Partner

A drunk Paw is a philosophical Paw. Which I thoroughly enjoy talking to, I must admit. Though I Paw before hand made me highly worried. I've seen other power users look and be like that and usually they die afterwards. They can survive. If cared for properly, but few are able to admit to others that they're hurting like that.

Mik's going to work around Paw's pride, not to worry. No dying.

This ended up being longer than I wanted and ended an entirely different way than I expected. There are bittles there that are... foreshadowing? And even though I didn't try to foreshadow, to me, they're quite obvious.

Thinking of doing a live chat, Saturday morning at about 11am pacific. Let me know what you think. It'd go from eleven to when we got bored. Let me know what you think.

Partners doesn't seem to raise as many questions as it used to, I don't know if that's good or not, like am I getting better with the being explainitory or have the questions just stopped coming?

Read, Review and Enjoy.




It was a few days later when Paw pulled Mik out of the shower. The Sidhe’s hands trembled, the effort of bringing Mik out of the shower brought Paw against the wall, puffing and pale. Mik moved quickly but didn’t rush. He didn’t want to slip on the wet floor. He dressed and slid his socks over still wet feet and cringed at the unpleasant feeling of them.

The phone was between his shoulder and his cheek as he struggled with his shoes. The car would be waiting for him.

He checked the hallway before he helped Paw to the elevator. Paw insisted that none of the others saw him. By the time they got to the car, Mik was all but carrying Paw. The Sidhe collapsed into the backseat, shaking from head to toe.

“What is it?” Mik asked Paw as the car lurched into motion.

“Just… pain.”

Mik was terribly aware of every bump the car hit, of every jolt from a stop or a speed up. He worried about the kind of pain Paw was in, and what was causing it, but there was little he could do to try and find out why Paw was in so much pain.

For the moment he could, and would, chalk it up to the power use of a few days before. Or from the power use Paw had done over the past few days, the walking and searching, Paw was trying to find information on the symbols written on their wall and about the speckled male.

By the time the car pulled up to the program building, Paw was cold, pale and sweating all over. Mik pulled the Sidhe from the car by himself and with the help of the driver, got Paw into the elevator and up to Palt’s office.

Palt stepped out of his office, bag in hand, just as Mik, the driver and Paw entered.

“You will have to deal with Shaester, I have something important, and yes, I realise that this is important as well, Mik but the Sidhe trusts no one else to administer drugs and they are the same drugs no matter who administers it and Paw at least will trust others, that door over there.”

They steered Paw towards the other door without complaint. Mik didn’t have the time or the energy to argue with Palt about administering medication then of all times.

In the room, Shaester was already at the cabinet.

“Sedative.”

“No,” Mik snapped, “sedative keeps him here, I need him upright so I can ask him what the fuck kind of idiot he is.”

“Ah. Tahluen sent us a pain blocker when they discovered the Sidhe cannot be partially sedated. It has been tested as safe for most … life forms. We have not tried it on a Sidhe before but any other animal shows the same results. How long they last for… may vary. As sedatives do not always work for the length of time we expect them to, the same can be said for this. Do you agree to my administering it?”

“Yes.” What other choice did he have?

“Put him on the bed and then leave.”

They pushed and manoeuvred Paw onto the bed and the driver headed for the door immediately.

“Not you,” Shaester snapped at the man, “Mik, you go and wait in the sitting room. I don’t need you getting upset about how this is administered or such.”

“Fine. But if he gets hurt, I’m holding you accountable.”

“Understandable. Leave.”

Mik left the patient room and settled in a chair by the door of the waiting room. The nurse smiled sweetly at him and was instantly distracted by the phone. A moment later two nurses rushed into the room with a prone Sidhe on a stretcher. There was only one Sidhe he didn’t recognise and that was Mm, mainly because the creature’s head was always bowed in the videos. The pair and the stretcher disappeared into a room.

A moment of silence and… in walked Palt once more with his bag in hand. Behind Palt a young man slid in. Black hair, green eyes. Not like Paw, not at all. Shiny black hair and dark green eyes, so dark that Mik would venture that in the right light the young man’s eyes would look black. The young man shuddered, eyes roving to the floor as if catching the end of a thought.

Palt waited for the young man to notice him once more before motioning to the seat beside Mik. The young man sat and looked around him.

It wasn’t until they were face to face that Mik realised just how young Rel was. The videos, the supposed crimes that Rel committed… it made the young man seem so much older. Rel was hardly old enough to be considered a man, eighteen at most. All that experience, all that schooling and Rel wasn’t even old enough to shave. Not with how smooth the young man’s face was, the room had no razor, to prevent a suicide attempt.

Mik glanced downward and saw the lacy marks of still healing attempts down Rel’s wrist.

Rel’s attention shifted and Mik met the young man’s eyes, “first time here?” he murmured.

“Yes,” Rel responded, “is it that obvious?”

“Mm,” Mik responded, taking in a breath as he tried not to wince at the sound of Rel’s Sidhe’s name, he glanced at Rel to see if the young man had noticed and then looked at the table, searching for an excuse, “most partners find the quiet of the doctor’s office relaxing. Only new ones need something to occupy their time.”

“Ah,” was all Rel could come up with. A moment later the young man seemed to come back from an errant thought, “why are you here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Regular test. He didn’t want the others around for it, so I came instead,” Mik stumbled out, nodding his head only to have his hair fall into his eyes. He had to get the damned stuff cut back again and he kept forgetting. Just one thing after another.

He flashed Rel a smile and saw the way the young man’s eyes glazed over. Sort of reminded him of how Paw got when he went floating off into a thought.

“Regular test, huh? If it’s regular, why didn’t he want the others coming? And who are the others…” Rel trailed off at the last bit, as if he wasn’t certain whether or not he wanted to say the last sentence, but it had escaped his lips anyhow.

“He did something he wasn’t supposed to and now he’s hurting because of it,” the man responded, “if the others knew he had hurt himself, they’d go nuts and he’d cry and I’d get upset and the others would get crankier. It’s a huge mess to deal with him when he gets hurt.”

“Like it is to deal with any social creature.”

“No. Souse got cut the other day, one of the board members flipped out,” the man sighed, “all he got was a ‘why aren’t you smart enough to duck’ but if they found out that…” Mik paused as he struggled with the thought of whether or not Rel knew who he was, “Auhi was hurt, then they’d throw ten kinds of fits.”

Rel’s face changed to one of puzzlement. The man reached to his stomach, as if trying to hold his guts in.

“Mik,” a nurse came out of the room with Paw following closely behind her. Mik wondered where the hell in that room she had been hiding, “Paw is ready for you.”

Mik saw the way Paw looked down on Rel, the curl of the Sidhe’s lips. The way Paw had treated the woman from the museum and Ell when the reporter had flirted with Mik. Paw felt threatened by Rel’s attentions on Mik.

“Rel?” Palt came out with a black sheet in his hands, “could we speak to you, please?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Paw rolled his head lazily to Palt, arrogance and an uncaring attitude, “try to kill himself.”

A Sidhe’s way of disassociating but still getting the information he needed or wanted. Paw wanted to know about the male, he was curious about Mm’s state of mind and body and how the program was doing at helping him. But at the same time Paw was afraid of connecting to the Sidhe only to have Mm die. It was a survival instinct, one that seemed cold, but if Sidhe felt grief like they did everything else… it was a necessary skill.

“No, Paw,” Palt responded as if he were speaking to a child, “the farmers fed him metal filings and they are lodged in his intestines. He’s in an intense amount of pain.”

And Paw wilted. Mik saw the tired look in the Sidhe’s eyes as he cringed away from Palt, at the tears that threatened to well up in Paw’s eyes and the way Paw protected his chest. Enough was enough. Mik had to tell Souse, even if it was while Paw slept off the drug.

“Come on, Paw, before you manage to make everyone in the program aware of your condition.”

Mik left and Paw followed closely behind. They were at the elevator when Mik recalled the driver and commented to Paw about the man’s absence.

Paw shrugged at Mik’s question, “Paw might have hurt man, Shaester looking after him. Called down for ‘nother car.”

“Ah.”

They stepped onto the elevator and the doors closed. Paw shifted his weight from one foot to the other as if testing his legs.

“Mik…”

“Mm? Eh, yes?”

“Thought you said Rel was bad man.”

“No. Paw. He was found guilty of double homicide, consigned to die at the whim of his victims but as they were arguing and the program needed someone…”

“Not a bad bone in Rel’s bodies. But… well with the cutting, he’s kind of afraid of what people think of him.”

“Observant, but we view him, mostly, as weaker than us, because he did so.”

“He was being raped and had nightmares and was certain he was going to die. But then. He also cut across, not up. He didn’t really try to kill himself, just to control some aspect of his life.”

“Pain.”

“Having control over something can keep a person from breaking. It is good that he found a way to control it. But… without the control of pain. Rel needs something else to focus on.”

“Why? He has Mm to focus on.”

“Yes. But… like how Paw needs to obsess over things that aren’t power. Rel needs control over things that are not emotion.”

“Pain is emotion.”

“Pain is the body informing the mind that both still live. Pain is good. In small amounts. Mik is going to tell Souse about Paw.”

An errant, almost side note, like Paw was thinking it and it had slipped out. Mik and Paw looked at one another and Mik looked away.

“Anyone else and I could have told him and he probably could have fixed it.”

“Oh, Paw, Auhi and Whisper won’t remember this conversation when the body is no longer drugged,” Paw murmured.

“Then who are you? Another facet of personality?”

Paw sighed out, “who are you? Just a facet of a soul that has been divided time and again. Higher spirits are souls who can show you any facet that they want. Does that make me a higher spirit, or am I something that no longer exists because I have called myself many different things? Am I Paw? Am I Auhi? Or has Paw consumed Auhi in his desire to live? Paw is no one, Paw is a name you call me and I accept, Auhi is my true name and when you call me it, on special occasions, it rings so much truer than if you use it often. Whisper is my title but when people look in my eyes they can tell the difference. Like knowing the difference between twins. I am me. What does it matter what I call myself?”

“Auhi is still the free Sidhe,” Mik murmured back, “Paw is the leader who isn’t afraid to kill every last one of us, if need be, for his family to survive. Whisper. To look into the eyes of Whisper is to look into the eyes of the gods themselves, it seems. I don’t believe in gods or higher spirits or any of that, but when Whisper looks through your eyes, I know that it’s not just you. It’s something bigger than us all and it frightens me to think that maybe the gods are real. And that they haven’t struck me down for not believing.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Paw leaned close to Mik.

“What?”

“The gods envy you, Mik, they look down and they watch you and they cry because a man who does not believe in them is doing their good work, not for fear of them, but out of the goodness of his heart. They envy and cherish your existence.”


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