To Love, Once Again

Chapter 21

".........."

Only silence responds to her.

Lucien takes her hand, that was tracing his scar, and pulls it down, past his rippling abdominal muscles, even lower. She can feel her palm going over every bump of hard muscle, every raised ridge of a scar. Sera can't clench her fingers, Lucien pressing himself against her spread palm.

He guides her hands down.

Her fingers curl into the cold metal buckle of his belt.

Shaking her head, she pulls away.

Clearing her throat, she tries to speak in a firm tone. Now wasn't the time to get distracted.

"I need to check your wounds before anything!"

The slumbering desire in Lucien's sky-blue eyes fades, and he lets her go.

Giving a cursory look down his torso, she slips into doctor mode. His chest wounds don't look that deep. She deftly unravels the loosened bandages from around his arm. Sera knows exactly what she's doing as she checks the opened wound, and gasps at the messy stitches that barely do their job in holding the wounds together.

It looked like someone, with no idea what they were doing, stitched him up in the dark.

No wonder she'd seen so many new burn marks on him. With this kind of stitching, no injury would heal properly. In the end, someone would've had to burn it shut before it got infected.

Sera couldn't leave him like this. Running to the door, she throws it open. Right outside the door, Icaros' dumbfounded expression greets her.

"Perfect timing! Icaros, bring me freshly boiled water, bandages, some strong wine, and a sewing kit!"

Sera's happy that she can finally do something for Lucien, something that she could do right.

"Just bring the water" Lucien tells Icaros from behind her.

"There's strong wine here."

"What about the sewing kit?" Sera asks.

"There's one right here" Lucien opens his desk, off in one corner of the room, and a light flashes from the drawer he opens. He's used magic to open the drawer.

She didn't want him to use any more magic so nonchalantly like that. He didn't have mana like this before, and she worried about the strain on his body.

Magic required mana. If the magic casted required more mana than a wielder had, the wielder would die. Using too much mana also sapped away at your vitality. Sera knew that all too well. There was the one time a magician was brought to the medic tent. It was her first and only time she'd seen a wounded magician. Magicians were rare and well protected, used more in war for strategizing, information gathering, construction work and item creation, than as a fighting force. That time, one magician was caught in a surprise attack during the construction of a new tunnel. He'd come in with burn wounds all over his body. She'd judged the wounds as not too severe, the skin being red but not completely destroyed. But she'd been wrong. His body wouldn't heal like it should've. Then a fever settled in. She'd done her best to keep him alive, bathing him in cold water and trying to make him drink. But he kept getting weaker and weaker. Weaker from wounds any other soldier could have easily recovered from.

The nights when one of her patients died was horrible. The magician's death was one of those deaths that weighed heavily on her, even now. In hindsight, she felt like she could've done better, if she'd only known the root cause. Lucien would wrap himself around her so numbingly tight, repeating to her over and over. "It's not your fault"

Never-mind that for now.

Icaros is gone, off to bring hot water.

Lucien carefully lifts out a small bag. It was an old and worn-looking brown leather bag, dry leather cracked and warped.  Sera knew there would be a small dark stain in one corner of the bag. It looked like that because her blood stained it after the truck hit her. The bag was there with her when she woke up in the summoning circle, with messy braids, and ripped up, blood soaked clothes.

Her body was completely injury free, but the state of her clothes and bag shocked her into understanding that something really, really bad just happened to her.

That's her school bag, from her first trip here. Her parents bought it for her as a congratulatory present on her entrance to university. She'd carried it everywhere with her as she went between classes, and it even followed her to Thornmere.

In Thornmere, she used it like a doctor's bag, filled with herbs, medicines, and her special equipment. A kind blacksmith had taken his time from smelting swords to make her needles made of steel, in exchange for a precious chocolate bar she had in her bag. After the success of the first stitched up injury, she'd been able to officially commission scissors and a magnifying glass. The scissors were easy enough to make, once she'd gone through the design with the blacksmith. It was harder to figure out how to make a magnifying glass.

Only magicians could enhance their vision to see far away or look closely at things, and no one ever really thought of the need to look at wounds up close.

She'd done it, though, after much trial and error. The magnifying glass was necessary in spotting any shards of wood from an arrow that shattered in a patients body. With a modified version of it, Sera had even performed a rudimentary surgery once.

Sera and that bag truly went through a lot together.

Rummaging  through the bag, Sera finds her set of needles, and dried herbs for pain reliever.

Lucien lightly sets a bottle of wine next to her from where she's unknowingly commandeered his desk.

"Here, chew on these. " Shaking out 3 dried leaves into her palm, she offers them to him.

"I won't need it."

"Why not?"

"It won't mix well with the other medicine I already drank" he shrugs his shoulders.

"Oh....Will you be alright when I start stitching"

"I'll be fine, since it'll be you doing it" The corner of his lip quirks up, just the smallest bit.

Sera can feel her face blooming red, her face hot. His beautiful face, with that expression focused on her, makes her heart beat thunderously in her chest.