do i not bleed too;

It hurt, it hurt, it hurt. Her teeth sank into the leather wallet hard enough to make her jaw ache, and it wasn’t enough to stop the pathetic whimpers and burning tears. The needle stabbed her on occasion but it wasn’t as if she could do any better as her vision swayed. She couldn’t think about how this would scar, how this would surely infect her with something nasty, if the corruption wouldn’t take its toll on her first.

Gods. She had a gaping maw where her stomach should be. She had other things to worry about.

When it was done, she looked up at him with streaks on her face, eyes far too red. She spat out his wallet where the puncture marks had gone clean through it, ruining whatever was inside.

“Take a guess.” She uttered, though it was without bite this time.

She took her now-bandaged arm back, pondering what to ask him to bring back. Antiseptics, clean bandages, enough alcohol to clean this putrid mess and make her not care of it, hot water to scrub even the memory of this away, pain medication, and servants to wait on her hand and foot – she closed her eyes. What she needed was to go home.

But she couldn’t do that in her current state. She could barely get herself to this tiny little washroom, let alone all the way to Faline. She’d simply never counted on losing her magic like this.

That was part of the hollowness, aside from the literal kind. She couldn’t call on it here in this house, otherwise she would’ve shifted to a healthier body and left by now. She felt its lack like a sickness, like she was missing a limb instead of merely having a chunk taken out of one.

Lasair asked for a cloth and clean water to rid herself of the mess clinging to her still, and while he got up to fetch it for her, she quieted down, applying pressure above her forearm if it might make the burning pain lessen, even if a little bit. She looked through the doorway back to the disheveled den with its bottles and cobwebs, and murmured, “I suppose I should thank you. For saving me. Helping me, when you didn’t have to. But I wonder...who saves the hero at the end of the day?”

She brought the basin of water closer to her, taking the cloth he offered with a nod. “I’ll return the favor one day. If you need help one day, you can call on me.” She smiled very faintly. “I’m not always this pathetic, I assure you.”

Once he left the house to go fetch something to eat for them both, she took her time peeling her ruined clothes away, cleaning the stain from her skin and poisoning the water black. The more she rinsed away...the better she felt. Every stain removed felt like a weight lifted from her back, like more air filling her lungs. That missing-limb feeling dissipated the more she scrubbed, till she finally felt her other skins calling to her and she slipped into something else that wasn’t in so much pain.

Feathered wings spread in the tiny washroom and she laughed in pure relief, standing as a harpy as fierce as it was finally free of that dizzying sickness from the beast’s tar. Now she knew why she’d felt so ill! Finally, gods above, she could leave this little hellhole her savior deigned to rot in.

She strode out into the den, clawed wings folded over her chest. In the end, she left her calling card on the little table and a few stray feathers on the windowsill of his open window.

She wrote on the back of the card: I owe you. 

As good a promise as any that they would cross paths again.