#themutatedpair

"A day ago? Little less. He likes to bar hop a bit, he's usually back before the wee hours of the morning, I stay up when he goes out just in case. I even searched." Aiden felt as if words could not come out of his mouth fast enough as he sat down.

Aiden had a tenancy to wander off, that just happened to be in his nature. Jae usually wasn’t far away, not that he didn’t trust his brother, it was other people. Out of the pair, the elder was more noticeable, natural blonde roots showing and the blue eyes were a dead give away that he wasn’t exactly human. Most weren’t kind to them, and since his little brother was always playing around with the visual hallucinations he’d give to random people, it was a recipe for trouble.

A flash came to his eyes, the close and possible future always did this. Aiden was screaming, against a wall or on the ground in pain. He could hear him, just begging the other person to kill him rather than torture him, or so it looked. Jaehyo started in a dead run down the street, looking for any sign of him. Shit, that makes this even more plausible.  Searching was cut short when he heard Aiden screams, followed by utter silence.

"AIDEN!" He called out, running towards the sound, down into an alley way. A young woman was crouched at his side, he couldn’t tell what she was doing. "What the hell is going—" He would have began to yell, but seeing his brother like this brought him down to his knees. "Is he still alive? He’s got to still be alive, right?!"

When she was young, Seren had often been brought along by her mother when she needed to heal the other people of their clan. It was messy work - living in the forest implied animal attacks were frequent, and with the Blight having been banished from the land merely a few years ago, demons were roaming everywhere... and the kind of monsters that she didn't even want to remember came along. Always. She was used to the blood, to the gore, to the tears and pleas of the wounded.

But she had never quite had to work with another person's suffering. No one was allowed around the injured, except from the Keeper and her First. The family and friends had to handle their grief, but stay away from those who needed to focus. So, while the fallen man's wounds had been easy, she couldn't figure out what to do to calm down the other - by the similarity in their auras, she would presume they were family. A brother, perhaps?

"He was unconscious when I found him!"

Well, that was... inaccurate, to say the least. She's been drawn to the dark alley by the man's screams, and by the time she managed to find him and kneel down next to him, he had been writhing, begging to be killed, so that the suffering would stop. So she made it stop... somewhat. Her first spell (the one she was certain would not attract anyone's attention) had forced the man into slumber of a sort. Humans would have probably considered it closer to a coma... but it didn't matter, she'd get him back on his feet soon enough.

That was what she had thought. 

Unfortunately, the healing spell she used afterwards had to be powerful. It had to be, because he'd been covered in dozens of deep cuts and a some more shallow ones, all over, and she couldn't imagine that he would be able to survive that kind of injury without her help. If she would have thought this through, she wouldn't have been surprised that the green display of light - almost like an aurora of sorts - that came with the spell attracted someone's attention... but it did. 

She hadn't heard footsteps, she didn't even see shadows moving. One moment he wasn't there, and the next he was just behind her, the look on his face impossible to read as he glanced down to her, and Seren quickly freed the strand of hair she'd tucked behind her pointy ear, so as to have the lock cover it instead, as she frantically sought for a way to be able to cast another spell - he wouldn't wake up if she didn't coax him to. He couldn't. But how could she work her magic with another present?