Chapter 19: A Healer’s Silence
Chapter 19: A Healer’s Silence
The torch had burned low.
Alex knew this the way he knew everything now. Distant, through a layer of something thick and cold, that wasn’t quite excruciating anymore. Pain had been the first hour. The second hour had been something sharper and more specific. By the third hour his back had gone partially numb, which was somehow worse, as everything around him blurred into white noise of hurt that his brain had eventually decided to process as background rather than signal.
Now it was just dark, and quiet.
He had stopped feeling his wrists somewhere around the second hour, or third, which was the one mercy the room had offered him. The chains held him upright by default — his legs weren’t doing much of that work anymore, his knees bent slightly, his weight hanging from the iron rings above.
He breathed slowly. Carefully. Each breath a negotiation with his ribs that he was no longer winning cleanly.
The room felt cold on parts of his skin that still had their senses.
The blood on Alex’s back had dried.
The ripped flesh on his back hardened in particular tightness across his shoulders and down his spine, pulling slightly every time he shifted, like old leather that had shrunk overnight. The cuts themselves had stopped bleeding a while ago. He knew this not because he could see them but because the dripping sound that had kept him company for the first part of the evening had stopped.
The room smelled like copper and stone and something older underneath both.
Somewhere outside the walls, Rome was doing what Rome always did. Being enormous, indifferent and alive in ways that had nothing to do with whatever was happening in this room.
Alex stared at the crack in the wall. His breath hitched, caught in a sigh.
He had a strange, half-delirious appreciation for that.
Then something moved near his feet.
He looked down slowly, wincing in pain, and found a rat sitting at the base of the wall, nose twitching, whiskers catching the last of the dying torchlight. It had found his foot in the dark, and was nibbling at his smallest toe with the calm, businesslike concentration of an animal that had long ago concluded that the occupants of this room were rarely in a position to object.
Alex watched it for a moment.
"Fair enough." He said. His voice came out rough and strange, cracked at the edges from hours of disuse.
The rat ignored him and kept nibbling.
’Ping! +1 vitality.’
Alex closed his eyes briefly. Even now, the system was apparently logging the rat.
He opened them again.
The torch guttered once, twice, but still held.
Then boots in the corridor.
At the sound of that, the rat’s ears twitched, as it stopped its nibbling, and scurried away frantically.
The door swung inward hard enough to bounce against the wall, and two guards came through, torches in hand, flooding the room with light that hit Alex’s eyes like something physical.
He squinted, and turned his face away. The chains swayed slightly.
Following the guards, unhurried, whip at his side as always, was Akosa.
He stopped just inside the doorway and looked at Alex the way he always looked at things he was assessing. His eyes moved from Alex’s wrists to his back to the dried blood on the floor beneath him, taking inventory without expression.
Then took another step, to have a closer look at Alex’s face.
"Still awake." He said, somewhere between observation and mild surprise.
Alex said nothing. His jaw was working properly but the words weren’t cooperating.
Akosa let the silence sit for a moment, then tilted his head slightly.
"So." He said. His lips curled up to something sinister. "Have you decided yet?" He folded his arms, the whip hanging loose from one hand. His voice carried the particular tone of a man returning to a conversation he’d been thinking about at intervals and was now genuinely curious about the answer to. "Bold, or stupid."
Alex looked at him. His jaw tightened once.
Then he looked back at the crack in the wall.
Akosa studied him for another long moment.
Then he made a sound in the back of his throat — not a laugh exactly, not quite a scoff either, something in the narrow space between respect and exasperation — and turned to the guards.
"Get him down." He said. "Then take him to Gaius."
He didn’t wait to watch it happen. He was already walking back through the door, the sound of his footsteps fading steadily down the corridor.
The guards moved to the chains.
When they released Alex’s wrists the sensation that returned to his hands was not pleasant. His knees hit the floor before his legs caught him, which they did, barely, with a guard’s hand under each arm doing most of the actual work.
They half walked, half carried him into the corridor.
The torch behind them died as the door closed.
---
The guards didn’t knock this time.
They just came through the door sideways, both of them, with Alex hanging between them like something they’d found rather than something they’d brought.
Gaius looked up from his table.
He took in the scene as quickly as he always did, without visible reaction. His eyes moved from the guards to Alex to the state of Alex’s back, which was not something he’d seen outside of a battlefield in quite some time.
He set down his pestle.
"Again." He said. Not as a question, nor as accusation. Just a word that carried the full weight of a man who had reached the particular point in life where very little surprised him anymore, but still occasionally disappointed him.
He gestured at the nearest empty bed. "Face down." He said. "Carefully."
The guards lowered Alex onto the bed with considerably more care than they’d shown getting him here. Alex made a sound when his chest hit the straw — something involuntary, something that came from deep in his ribs rather than his throat — and then went quiet again.
Gaius crossed the room, looked down at the guards, and said nothing further. They took the hint and left.
He stood over Alex for a moment, studying the damage with the eyes of a man who had spent thirty years learning exactly what the human body could and couldn’t survive, and was now running his own quiet calculations.
"We really have to stop meeting like this." He said.
Alex didn’t respond. His breathing was shallow and uneven, his eyes half open and fixed on something in the middle distance that wasn’t in the room. Conscious enough to be here. Not conscious enough to be present.
Gaius pulled up his stool.
He worked methodically, the way he always did. Cleaned the wounds first with a damp cloth, working from the shoulders downward, removing the dried blood in long careful strokes. He counted the lashes as he went, the way a builder counts cracks in a foundation. There were a lot of them. "Whoever had done this had been thorough."
He prepared his needle and thread.
Started at the deepest cut, near the left shoulder blade.
He’d stitched wounds in worse conditions than this — battlefields, dungeons, the arena floor itself once, a long time ago when he was younger and less careful about what work he took. His hands remained steady, despite his age.That had been trained out of him years before Alex Norman existed.
He pulled the first stitch through.
And then he stopped.
His hands stayed exactly where they were, needle between his fingers, thread drawn halfway through. His eyes had caught something at the edge of the wound — the far side of it, where the flesh should have been sitting open and raw and waiting for him to close it.
It was moving.
Not dramatically. Not the way things moved in stories, no golden light, no visible heat. Just the very slow, almost imperceptible drawing together of tissue. Like watching a tide go out. The kind of movement you could convince yourself you hadn’t seen, if you looked away and came back.
Gaius did not look away.
He sat on his stool with his needle and his thread and watched the edge of the wound he was about to stitch close itself by a fraction of a measure, and then another fraction, and he breathed slowly through his nose and said absolutely nothing at all.
His only visible reaction being his arched brows.
After a while he looked up.
Alex’s white hair was matted with sweat and dried blood, splayed across the pillow in every direction. His back rose and fell in the shallow rhythm of someone balanced on the edge of sleep. His face, what Gaius could see of it, was slack and young and completely unaware of being watched.
Gaius looked at him for what felt like a long time.
Then he looked back at the wound.
Then he finished stitching it. Quietly. Carefully. Every stitch placed exactly where it needed to be, even the ones that, strictly speaking, probably weren’t entirely necessary anymore.
He applied the ointment. Wrapped the bandages. Tied them off with a neat knot and patted them once, same as always.
He stood up. Picked up his bowl. Walked back to his table.
He sat down, picked up his pestle, and he began to grind.
The old man paused for a beat, took another glance at Alex, something flashed within his gaze, like he had remembered something. He stared for what felt like a minute, and went back to what he was doing.
Comments