When Mirk woke up, he was alone.

Someone had carried him to one of the heavily-shielded long-term ward rooms and had done their best to make the lumpy bed comfortable for him with stolen blankets and pillows. The room's magelights were out, but the same person who'd put him to bed had left the one he wore around his wrist illuminated. Its faint glow was just bright enough for Mirk to make out the faint shapes of a collection of bottles that'd been left on his bedside. Two mid-strength pain blockers, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and a plate with a few doubtlessly stale sweet buns on it.

The whiskey had to be Yule's doing — there were very few good things the older healer was willing to grant his homeland, but its liquor was one of them. The blockers and buns must have been Danu's work. Yule never thought of eating on his own, and he always favored toughing things out with alcohol first before resorting to potions.

It made Mirk feel less cold and empty to know that they'd both thought of him. He fixed his mind on the feeling, on the warm comfort of being cared for, as he took the blockers in quick succession. There were other things to think about, of course. Like the staff propped up against the foot end of the bed. But he wasn't ready for it. Not yet.

If he was honest with himself, Mirk didn't feel terrible, even after all the things that had happened. He'd expected to wake up feeling utterly lifeless, drained down to his core and unable to do much more than sit up in bed for a few minutes. He did feel tired, but it wasn't the same, aching, freezing sort of tired he'd been after he'd accidentally asked the staff to intervene on Alice’s behalf. Cautiously, Mirk passed a hand over his hair before reaching for the plate of sweet buns. No missing clumps of hair, though it still was an uneven length from the last time he’d made use of his grandfather’s staff. And a sweep of his tongue confirmed that all his teeth were still firmly anchored in his jaw.

He tried not to think of any of it. But pieces came back to him despite his best efforts to ignore it, to concentrate on his breathing and the burn of the whiskey and the tough, gritty sweetness of the buns. How the Easterners had looked like nothing but corpses, the terror of the other healers as the shadows offered out more and more of them. The way K'aekniv had lurched and reeled from side to side as if drunk, overflowing with pain and bleeding from dozens of bites. How Genesis's insides had been warm, but the fingers that had wrapped around his hand had been ice cold.

Mirk shook his head, hard. "Du calme," he mumbled to himself, before mechanically forcing himself to take another bite of the bun. The same words he'd said to Elijah, who'd received as little comfort from them in the past as he felt in the present. As Mirk forced himself to keep eating, he tested the strength of his magic. Enough to summon weak mental shielding, but not enough to do much else. Combined with the blockers, it'd allow him to go check on the Easterners, even if he wouldn't be able to heal anyone properly.

He had to start moving. He had to get working. Otherwise he'd be left alone with the enormity of what he'd done with his grandfather's staff. And the weight of the words the Death had spoken to him before he had vanished back into the ether.

Once he'd chomped his way through the bun and downed the last of the liquor, Mirk changed out of the patient robes he'd been put in and back into the clean set of work robes that had been left draped across the foot end of the bed. Thankfully, whoever had changed him hadn't decided to throw the bloodied chemise and braies he'd been wearing underneath his robes down the incinerator chute. Mirk hesitated, but took hold of the staff and banged on it a few times until it shrunk down small enough for him to cram it into the pocket in his sleeve. It was too dangerous to leave the staff lying around, even if it made Mirk feel sick to touch it.

It didn't take Mirk long to find the Easterners. The overnight healers had done the only sensible thing and clustered them all together on one floor once they were stable, as far away from the general patients as was practical. They occupied the whole back half of the fourth floor, both the ones who had come in wounded from the field and the handful who were still recovering from their illness. While the long-term ward had been dead silent and empty save for a few patients locked up behind shielded doors, the atmosphere up on the fourth floor put Mirk more in mind of a festival. All the doors along either side of the hall were propped open with bedpans and buckets and bits of armor. The men who could walk wandered from room to room to pester their bedridden friends. And there wasn’t a nurse or an aide in sight.

The warmth of their relief and good cheer buoyed Mirk down the hall, helped him ignore the darker undertones of their still-recovering bodies. Most of the snatches of conversation that Mirk could understand — whoever had left him the new robes had forgotten to switch over his translation charm — were mostly about what they were going to spend the gold from their last bloody contract on. The popular consensus seemed to be that the best course of action was getting as drunk as possible as often as possible in the company of the finest women they could find, at least until the Festival of Shades ended and they were sent back through the transporter to fight again.

"Mirgosha! Come join us!"

Mirk turned toward the sound of the booming voice, letting out a sigh of relief. K'aekniv was among those who were alive and well, more or less. Though he was propped up across two beds rather than wandering the halls with the other men. Now that Mirk had a chance to really look at him, in the bright lights of the infirmary, he noticed that most of K’aekniv’s feathers had regrown while he was off fighting. But they'd grown in purple and strange rather than soft and grayish-white. K'aekniv's bare chest was covered with bits of tacked on bandage, and he was much thinner about the shoulders and the middle than he usually was, but he was in high spirits nevertheless. He ushered Mirk into his room with an easy grin and a pointed gesture with a half-full bottle.

The half-angel was surrounded by his closest friends, Slava and Ilya and Pavel. Mordecai was doubtlessly off with Danu instead. There was a new man there as well, one Mirk didn't recognize, as tall and broad as Slava, who he was sitting on the floor beside. Mirk didn't allow his mind to linger on thoughts of the other notable absence. Not that Genesis would ever tolerate a drunken infirmary party, even if he'd been physically capable of joining in with the other men of the Seventh.

Mirk took a moment to shore up his shielding before coming in. "Are you all right, Niv?"

"Eh, could be worse," K'aekniv replied, shrugging his wings. "Those mages were terrible. I was so sick I was seeing four of everyone by the end. But! It's over. Nothing else until after Shade's Festival. I made horse-fucker promise us."

Sidling his way through the fighters clustered around K'aekniv, Mirk went to his bedside and touched one of the purplish feathers dotting his wings. It felt as wrong as it looked, oily and jagged rather than smooth and dry. "What are these from?"

"The poison. The first time they got me, it was...what? The second day? So it was in me for a while and did something weird. They'll fall out, same as the rest. I'll just look like an idiot for a month or two."

"You look like an idiot all the time," Slava said, grinning up and over at K'aekniv from his spot seated against the wall.

"Ah, fuck you," K'aekniv said with a laugh. "At least nothing came close to biting my dick off."

Slava reached up to smack K'aekniv in the side. "That's because Mordka pushed me!"

"Did he drop your sword for you too?" K'aekniv waggled a scolding finger at Slava, too high for the fighter to reach.

"It's amazing any of us came back alive," Pavel interjected. He was sitting on the foot of K'aekniv's bed, on the sliver of mattress not taken up by K'aekniv's giant legs. Mirk thought the aside might dampen the mood, but the other men's cheer was unwavering. They were accustomed to Pavel making those kinds of remarks, Mirk supposed. Just another thing to be tuned out, the same as everyone else's faults, except for when spirits were high and someone was due a good ribbing.

"It's not selling you good, seeing you all like this," the man Mirk didn't recognize said. His voice had the same echoey tone to it that one being run through a translation charm did, though it was hard to make it out over his thick accent. That's because it was being translated, Mirk realized — the man was using the Easterners' sole vocal translator, a magicked stone that could be clipped to a collar or sleeve that shifted the speaker's voice to the listener's native tongue rather than the other way around. An expensive bit of artificing, one that the Easterners only owned due to Genesis's penny pinching and constant exasperation with trying to translate elaborate, vulgar insults back and forth among the men.

Mirk didn't allow himself to dwell on the memory of it — on how the men had all snickered and goaded one another into ever-more convoluted chains of debauchery just to watch Genesis get more and more frustrated by the physical impossibility of most of their finest insults, how the tips of Genesis’s ears had started to grow red and his long fingers had started to twitch at his sides as he struggled to conjugate very, very descriptive verbs — redirecting his attention toward studying the finer details of the newcomer's appearance.

Like most of the Easterners when they'd first arrived, the new man sitting on the floor next to Slava had a full beard, albeit one that was tidy and close-cropped instead of wild and curling. His clothes were also the usual newcomer mishmash of homespun wool and well-worn leather, with the only notable addition being a tall, round fur hat resting in his lap. There was a friendly, jovial spark in his eyes that intrigued Mirk. Most of the newer Easterners tended to be wary and withdrawn until they got a better handle on how things worked in the City. The man beside Slava seemed right at home, despite the reservations he'd just voiced to K'aekniv.

And K'aekniv was quick to counter them, offering the man his half-empty bottle to sweeten his words. "But you know what you're getting into now. Anyway, it's not like this all the time. This is the worst we've had in ten years. And look! We all made it back. Because we've got Mirgosha here to help."

The man looked to Mirk as he took the bottle from K'aekniv, his heavy brows furrowing in thought. "Mirgosha? What? Do you have so many Mykhilos you're just making things up?"

Mirk laughed, smiling and dipping his head to the man in acknowledgement. He got the feeling that he wasn't the sort who'd be either impressed or satisfied by a full bow. "Mirk. Your servant, Mister...?"

"Orest," the man replied, nodding back at him and taking a long drink from the bottle. "Mister? Servant? This place is as fancy as it looks."

K'aekniv waved Orest off. "Mirgosha, he's from some fancy place down south. Even this place can't beat home out of you."

"Good." Orest sighed, leaning his head back against the wall and looking to the ceiling for a moment. "If I turned into a city person, I'd never be able to show my face back home again."

Anticipating Mirk's question before he could ask it, K'aekniv began to enthuse at them all about the newcomer's lineage. "That's right! A tame Cossack is no good for anyone. All horses and wild women and good drink. I'm surprised one of you came! You all still make good enough money fighting for whoever back at home, yes? So why come here to do it?"

Pavel heaved a sigh, looking like he wanted to say something, but he ultimately decided against it. Ilya spoke up on his behalf instead, softly, his usual smile taking on a brittle edge. A strange emotion skittered across Mirk's mental shielding as well, but it was too fleeting and faint when compared to the rest of the men's good cheer for Mirk to tell what it was. "Leto came for you."

Orest took another long drink from the bottle. "You can only cross him once. So here I am."

"Well, if you came here to get away from him, you're safe," K'aekniv reassured him. "They never send us out east for work. Did you get on his bad side alone, or are there more?"

"Alone. But the Host has its own problems. There's only one real magic one left. Everyone used to have their magic people, but now they're all put together in the same Host. Same as everywhere. All the city and army mages want everyone in a guild or want them gone. There's only so far to run."

K'aekniv nodded. "Terrible. Everything is going to shit these days. It used to be that if you looked poor and stupid enough people would leave you alone."

"But it's hard to hide your magic if you're always fighting," Slava interjected. "You go beating people, and everyone pays attention."

Orest shrugged. "I'd rather live in your big ugly city and keep fighting than become some farmer. Maybe some of the rest will feel the same."

"All you Cossacks are welcome here," K'aekniv said. "The more the better, I think. We won't have to work so hard to train you. You can look around here and think about things for a while, then Mordka will take you back east if you want to tell your friends about it when he goes home next week to talk to his deda. He'll be trying to sell Danny to him for at least a week, I'm sure. You'll have time to talk to your people."

"Mordecai's going home?" Mirk asked, curious. Though the teleporting mage had the magic to go home more often than he did, he usually limited his trips to holidays and emergencies. He loved to wax poetic about his grandmother's cooking and how much more fun he could be having with his cousins if he went home every chance he got, but he admitted that going back too often only made his homesickness worse. The matter of him wanting to spend the majority of his free time talking to Danu aside.

K'aekniv nodded, taking the bottle back from Orest — his willingness to share was a sure sign of the newcomer's good nature. "Things are looking good! This shit was terrible, but we got some gold out of it. Mordka has enough money to ask Danny to marry him now. But he has to go ask his deda if it's all right first. He'll still do it even if he says no, but if his deda's happy, that means we all get to go to Mordka's village and have a real party instead of just sitting around here getting drunk for a few days."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Oh...I didn't know," Mirk said, as he tried to remember what Danu had told him about Mordecai's traditions. But he was too tired to come up with more than her constant complaints about how she couldn't ever remember how anyone in Mordecai's extended family was related.

"His people, they throw the best wedding parties," K'aekniv said. "Theirs are even better than ours, and ours last a week at least."

"At least," Slava confirmed.

"Am I supposed to keep it a secret?" Mirk asked. Not that the inevitability of Mordecai asking Danu to marry him wasn't obvious to everyone. The only matter of debate among the infirmary healers was when Mordecai would summon the nerve to ask. Yule was of the opinion that Mordecai's desire to consummate the marriage would keep him from holding out much longer, while Sheila was convinced that he was too flighty to commit without something drastic happening first.

Mirk thought they were both being too cynical. They had to be able to feel the earnestness of Mordecai's love as well as he could. It was mostly a matter of money: some reverse dowry that was traditional among Mordecai's people, something that was important to him, though Mirk could tell Danu would accept his proposal even if Mordecai didn't have a penny to his name. A luxury that Mirk often thought of wistfully, despite their situation not being anywhere close to his own.

K'aekniv laughed. "We're too late for that. When one healer knows something, all the healers know. Besides, Danu will know he's gone to ask his deda the first time he doesn't come to bother her for lunch."

Mirk laughed as well, though he felt he did a poor job of it. Despite the light atmosphere in the room, there was a weight still tugging at his chest, one that he was finding it harder and harder to ignore. "You could set the clocks by him now, methinks."

K'aekniv gave a wistful sigh, the two pushed-together beds creaking under his weight as he tried to find a more comfortable position. "Like I said, things are good now. We have a little money...no work until after Shade's Festival...a wedding after that...who could complain?"

"You've always been easy to please," Pavel said, shaking his head as he tried not to get knocked off the end of the bed by K'aekniv re-crossing his legs.

"And you're always bitching," K'aekniv teased, nudging Pavel in the side with the heel of his boot. "We should all get a break with Gen gone! Instead we just get you bitching at us."

Orest perked up at the mention of Genesis. "Where is this big leader of yours, huh? If I'm going to join, I want to meet him first. I'm not trading one bastard for another."

"Ah, he's not so bad, you just have to bitch about everyone a little. You know it is," K'aekniv said. "But they never put him by us when he's sick. It would make him mad to wake up with so many people around. And he gets weird when he's sick, so it's better to keep him a little happy." The half-angel turned his attention back to Mirk, who was trying to will himself not to listen too closely to the men's discussion of their missing commander. "What happened with him, Mirgosha? We heard they found you in his room all full of blood when it was safe to go looking."

Mirk knew he couldn't avoid the topic forever. He sighed, unable to offer much of an explanation to the curious men beside a defeated shrug. "I don't know. Methinks he put a spell on himself, over the, euh, old one on his arms, but I fixed that. He'll be fine. He always is."

Genesis very nearly hadn't been fine. But Mirk was uncertain of whether he'd be sharing the details of how close Genesis had come to death with anyone other than with Genesis himself, once he woke up.

But K'aekniv was smart — and had been dealing with Genesis for decades longer than he had. He wasn't thrown off the trail so easily, keeping his tone casual despite shooting Mirk a pointed look. "It was close this time, yes? That bastard needs to be more careful. We won't make it if we don't have him around."

"I'll talk to him about it once he's awake," Mirk said. "At least he should tell us more about what magic he's putting on himself so that we can help him once it's over."

"If he'll listen to anyone, it'll be you, Mirgosha. I don't know how you do it. Me, I try everything. I do him favors. I yell at him. I try to do his stupid book learning puzzles. And I get nothing! Just the same old you see to your business and I'll see to mine," K'aekniv said, doing his best to mimic Genesis's accent and dour expression as he repeated one of the commander's adages for the other men. His impersonation was so bad that it got a laugh out of them, Orest included, even though he didn't have the original to compare it to.

Again, all Mirk could do was shrug. "He is a little, euh, stubborn."

"Anyway, are you going to see him?" K'aekniv asked. "Or will you stay and have a drink with us?"

Most of Mirk wanted to stay and drink, drink until he couldn't get up and needed to be carried back down to the long-term ward to sober up. But he shook his head instead. "I should go see what the others did to help him, methinks. Even if I don't have the magic to start fixing him yet."

Orest reached out to take the bottle back; K'aekniv handed it over. "Will he be awake?"

"No, methinks it'll be a little while yet. He was very...sick."

"Then I'll stay with you lot," Orest said, grinning at Slava. "You promised me you'd tell me about all the women here."

"Don't talk to Slava about them," K'aekniv said, goading the fighter by jabbing his shoulder with one thick finger, leering down at him. "He's already given his heart to some Prussian."

Slava slapped his hand away. "Fuck you! You're too terrible for any woman to want to be with. Besides, her father was normal. It's just her mother that was Prussian."

"A Prussian?" Orest looked deeply skeptical, but his grin still had an eager edge.

Mirk took the exchange as his cue to leave. Despite the siren call of the Easterners' rough banter, their terrible jokes and their scrounged up bottles of liquor, he knew he had duties elsewhere. Waving and nodding rather than cutting into their conversation again, Mirk headed back out into the hall. Only Pavel seemed to notice his departure, returning his nod. The rest were already too caught up in debating the merits of Prussian womanhood to have noticed anything short of a bomb going off underneath K'aekniv's pushed together beds.

He shuffled down the fourth floor's main hallway, his hands tucked into his side pockets to stave off the chill. Every so often, he paused to check in on one of the more weary and aching patients, but no one else paid him much heed, beyond the occasional nod or bottle half-raised in his general direction in a sort of comradely salute. Mirk returned their greetings, but didn't linger.

The Easterners' voices cut off abruptly as he passed the barrier at the end of the hall that separated the fourth and fifth floors. On the other side of it, the hallway was dead silent. Though Mirk couldn't be certain how long he was asleep, enough time must have elapsed for the upper floors of the infirmary to have emptied out in preparation for the Festival of Shades. Aside from the one patient that the healers, with good reason, thought might pose a threat to the others. Mirk let his mental shielding fall away, searching for any traces of Genesis's magic.

He felt him at the far end of the floor, near where it transitioned to the sixth. Someone had tacked a note to the outside of the door to his room, a check-in log. Genesis had been checked near dawn, but not since then. The commander's condition had simply been jotted down as alive. Mirk paused in front of the door, closing his eyes and drawing in a deep breath, trying to steel his nerves. Then he pushed the door open.

Mirk had been put to bed gently, with care and thoughtfulness, changed into clean clothes then swaddled in extra blankets to protect against the chill of having his magic drained. Genesis had been dumped on the bed in the middle of the room with less dignity than a corpse. He was still in the clothes he'd been wearing when he'd stumbled out of the shadows covering the parade grounds, though the front half of his shirt had been cut away to provide easier access to his wounds. The one across his stomach had been stitched together haphazardly, just well enough to keep his innards from spilling out onto the floor. His chest wound had a square of bandage tacked over it. No one had thought to cover him with a sheet. One of his arms was hanging off the side of the bed, unmarked by the magic that had nearly killed him.

At least someone had been considerate enough to close his eyes, even if they’d ignored the rest.

Something inside Mirk broke. It was all the tiny details, all the minor slights that added up to a cold indifference to Genesis's life. They crushed down on Mirk with the weight of a thousand leagues of water, making him burst into tears. He stumbled to Genesis's bedside and took hold of his arm, putting it back beside his rail-thin body on the bed as he continued to sob.

"Oh, messire...I'm so sorry, messire..."

Mirk peeled back the edge of the bandage over the wound in his chest. Nothing had been done to it. Genesis's depleted body and magic didn't have the strength to cover the gap, leaving it as an oozing, crusted mess rather than a snarl of misshapen arteries and flesh. Mirk tacked the bandage back down, squinting his eyes shut tight and biting his lip as he tried to compose himself. Crying over Genesis's broken body wouldn't do anyone any good. He needed to be sensible. He needed to help him, since no one else saw fit to.

He wasn't able to stop himself from crying completely, but at least Mirk was able to restrain himself to silent tears as he continued his inventory of Genesis's injuries. Only the occasional choked-off gasp escaped him when he saw some other detail that overwhelmed him. Like how Genesis was still covered in his own dried blood, his torso streaked with wide swaths of it, smaller dabs coloring his neck and cheeks and his one exposed wrist. Mirk couldn't remember whether the dabs were his fault, or the work of the healer who'd come after him. The healer who'd done the bare minimum to put Genesis back together, then shoved him off into a distant corner of the fifth floor where he could easily be put out of mind.

It took all of Mirk's strength to pry himself away from Genesis's bedside long enough to fetch a basin of hot water and a rag from down the hall. Then he set to the task of scrubbing all the dried blood off of him. Mirk tried to do it mechanically, tried to separate himself from who it was he was washing. He was a healer, and the body on the bed was that of a patient. No more, no less.

It was impossible. Every time Mirk thought he'd finally gotten a handle on the despair churning inside of him, some small part of it would set him off again — how cold Genesis was, how little flesh was left on his bones, how the pulse he checked on his neck was so slow and faint. Genesis's chest only rose once every other minute. It hardly seemed like enough air to keep even his body, so hardened and fragile all at once, alive. Mirk gave up on maintaining his composure and resigned himself to crying over him like a child as he scrubbed at all the swirls and streaks of dried blood. It had to have been there for over a day now. For some reason. Genesis's blood always went sticky and black when exposed to the air for so long.

Once he'd cleaned Genesis as best he could — there were horrible knots in his hair, and Mirk knew Genesis wouldn't consider washing with naught but hot water sufficient — he went digging in the room's supply cupboard for a spare set of patient robes. They wouldn't fit right, Mirk knew, but it was better than leaving him to steep in clothes that stank of rotting blood. He tried to distance his mind from his work again as he manhandled Genesis's unresisting, gangly limbs out of their layers, throwing away the bits that were ruined and folding and setting aside the magicked parts that had already cleaned themselves, somehow. His overcoat, his boots, his weapons.

"I know you don't like these, messire," Mirk said as he wrapped the robe around his body, debating whether it was worthwhile to knot all the ties along its front. Maybe talking might force him into composing himself. Genesis would never have tolerated him crying and snotting everywhere had he been awake. "I'll get your normal clothes for you when I go back to the dormitory. Until then, methinks this has to be better than that uniform..."

Mirk stepped back to study him. Even now that he was mostly clean and his limbs were in order, Genesis didn't look much better. Somehow, he looked even more like a dead body than when he'd first came in. Properly composed and prepared for his funeral, but dead nevertheless. Reflexively, Mirk leaned in and felt for Genesis's pulse on his neck once more. It took five seconds for his heartbeat to flutter against his fingertips.

Again, Mirk was left on the cusp of tears.

Focus. He needed to focus. There was more left for him to do, even if he didn't have his magic. Mirk couldn't heal the terrible gash in Genesis's midsection, but at least he could pick out the old sutures and put in fresh ones, ones that were even and secure. Genesis always hated messy stitches.

Mirk fetched the supplies from the cabinet — needle, thread, pan, tweezers, scissors — and set to work. He pulled open the robe he'd just put on Genesis's unresponsive body, then found two sheets to drape over the rest of him. To preserve Genesis's sense of modesty, even if the commander wouldn't be awake to complain any time soon. He arranged his tools on the half of the bed Genesis's thin body left empty and set in on the crooked, provisional sutures with tweezers and scissors.

His hands were shaking too badly to grab hold of the first stitch. Mirk bit back a curse as he dropped his tools and stalked away from the bed, dragging the room's chair over to Genesis's bedside and collapsing into it with a huff, boneless and defeated. Mirk stared at Genesis's lifeless body for a moment. Then he snatched up his hand, grasping it tightly in both of his own as a fresh wave of tears rolled down his cheeks.

"I'm so sorry, messire. I'm sorry. I'm…"

He was sorry he was weak. He was sorry he was wrong, sorry he felt so much he couldn't do his job. He was sorry he loved him.

"What the hell is going on?"

Mirk was so lost in his own misery that he barely registered the voice from behind him. Still, he turned toward it obediently, trying to compose himself a little by swiping his face against his robes to clear all the mess off it. Yule was standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips, eyes narrowed and critical. The older healer glared at him for a moment, then sighed, one hand shifting to his forehead to rub at his temple. Suddenly, Yule looked exhausted.

"It's fine, Yule," Mirk said, sniffling and moving to get up. "I'm sure you all did your best. I just...I'm not good at this sort of thing yet, I suppose. Methinks I should be well enough to start healing him once I've had another nap, but for now, I can—"

"For Christ's sake, stop babbling," Yule barked, though he cringed the second the words were out of his mouth. Mirk must have made a face. Yule sighed again. "You're not fooling anyone."

Mirk fell silent, looking back at Genesis's body. He was still holding on to his hand. "I..."

"You need a drink. And we need to talk," Yule said, as he joined Mirk at Genesis's bedside. He took a cursory look at the wound Mirk had been picking at, then jerked the lower sheet up over it. "He'll be fine."

Abruptly, Mirk let go of Genesis's hand. Though he made it a point to put it back by his side rather than leaving it dangling off the edge of the bed. Yule was right. He wasn't fooling anyone. At least no one that was awake to notice things. His mind still wasn't shielded. And Mirk didn't think there was much point to starting, considering what Yule must have already felt. "I don't think I could do much for him right now anyway. I'm too tired."

Yule shot Mirk an appraising, sideways look. "Too tired to go to the bar?"

Mirk tried to summon his mental shielding. It didn't do much more than take the barest edge off the tired concern radiating off Yule, despite the older healer's own shielding. Mirk shook his head. "I...well, as long as no one can feel me, I suppose..."

"I've got another spare blocker or two. And I'll shield you the best I can." Yule glanced back down at Genesis. "If I'm ever going to talk sense into you, we need to get you out of this hellhole for a couple hours."

Though Mirk wasn't entirely certain what Yule meant by this, he nodded along anyway. "You'd know best, Yule."

"The hell I do. But I know better than you, though that's not saying much." Yule took him by the elbow and tugged him back toward the door. Mirk refused to go until he'd double checked that Genesis was tucked in, and until he'd turned off the magelights. Genesis hated sleeping with the lights on. Even if he wasn't likely to wake up before Mirk returned, it was the thought that counted. At least, that was what Mirk told himself.

With any luck, Yule would be right, and being away from the infirmary for a few hours would put things back into their proper perspective.