite the apprentice's assurance. He gave her a sympathetic nod and gestured for her to sit. She did so.
"And how are you doing, good lady? If I recall you came in with an injury of your own."
"She should be fine," the apprentice answered on her behalf. "Boxer's fracture. Nothing serious."
The practitioner looked at his employee a moment, evidently not impressed with his bedside manner. He turned to Agrias.
"And if I might ask you again..." He glanced briefly at the apprentice. "How do you feel?"
"I've been better," she said softly. She had been looking at Mustadio from the moment that she had first entered the room, and the sight of him was not cheering. Whatever weapon the machine had loosed on him hadn't burnt like a normal fire or spread with the force and pattern of typical magic craft. While he was a good sight better than he'd been when she'd seen him last, his normally pale face was still discolored by an unvaried and thankfully mild burn, and the rest of his half-clothed body seemed a patchwork of bandages. She frowned a bit as he drew a deep breath, a rattle issuing from his chest as though he were merely another Gougish artifact on the fritz.
"I'm sorry to hear that," said the healer, raising an eyebrow ever so slightly. "I hope you aren't too terribly worried about your companion."
Agrias took a deep breath, nodding. "He'll be all right? Right?"
He smiled and spoke very gently. "There's no guarantees, my dear, especially not in times such as these. I'd be very surprised, however, if he didn't make a swift and full recovery."
"That's... good," she felt her voice begin to crack ever so slightly.
"Would you like to be alone with him for a while?"
She didn't reply, but the old man stood up and walked to the open door, gesturing towards his apprentice to get himself back to the shopfront. Agrias sank a little as soon as they were gone. She thought it very stupid of her to get so emotional at the sight of somebody injured, especially after all the lot of them had been through. What was a little thing like being blasted unconscious by an ancient mechanical man after they'd walked out of Riovannes?
"Hey," she whispered glumly, holding up a bandaged hand he couldn't see. "I hope you appreciate how greatly I suffered trying to save you back there."
Agrias sighed. She wasn't often one to make an attempt at humor, but having a completely unconscious audience had made it almost bearable.
"You probably will, you know," she mused. "You'll wake up any moment now and your first question will probably be ‘How did Agrias end up with a boxer's fracture?' because you're the exact sort of person to take notice of somebody's hand being off before you ask how you survived an explosion, and you're the exact sort of person to know whatever in the Saint's name a boxer's fracture is."
She shook her hand a bit. "I mean... it's not that hard to figure out, I guess, given how you get one."
Mustadio said nothing, nor did he give any indication that he was aware of her voice even in his dreams.
"I'm just trying to say that... that you're good at knowing and... noticing... things." She drifted off, not knowing precisely what she meant to say or why she thought it would be of any use to tell it to a man who couldn't hear her.
Knowing, though. Noticing. Mustadio had such an eye for things easily overlooked and immaterial: the face of a long dead monarch on the odd coin, the subtle ways the lead piping told you the order in which church windows were commissioned, how a lone patch of flowers in a meadow matched her coat. More than his pragmatic knowledge of winding springs and filing gears, he really had a sense for the minutiae and wonder of all the rest of the world. He'd even thought to remember her birthday, which she'd barely remembered herself after so many months on the road.
"I sometimes wonder what it might have been like if you'd grown up in the capital. A man with a good eye there... you could've carved out quite the living for yourself." She sighed again, "We might even have met back in happier times."
They wouldn't have though. Mustadio was quite the opposite of every man in Lesalia she had ever met, and if he'd turned his powers of observation to the workings of that city... well, he'd either have been a very different sort of person or he'd have found himself ground up in its machinery.
"I suppose though," she said very quietly, brushing a stray hair away from his face. "I suppose it's a happy thing to have met you now."
When Mustadio opened his eyes, the sunlight streaming into the bare room around him seemed far dimmer than it should be, as though it had been filtered through a dark glass. He felt like he'd been thrown from the great phantom train of Warjilis and straight through hell into whatever lay beneath. It was dreadful. He hoped Ramza might experience something similar as soon as possible.
He didn't see Ramza, however, nor the marvelous artifact of the ancient world he'd impulsively sicced on him. Blinking a few moments, he realized that he was in the little clinic running out of old Janell's apothecary, probably having been dragged there to have the old chiurgeon sew him back together. He wondered why they hadn't just given him a phoenix down. He tried to recall if they could afford any.
As his senses gradually came into focus, he realized that somebody was in the room with him, humming softly as they leaned against the wall. His heart let him know just how alive he was when he realized it was Agrias.
She seemed unaware he'd woken up, and in the blur of his vision he couldn't quite make out what she was doing. As he propped himself up he made out what looked like a scrap of cloth, a letter perhaps, something small and white in her hands.
"What are you doing?" he blurted out clumsily, immediately regretting that he hadn't come up with a more suave way to let her know he was alive and conscious.
Agrias looked at him, obviously startled. She smiled with a look of embarrassed bewilderment.
"It's um... it's some needlework."
"Needlework?"
"I had a lot of brothers," she said haltingly. "My mother tried very hard to teach me some—I think you called them ‘womanly things.'" She looked down at whatever she was working on. "She was largely disappointed, but this sort of stuck, I guess."
He nodded, quickly realizing it was a bad idea to do so as his neck began to smart. "Agrias?"
"Yes"
"Why are you sewing with your left hand?"
She laughed, dropping whatever she was working on for a moment as she raised her right hand, ungloved and covered in bandages.
"Boxer's fracture."
Months later, after that particular round of injuries had been long forgotten, after the summer had drifted into an overly warm autumn and the blue harebells of the steppes had withered into rattling husks, after the horrors of Limberry and the siege of Bethla—after all that, they walked the long road back to Gallione. During an evening camped under browning trees, she approached him with a small package, wrapped in a bleached printers' rag and tied up in twine.
"It's nothing much, not in comparison to... well I thought I should give you something, considering."
Mustadio smiled as he looked at the gift. Untying it, he found that it was ultimately one linen enclosed in another; the wrapping contained a handkerchief with small leaves stitched in winding patterns along the corners.
"I figured, if nothing else you'd have something to clean your guns with." She didn't meet his gaze. "I mean, the wrapper, not that... not that I'd mind if you wanted to..."
"Thank you," he said warmly. "Were you making this back when...?"
"Yes." She turned about, looking for where Worker 8 stood still at the top of a nearby hill, the blue lights under his iron skin dimmed as he kept a sleepless watch over the area. "Yes, I was."
They looked at each other, and Mustadio thought of all sorts of lethally stupid things he wanted to say but wouldn't. He said "thank you" instead, and told her very earnestly that he'd treasure it. She said she was glad, and left more hastily than he liked.
Turning it over in his hand, he traced the lines of clumsily rendered stitching, noting how they grew more steady as he turned the cloth around corner by corner. While he had no way of knowing if was intentional, it was not lost on him what plant the broad lobate leaves gracing each corner was from.
He walked a little ways into the woods with no particular direction in mind, his fingers wrapped tight around oaks he could carry with him. Closing his eyes and breathing hard, he steeled himself, turned back, and cut a clumsy path as he suddenly barreled through the roots and underbrush.
Keeping watch was no burden, for its makers had not made it to feel the burdens of boredom or sorrow. Still, the Worker Unit was better able to engage with its duties when they gave it something to occupy its mental works, and the faint motions of beasts and birds were all routine to it now—strange as they might have been when it first awakened. As a result, its perception of the area it had been asked to survey was not as exacting as it ought be, and when one of the masters ran suddenly into its field of vision, it could not help but look for an unforeseen intruder.
Its weapons systems hummed into partial power, and it adjusted its sensory apparatus, honing in on the moving being in question as it saw the heat and pulse of the aura that surrounded it. It swept the area again and again to find no pursuer—nothing that could account for the flicker of a fast-beating heart that seemed to outpace the speed at which the man was running. Stride by stride, that shape flew through the forest, until exactly 89.47 dohms from where Worker 8 stood, it intersected with the shape of another master, stopped, burnt bright, and after 47 seconds of conversation too far away to record, wrapped its limbs around her.
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