Page 101 of Katya and the Young God

Katya hisses and his hands falter, but he continues with slow, even strokes.

“I checked it, when I got in,” he says, and they’re sitting they’re close, so close she can barely breathe. “Everything’s still fine, your work is impeccable.”

The tears are back, unbidden, in Katya’s eyes, so she stares at the ceiling, blinking as fast as she can. “And Selene’s injuries?”

“Those are unknowable.” Putting aside the muddy cloth, he rips open one of the sterile wipes, and the sting of the antiseptic makes her eyes water even more.

She shifts so she doesn’t cry out, pressing her leg against his, and he gives her a briefly startled look before continuing to clean the abrasion.

“Are you counting this on your almost died list?” He asks, and his voice is still flat, still remote, but he presses his knee against hers back, some sort of soft affection.

She breathes out of her mouth, slow, hating how close she is to losing a little bit of control at this, how much she wants to just break down. Let the last bit of foundation crumble, until she’s sobbing at the desk.

“I don’t know,” she says, rolling her neck back again for something, anything to do to change up the sensation. “I knew that Not-Thomas was coming back —"

“You call him Not-Thomas?” He interjects.

“So I knew I only had to survive a little while, that takes it away from true ‘close to death’, but I was down, and I couldn’t get back to standing, which is, you know, bad.” She’s rambling, she hates rambling, but there’s nothing else she can do as he literally lifts strands of fabric from her skin. “But also he was cocky, and wanted to gloat about besting me, so he got close when he saw I was hurt.”

Pieter pulls out a set of tweezers from the medical kit, and Katya’s undergone surgery before, this shouldn’t be as terrifying.

“So mixed. He wanted to draw it out to gloat, which is always good for survivability, —"

“Vanya did that too much, too,” Pieter mumbles, lifting out a small piece of gravel from her skin. “He would talk and talk and talk before doing something, and I would time him, just to see how long he went. If he had just shut up, he’d be alive.”

And Katya’s not exactly in the mood to remind him of that while he has medical equipment out, but he brought it up, and the adrenaline of the day is leaking from her.

“So I don’t know. It was bad, but it wasn’t bad-bad.”

“I hate your definition of bad-bad,” he says, before opening another sterile wipe. “You almost got shot, too, and if I hadn’t stopped her Selene would have grabbed you out of instinct.”

“That’s gonna be a challenge,” she blurts out, and every bit of her soul hates how she’s shaking, hates how weak she’s being, hates how little control she’s having over herself.

His grey eyes flicker up to her face again, like he’s briefly affected by her tone, before he reaches, grabbing the bandages from the kit. “She learned, quickly, what it meant, when they had both of us. They would test to see how she killed, and she...learned.”

Katya nods, and he carefully spreads the bandage over the abrasions, before wiping the mud away from the entire cap of her shoulder. “Get me a towel?”

Without even questioning her, he does, and she wraps the ice pack in it and presses it on top of the bandages.

“Let me check your stitches?” She asks, her mind shying away from the information he just told her about Selene. “I don’t know what the Magician did to you, it looked bad, let me check.”

He watches her for a long second, before pulling up his shirt. “I forget humans can’t see magic,” he says, and she spreads her uninjured hand over his wound. “He just increased the air pressure where I was, trying to get me to freeze in place.”

The stitches are pristine, clean despite the mud, not a single one out of place. “That sounds horrific.”

“I’ve had worse,” he says, teasing. “Doesn’t even rate up there on the times I almost died.” Despite his mocking words, his face creases, and he lets his hand rest against her cheek, cradling her like she’s a fragile treasure.

And, abruptly, her resolve breaks.

She sags against him, her body deciding it’s had enough stress and enough pain. He catches her, wrapping his arms around her, even though her shirt is still muddy and gross, and rests his face in her muddy hair.

“It took the demon so long to get back, I didn’t know what happened to you,” he whispers into her hair.

She doesn’t have an answer for him, doesn’t have anything to say, so she just lets herself be cradled by him.

Lets herself be drawn into the shower, to rinse off all the mud and grime of the combat. Lets herself be helped into pajamas, and lets herself be guided gently to the bed.

Lets herself fall asleep with the gentle touch of his lips against her forehead.

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