Page 42 of Threadbound

Bran very cautiously pushed himself up with his good arm, breathing through his nose in order to keep moving through the pain. It honestly wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, although he definitely wasn’t enjoying it. But he thought that maybe, with Jamie’s help, he could make his way into the bathroom.

Looking down, he noticed that he was still wearing the papery blue things the nurses had put him in at the hospital, and he wondered what had happened to his clothes—not that it mattered. He’d easily be able to spin more when he needed them.

Then Bran frowned, realizing that he probably shouldn’t do that around Jamie, because the half-breed was almost certainly going to notice magically appearing clothing. Bran didn’t inherently object to being unclothed, given that it was plenty warm and Jamie’s bed had blankets if he did get cold at night. However, the color that had come to Jamie’s cheeks at the thought of Bran naked probably meant that even if Bran was okay with it, Jamie wasn’t going to be, and it would be unforgivably rude for Bran to make his generous host any more uncomfortable than he already was. He sighed.

Jamie returned from setting up the bathroom, then smiled when he saw Bran sitting on the edge of the bed. “You’re sitting up! That’s great!”

Bran looked up at him with what he knew must have been an incredulous expression. He was sitting—not even in an entirely upright position—on the edge of the bed. The idea that he’d accomplished anything at all by getting to that position was completely pathetic. A warrior of his caliber should not onlyhave been able to sit up, but blithely walk across the room. And shift his sorry Lugh-cursed ass back into bird form to fly out the damned window.

Not for the first time, Bran wondered if he’d done permanent damage to himself by refusing to complete the threadbond for the past two years. Longer, really, since it was possible for the threadbond to be completed even in childhood, although that often made the magic more unpredictable and dangerous. The Wyrthings preferred to complete the bonds after both participants had harnessed their magic. Assuming both participantshadmagic, of course.

Being near Jamie was helping to keep Bran’s magic calm, but he still felt like absolutecrodh maradung, and he was afraid that it wasn’t all from the beating he’d taken from thegeàrd soilleir.

“Do you want help standing?” Jamie asked, and while Bran most definitely did notwanthelp, he knew he probably needed it, so he nodded.

Jamie crouched down enough to put an arm around Bran’s back under his good shoulder, his hand resting on Jamie’s surprisingly muscular bicep as the half-breed half-lifted Bran to his unsteady feet. As Jamie was helping him through the doorway of the tiny bathroom, something elsewhere in the apartment started beeping.

Bran looked up at Jamie.

“I’ll deal with that in a sec,” the bigger man told him. “Once you’re all set.”

“What is it?”

“Dinner.”

Bran’s mouth watered at the very thought of food. “You made dinner?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager or greedy.

But Jamie smiled again, that quirky, slightly lopsided smile that Bran found himself disturbingly looking forward to seeing.“Nothing much,” came the answer. “Casserole. There’s some beans and tuna and stuff in it. Just what was in the apartment.”

Bran drew in a deep breath, appreciating the smells of cooking, although he couldn’t identify much about the food in question. Honestly, he didn’t really care. He’d eaten all sorts of questionable things over the last few months, and the thought of having hot food that he hadn’t scavenged out of a summer trash bin was more than enough to make his stomach growl.

The sound earned another slightly crooked smile from Jamie. “Once you’re all clean, it should be cool enough to dig in.” He helped Bran into the shower and down onto the chair. “Uh… do you think you need help with…?” His ears and cheeks caught fire again.

“I—I think I might need some help with the arm,” Bran admitted, not terribly happy about it.

“Yeah, sure. Of course.” Jamie bobbed his head, clearly nervous.

Prudish humans. Bran wanted to shake his head, but that would be extremely rude, given the circumstances, so he kept the thought to himself.

Jamie couldn’t look at Bran’s face, but he tried to be gentle as he helped Bran work the crinkly blue scrub shirt off over his cast, trying not to jostle either his arm or his chest.

“Holy shit,” he breathed when they’d finally gotten it off.

Bran’s whole chest was a mottled pattern of red, blue, sickly yellow, and a purple so dark it looked black in the admittedly poor lighting of Jamie’s bathroom.

Bran looked down at himself, then winced a little. “It looks worse than it feels,” the smaller man said.

“Bullshit,” was Jamie’s automatic response, and it made Bran look up at him with an odd expression, his dark eyebrows lifted. Jamie felt his face darken even more. “I mean. It’s bad. It looks bad. You don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt.”

He especially didn’t want Bran to lie and say that it was okay if he was in a lot of pain, because the doctor had said something about watching for signs of internal bleeding, and the bruising was bad enough that Jamie was now legitimately worried that might be a real problem.

“I dinna say it dinna hurt,” Bran muttered back, his brogue thick. “Only that it dinna feel as bad as it looks.”

At Bran’s insistence,Jamie had left him alone in the bathroom while his scrub pants were still on, the door cracked to make sure that if he called out for help, Jamie could hear him. After some scuffling noises, Jamie heard the water turn on, and decided it was probably okay. At least for now.

He set another timer that he told himself was for the casserole to cool down, but was actually the point at which he was going to make sure Bran was still okay if he hadn’t already come back out or called for Jamie’s help.

At least, he reminded himself,Bran’s awake.It had taken him longer than Jamie was happy about, and he’d leaned on Jamie quite a bit on the extremely short walk to the bathroom, which was also worrisome. Maybe it was because of low blood sugar from not having eaten most of yesterday. Maybe the pain was worse than he was letting on, and he just didn’t want Jamie to fuss.

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