Warm Blood

"... My hands are shaking." - these words come out of the mage's mouth no louder than a whisper, but Screks' long ears twitch in response.

The magician's sight is fixed on his rattling palms, as his breathing is getting more and more unsteady while he watches his fingers quiver sporadically.

"Katsu?" - the scientist turns to his partner, who is facing away from him, standing in the middle of the room, looking down. - "Katsu is everything-"

A loud thud fills the space as the taller figure collapses to his knees.

The doctor immediately stops what he is doing and stands up. His chair falls behind him with a metallic thud, as he rushes over to the mage, nearly tripping on himself as he does so.

Screks crouches in front of his partner. - "Hey, hey, hey, is... is everything alright? Wha... what happened? Are you alright?" - he shutters, his voice shakier than usual, the words feel difficult to come out as his organic eye widens.

Katsu's heavy breathing fills the cold metallic walls of the lab. A conic beam of red light, coming from the doctor's mechanic eye, scans Katsu from head to toe, as several blue holographic panels pop up all around him, searching for any kind of physical concern.

"I... I'm okay. I guess I'm just a bit tired, that's all." - Katsu murmurs, trying to get his breathing under control.

"No, no, no. You're not "okay", don't you lie to me. Your heartbeat is way faster than it should in a passive state, you're not doing any kind of intense physical activity to justify these numbers, and your body heat is also way higher than usual, which is definitely concerning due to your condition, and, yep, it keeps getting higher as we speak so, there is definitely something going on." - Screks details, looking over multiple rectangular holograms filled with data from the scan, while crouching in front of his wobbly partner.

As Screks shifts his attention to his partner, all the floating panels around him disappear at once. He reaches towards the black man's head with his organic hand, placing it softly on the mage's cheek, gently pushing it up so Katsu looks at him.

Both exchange looks for a few seconds before Katsu's gaze starts slowly shuffling away from his partner and into the empty floor, his gaze fixed on the nothingness of the metal floor, as he grasps at his own chest.

With a flick of his cyborgish wrist and a tongue click, a new blue panel appears in front of the pale man. - "Winter, me and Katsu are going home for the day, he's not... feeling well, be a dear and close off the lab for us when you can will you?" - the panel disappears right after, not leaving time for his assistance to argue. 

Screks' words break Katsu out of his trance, making him look at his partner again, who still had his gaze fixed on him, the doctor's eyebrows sink into a concerned frown as he gently strokes the red-haired's cheek with his finger.

This rare sigh of genuine tenderness coming from the pale man in front of him makes Katsu unable to refuse, and as he sees Screks finishing his call, he teleports both into their place of rest, their house.

The cold metal walls and floor are now replaced by warm and inviting painted wooden walls and a rustic dark wood floor, and, in place of the cold white artificial lights, a soft golden glow, coming from a few magic floating lights, hovering in various corners of their living room, complete the ambient.

As they get there Screks immediately uses the unnatural strength of two mechanic arms that sprout from his back to, slowly, pick up Katsu and place him delicately on the big beige sofa in the middle of their living room, going towards the kitchen space that is connected to it right after.

"Try not to move. I'm gonna get you one of those concoctions me and Tasha made, for when you have relapses of your condition, alongside something for you to eat. So just try to relax I... I will take care of you, so yeah, don't worry. You know you're in good hands, or hand I mean, well technically I have multiple hands but they are not organic, so I don't know if they would count for this specific expression, but I will consider they do." - Screks rambles on, which makes the mage feel a bit more at ease.

Katsu opens his mouth to talk back, but he feels his strength failing him, so he gives up and lets himself sink into the soft material of the sofa, resting his eyes and focusing on controlling his unsteady breathing.

Some good couple of minutes pass, and his long dark right ear twitches as he notices someone approaching, he opens his eyes back again to see his partner handing him a glass cup with a pinkish liquid inside, which he takes.

"Drink that and uhm..." - the doctor places on the coffee table by Katsu's side a tray where there could be seen a golden sandwich, with a hefty slice of steamy dark meat covered in a generous amount of melted cheese, accompanied by some slices of lettuce and tomato on one side and a mug filled with some hot herbal tea in the other - "I made you some food as well, be sure to eat that, because weakness due to lack of nourishment can worsen your symptoms. I'm just going to-"

As a restless Screck is about to leave for some other self-given errant, he feels Katsu's warm magical hair gently wrap around his organic wrist.

"Dear, I'm okay. I don't need anything else." - Katsu reassures with a soft smile, but his shakiness has yet to subdue.

"You're definitely not, I can very literally tell by looking at you and I..." - the doctor clenches his fist while looking into Katsu's tired eyes, he takes a moment and his expression softens. - "I don't like to see you like this, so I want to do the best I can to help you. So let me."

Katsu sighs softly and nods in agreement, letting go of his partner's wrist, who starts going towards the kitchen once again while the mage chugs down the pink potion in one go. His expression twitches as the bitter cold taste hits him but he drowns the flavor by taking a bite of his warm snack, and the juiciness of the meat soon washes down all that remains of the weirdly colored liquid's flavor.

The mage rests his head back, trying to relax, while reaching out towards his chest with his free hand, stocking it, as if to try to relieve some tension. He can feel the concoction slowly starting to take effect as his body starts cooling down slightly.

He remembers a time before this, a time when he had dealt with this for the first time. He was in the middle of his training in the Land of Dragons, and Lord Vermilion, his teacher at the time, didn't have a lot of experience with mortals, other than humans, so it was a painful couple of days before his condition started wearing off.

Of course, they eventually found a way around it, for when it unavoidably happened again, but it was a lot of dreadful trial and error until then, but, the first time that happened alongside the horned man, that he now could hear chopping up something in the kitchen, went down way differently.

In no time, even without any previous experience with his very particular condition, the doctor quickly found a way of making Katsu comfortable in the middle of a relapse, and for him to be in an adequate environment so his symptoms started slowly wearing out naturally. Eventually, they did do more research about it and talked with more people from the old Free Faction labs, one of those people being Dr. Natasha, who later helped Screks make a brew that would help with said symptoms.

This wasn't the only time Screks had been there for him, in fact, it was weird thinking about a time he wasn't. Even though the doctor treated a lot of people with the most varied of cases, when it came to the mage, the cyborgish man always had the distinctiveness of stopping whatever else he was doing and making Katsu's well-being his top priority. And that kind of had always been the case, even a couple of centuries ago, not only would he always treat him with utmost urgency, but with a certain tenderness that the mage never saw him have for anyone else.

"Here, I cut up a plate of frost fruit, this can help the medicine effect to be quicker. I put some honey on it to drown out a bit of the sourness so you can just eat it without much trouble." - Screks says as the hands the resting man a place with an exotic light blue fruit sparkled with tiny circular black seeds cut into cubes.

"O-oh, thank you." - the mage accepts the bowl of fruit.

"Tell me right away if you feel it getting worse in any way, if you start feeling, dizzy, lightheaded, cold, anything at all feels bad or weird alright?" - Katsu nods in response.

As he notices that the bowl has been delivered Screks goes back to the kitchen area, starting to tidy out what he had disorganized throughout the kitchen, putting everything back in its place in a seemingly methodical way.

The quiet mage stares down at the bowl of light blue cubes in his hands, clenching it.

Katsu hesitates at first but after a deep breath, he finally calls. - "Hey Cael..."

"Hm?" - the doctor doesn't look at his partner, as he is finishing up his current organization task.

"How come you always end up taking care of me?"

Screks stops. - "What do you mean? Of course, I will always take care of you, you do the same for me, it's not like-"

"No, no I... I know." - the mage takes a deep breath. - "Sorry, that's not what I meant, let me reformulate."

"Uhm... alright." - the doctor places down the plate he was about to store and goes towards his partner, who still has his gaze fixed on the fruit.

"The way you take care of me, it's different. It's always been different from the way you treat... like, everyone else. When it comes to me you're much more... I guess, serious, in a way, about it. You're much more methodical and to the point, while with many of your clients, you always take a more, almost experimental approach, in a way less straightforward way, I guess." - the mage pauses. - "Why is that? Like, why do you treat me differently?"

"Because you're different."

Katsu looks forward to see Screks crouching down in front of him, his deep scarlet organic eye fixed on him.

"You're completely different from anyone else, absolutely no comparison. You're quite literally the most important thing in my life, of course, I would deal with anything that concerns you with much more care and effectiveness than anyone else. I..." - the doctor's gaze swifts around as his speech becomes more and more gestural. - "I don't care too much for small mistakes that may or may not happen when I'm treating others. I don't care for using them as test subjects, always in a restrained and safe way of course, but in all honesty, in most cases, I don't completely care for their well-being." - he stands up, looking towards the big window in front of the sofa.

The view was of a great dark cave, a black rock wall filled with blue crystals that glow with a magical touch, and in the distance, there could be seen a small waterfall.

"I care for being successful, to keep up to the reputation and stakes I've built for myself, but if something goes slightly unplanned or wrong, if it doesn't make my end objective fail completely, in the majority of cases, I feel absolutely nothing for those people, even if these small mistakes might impair them slightly as the final result. I will personally gain more from experimentation and that counts more for me. Of course, this is not exactly 100% accurate for all cases but it is definitely for most. But..." - the doctor's gaze shifts back to his partner. - "When it comes to you I..." - Screks crouches down in front of Katsu once again, staring at his eyes, seeming almost lost in them, and takes the man's hand into his own, stroking it gently. -  "It's not to say I don't take all my works and clients seriously but, you are... special to me. In a way no other is or will ever be, so that's why."

Katsu lets a tender smile fill his face as he hears his spouse's peculiar explanation, he of course did always have a sense of this but, it hits differently when explained to him so directly, but he is glad that is the case. - "Thank you Cael, for always doing your best to care for me." - all things considered, he's unsure of how to feel about this, of course, he doesn't dislike it, but it is certainly unusual, not that anything about the man crouching in front of him is conventional anyway.

The doctor takes this moment of pause to get closer to the mage, placing a quick tender kiss on his lips. - "Rest now, I will be here if you need anything."

"I will, thank you, dear."