Chapter Text
Phainon is only half-conscious when Mydei finds him.
Not that he knows it’s Mydei when it happens—his awareness is drifting, caught as he is in the chains that string him up by his wrists. The shiver he makes is reflexive at the hands that cup his cheeks, the fingers that pull the gag from his mouth and slide down too quickly to check his pulse and breathing.
“Deliverer,” he thinks he hears, an urgent sort of thing. But the sound trails away, as does the thought, as does the dimness of his vision, all of it sinking back under the rip current that has risen to claim him.
The hands leave his face. Phainon’s head dips back down again, too weak to hold itself up without assistance. A fleeting pang of loss begins to take shape in their absence, but before he can really make sense of it a burst of faint red light is flaring through his half-closed eyelids. The sound of metal breaking.
The chains holding him against the wall detach, releasing him abruptly. Phainon crumples forward, or at least he starts to. But before his knees can hit the stone floor, those warm hands return to catch him.
Scarlet fragments into stars in his field of view, dusting over him. Inhaling hurts, feels for an instant as though he is choking. He is pulled against a steady chest, shifted into a strong pair of arms, and that hurts too, sending frissons of pain and confusion through his broken body.
“Bear with it,” they tell him. Low. A bit like lightning. “You’ll be safe as soon as we reach the city.”
Safe.
Phainon isn’t safe here, he supposes. Wherever here is. But he isn’t sure if he ever has been, really. When was the last time hearing that word meant anything? A sister’s smile? A bandaged knee?
He smells smoke, and can’t tell if it’s from these arms or from his memory. His eyes slip shut again, or maybe they were shut already.
There’s too much of a haze in his mind to try and figure out whether or not he is a real thing.
“…rest,” the mirage says, as though granting him permission.
Their presence is a dizzy heat, seeping through the clothes between them and into Phainon’s clammy skin. He hadn’t even realized until they were carrying him how cold he had been.
He thinks of a name, in that blurry moment before the darkness expands beyond his rib cage to consume him. His lips part, mouthing around the pomegranate-shell of it.
But then he sinks back into the shapeless unconsciousness and that, too, recedes.
The second time Phainon wakes, the world is filtering through much more clearly.
He is lying on a sturdily woven kline, not in his own residence, but in one of the rooms the Marmoreal Palace staff had repurposed as an infirmary. His body still aches, but far less than before, enough to leave room for him to think.
He doesn’t entirely remember what had happened to bring him here, nor where he was before it, but that in itself isn’t unfamiliar for him. Any number of times Phainon has opened his eyes to these walls, the faint crack that runs through the marble ceiling, the worn folds of these cushions underneath him. Any number of times he has learned it is a place of failure, a place of defeat.
He wants to be more afraid, to feel his lungs squeeze at the thought of who he must have let down by losing consciousness, but the rest of him won’t quite listen, still heavy and drifting and weak.
“You’re awake.”
Through the indistinctness, the voice surprises him.
It isn’t the gap in Phainon’s recollection—scarlet light, warm hands, breath ghosting over his. No, this is a different presence, one that anchors Phainon to himself, to his bearings, to his existence.
He tries to turn his head toward Professor Anaxa, to greet him with the respect that Phainon has always offered him, but the attempted movement makes him immediately nauseous.
Professor Anaxa shifts in his seat. He has never been one for unnecessary motion, unlike Phainon, so the only reason he could have for it is that it places him more directly in Phainon’s line of vision. The blues and greens of his outfit mix together in a mess of color, unresolved until Phainon blinks.
He hasn’t seen his professor in… how long has it been? Weeks? Phainon doesn’t know, and now the not-knowing makes uneasiness worm its way into his stomach. He is always excused from class while he is out on a mission, but if he has been injured again, they are going to have to delay his graduation for the third time, he thinks.
…why is Professor Anaxa here? He never makes the trip to Okhema unless it’s absolutely needed of him, or otherwise an emergency. But today he is sitting by Phainon’s bed instead of doing whatever it is that he was summoned to be doing.
Either Phainon has died, he decides to himself, or he is having a very strange dream.
Professor Anaxa sighs, seeing his face. “Don’t look so startled. That woman requested Hyacine’s presence from the Grove; I merely happened to be free.”
His eye flicks over Phainon, then, and under the weight of his attention Phainon becomes aware of the bandages spun as though a protective cocoon around his ribs. There are more around his throat, the rings of his wrists, where he vaguely remembers being gripped.
It doesn’t hurt less because enough time has passed for him to heal, he realizes, but because they must have indulged in prayers to numb the sensation and ease his recovery. They had gone so far as to call Miss Hyacine away from her duties to tend to him. Guilt creeps over the base of Phainon’s tongue and hitches his breathing.
“P-Professor,” he croaks. The effort stings, a sandpaper-sound to it, and his voice comes out as a whisper for all that he tries to enunciate the way that he’d been trained to, properly.
“Save the speech.” A faint knit appears between Professor Anaxa’s eyebrows, either at Phainon’s inability to articulate or at his general condition. His own words remain matter-of-fact, unmoved by what he is saying. “You nearly died several times over. You need to be conserving your energy.”
Phainon must have nearly died a hundred times by now. None of it ever sticks. But Professor Anaxa already looks… well, Phainon isn’t sure what that expression is supposed to be conveying, but it most definitely isn’t happy.
Either way, he doesn’t verbalize it.
Professor Anaxa watches him for a moment longer before he exhales and turns away, making as if to stand and leave. “I’ll go notify your other teachers,” he says. “The little messenger was waiting with you for days before they finally convinced her to fly off and get some sleep.”
“W-wait,” Phainon chokes out, against his professor’s recommendation.
Professor Anaxa pauses, half out of his seat, and looks back at him.
Phainon had wanted to reach for him, to stop him from going, but the spasm that runs through his fingers and up his arm has it falling back onto the kline limply. “What,” he struggles to say, then coughs, the pain that rocks through his chest leaving him a little breathless. Even so he retries the question. “W-what did I… what happened?”
That frown has gotten deeper. Professor Anaxa glances at the quivering line of Phainon’s hand and Phainon wishes he could disappear, wishes he could hide it, wishes he didn’t have to be so childish. How humiliating.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, ashamedly.
“What is there to apologize for?” Professor Anaxa sounds genuinely baffled. Then he shakes his head before Phainon can react to it. “Don’t answer that. I told you to conserve your energy.”
A beat passes as he weighs how much to tell Phainon, visibly.
“I don’t have all the details about your rescue, unfortunately. Suffice to say that the people who did this were located and swiftly dealt with. You were poisoned—that will explain any cognitive impairment you might be experiencing—but you’ve been treated for it. As well as for the…”
He stops. The shadow of anger seems to pass over him, but in seconds it is pressed back under the veneer of calmness he is wearing.
“…other injuries.”
For as much as Phainon had wanted to know, he is having trouble processing the information that has been presented to him. Rescue. Had he been missing? Wasn’t this just a usual mission, a usual incapacity?
Why is the room starting to close in around him?
“I’m…?” Phainon sounds too lost even to his own ears. He course-corrects. “S-so this… isn’t a dream?”
He had been striving for levity, but his voice wobbles midway through and Professor Anaxa’s face softens terribly. The look in his eye isn’t exactly pity, but Phainon doesn’t have another name to call it. He reaches down and rests his fingers on the back of Phainon’s hand, just above the bandages.
“It’s not a dream,” he says simply. “You were missing, and then you were found.” His next sentence is very firm, an order as much as it is a promise. “It may take some time, but you will recover fully.”
Phainon’s hand continues to tremble beneath his, but this time Professor Anaxa doesn’t look twice at it.
“…w-what were the… other injuries?” Phainon asks, unsure if he is allowed to, weakly.
Professor Anaxa’s lips thin. He shakes his head again, a rare rejection of the inquiry. Phainon does his best to accept this and to swallow his escalating anxiety.
If he isn’t being told, that means he doesn’t need to know it. Phainon understands this logically. But it doesn’t ease the panic, the wrong-footedness. Why does he have to ask at all? Why can’t he remember what led to this?
“Phainon,” Professor Anaxa says, cutting in through his spiral. Phainon looks up at him, desperate for reassurance. “You need to give yourself time. Just focus on healing.”
“But…”
But it feels important, Phainon wants to say. It feels like something is wrong with me.
Only the thought dies on his tongue before it can leave.
Because the look isn’t pity. It’s the look Professor Anaxa gets when an experiment isn’t working—when he is assessing whether or not something is broken.
And Phainon doesn’t think he wants to know after all which conclusion his professor has reached.