Crossing Boundaries

Chapter 36

Luin

Healing used to seem like such a nice magic to have access to. I used to be jealous of Arrowan being able to help people like that and thought I would happily trade one of my own affinities for it. The ability to manipulate people and animals, maybe – I had never much liked that particular magic, anyway.

Now I was grateful that healing was an Unseelie magic. I would never be jealous of Arrowan again.

When the severed leg patient came in, I truly thought that would be the worst we saw. I should have recognized the odds that the worst case would come first. It was just the beginning.

Over the next several weeks, I was subjected to nightmare fuel every single day. It didn't help that my job was to help keep Arrowan's magic up, and he was given all of the worst cases. Anything particularly grisly or dire was sent directly to his office, to the point where he and Jaron started sharing the room just so Jaron could offer some relief when needed. When only one of them was on shift, the other slept in a room just a few doors down. Arrowan and I were woken up almost every night as patients came in beyond everyone else's healing capabilities.

And through it all, I had absolutely no idea how we were faring in the war. Everyone who came through the hospital was too far from the planning to be able to tell us more than how the current battle was going. I knew we won more than we lost, which was comforting, but were we showing ourselves to be enough of a threat for the other parties to agree to a treaty with us? It was truly bizarre to be working so hard and putting ourselves through such trauma without having any clue how things were going.

Until...

Until five weeks later. We were worn ragged and seriously contemplating going home for the first time since all this started, hospital be damned. Arrowan and I talked every day about wanting to go home just for a day, to get a full night of sleep and to check in with the people in our lives. They had known we were coming here to work at the hospital, but we hadn't prepared them for the possibility that we might not be home for weeks. They probably thought something had happened to us, but we were so tired at the end of every day that going to the portal, then teleporting to someone's house and going through what was bound to be a long conversation (no way would Magnus or Safiya let us get away with a quick chat) never seemed worth it. And besides, if we left the hospital even for a short amount of time, it could mean the difference between life and death for who knew how many people? How could we go when Arrowan was so badly needed here?

So we kept putting off leaving.

We were reaching a breaking point, though, and I didn't see how I could possibly go on without a break. There's only so much gore and hurt you can see before you're forced to take care of yourself first, and the instant I hit my fast-approaching breaking point, I knew Arrowan would get us home, consequences be damned. I would do the same for him, but he was holding up better than me.

When we laid down at night to snatch whatever sleep we could, Arrowan fell asleep within minutes. He had disturbed dreams, but they weren't enough to keep him up at night and he was still functional enough during the day. I, on the other hand... I had terrible nightmares, and the dread of what the next one would bring made it feel impossible to fall asleep. Sometimes I laid there, eyes wide open because when I shut them, I saw the parade of terrible injuries that had somehow become my life.

When Arrowan suggested we join the war in this capacity, I really believed that we were getting off easier than the people doing the actual fighting. Now, I wasn't so sure. Neither of us had to deal with the trauma of actually hurting people, but we dealt with the aftermath of the hurt other people inflicted, and we saw the absolute worst of that.