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Adolin wakes to agony and blinding light.
The blinding light is the sun, achingly bright to his pained eyes. The agony is… everything else. He remembers falling. He remembers… the weight of a mountain landing on top of him. Everything is. Fragmented. Like rock shattered by a hammer. He thinks he ought to be dead.
Pieces of the thunderclast, and of his own armor lay scattered around him. He’s distantly shocked that pieces of his bones aren’t among them. Or other torn bits of his mangled corpse.
He can’t… move. Every limb feels as heavy as if the thunderclast’s body is still pressing down on it. Nevertheless, Adolin tries to lift his head, get a sense of his surroundings, he needs to—
“Don’t try to move.”
Adolin’s head falls back to the ground. Even that slight motion is agony. “…Kal?” he croaks.
He can just barely make out, through blurry vision, Kaladin knelt by his leg. “This might hurt,” he warns, and then yanks tight the belt he’s wrapped around Adolin’s thigh.
Adolin jolts, but the pain of the tourniquet—surely that’s what it is—going tight is swamped by every other part of his body, which are also screaming. “More than everything else?” he says, when the wave of dizziness passes.
“That’s the spirit.”
Syl lands on Adolin’s chest as a tiny woman in a miniature Bridge Four uniform, hands on her hips. She’s been appearing more and more visible to others lately, it seems. She studies him, then says over her shoulder, to Kaladin, “I think you’re right!”
Kaladin leaves aside Adolin’s leg—Adolin thinks it’s probably for the best that his vision is still too blurry to really see the damage—and kneels by his head, taking a glowing gemstone from his pouch. Adolin’s vision is swimming too much to make out any detail in his face, but the emerald glow of the gem is clear. “Take the light,” he says.
Every bone in Adolin’s body must be broken, surely, and maybe it’s making him hallucinate. “What?”
“The stormlight,” Kaladin says.
“I- I can’t, I’m not—”
“Try,” Kaladin says. “Imagine yourself drawing it in.”
There’s little more to lose at this point, so Adolin focuses on the gemstone Kaladin holds to his lips. Feels the swirl of stormlight within it. He takes a shaky breath, lungs struggling to fill under what must be cracked ribs, and imagines— not taking the stormlight. What he sees, eyes falling shut, is Maya blowing a soft breath across her palm, and giving it to him.
The pain recedes, just a little. He coughs, blood spattering his lips, but it makes his lungs feel a little more clear and it’s not quite so hard to breathe.
“Good,” Kaladin says. “Can you get any more?”
“I don’t… think so.” He shouldn’t be able to draw in stormlight like that at all, but he can feel Maya, distant, worried for him… so, maybe. “I think I should be dead.”
“Thank your helmet for getting crushed instead of your head,” Kaladin says, pocketing the gem again.
“Thanks,” Adolin says faintly, and thinks he feels a burst of affirmation… from the Shardplate?
Kaladin’s half-smiling when Adolin’s finally able to make out his face. Adolin hasn’t seen him since they parted ways upon the arrival of the thunderclast, and he looks somewhat worse for wear, hair and uniform crusted with blood—though most of it orange. Can’t possibly be as bad off as Adolin, anyway.
“You’re not going to die,” Kaladin says, as if sensing what he’s thinking about. The way he says it, it sounds more like, I’m not going to let you die.
“You’ll make sure of it?” Adolin says. Half-tease, half-plea.
“Can’t let you die when I finally started to like you, Brightlord,” Kaladin says.
“If that’s-” he remembers Kaladin’s hands on him the other night, a stolen moment when they really should have been resting between rounds in the dome. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
Stormlight and tourniquet notwithstanding, Adolin feels like he’s… fading. Everything hurts, his head especially, and Kaladin’s face above him is wavering in his vision. He tries to turn his head, to at least try to get a sense of the larger battlefield, but Kaladin holds him still, fingertips pressed to his temples.
Kaladin is glowing faintly with stormlight, even if he’s not actively using it, like an afterimage of battle. He could have stepped out of a childhood story about ancient heroes. “Looks good like that,” Adolin says, the words sounding slurred. “All... glowing.”
“Syl,” Kaladin says, voice wavering for the first time, “can you find that healer?”
“She’s already on her way,” Syl says, though she sounds worried.
It’s probably for the best that Adolin can’t see himself, he thinks.
True to Syl's word, May comes running over, the Truthwatcher healer—Rahel, right, he remembers, his mind is scrambled from the fall but he does remember, he always tries to remember—right behind her. “His leg!” Rahel cries, falling beside him.
What? Adolin thinks, dazed. He tries to look down, but Kaladin keeps holding him still.
“No, start with the head wound,” he says. Utterly calm once again. His stoic professionalism is… comforting. More than Adolin would have expected. Panic only begets more panic. “I’ve already staunched the bleeding in his leg. Did they teach you triage?”
“Y- yeah.” Rahel kneels beside Kaladin, out of Adolin’s sight line.
“That would have been the right move if I hadn’t gotten the bleeding stopped,” Kaladin tells Rahel. Ever the teacher. “He’d bleed out before you ever got to fix the rest of him. I’ve… made the mistake of leaving that for second before.” He takes a breath, steeling himself. “But now you’ve got to stabilize him and start with the most critical damage.”
Critical damage, Adolin thinks faintly.
“What would you do if there wasn’t a Radiant healer?” May asks, her normally steely voice gone quiet, as Rahel lays her hands on Adolin’s face.
Kaladin blows out a heavy breath. “Whatever I could,” he says simply. “Now”—this to Adolin—“this time it really is going to hurt.”
Rahel starts knitting Adolin’s bones back together, and Adolin screams, painspren exploding around him—
—and blacks out.
He comes to in a flash not long after, heaving in a breath, ribs popping as Rahel pulls them back into place, and—
—he blacks out again.
Awake again. Flashes. He’s pretty sure they normally knock people out for this sort of thing. “Easy,” Kaladin says from above him. Adolin would have thought he’d go back to the battle—not much left for him to do now that Rahel is snapping Adolin’s body back together like a demented puzzle, and Kaladin really should be guarding the dome before the city falls—
—darkness again.
Consciousness is like lightning flashing through cloud cover. On and off. Light and dark in delirious cycles. Chaos out of time.
Really it’s a mercy because being aware for all of it would have been far worse.
He surfaces again from the clouds with a gasp. Rahel’s hands have gone still. Everything still hurts—but not as much as before. He aches from the fall. He feels… fragile. But not on the imminent verge of death anymore.
Kaladin has one hand on his face, one on his shoulder, holding him down, holding him still. Adolin’s head is resting in his lap. His mouth is full of blood, but his lungs feel clear—he must have bitten his tongue. He turns his head and spits out a mouthful of blood—right onto Kaladin’s leg. All Kaladin says though, is, “Sorry. Should have given you something to bite down on.”
Rahel is trembling, face streaked with tears. It really wasn’t fair to drag a young girl with no battle experience into this horror—but war isn’t fair to any of them. May rests a hand on Rahel’s shoulder, an attempt at comfort.
“I’m sorry,” the girl whimpers, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Go rest,” Kaladin tells her. “Get more stormlight. You’ve done as much as you can.”
She stands, shakily, backing away. Before she can turn away, Kaladin adds, “Rahel.” She turns to look at him. Kaladin gives her a nod of respect. “You saved his life.”
Rahel nods rapidly, still shaking, then beats a hasty retreat back towards the dome, and more wounded.
May stays behind. She looks, grief-stricken, at Adolin’s leg. Adolin follows her gaze, and finds what he thinks he already subconsciously knew he would. Which is to say, nothing. The lower half of his leg is gone.
He feels sort of numb, looking at it. Any particular shock is lost in the overall swarm of everything.
“Get me up?” he says, voice rough.
May starts to say, “Do you really think you should—”
Kaladin hauls him upright.
Adolin has to cling to his shoulder to balance, but his remaining leg holds his weight. Rahel had done a good job with what was within her abilities. Kaladin pulls Adolin’s arm more properly over his shoulders, bracing him, and wraps an arm around Adolin's waist. Then Adolin feels the way Kaladin lashes him upward slightly, so he can walk without bearing so much weight. Storms.
“You should go,” Adolin tells him, even though it would mean he’d be left behind to hobble over himself. “Protect the dome.”
“It’s… been handled,” Kaladin says, sounding troubled.
Adolin decides to just wait the few minutes it takes for them all to—slowly—limp over to find out what exactly that means.
The extreme carnage left in Taln’s wake hovers in Adolin’s mind as he tries to eat dinner. The carnage of the whole week, really. Neziham crushed into the ground by the thunderclast’s fist. The pile of bodies at the opening of the dome. Even Rahel, trembling, Adolin’s blood on her hands. He has a strong stomach usually, but he’s feeling increasingly nauseated.
He tries to eat anyway, because if he’s going to be of any help, he can’t afford to lose any more strength than he already has. The only thing worse than not being able to fight would be lying useless in a hospital bed, unable to do anything at all.
He picks at his curry. Wishes, more strongly than usual, that Maya were there. She can’t manifest fully in the physical realm like the other Radiant spren can, but he could hear her voice, hold her blade in his hands and know that she was there. He isn’t a fan of the structured oaths of the Radiant bonds—but the friendship. The camaraderie. That feels nice.
Courage, she sends him, from far off.
He’s normally taken to eating with some of his men, or while playing towers with Yanagawn, but for now he’s alone. He just… needs a moment. A second when he isn’t a commander.
Kaladin pushes open the flap to his tent.
Adolin can’t say he’s surprised to see him. He is surprised that Syl doesn’t seem to be with him—Adolin hasn’t seen her since he woke up, she must be off being helpful somewhere. The other night, she’d ‘given them privacy’ with an extremely exaggerated wink and nudge but this, unfortunately, is not so light an evening.
Kaladin sits down across from him. Adolin gives up on eating and just pushes the rest of his food across the table to him. Kaladin picks up a piece of flatbread without protest and starts eating. He must be starving; neither of them has eaten since morning, and it’s dark out now.
After several minutes of quiet with just Kaladin eating and Adolin slowly drinking wine that’s not nearly strong enough for what he really wants to be feeling, Kaladin stops and says, “We should have sent me after the thunderclast.”
“You’re our only Radiant, we needed you against the Fused,” Adolin says.
“At least I can storming fly out of the way when something tries to crush me,” Kaladin says. “Or—”
“Regrow a limb?” Adolin says, grimacing.
Kaladin’s silence is a solemn, but affirmative one.
“Did I actually use stormlight?” Adolin asks. He remembers, but. It feels surreal. “Before, I mean?”
Kaladin's lips press tight. “You must have. You would have been dead by the time I got to you if you didn’t. Those things are heavier than a chasmfiend— it should have crushed you.”
“It did crush me.”
“Crush you more. The armor helped, but…” He sighs. “It takes a while to learn how to really effectively use stormlight, though.”
“It’s not a real Radiant bond,” Adolin says. Though he regrets, as soon as he says it, describing what he and Maya are forging as not real. “I don’t think Maya would want that again anyway.”
“Whatever it is, it saved your life.”
He’ll have to thank her, when she gets back.
“I think you’re wrong, though,” Kaladin adds. “About the bond. I talked to one of your men outside. One who saw the fight. He said you were moving like… you were dancing on ice.”
“The ground was covered in oil,” Adolin argues, though his heartbeat ticks up.
Kaladin raises an eyebrow, a smile tugging at his lips. “You realize I’m actually saying something nice about you and you’re turning it down?”
“Sounds more like one of my men was saying something nice about me.”
Kaladin says, quietly, “I wish I saw it.”
Well, Adolin thinks, with a pain that’s hard to let himself grab hold of, so much for that.
Kaladin studies him, thinking. Then lunges across the table and grabs hold of Adolin’s wrist.
Acting on the instinct of too many battles, Adolin yanks his arm back— and despite the strength of Kaladin’s grip, his wrist slips free, easy as a Shardblade through stone.
Kaladin leans back in his chair, looking rather smug.
Adolin stares at his arm, which, this time, isn’t coated in oil or anything else that could explain it. And… Maya is a Cultivationspren. But it shouldn’t be possible. Not like this.
“I… don’t know what to do with that,” he says, honestly. Storms, he’s too exhausted for this right now. And he has to talk to Maya, before anything else.
“Not much to be done about it right now, I guess,” Kaladin says. “But watch your step.”
Great, now he’s being teased. “How did things look out there?” Adolin asks, changing the subject by blunt force. “Are you in the next rotation?”
“In a few hours,” Kaladin says. “It’s grim. Taln and Ash gave us a reprieve, but… I don’t know. I’ve been turning it over in my head, and I still don’t know how to hold the city. At best, we hold the line, but by the end the population is decimated. A city held without its people.”
Adolin’s mind has been in the same place. And he feels particularly useless in fixing it. “I know. We’re pinned.” He looks down at his knees, one still caught in a phantom ache. "And down two Shardbearers."
Kaladin runs a hand through his hair, letting out a tired breath. Shakes himself as if knocking the thoughts away. “Can I take a look at your leg?”
“One thing you can fix?” Adolin says, the words pinched, not as much of a joke as he’d really like.
“If only.” He drags his chair around to Adolin’s side of the table, sits across from him, takes the stump of Adolin’s leg carefully in his hands, resting it on his own knee. The wound was below the knee, so Adolin had kept mobility in the joint. He supposes he should feel fortunate for that, at least.
“Does it hurt?” Kaladin asks.
“A bit.” Adolin’s used to pain during times of battle, though. He’s not sure he wants to disentangle this one from the general mess of it all, not quite yet.
“I can get you something for the pain from the surgeons’ tent,” Kaladin offers.
Adolin shakes his head. “Not if it’s going to cloud my mind.” The one thing he can still offer this conflict is his experience, his tactical mind. He won’t jeopardize that now.
Kaladin rolls up Adolin’s pant leg, then digs his thumbs into the muscle around Adolin’s knee, working out stiffness that’s already started to build up. Adolin gasps at the release of pressure, gripping hard at the sides of his chair as his whole body jolts. Fuck.
Kaladin doesn’t apologize, as if he knows the reaction is a good release of tension, and not more pain. “We’ll have to keep up with that,” he says.
“We?”
Kaladin just gives him a look.
Right, Adolin thinks. We. There is, in fact, a tentative we.
Kaladin was the one who dug him out from under the thunderclast, not that Adolin was awake to experience it. He imagines, in flickering images, Syl—as a Shardblade—slicing through the creature’s stone hide, Kaladin lifting pieces off of him with lashings. He must have done it quickly, if Adolin’s state was really so dire.
“Where’s Syl, by the way?” he asks, rather than bring it up.
“She went to talk to Notum.” Kaladin says. “I think that was an excuse, though. She winked at me as she left.”
“What exactly does she think we’re going to do at a time like this?”
“That’s what I said,” Kaladin groans. “You almost died, does she think I’m going to—”
He seems to suddenly realize that he’s still holding Adolin’s leg between his hands, fingertips pressing into his thigh. Adolin becomes suddenly more aware of it, too, as Kaladin looks at him, but doesn’t let go.
Surgeon’s hands. That’s what he thinks about. Holding him in place on the battlefield as Rahel worked, light on his temples, but assertive. Skilled and firm with his knee, each touch deliberate and knowledgeable. The way Kaladin works with his hands while healing is the same way he fights with the spear—with Syl—each stroke born of practice so deep it’s now instinct. Adolin knows because he feels the same thing when he fights with his sword—with Maya—each step, each blow sure and known and true.
He’d understood what a morale boost that kind of skill was on the battlefield, how seeing a warrior who knew every beat by heart could rouse troops from the brink of defeat. It’s the first time he’s thought of it like this, though, thought of himself immobile and defeated under the thunderclast, slipping, fading—and then Kaladin’s hands, holding him steady.
“Help me up?” he says, voice thin.
Kaladin blinks, coming out of a trance. He lets go of Adolin’s leg, stands, and pulls Adolin to his feet. Adolin gestures to the corner of his tent, his bedroll on the ground—thin but still more comfortable than the hard chairs—and they sort of hop-hobble their way over there.
“You could have crawled,” Kaladin says as he sets Adolin down, then, with a moment’s hesitation, sits down beside him.
“I was really trying to avoid that.”
Adolin stretches out his legs—leg?—leg-and-a-half?—if he thinks about it for too long he’s going to start dry-heaving. He’s going to start remembering the splitting moment when he’d hit the ground and thought, I’m dead.
One of the small diamond chips in a cup by the bed, left there for light, blinks out.
Kaladin looks at him. Adolin looks at his own hands, then closes them into fists before they shake. Then he lays down on his side, curling his knees up towards his chest, and rests his head in Kaladin’s lap.
Kaladin is frozen for a moment. Then, gently, he lays a hand on Adolin’s head, and holds him still.