#zuhra

Zuhra’s wasted no time in engaging the main body of the Ya-Te-Veo; she puts the flight potion that she downed right before to good use, springing out of the way of the thrashing vines. When she fires, the bullets leave smoking craters: Metzli’s enchantments, reliable as always. But one of the tendrils snaps, a little too close to comfort, near her cheek—Ayer starts, shaken out of his reverie, and struggles to untangle his rifle from where it’s slung across his chest. His bad shoulder screams with the effort, but he manages to get it out and propped against his knee with only a few black spots dancing across his vision.

From there it’s easy to pretend that this is a routine job: a deep breath, and his vision sharpens—a bullet makes contact with one of the vines, ballooning into a net and pinning it to the ground. Four more in quick succession—two sink harmlessly into the bog, but the others find their mark in the Ya-Te-Veo’s limbs. The beast thrashes, its cellulose-enforced muscles bulging with the effort, but the glowing blue threads hold strong. The wind picks up as surrounding leaves are suctioned into the area surrounding the nets—Zuhra has to leap back to keep from being affected by the altered gravity.

“Ayer! Are you alright?” she calls, and lets three bullets loose into the body of the creature. She shakes out the spent shells and reloads.

“I’ll manage,” he shouts back, shoving bullets into his own magazine one-handed. His left arm barely moves anymore—he supposes it’s lucky that he didn’t land on his right. “Can you lure it a little closer, away from the bog?”

“Yes, but be careful!” At any other time, Ayer would’ve been touched. Now, though, he just focuses on swallowing down the bile that threatens to rise in his throat, and ignoring the way he can’t feel his toes. He draws his pistol and presses it into his left hand.

Zuhra’s quick footwork brings the Ya-Te-Veo lurching towards him earlier than he expects. She empties her revolver into its crown: six bullets, and six glowing holes. The forest shakes with the creature’s rage, and it reaches out with the vines around its torso to snatch her from the air—

“Zuhra, jump!”

She kicks off of one of the reaching limbs and flips into the empty space above the Ya-Te-Veo’s head. Its vines follow her up, stretching to snag at her feet—and a glowing blue bullet sinks into the base of each of them.

Its arms blow back explosively, and before the ends of its rapidly growing vines can wrap back around its trunk, Ayer fires every bullet in his pistol at the Ya-Te-Veo’s core. Even for firing wrong-handed, this probably ranks pretty high up in worst-he’s-ever-aimed—but somewhere in the wide arc of bullets one of them sinks into the bark and holds.

For all her happy-go-luckiness, that new bartender sure knows her way around fire runes.

The trunk lights up with molten fissures, and a few moments later chunks of burning debris are flying everywhere. Ayer flings his good arm up to block a piece of charred wood that launches his way, and through the smoke he sees slivers of something radiating a searing white light.

“Zuhra—” he begins, but she’s a step ahead of him. The reflection of the Ya-Te-Veo’s core off her cold-iron dagger nearly blinds him—he leans his head back against the trunk and squeezes his eyes shut as the clearing goes blank with light—but then the starlight is fading, the color of the trees returning, and Zuhra is pulling her blade out of what is now a putrefied clump of plant matter. She wipes it on her shirt, nose scrunched with distaste, then turns to Ayer.

“Alright, time to…” she trails off, and then her voice is soft and afraid like Ayer’s never heard before. “Ayer.”

“Hm, yeah?” he says, rolling his head—so, so heavy—across the bark of the tree to look at her. She’s staring at something in front of him, and he doesn’t know if it’s a remnant of the monster or what until he cranes his neck to—oh.

The part of his leg below where the vine still grips ferociously is almost comically ballooned, straining against the leather of his boots. The slice of ankle he can see between his sock and pant leg is purpled and blotchy. He tears his eyes away.

“Yeah,” he says, sounding breathless even to himself. “That’s certainly, uh, something, isn’t it. Can you help me cut the vine off? The boot too, if you can.”

“Y-yeah. Hold on.” She crouches down, and her knife is steady as ever. The cold iron makes quick work of the vine, which shrinks and shrivels off under its touch; as she pulls it out, dark blood drips from the thorns. His shoe is a little more trouble. Cursing, she pulls out a serrated knife from her belt, and starts sawing. “Any other injuries?” she asks, conversationally, as she works.

He leans back against the tree again. “Left shoulder’s busted. Might’ve cracked some ribs while it was swinging me around, but nothing serious.” Zuhra’s bark of dry laughter lets him know what she thinks of that, and he grins despite himself. Then he closes his eyes for just a moment and then his foot is freed, his boot and sock tossed to the side, and he’s standing up, his good arm slung across Zuhra’s shoulders. “Oh,” he says, suddenly light-headed, and wobbles on his left foot.

“Can you walk?” Zuhra asks. Ayer knows if he says no he’ll be thrown into a fireman’s carry, and the thought of bouncing on Zuhra’s too-small shoulders with his busted one makes him want to cry, so he mumbles an affirmative. Zuhra hesitates for a second, and then they jostle into motion.

2.

“I think it was sighted around here,” Zuhra says, nose-deep in the map and floating a few inches from the ground. They’re deep within the forest, where it’s dark enough that the air smells thick with mold and decay. Even more pleasing to the olfactory organs is the stench of peat just nearby—the boglands that some unfortunate teenager had wandered into and gotten eaten in.

“Hey, you think I can find my prince here?”

“What?”

“He’s big, he’s dashing, he’s green…I’m head ogre heels for him.” He barely dodges Zuhra’s punch, and cackles. “Don’t deny it, who could resist that ogrussy?”

“The ogr—Ayer!” This time, she lands a hit on the back of his head—he’d almost forgotten about how high a flight-potion-assisted Zuhra could jump. He rubs at it dolefully.

“That’s not very Shrektacular of you,” he says, before a thick green appendage from a source nowhere near as charming grabs onto his ankle and tows him through the brush.

1.

“A Ya-Te-Veo was spotted in the bogs,” Metzli tells them, “and the council has hired us to clean it up.”

“Huh. So you mean, you’re hiring us to clean it up,” Ayer says. “Aren’t those things like, plants?”

“Plants with murder on their minds, yes. They’re not smart, but they’re fast—I want experienced hands on this.” She inspects the glass she was shining—satisfied, she places it aside and picks up another one. “What do you need me to prepare for you?”

“If it’s fast, we’ll need a flight potion,” Zuhra says, “and since it’s plant-based we’ll want explosive bullets. As much fire as possible.”

Metzli hums. “I’m sure Lorelei can help out with that. I’ll have her enchant some ammunition for you by tomorrow morning.”

Ayer looks up from his phone. “Add gravity nets to that too,” he sighs, showing the drawing of a Ya-Te-Veo to Zuhra. “Ugh, I hate monsters with tentacles.”

4.

An indeterminable amount of time later—it feels like days and seconds all at once, though Ayer vaguely remembers having to lean on a nearby tree and catch his breath at least twice, so it can’t have been that short of a trip—they reach the car, and Ayer sags into the passenger seat gratefully. Zuhra throws all their gear in the backseat, which is weird—she’s usually pretty methodical about packing everything away: something about safety hazards, or whatever.

He loses that train of thought when she slams on the accelerator and he smashes his bad shoulder into the seat. His vision goes white and he hears himself let out a pathetic wheeze—and even weirder than Zuhra’s sudden carelessness is the fact that she doesn’t immediately make fun of him. She’s too busy punching numbers into her phone one-handed, it seems. Ayer wonders who she’s calling. Swaga, maybe? He knows that recently, Zuhra’s been training in the evenings with her, and the little green brat’s flirting is so obvious that it makes him sick.

Speaking of being sick. He feels weirdly sweaty, and his stomach’s doing flips in his gut. It’s like that one time he tried eating that 2-week-old pizza in his fridge. The white dusting he thought was parmesan was, evidently, not—it put him out of commission for a week while his digestive tract rebuilt itself, and he couldn’t eat but except saltine crackers for the next few days. Ugh, just thinking about it makes him want to hurl—

He rests his head against the window and tries not to retch. Zuhra’d kill him if he threw up in her nice car. Zuhra, who right now is saying something about Robin. Oh, and he catches snippets of his own name in there, too. Mean old Robin with the stick up his ass. What’s his problem, anyways.

“’m the better doctor,” he tells Zuhra firmly—as firmly as he can when his mouth doesn’t seem to work properly. She looks at him, brow furrowed, and then returns her focus to her cell phone and the road ahead. Rude. He stares out the window. Whatever, he has better things to do than to pay attention to this weirder-than-normal Zuhra. Better things, like counting the cars that they’re passing. …Wow, Zuhra’s driving fast. A particularly harsh turn has his face smashing against the side window, and when they straighten back out he nearly goes flying across the center console. Zuhra sticks an arm out to steady him—he can’t hear her too clearly, but he thinks she says something about a seatbelt, so when he’s balanced back in his seat he tugs at it with his right hand. It doesn’t move even when he pulls it with all his strength, so he gives up and lets his hand fall.

He’s tired.

His head droops to his collarbone, and distantly he notices that someone had replaced the part of his leg below the knee with like, a really fat purple sausage. It looks really dumb, and he wonders whose shitty idea that was. But, y'know, maybe the sausage-man that this leg came from really wanted to have prettier legs, and Ayer’s legs were the prettiest ones around. If that’s the case he guesses it’s okay. He still has one leg, after all, and it would be selfish not to share. He tries to wiggle the toes of the sausage leg, and as expected, they don’t move. Oh well. He’ll have to work on getting used to it. He hopes the sausage-man is making good use out of his old leg.

He feels hot.

He feels cold.

And then he feels nothing at all, really.

5.

“Ayer.”

A voice like a breath of wind, and Ayer’s eyes snap open. In front of him is the biggest door he’s ever seen, and it’s rimmed with golden light. But he doesn’t care, because he knows that voice, and he whirls around and sees—

“Lana,” he breathes, and then he’s scrambling to get his feet under him and stumbling towards her and she opens her mouth and says,

“Stop.”

Her voice is a thousand whispers and a thousand screams, and he feels the command shake through his bones like a tempest. He stops, because there is no other choice. She extends a finger and he follows it with her eyes until he’s looking straight down. A silvered chain extends from his chest and leads to somewhere beneath his feet. It’s been pulled taut by his movements. The finger lowers.

He’s seen chains like this before, and the implications of it have his mouth running dry. Even unmoving, the surface of the links are beginning to oxidize. He turns his head towards the door—his door, he now realizes—and back again. “Lana,” he says again, desperately. “Lana, what are you doing here?”

Her eyes are hidden by a shining light, so bright that the only way to look at her face is to focus on the line of her lips. She inclines her chin, and then she moves to the side and Ayer’s breath catches in his throat. Where his own door was, the area behind her is covered in a pile of rubble. Then she returns to her original position and the remnants of her door are hidden from sight.

She has a halo, Ayer realizes—a circlet of bone, growing out of her skull. The light from before follows her around, hovering in the center of the ring. His heart drops into his stomach. “Are you—an angel?”

“Yes,” she sighs, and Ayer feels strands of his hair flutter from the invisible wind that picks up as a result. “I am here to guide your soul.” She waves her hand over the white expanse they’re sitting on, and it dissolves into color. Ayer looks down. He sees himself.

They have him laid out in the Shop’s back room, and he looks like—to put it lightly—absolute shit. His leg’s swollen all the way to the hip; his shoulder looks like it got run over with a truck. Robin’s hunched over him, feeling him up with those magic tentacles of his—someone had summoned a cluster of leech-like wisps, and they float over his exposed leg, sometimes dropping down to suck thick, purplish fluid into their translucent bodies.

Swaga has Zuhra—snarling and eyes wild—pinned against the wall and Ayer’s breath stutters to a halt when he realizes Zuhra’s crying. He reaches towards her, entranced, and flinches violently when Lana dispels the image.

“You have good friends that care about you,” Lana whispers. It curls around his ears like a caress. “You should be happy.”

“Yeah,” Ayer says, “I’m a lucky guy. I’m,” he looks down at his hands. His chain is crumbling on his chest. “I’m really glad I got to see you again, sis. Even if it’s like this.”

And then—something in Lana’s serene expression cracks, and the light above her head flickers: off, and then on again with barely enough time in between to blink. “Ayer—” she says, and her voice sounds distorted and torn but more alive than anything that had come before.

Ayer looks up, eyes widening. “Lana?”

The light dims—brightens furiously—and then shuts off, and Lana’s sitting there. The real Lana—the Lana that Ayer knows—and the only thing that stops him from rushing forward is the sizzling gold sloughing off of her. Her shoulders heave laboriously, and she reaches out as if to grab him. “Ayer—Ayer, it’s not your time—you have to go back—”

“Lana—Lana, I missed you so much, I—”

The light sparks to life for a split second before being smothered again, and Lana’s on her hands and knees on the ground. Glowing ichor drips from the side of her mouth—she spits it out, and it vaporizes on contact with the floor. Shaking violently, she raises her hand again.

“Ayer,” she says, her voice layered with overtones and undertones and everything in between, and then—for a moment—all the static in her voice is gone. “I’m so proud of you. Promise me you’ll stay safe—” and she curls her hand into a fist.

The chain on his chest snaps back to place, Lana’s halo lights up like the sun, and Ayer claws at empty air as he’s swallowed up by the floor.

6? 41? 12? 20?

His arm feels like it weighs a thousand pounds but he flings it out anyways—gets a yelp for his efforts—it catches against something hard and he pushes himself up against it but then there’s hands pushing him back down and shouting and—

“Lana,” he tries to explain—she’s out there and she’s alive and she’s suffering—but his throat feels like sandpaper and his voice sounds like sandpaper and he—

—he kicks out and wisps buzz into his vision and why there’s so many wisps around him, he doesn’t know—

—his foot catches against his other leg and pain like he’s never felt before runs jagged up his spine—the intensity of it knocks the air from his lungs and he chokes for air and—

—and Zuhra’s there—

—and he tastes the sleep soot before he sees it and he feels consciousness slip away like a silk ribbon between his fingers.

10? 2? 136? 0?

He wakes up and he’s in Lana’s bed.

But he doesn’t have the time to wonder about how he got here, because he’s covered in cold sweat; his stomach spasms violently, and he’s barely able to turn his head before he’s throwing up all over the sheets.

Lana’ll kill him for getting her pillows all gross, but he can’t really focus on that because he can’t breathe—his lungs burn even though he’s gasping like a fish—and then there’s a hand on his shoulder telling him to take—deep breaths. In, out, in, out. It’s nonsensical, but he follows the too-slow rhythm of the voice because some part of him tells him it’s a voice to trust. In, out, in, out, and the fire in his chest recedes just enough that he promptly tumbles back into dark, comfortable unconsciousness.

8.

The next time he surfaces, it’s to fingers combing through his hair. He must make a sound, because the fingers stop—he makes another sound and pushes his head towards them until the fingers give a watery laugh and continue petting him.

He cracks his eyelids open against the morning sun, and his eyes focus somewhat blearily on Zuhra. She’s propped up against some pillows, balancing a book on her lap, but her attention’s all on Ayer—he feels a little self-conscious under her gaze.

“Welcome back,” she says, like she’s afraid he’ll break if she speaks too loudly.

He reaches towards her, aiming for her other hand—the one not occupied with touching his hair—but aborts the motion when he gets too tired halfway through. His hand flops on top of the blankets somewhere between them. Blankets, too fluffy and too void of cat hair to be his own.

“Where are we?” he asks. His voice is creaky and his tongue feels thick and clumsy in his mouth, but Zuhra doesn’t seem to take notice.

“Metzli’s room. She’s been sleeping at your apartment, taking care of Fish.”

He hums, absentmindedly. Then it hits him. “Wait, how long have I been out?”

“Three days, twenty-one hours, and…” She squints at the clock across the room. “Thirty-two minutes. You want the seconds on that, too?” She laughs, but Ayer knows that she could give him the number if he asked—he may be out of it, but he can see the dark circles framing her eyes, the way that her hand slowly digs into the blanket on her lap.

“I’m sorry,” is all he can think to say in response, and he knows it’s not enough, but he can’t think of anything else that would sound sincere—nothing that doesn’t sound cheesy, or flippant, or unappreciative, so he settles for repeating it again. “I’m sorry.”

Zuhra puts her book aside and sinks down until she’s curled up next to him. “You don’t need to apologize; none of it’s your fault, anyways—I’m just,” she closes her eyes, and when she opens them again they’re glassy. “I’m just so glad you’re here,” she murmurs, and Ayer would cry if he had the strength. Instead, he settles for tucking his head under her chin—Zuhra wriggles closer to oblige him.

As he tries to turn on his side to get a better cuddling angle, he hears something clatter—belatedly, he notices the IV attached to his right arm. And then there’s a groan, and a sleepy-but-furious voice says, “Zuhra, for fuck’s sake, I told you not to touch the medical equipment.”

Ayer freezes. Robin?, he mouths at Zuhra, raising his eyebrows.

She nods, then leans in close and whispers, “They told me to wake them as soon as you woke up, but—well. I thought I’d let them sleep a little more.”

“Time for a wake-up call, then,” Ayer whispers back, grinning. “Help me up?”

When he gets into a sitting position—which takes more help from Zuhra than he’d like to admit—he sees Robin splayed out on the couch. They’re holding a pillow over their eyes with their left hand, and a quilt’s become tangled—almost impressively so—around their legs. Their other arm’s fallen off the side, fingers trailing on the floor. They look adorably deep in sleep, despite their brief lapse into wakefulness a few seconds ago.

Ayer gestures for Zuhra to pass him her book.

A paperback, of some boring title he doesn’t recognize. He gives it a few experimental hefts with the atrophied muscles of his left arm. His shoulder’s healed well—it’s a little stiff, but he thinks he can make it. He eyeballs the distance—rechecks the weight of the book—and with all the skill of a professional sharpshooter, takes aim and hurls the book directly at the crown of Robin’s head.

They jerk awake with a shout, flinching so hard they knock themselves off the couch and onto the floor. When they untangle themselves, and stumble to their feet, Ayer almost regrets waking them—their eyes are bloodshot, their skin is pale and sickly, and most importantly: they look ready to strangle someone.

Still, though. It was hilarious. “Good morning,” he says smugly, folding his hands across his lap.

“Ayer, you rat bastard,” Robin growls, stalking over and tugging viciously at his ear. “You wake up and the first thing you do is to fucking antagonize me, huh?”

Ayer yelps. “Hey, you’re not supposed to harm the injured—isn’t that like, the Hippocratic Oath?”

“I’ll harm whomever the fuck I want, you little bitch—” Robin climbs on the bed, straddles him, and starts yanking at Ayer’s cheeks with both his hands. “—little ungrateful bastard—I put sweat, blood, and tears into reconstructing that shoulder and you use it to throw shit at me—”

Ayer would say something back, but his face is being pulled into unnatural shapes and all that comes out is a garbled laugh. He takes his left hand and uses it to jab Robin in the ribs—they tussle for a few more seconds before Robin loses their balance and falls back. Onto Ayer’s right leg.

“Fuck,” he wheezes, vision going white, and Robin does something sparkly with their fingers before crawling up and collapsing next to him. Zuhra’s giving them both the side-eye, but her lips are quirked into a smile.

“It’s what you deserve,” Robin says, as if they didn’t just use the last dregs of their magic to check for damage. As if they weren’t currently nosing Ayer’s right arm up so that they can burrow their head into his shoulder. Zuhra sighs and mirrors them with a little more grace, lifting Ayer’s left arm and sliding under.

“You guys spoil me,” Ayer sighs, tilting his head back into the pillows.

“You better fucking know it,” Robin gripes, kneeing him in the ribs—gently. As gentle as casual violence can get, anyways.

And—and it’s not perfect, not by the widest margin. He’s got a leg that makes his brain go wiggly if he thinks at it too hard, two arms rapidly losing circulation from the two muscle sacks lying on them, and he still feels exhausted even though he’s apparently slept for four days. But he’s warm and being cuddled from two sides and Lana—Lana!—told him to be happy, so he… lets himself be.