Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jak wakes up curled into the warmth of his bed. When he fell asleep Daxter had been sprawled out next to him, dozing, after staying up talking rather than leave Jak to the nightmares by himself. Now, though, Daxter is sleeping wrapped around himself, feet tucked under his fur and his tail over his nose, shivering ever so slightly in the winter chill seeping into the apartment through the shitty windows. He looks so small. Jak rubs the sleep from his eyes and reaches out of the blankets to scoop a hand around Daxter and pull him into the warmth next to him.

The pain is sharp and sudden as Daxter bites deep into the meat of his thumb. Jak jerks his hand away, more from surprise than anything, a second before his jaw unlocks and he lets go.

"Holy shit," Daxter yelps, shocked. "Are you okay?"

Through the dark, Jak watches the blood well up in a wide crescent on the inside of his palm. "What the hell?"

"Sorry! It was, like, instinct! You scared me."

"Come here," he mutters, scooping Daxter up with his bloody hand and shoving him under the blankets, into the pocket of warmth against his chest. This time Daxter doesn't fight it.

"Dude, you're bleeding," he protests, though, when Jak snuggles back down.

"It's warm."

He shoves Jak in the shoulder. "Go wrap it up at least. You're gonna get blood everywhere before it stops."

Jak doesn't move besides stretching his arm out so the blood doesn't seep into Daxter's fur.

"Get up, Jak."

He sighs, and rolls up on his elbow rather than smear red all over the sheets. "Fine. Stay here."

It's not until he's in the bathroom standing over the sink that he realizes how bad it is. Jak's scale of pain is fucked. The blood doesn't stop, Daxter's sharp fish-eater teeth long and serrated enough to carve deep into his hand. There's muscle damage. Jak's pretty sure he's had canines punch into the cartilage of his thumb. The back of his hand doesn't look much better. Holding it under the tap does nothing to staunch the flow.

"Holy shit," he says under his breath.

Daxter, disobedient as expected, pads over the cold tile and jumps up on the lip of the sink. He winces at the blood all over the white porcelain. "Okay, that looks bad."

"God, Dax, you really bit me."

Blood drips from his pinky as he presses down on the wounds in his palm as hard as he can.

"Don't you have, uh, a pulse in your thumb?" Daxter asks, wary.

"It's not gushing. They're just really deep."

"That's gotta hurt like hell." A moment later his brain clicks. "Right, probably barely stings after all the torture."

"I didn't realize it was this nasty. Why'd you bite so hard?"

"I don't know! Like I said, pure animal instinct. Bite first, ask questions later. Besides you pulled away. That probably tore something."

That helps explain all the blood. Jak frowns at him, then asks, "Did you have to bite people while you were on the street?"

"No, but I bit a couple cats for messing with me while I was sleeping. Bit a raccoon once for the same reason. Couldn't get the taste out of my mouth for weeks. You ever lick the inside of a dumpster?" He gags, then sobers. "I didn't think I'd still be doing it now, though. I guess I should have warned you."

"Don't wake a sleeping ottsel."

"I'm so sorry, buddy. Let me help?"

Jak rinses his opposite hand off and pries the medicine cabinet open, looking for green eco salve, or at least gauze. Something to tie his hand up to try to stop the bleeding. All he finds are bandaids and aspirin and antiseptic.

"Remind me to order medical supplies next time Tess does inventory."

"I think this'll be reminder enough," Jak says. "Give me that towel, I guess."

"That's just gonna soak up more blood," Daxter protests, but he does hand it to him.

Jak rips a long strip out of it, his injured hand twinging as he does it. One handed, he tries to wrap it around the worst of the bite marks.

Daxter slaps him in the shoulder. "You gotta at least disinfect it first."

"What, is your mouth dirty?" It's filthy, but not in that way. He still brushes his teeth.

"They're puncture wounds, smart guy. You wanna smack yourself in the face trying to shoot a gun with gangrene?"

Frustrated, he climbs up Jak's arm, claws sharp on bare skin, and stands on his shoulder to fish a bottle out of the cabinet. Then he jumps back down onto the lip of the sink and twists off the cap.

Jak yields, and holds his bloody hand out to Daxter to let him dump a stream of peroxide into the punctures in his skin. It bubbles up, red foam, and Jak resists the urge to pull the wounds open farther just in case.

"Rinse it. Then give me that towel. There's no way you're tying anything with only one hand."

"This is so stupid," Jak says. Losing this much blood to an accident in his own apartment when he's had so much worse.

"It'd be funny if you weren't bleeding like a leaky faucet."

Daxter braces a foot on his wrist and wraps the bandage so tight Jak feels his fingers swell up. The punctures in his thumb joints are still exposed and bleeding. He tears another two strips out of the towel and hands them to Daxter. Those go around the rest of the wounds, the pressure crushing. Jak watches to see how quickly the blood will start to seep through.

"Are you light headed?" Daxter asks, the fur on his fingers bright red, as he twists the ends of the last strip into a knot at the back of Jak's hand.

"I'm fine."

"Look, I'm running way less blood in my body now that I'm fuzzy, so to me this looks like a murder scene. Just because you don't notice pain doesn't mean you can't be light headed."

As much as Daxter's trying to play it cool right now, something about him hen pecking is cute, even if it's because this was his mistake in the first place. He cares so obviously when it comes to Jak. That ride or die ancient history.

"Don't smile at me like that! I'm the one who sunk his chompers into you. Best I can do is take care of what you can't do one handed."

"Thanks for patching me up," Jak tells him.

Daxter waves him off and jumps into the sink, getting more blood all over his toes, and cranks the tap back open to wash some it off his hands. He stands there sloshing around in lukewarm red water, trying to get enough of it to go down so he doesn't look like he just ran through the back of a butcher shop.

"So how do I taste?" Jak asks, trying to lighten Daxter's sudden seriousness.

He watches something incredibly dirty go through Daxter's head before he says, "Like meat. Maybe a hint of that peppery gasoline dark eco scent. What kind of question is that?"

"Better than the raccoon?"

"Nothing about you could taste that rank. Don't remind me."

Jak ruffles the fur on his head. Daxter bats at him.

"Okay, you sit," he orders, pointing at the toilet, "until the bleeding stops. I'm freezing my ass off in here with wet feet but I'm not letting you go back to bed if you're just gonna bleed through three layers of towel."

Jak complies, his feet cold on the tile and his fingers full of pins and needles from the bandages.

Daxter takes the remains of the destroyed towel and jumps down to the floor to work at rubbing the bloody water out of his fur. Then he wraps it around his shoulders, clasping it in front of himself to hide the way he's still slightly shivering.

"It's messed up you didn't feel it. I'm not nuts, right?" Daxter asks eventually, even his tail tucked into the towel.

"You're not."

"I know I'm a light weight. I'd be bawling my eyes out. We got into a lot of scrapes and I definitely didn't appreciate getting electrocuted by KG sadists, but I didn't think about you not feeling any of it."

"I'm not totally numb. Getting shot hurts." He holds his injured hand up. "This is just nothing."

"It's not nothing! You bled everywhere and nearly gave me a heart attack. The fact you can even say that makes me want to ram a gun down someone's throat. Preferably a certain megalomaniac dead man."

He's heated, his cool slipping to a naked angry worry. And maybe it catches Jak off guard that with his hand patched up, Daxter's pivoted into that specific darker territory. Fixating on Jak's broken sense of pain, the shitty healing without eco to aid it, the way Jak wakes up sweating every other night with agony a white hot memory under his skin. Daxter never talks about it, but them living together means he's front and center to witness every way Jak's health is complicated after all the dark eco shock treatment. Jak hadn't thought it was getting to him.

"I know it's messed up," he admits, quiet. "It's just easier to say it's not."

"I get that, but," Daxter shrugs, "I still think about it."

It took him two years to bust Jak out of prison. To Daxter, it will never feel like he did enough, no matter how much Jak tells him that it was.

Jak watches him sit there shivering, not quite looking at him, and then shifts down to sit on the cold tile across from Daxter.

"Come here."

"Why?"

"Because you're the one who's more upset about my hand than I am."

"You really think I'm talking about your hand?"

"No. And you're a terrible bluff about it. Plus you're obviously shivering."

Daxter rolls his eyes, putting in the effort to switch tracks. He huffs, "I know for a fact your hands are basically icicles right now, and I at least have a fur pelt. I don't need your pity."

"You're an ass."

"Hey!" Daxter yelps as Jak grabs him by the scruff of the neck and gently deposits him on his shoulder instead, towel and all.

"This all started because I didn't want you to be cold, okay? Stop moping and throw me a bone here."
"I'm not moping," he mutters. "This is genuine." His feet are like ice through Jak's shirt, but he does shift to tuck his cold little hands into the warmth behind Jak's ear. "Thanks, though."

"You too."

Once the red on the bandages stops spreading Jak lets Daxter carefully unwrap the dressing to tie it back up with more strips from the destroyed towel. His fingers don't go numb this time. Only when the blood stops does Daxter stop fretting and let them both go back to bed. The sheets have gone cold as Jak hefts himself back into them. He pulls Daxter in close before he can bite him again, and goes back to sleep.