When T’of woke, he wasn’t sure of the hour. The glows in his weyr were turned for near-total darkness, and so he assumed it was nighttime. Glancing toward the furs where his weyrmate almost never slept, T’of couldn’t initially tell whether or not he was alone. Not that a dragonrider was ever truly alone.

Instinctually, T’of reached with his mind for Makhmilith, but the wounded blue still slumbered with his mind retreated too far to reach, but for the barest brush. T’of was never unaware of his dragon’s pain, feeling an echo of it himself in all his waking hours, and worse in his sleep. He thought it had lessened over the past day, but evidently not enough for Makhmilith to bring himself back to face it yet. He missed the blue’s rasping mindvoice more than he had ever missed anything in his life.

As for himself, though the scoring along his torso was severe, it had been healing well enough that the healers in the infirmary had declared him fit to recuperate in his own weyr, for which he was grateful. T’of knew himself to be a terrible patient, averse to skin-on-skin as he was, and was willing to endure the physical discomfort of tending his own wounds if it meant he wouldn’t be handled by other human beings on a regular basis. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know how to care for his injuries, after all.

As it happened, though, T’of had been spared having to deal with the torso wounds which made him sick to consider, and that was because of Reya. She had somehow found herself a pair of kid gloves which she was willing to essentially ruin in order to apply the necessary salves and balms to his injury, which still wept blood and serous fluid. If she found the task unappealing, she never gave any sign, instead talking to him and doing her best to distract him from how nearly another human being was touching his skin. She’d even taken on the care of his two firelizards, apparently training them to respond to hand signals.

There were things T’of would not have Reya help him with though. He tended to his own personal hygiene, bathing, and grooming, and he dressed himself every day, though he often chose to forgo a top unless he knew he would have to leave the weyr. He had been forced to resign himself to wearing a small rotation of old tunics, many times stained by seepage from his wounds, because the alternative was to gradually destroy every top he owned. It did not sit well with him to wear visibly stained clothing, even though he knew it to be cleaned, but unnecessarily soiling his clothing was impractical, and if it made his skin crawl just a little to think of it, well, he was coping so far.

As his eyes adjusted to the dark weyr, T’of was able to make out the forms surrounding his furs: Makhmilith’s harness, repaired by his friends and returned to his weyr while he was still in the infirmary, the trunk containing most of his everyday clothing, the stacks of hides and scrolls he cajoled people into bringing him from the archives as well as the folios containing his notes from his time training at Healer Hall. He knew Reya had been reading these, and occasionally worried that she would come across something regrettable scrawled in a blank space, though hide had been precious and he had not been inclined to waste space in his note-taking, so much of what was written there had actually been written on a slate during lectures, and then copied in a fair hand onto the hides for greater permanence. With youthful arrogance, Tofir the would-be healer had thought to one day have his note bound into a codex and give it to Healer Hall’s archives for other students to use.

T’of was also able to make out the faint, limned form of a dragon occupying Makhmilith’s ledge. Of course, it was Raqisath, Reya’s green. She had been firmly told that she could not hang around the infirmary in her spare time, worrying over Makh, and so she sometimes chose to sleep here, though when she did, it usually meant that Reya was there, too. It took him another few moments to locate the greenrider where she’d curled up against Raqisath’s side, locating her by the comparative paleness of her arms against Raqisath’s green hide, though in truth her natural skin tone was darker than his was even after days spent in the summer sun.

Staring through the darkness, T’of’s heart raced suddenly and his stomach flipped with a sort of precognition of a conclusion he had not yet reached consciously, but his mind was only a few seconds behind. He knew that he couldn’t think those thoughts, though, or else he would shortly be dealing with worse than an elevated heart rate and unsettled stomach. Instead, he let his thoughts skitter against and veer around the idea and in the darkness his hands flexed, strangely more willing than his mind to follow through on his crazy ideas.

Climbing from his sleeping furs was an agonizingly slow process, and afforded him altogether too many opportunities to lose his nerve or to be overcome by his own mental hangups, but in this the darkness was his friend. It distorted his perceptions enough that he could convince himself he had endless time to complete each movement leading up to sitting and then standing up. On his feet, T’of swayed briefly with a dizziness he was pretty sure was unrelated to the action of rising, but instead attributable to a sort of anticipation bordering on dread.

His steps were slow, but not quite halting. He didn’t dare let himself actually come to a halt as he carefully crossed the weyr, or else he might freeze, rooted in place until the sun rose. His pulse filled his ears, as he lowered himself into a crouch which was, he suddenly realized, a mistake. His scored chest did not approve of that particular body contortion, and the sudden jolt of pain was enough to shock him out of the near-sickness which had begun to overtake him even before his brain formed this ill-conceived plan.

Whether T’of would have succeeded in carrying out his ill-advised plan, actually touching Reya with his bare fingertips as she slept, remained to be seen. He knew perfectly well that what he was thinking was creepy, no matter the intent behind it, and yet it had seemed like an inexplicably good idea while lying beneath his furs, considering all that she had done for him and how much he owed her.

It’s still creepy, a voice in the back of his mind said. It was ragged and rasping and terribly faint, but it was the voice T’of had been waiting to hear for several sevendays and he gasped.

Makh!

“T’of?” Reya murmured sleepily from a distance that T’of’s mind told him was not nearly distant enough. “What are you doing?”

“Something stupid,” he admitted, barely able to remember what he had been doing now. “I have to get to the infirmary. Makh’s awake.”

That was all it took. Reya was on her feet too quickly and he couldn’t back away fast enough. The top of her head collided with the bottom of his chin as he tried and he bit his tongue hard enough that he tasted copper. She mumbled an apology, evidently less interested in why he had been close enough to collide with in the first place than she was in getting him to his dragon.

In a trice he was on Raqisath’s back, taking the quick way to the infirmary and breathing through his teeth at the double onslaught of searing pain across his torso from his reckless climb onto the green combined being pressed too close to Reya’s back despite his efforts to lean away. When he flung himself from Raqisath before she had properly gotten all her limbs on the ground and lowered herself into a crouch, the decision was purely based on his need to be with Makhmilith.

And then he was. The midnight blue dragon’s eyes were still streaked with the colors of pain, but they were open and although he didn’t really have anything to say to T’of, feeling him in the back of his mind once more was enough.

You’ll stay? Makh asked in a rare moment of insecurity as T’of pressed against him.

Just let anyone try to stop me, T’of promised. But you have to stay, too. I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.

I’m here now, aren’t I?

T’of fixed on his dragon’s restored mental presence to the exclusion of all else, including Reya trailing after him and making excuses on his behalf to the healers who had not been pleased to have a half-dressed man running through their infirmary in the dead of night, bleeding on one of their draconic patients. Those were problems for Future T’of, and he would deal with them alongside Future Makhmilith, who was conscious once more.

Word Count: 1,536
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