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Your name is Joey Claire, and you did not make it this far for your new alien friend to bleed out on the threshold of shelter.
Maybe you’re being a little bit dramatic, considering how Xefros is carrying on his side of a chipper conversation and matching your pace as he limps, but there’s a lot of blood seeping into your shirt from his, and you still haven’t forgotten the XXD he’d offered in reaction to the rubble responsible for his injuries in the first place. It’s especially hard to forget now as you hurry through the hive door, shoving it open with a louder rusty squeal from its hinges than would be ideal if you were anything but driven.
At the way Xefros’ chattering falters, you take pity on him, closing the door behind you once Cornibuster pads in and pushing it firmly back into its jamb with something much quieter and much closer to caution. You doubt it makes much of a practical difference, but the modicum of tension dropping from his shoulders is enough.
If you had any company around this far from the subgrubs, your newfound stronghold probably lost their interest long ago—aside from the nearly-rusted-shut door and its broken lock, the place looks ransacked, cupboards of what might have once been a kitchen (the freaky alien equivalent, anyway) thrown open or missing doors entirely. A quick scan confirms they’re missing anything potentially edible, naturally.
Opposite the destroyed kitchen is an equally-wrecked open area that registers to you as a living room. Your hypothesis is supported by a single couch sitting just off-center of the middle of the room, trailed by scrapes in the floor, as if someone had tried to haul it away and given up midway through.
The couch doesn’t appear too parasite-infested or mold-blanketed, so you tap Xefros’ shoulder where your arm is thrown around him and point to the lone piece of furniture once he turns a curious eye to you. “Does that look alright to lie down on? No weird blood-drinking bugs, or whatever?”
He considers it for a moment, brow crinkled in thought and hopefully not notable amounts of pain. “Nah. I think whoever lived here would’ve took those when they left. And if they didn’t, whoever else did that—” He makes a wobbly sweeping gesture at the general havoc. “—would’ve. So I think you should be fine,” he finishes with a nub-fanged smile.
“You should be fine,” you correct, already leading him towards the couch. Around your shoulders, his hand twitches away from you whenever his fingers come close to resting against your arm. “You need some rest, pronto. No more running around bleeding for you.” Cornibuster, curling into a loose ball in front of the door, lets out a chuff that you’re pretty sure is an agreement. Man, smart alien parent-animals are cool. “See? Official deercat verdict.”
For as much dark, deep burgundy is soaking the both of your shirts, his smile quirks unsteadily upwards at that, and he makes a noise somewhere between an unintelligible word and a soft, cicada-esque buzz. “Whatever you say, Joey! You’re the docterrorist here.” With that off-putting portmanteau, he sinks onto the couch, heaving a sigh as his arm slips from your shoulders and his weight settles onto the seat with a creak.
He’s just lying back, pillowing his head on a less understuffed section of the arm, when something strikes you that in retrospect should have been obvious from the minute you noticed the ride had reopened his wounds. You pause for a moment, wincing internally and a little externally, before clearing your throat and folding your hands behind your back. “Well,” you start off, “the doctor-terrorist or whatever kind of needs you to take off your shirt.” You rock on your feet for another moment. “So she can actually work.”
His smile fades, but you can appreciate the surge of lucidity that replaces it as evidence that he’s at least not hazy with blood loss. For that matter, the flush across his cheeks lets you know he’s got the blood for it, which is good because it’s really not helping with anything else. “Um,” he mumbles, pulling at the hem of his shirt, “one second.” You give him one second, then two, and when he still stalls, you decide to make it easier on both of you and turn around to retrieve your vet kit from your sylladex.
Finding the kit itself is easy. Like your flashlight, it’s ever at the ready in case of danger, whether that danger is a crevice too dim even for Xefros’ nocturnal eyes or the scratches you’d gotten from tripping in similar crevices. The saline, antibiotics, and bandages should be just as easy to gather from the kit proper, given your daily check-ups on Cornibuster’s paw, but you find yourself sifting through your supplies, turning a bottle of heavy-duty painkillers in your hands as you listen to the rustle of fabric against fabric behind you.
You muster your nerve and face him again to find he’s folded his half-soaked, half-crusted t-shirt neatly in his lap, which he indicates with a weak ta-da of a flourish. For a second, your eyes linger on it, then they move up, and two things immediately occur to you: first, that travelling so far tonight was not easy on him, and second, that there are a lot of differences between your species. Alarmed concern wrestles with unnerved fascination behind your temples before your sense of Hippocratic responsibility intervenes on concern’s behalf.
The heavy-duty painkillers don’t make it into your armful of tools, but a smaller, less potent bottle does. You unscrew the cap (which lacks a child safety function, to your mild worry) and tip two pills into Xefros’ hand as you take his bundle of a shirt, letting it fall unfolded again in your free hand and shrugging in apology at his face falling. “Sorry, it’ll dry better this way,” you explain, “so no bacteria or stuff grows on it.”
He swallows the painkillers without hesitation, as if he’s used to taking unidentified pills at the slightest friendly prompting. You really hope he’s not, but his voice interrupts that line of thought. “Oh, right. That was in the butlering manuals, I think?” He’s holding one forearm across his chest, rubbing at his other arm, uneven, blunt yellow nails just long enough to draw pale lines across the skin. “Sorry, I’m bad at remembering,” he apologizes, flashing you a smile right out of your dog obedience guide’s section on deference displays.
“Xefros, c’mon.” His wound, or at least the one that opened, isn’t a clean cut, but it’s much cleaner and much narrower than you would expect from being crushed under rocks. Whether luck, or a miracle, or whatever else, you can be thankful for that. Stitches would be a Russian roulette of technique and infection you’re not going to shove Xefros into. “We covered probably miles today, and you bled all through the last ones. I’d be bad at remembering, too,” you soothe, and pour saline solution over the kit’s stained washcloth. It’s not the carefully-sterilized white one still sitting in your vet kit at home, but it’ll do. “No need to apologize.”
Touching the washcloth to his side is easier than expected. When he’d taken his shirt off, you’d halfway braced yourself for a switch to flip—for him to start being someone else, someone like one of Clarissa’s crushes, maybe with tousled hair or a roguish charm. Someone different from your friend. As it turns out, shirtless Xefros just looks very awkward, very alien, and very pained. Exhaling, you set to fixing the lattermost, swabbing the gash down his chest and side in gentle, smooth movements.
It takes several passes and several minutes before you’re confident you’ve cleaned it thoroughly, and in the process, the stiffness in Xefros’ posture dissolves, your work broken up only by his chest heaving with a long sigh. You take a minute to appreciate the painkillers’ speed, though when you shoot a glance at his face, his violent maroon flush’s mellowed into a softer dusting of color, too. Lying here now, his home fathoms away and probably in ruins by now, the sagging couch not even worth the effort to steal, he’s most content you’ve ever seen him.
Something in your chest feels warmer. Patting his arm, you hum under your breath, uncap the antibiotic ointment, and return your attention to his wound.
You barely realize your progress until you’re tying your best knot to keep the bandages wrapped firm-but-not-tight around his torso. “Oh,” you notice, blinking once at the sound of your voice in the room, then looking to Xefros when he stirs at it, too. “Hey, do those fit alright? Not too tight, or anything?”
“Yeah,” he starts, but then trails off. Momentarily, he breaks eye contact. “Well,” he ventures, “they’re a little tight. I’ll be okay! It’s just, my exoskeleton feels kind of pinched there.”
He hasn’t even finished his sentence before you’re worrying at the knot, untying it and tutting at him as you do. It’s not the most professional-sounding tutting, but it feels like the most doctor-y thing to do (though you can’t say how docterrorist-y is it). “You’ll be more okay if it’s not tight, bud.” You pull the knot tied again, though with less force this time, and test to see if you can wedge your fingers under the bandages. You can’t. “That better?”
The couch gives the beginnings of a groan as he shifts, spiracles flaring with his breath. His hand smoothes over the bandages, and when their edge doesn’t dig in at each inhale, he flashes you a look of equal parts gratitude and relief. “It is, thank you!” Idly, he reaches to scratch the crust of dark, dried blood off of a spiracle.
The massive blot of tacky, drying blood smeared across his stomach suddenly makes itself much clearer. “Oh geez,” you mumble, then speak up, “Hey, Xefros? You’re kinda all bloodied up.” Helpfully, you hold up the now-burgundy-tinged washcloth in one hand, saline solution in the other. “For now, I don’t think you should move a lot, since your cut needs to start sealing again. But I can help, if you want.” The way things have been going, his wounds aren’t going to have anything close to optimal healing conditions, but giving them a head start is the least you can do.
He hesitates. It could be that his thick-skinned, sharp-toothed features are just beginning to cease being alien to you, but you think you see guilt crossing his expression. That he was hurt? That he needs the help? None of your guesses fit right. Nonetheless, you’re trying to string together some sort of comfort when he swallows, turning back to you.
“Sure,” he finally answers, lifting one hand in a (clumsy, courtesy of the painkillers) thumbs-up. “It's kinda weird, Tetrarch Dammek was the one helping before.” His hand falls the few inches back to the couch. “Helping sometimes,” Xefros admits, and you watch as his eyes glaze over, followed by his translucent third eyelids—nictitating membranes, you remember reading—slipping halfway closed and startling you for a bewildered split second. You always forget he has those. “When he got to be Tetrarch, he wanted me to do better on my own,” he says. “He was always looking out for me.”
The way he stares, wistfully, at nothing in particular leaves a sour taste in your mouth. Words pile up at the tip of your tongue, but as much as you'd like to let them all spill out, you and Xefros are going to be hunkered in this hive all day. The both of you are bruised, scratched, and eating off of only what you can salvage along the trip. Some nights, you wake up to this from dreams of Lite Brite art with Jude. For the time being, the last thing you want to do is to curdle the atmosphere.
Instead, you wring out the washcloth, drip a second soaking of saline onto it, and start on the bloody mess of his torso. Where cleaning his wound was swabbing, this is closer to scrubbing, but still, you afford it as much care as the unfamiliar territory of his alien features merits. His spiracles you could at least recognize after a minute’s worth of remembering your biology books. You clean them first, careful of their closing reflexively under your touch—breathing through dried blood can’t have been pleasant for him.
As you continue, he does seem to breathe more easily. The gentle huff of warm air over your arms, ruffling your sleeves, from each pair of spiracles along his abdomen is more pleasant than you would ever expect being breathed on by a bug to be. Plus, the blood flakes off more easily from the defined edges of his skin, where you can feel the plates of exoskeleton under them, than it does from soft human skin. His skin warps oddly over one plate, just under his ribs. When you run the washcloth over it, you can feel how the exoskeleton itself dips inward, as if struck.
You scrub until ruddy near-black fades into gray peppered with pale scars, composing your message to Dammek and this whole horrible planet all the while. It’s not the most concise, and it involves a lot of phrases your babysitter wouldn’t say within earshot of you or Jude, but it makes you feel better while you focus on cleaning off each of the small, chitinous nubs between Xefros’ lower sets of spiracles. They’re rounded, each a third of the size of your palm, and the same orange-yellow gradient as his horns, which is about all you can tell, because you have no idea what they are. You’re considering the possibilities when you reach the last pair and feel an unfamiliar shape under the washcloth.
Your immediate suspicions of parasites or malignant growths are fortunately overturned by the glimmer of bronze-y metal as you pull your hand back. On closer inspection, it’s a piercing: a plain, straight bar, rounded at both ends and without any sort of other decoration. Checking the chitinous nub’s double at the other side of his abdomen, you realize it has a match. Curiosity piqued, you nudge Xefros and resist the urge to stare at his third eyelids sliding sideways open again. “You have piercings?”
He stirs, beginning to prop himself up on his elbows before you hastily guide him back down with a motion to his bandages, and settles for tilting his chin, looking down his chest to where you have his set of piercings half-cleaned. “Oh, yep.” As he speaks, he pushes the bar of one between his thumb and forefinger, pressing first one rounded end and then the other against tangerine chitin. “They were Tetrarch Dammek’s idea, a few sweeps ago. He said that grubscars were a good spot, because it was…” He pauses for a moment, nibbling his black lip in recollection, before finishing, “Rejecting highblood control of resources without celebrating decadence.”
You make a face at yet another mention of Dammek and add a few lines to your mental message. “‘Celebrating decadence’?”
Xefros nods. “That’s why it’s just metal. I mean,” and he shrugs, “the only other things we could get were plastic rhinestones. Those just look bad.”
An idea is forming in your head. Like many of your other ideas recently, it’s not very feasible, but hope springs eternal. With your free hand, you brush aside your hair, trying to ignore that it hasn’t been washed in a few days and combed for longer, and tap a finger against your earlobe. “How do these look?”
Somehow, through all the chaos of this whole ordeal, you’ve managed not to lose the earrings you’d worn the day the portal spat you out here. With them in your ears right now, you can’t actually see them, but you imagine they shine like liquid in the dull light.
His eyes widen in what might be awe. “Pearls?” he breathes, like saying the word any louder could bring a drone down on the spot. From your limited knowledge, it might. “How’d you get those? Did you know someone, or—” Breaking off, he makes a gesture as if taking something. Did you steal it? comes through loud and clear.
“Neither.” Just in case, you match his volume as you explain, “Anyone can get pearls on Earth.” You try to picture a seadweller from Xefros’ descriptions, all violet-flushed fins and jewelry and shark teeth. Then you think of the pictures in his gun-filled hive—the insouciant figure in the beam of red light opposite yours—and picture Dammek, all big horns and jutting teeth and sunglasses.
“Tell you what,” you say, letting your mop of hair fall back into place, “when we get back, we’ll get you some pearls. I don’t think we have stuff for grubscars, but you could get your ears pierced.” Glancing at Xefros’ more-mammalian-than-insectoid ears, you lay your hand over his and offer your best shot at a bolstering smile. “Then we’d match. That’d be cool, I think.”
The best way you can describe him is stunned. Twice, the beginning of a sentence rises and dies in his throat before he manages, hopeful and afraid at once. “Really?”
You’re not sure what in particular the question is directed at, but you know the answer. “Really.”
By the time he surfaces from thought and responds, you’ve already washed the rest of the blood from his abdomen. “Thank you,” he tells you, sounding a little more hopeful than afraid this time.
“Anytime.”