Stitching

[intheheart]

Title: Stitching
Rating: PG-13 for rather graphic depiction of wounds and seventeenth-century medicine.
Summary: Felipe and Zack have a bad day and encounter a mystery.
AU: EPIC PIRATE AU
Notes: This romance apparently proceeds rather differently in EPAU.


He hadn't been stabbed, exactly. Zack kept yelling about a stabbing, but he hadn't exactly been stabbed. Stabbing implied a small hole, with perhaps a faint trickle of blood until you fell over dead from bleeding inside (or sometimes infection, but there were usually warning signs with infection). This was... not a small hole. This was... a slash, maybe, if a slash had hit bone and skidded down. Whatever that was. It reminded him uncomfortably of skinning rabbits.

It definitely wasn't a stab, anyway.

"Who in God's name cares what it is?" Zack snapped. "We need a surgeon!"

Felipe held his forearm together with a bloody hand and looked around them, beyond the bodies at their feet, to the slums of Port Royal. Dirty, smoky, falling down, teeming with whores and pirates and intermittent screams... "I don't think we'll find one here."

"We'll find one," Zack said, dangerously. "We'll find one, and he'll fix you up, if I have to hold my gun to his head the whole time."

Felipe didn't feel that would encourage the surgeon to be very careful, but pointing out the obvious never helped when Zack was in a mood like this.

Besides, maybe it wasn't obvious. Maybe he was just light-headed with blood loss. He could definitely feel it now, over the screaming pain of his arm, a dizziness creeping up on him and blackness nibbling at the edges of his vision.
He ordered himself not to pass out-- it was the worst idea he could imagine, just now-- and blinked at the slumping wooden huts around him. "Maybe someone will have heard the noise," he said.

Zack sent an indiscriminate glare in the direction of the huts. "They all heard," he said. "They're just too scared to do a damn thing."

"It isn't fear."

It was actually kind of funny, the way Zack jumped. Felipe laughed, and then realized distantly that he shouldn't be laughing, he should be doing exactly what Zack was doing, which was spinning and pointing a gun at the person who had just spoken.

She-- it was a she, he could tell that much from the voice, but apart from that she was a dim shape between the huts-- ignored Zack, or at least the gun, and said, again, "It isn't fear. They just don't care."

Zack narrowed his eyes at her. "And you do?"

"Enough," she said, and stepped forward into the light of the moon.

About then, Felipe knew that he was going into shock, because his only reaction was to stare.

She was beautiful. Long hair left to hang, pale skin that practically glowed, a face made for his fantasies. He couldn't quite make out her colors, but he thought her hair might be red, her eyes maybe blue, or perhaps green. Not that it mattered. She was beautiful either way.

It wasn't until she gave him a mildly puzzled glance that he realized he'd been talking out loud again. He really needed to stop that.

"Thank you," she said. "I hardly think that's relevant."

"It isn't," Zack said, through his teeth. "He's in shock. Who the hell are you?"

The woman looked at him the way one might look at a child that has just asked a particularly silly question. "It doesn't matter," she said, and gestured at Felipe. "He needs my help."

"He needs a surgeon," Zack said. He didn't take the gun off her.

The woman gave him another of those too-patient looks. "He doesn't need a surgeon. They kill more than they cure, around here. He needs me."

Zack snorted. "And what makes you so much better than a surgeon?"

"I just am," she said, and apparently decided that she was through with talking. She picked up her skirts and walked very calmly past Zack, exactly as if he wasn't holding a gun on her, to kneel beside Felipe. "May I see that?"

"Get away from him!" Zack yelled.

"Zack," Felipe said, looking into those deep maybe-blue maybe-green eyes. "It's okay."

Zack looked at him as if he'd suddenly become a Bedlamite. "You're in shock," he said, still holding the gun on the woman. "You don't know what you're saying. I said get away from him!"

The woman ignored him again, taking Felipe's arm and stretching it out before her. "Ah," she said, ignoring too the blood that dripped on her skirt. "This is very bad. Hold still."

That was an order, as clear as any ever issued by a general, and Felipe obeyed, though her prodding made pain flame through his arm. She tsked over his arm for a moment, then produced a flask from somewhere, and looked back over her shoulder at Zack for a moment, before shaking her head and saying to Felipe, "This will hurt."

"Okay," he said. "Zack, if you're going to shoot, for pity's sake, shoot something not her."

"You're delirious," Zack said, but he lowered the gun at long last.

The woman pulled the cork out with her teeth, spat it delicately into her skirt, and then emptied the contents over Felipe's arm.

As advertised, it hurt.

As the echoes of his yell died down, Felipe realized with some confusion that his head was a lot clearer.

The woman had been watching his face carefully-- she nodded to herself, then bent over his arm, her hair sweeping forward over her shoulder, and pulled out a needle and thread. Where she'd been keeping all these things...

...where had she been keeping herself?

"What are you doing out here?" Felipe asked, yelping only a little bit in the middle when she began to stitch. "This is no place for a young lady, especially at night."

For lady she was. It was clear as crystal in the way she carried herself, in that pale, pale skin, even in the way she spoke. No common woman ever snapped orders like that.

She ignored the implied question and said only, "It's more a place for me than it is for you. Hold still."

"I'm trying," Felipe said, through gritted teeth.

"We're supposed to be here," Zack added, suddenly close. Felipe managed not to flinch, but only because his arm was currently being sewn up and he was concentrating his full attention on that. "You are not."

A faint smile crossed her face, though she did not look up from her sewing. "I live here," she said. "When we're in port, at any rate. We hardly ever are."

Zack's eyes narrowed suddenly, a hunter sensing prey. "You're a pirate," he said. It was not a question.

"No," she said. "I never was. Hold still."

"Zack," Felipe said. "Make yourself useful and help me hold my arm."

There was some grumbling, then his partner reached over and held his arm steady. It helped, although it didn't make as much of a distraction as he'd hoped.

"If you're not a pirate," Zack said, "what are you doing here?"

She clucked softly under her breath, and turned Felipe's arm to catch the moonlight. "I told you," she said. "I live here when we're in port."

"No honest merchant stays here," Zack said.

"No," she said, her tone so calm that it must be infuriating Zack. Felipe shot a glance at his partner and was amused to see darkening color on his cheeks. "I never said I was an honest merchant. You should learn to listen."

"You should," Felipe agreed, to be sociable, and yelped when Zack's hands tightened hard enough to bruise. "Hey...!"

"You're in shock," Zack said, calmly, "which is why my hands are around your arm and not your neck."

The woman laughed just a little, then leaned down, bit off the end of the thread, and stood. "There," she said. "Keep that clean and take out the stitches when the skin has bound itself again."

Felipe regarded his arm and the neat stitches marching up it. "Nicely done," he said. "I think I'll faint now."

The woman considered that. "I wouldn't," she said, at last. "Not here. You'll be dead before dawn if you do."

"Yeah," Zack said, still slightly venomous. "She'll probably be the one to slit our throats."

The woman sighed, and said, "No. I told you. I'm not a pirate." She turned away, her patience apparently worn out, and began to walk into the darkness once more.

"Wait!" Felipe called after her. "What's your name?"

"Who are you?" Zack added.

She paused, barely more than a smudge against the shadows once more. There was a moment of silence.

"You know," she said, "I don't believe I'll tell you."

Then she was gone. Zack sputtered.

Felipe was in love.