Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I shall wander in the night. Don’t wait up.”

That’s what Audrey said before setting off into the Weald by herself while the others remained at camp. ‘Don’t wait up.’ That part specifically weighed heavy on her mind now. Maybe if her companions had waited for her, they would’ve been awake to handle the ambush that came down on their heads.

She came back from her personal exploration of those hideous woods to find a fire mostly out and her companions gone. Or—not all of them. While trying to work out what happened, or maybe if she’d been abandoned, she heard a wheezy little sound beside her. Audrey nearly plunged her pickaxe into its source before realizing it was only the good doctor, Paracelsus…

…from beneath a dead fungal scratcher.

No, Audrey wasn’t abandoned, but she was.

She would never forget the sound the doc made when she rolled the scratcher’s corpse off of her, allowing her crushed body to once again breathe. Para still had her dagger clutched in her hand, and though she dispatched the monster, it wasn’t before it ripped her belly open like tissue paper. A voice throttled by fading shock told her about the infected swarm that descended on the heroes while they settled down to rest. They all meant to flee, but one got ahold of her, and the others just kept running.

“They thought I was there with them,” she tried to defend. It didn’t matter to Audrey. It only mattered to her that she was the one left behind.

The last she saw of the doc, only about an hour earlier, she was in peak condition. She asked, while pulling her mask aside to eat, to talk about new theories she came up with about the infected once Audrey was back. The graverobber was the only one, especially among that particular group, that could stomach the long, gruesome ramblings she so loved giving. Para would never conversationally have lasted a day in the aristocracy…it was part of what made her so endearing to Audrey.

Stuck there in the dirt, she was so obviously on death’s door. Blood seemed to be everywhere but inside her where it belonged. The only saving grace to the situation was that it was clear her stomach itself hadn’t been torn. She could survive this with quick work! Emphasis on ‘could’.

Audrey took her mask off with her permission, popping the goggles off at her request so she could still see with them. The mask looked even more eerie than normal without the eyewear—the resulting holes looking like deep, empty voids. A clean dagger cut away the fabric around the wound as Audrey apologized over and over for violating her modesty. There was only the light of a single salvaged torch illuminating the pair after fetching it and Para’s first aid kit from camp.

Crochet nor a clever sewing hand ever prepared Audrey for stitching flesh back together. The needles, the thread…it wasn’t the same. Paracelsus coached her through cleaning the wound with what was left in the graverobber’s flask (the scream…even with a rag stuffed in her mouth to muffle it, the scream burned itself permanently into Audrey’s brain), then through the process of suturing her up.

Para was all pained, fake smiles. “It’s okay!” She’d said. Her goggles made her gaze seem unfocused. “I…I’m likely going to faint, but it’s okay! You must keep going if I do. You must…” She wasn’t some maiden passing out on a couch because her corset was too tight! Fainting seemed like a very big deal! Audrey said nothing, however, unsure if her attempt at assurance was more for her or herself.

Shaky hands forced themselves to still for her sake. Two or three stitches in, done exactly as she was shown, and Para went totally limp. Like Audrey was ordered, she didn’t stop until her injury was sealed. It wasn’t perfect, but it at least mostly stopped the bleeding. She wrapped her middle tight with all the remaining bandages. When all was said and done, Paracelsus didn’t wake up. She was still breathing, but unresponsive.

That’s where she was now. Blood on her hands, an unconscious woman in front of her, and stuck without any help.

“Okay…okay…” Surely this was the hardest part, right? The living and the dead were each one thing on their own, but that in-between part that her companion teetered on was something else. That was all the doc’s specialty, not hers. She wished she could take a second to breathe.

“No time,” she said to herself. Pushed to the brink by stress, Audrey tried to stay focused to avoid losing her mind. Paracelsus still needed her. Taking one of the bedrolls from camp, she eased the small woman inside with a kind of care that implied she was made of glass, afterwards tying a rope around the roll. “A good lady makes do with what she has. That’s what this is. Making do…”

Dragging the roll by the rope, Audrey started her trek through the woods.

She had to put the torch out. As much as the light would help, it would also draw attention she couldn’t afford. Both hands were needed on the rope, too. Audrey managed a sluggish, but steady pace just off the path where it would be easier to be spotted by rogue bandits or more fungal monsters.

“I’m not fit for this…” she muttered bitterly to herself, as if robbing a grave didn’t often require the same amount of hard labor. The mental toll, though, was never so rough on her. It wasn’t freezing out, yet each heavy breath out whirled briefly in a mist in front of her face before disappearing. The chill was refreshing earlier. Not now. “If you told me I’d be here, like an ox strapped to a plow, five years ago…you’d be escorted off my property for such a suggestion!”

If it were anyone else, Audrey wasn’t sure she would have put the effort into saving them. Abandoned twiceover, but honestly, being humbled didn’t necessarily make her much less self serving as a human being. There was a reason she robbed graves instead of being a more common or daring thief. Corpses don’t report crimes. Where she called herself opportunistic, others might call her cowardly. If it were Dismas? Barristan? Up against that tree and sure to die without help? Well, nobody would ever know she left them. Anyone but this one…With Para, even if enemies descended on them right then and running without her was the only way to save herself, she wasn’t sure she could leave the poor woman.

“If you wake up…you must tell me. Don’t scream again, please…”

All she had to do was get to the point of egress. That caretaker with his stagecoach always seemed to know when he was needed. It had to be a supernatural sort of skill, and a very welcome one right now. If the others had beaten them there and left without the pair? Well, Audrey would haul her all the way back to the hamlet herself if she had to.

At some point, there was a little catch felt in the roll behind her. Audrey tried to force it forward, only—

Rrrrip

The sound sent ice flooding into her veins.

“No…” She dropped the rope. Checking behind her, the roll had been torn apart underneath Para by a sharp rock it caught on. “No, no!” This was bad. Really bad. Her heart began to pound in her ears as she pressed her palms to the side of her head. She could feel it: the threat of a breakdown bubbling up from the back of her throat.

“No! You! You are a lady! You make do…even in a situation like this.” A pickaxe and a loot haul were easier to carry than a human, but she had no other choice. The wounded woman was plucked from the mud, and with significant effort, Audrey managed to get her draped over her back. “I never fussed as much as my fellow upperclassmen, not even when I had the right to do so! That put me above them in my mind…it puts me above them now…”

At least this way, she could still feel her breathing. It reduced some of that dread that she was carrying a body back to be buried rather than someone who still had a chance at survival. Para’s hands weakly, unconsciously gripped the fabric of her coat.

“What have you done to me that makes me so determined to get you out of here?” Her voice never grew above a loud whisper all this time. “By the light…you’re so small, and you’re half-bloody-empty…why are you so heavy?”

Through mud, sweat, and tears she eventually could not bring herself to hold back any longer, Audrey carried her through a forest that would love a couple extra corpses to either take into its roots or convert to more infected. Hands that could’ve taken what little treasure acquired before the ambush instead went numb and white-knuckled in keeping a firm grip on her injured cargo. Once, twice, maybe three times, unfriendly chattering or rustling forced her to hide in the muck behind trees to avoid a potentially deadly confrontation.

When she finally made it out of the woods with Para, the sun was creeping up over the horizon. The doc never regained her senses once over the duration of the trek. Audrey felt like her chest might cave in from overexertion by the time the stagecoach was in sight, but still, she kept moving. The caretaker was there along with Dismas and Barristan.

They were preparing to leave.

Whatever chill there was settling deep in her bones vanished quickly, replaced now with a white, hot, invigorating rage. Their own expressions turned to an amalgamation of relief, horror, and awkwardness as they saw the women approaching. As if they could ever make up for leaving them behind, the two men were quick to offer to lighten Audrey’s load. She refused them even quicker, and she didn’t take kindly to them crowding her.

“Back off! I said I’m doing it!”

They lost the right to help her.

It wasn’t just that, though. Audrey now felt violently protective of Paracelsus. She kept seeing her underneath that…thing. That horrible, mushroom-ridden monster that held no semblance to the human being it used to be. It was like if she let her go, even for a second, Para would be right back there. Alone. Defenseless. For that reason, even as exhaustion bit deep into her bones, she refused to sleep on the ride back.

In the coach, she still held her. Her beloved coat went wrapped around her middle for whatever extra warmth it could provide and to cover up the torn fabric of her robes. Audrey cradled her head to her chest. It was an intimate looking position; there was no denying that, but neither companion on the opposite seats said a thing about it. Any time they tried to speak at all, they were met with a glare that was sharper than the graverobber’s favored daggers.

She tried not to think about how cold Para’s skin felt, nor about her pallid complexion and the way her breathing had definitely slowed since the trek back.

The eternity spent in those woods finally gave way to the hamlet. Despite the sanitarium nurses being the right people to handle Paracelsus’s condition, giving her away to them felt like some kind of betrayal. Audrey followed after them like a lost puppy, internally cursing how pathetic she must’ve looked. Of course, they wouldn’t let her in the treatment room, so she sat down on a plush chair just outside.

Even then, her legs like rubber and bones like jelly, she wouldn’t sleep.

Those nurses would later leave the room with bloodstained hands as they chittered about the saltwater they injected into their patient’s veins. It sounded barbaric, but Para was indeed alive because of their work. Because she was the one there, Audrey received all of their instructions of how to care for her…whenever she woke up.

Plenty of liquids! Milk and water and tea, as much as she can stomach! She nearly bled out, after all. Keep her confined to a bed until the risk of a popped stitch is over with! Return her to the facility at the first signs of potential infection!

Blah, blah, blah…Para was a doctor, she’d repeat all this back to her when taking her back to her dorm room.

The crones left her be to tend to other patients, and Audrey got to see the fruits of her labor. Not jewel-laden rings cut from stiffened flesh, not like usual, but a living, breathing woman recovering from her wounds. Her coat was hung on a hook beside Paracelsus’s tattered outfit. Looking over it, she grumbled to herself. Blood! On her best coat! It proved a hell of a lot harder to get bloodstains out of that particular fabric than dirt!

A silver canister was propped up beside the bed, connected by a tube to a silver needle stuck in her arm. By the label on the empty jar sitting on the end table underneath it, the setup looked to be a morphine drip. Whenever Para woke up, she would be feeling quite nice. Her goggles were set beside that jar within her reach.

“You…” Audrey began. “You trifling woman.”

That wasn’t even a good insult! Barely an insult at all! Nothing like what she could cook up as a maiden draped in furs and jewelry. Back then, she could pick someone apart after barely catching a glimpse at them. She still could! But…not with her. No, with her, Audrey couldn’t even muster up fake venom to back her words.

“Claiming you perform no witchcraft with your medicine…What do you call this terrible affection you’ve cursed me with? I should have left you. If I had, I would have returned to my quarters hours ago. No, no, instead I tweaked my neck sticking it out for you! Mucking up my boots, my gloves, my entire self beyond my usual level of soiling…for you!”

She dropped to her knees beside the bed, squinted eyes watching the rise and fall of Para’s chest. Her breath was so much steadier than it was towards the end of the coach ride. A hand reached out, slender but strong fingers taking a loose lock of her brown hair to play idly with. At least that horrible monster had the good graces not to rip up her face.

“I won’t ever forgive you…driving me to…to heroics! To virtue! You must understand such things simply are not my style,” she sighed dramatically. “Perhaps I should count myself lucky. This series of events excused me from suffering through those rambling theories you wanted to drone about.”

Knowing her, and with the morphine in her blood, whatever she wanted to tell Audrey about would probably be the very first thing out of her mouth when she woke up. Audrey wanted to hear all of it. Every single word.

Pulling herself away from the bed, the graverobber took a seat in the room and pulled her hat over her face. There was nothing left to do now but wait. It felt finally safe to rest. “I do hope you know I’ll be entitled to a share from all the gold you earn from here on out. It’s the least you can do to repay me for rescuing you.”

She wouldn’t owe her a thing. Not her. Not ever.

Except…maybe a kiss, if Para were to offer one herself.