Solo's asleep on the dingy safe-house sofa – or trying to be – and as much as she hates to disturb him, she can see the blood soaking through the bandages from across the room.
"Solo?" she says softly. Even knowing that the inner parts aren't damaged, it's hard not to want to be quiet. "I need to change the dressing."
He mumbles something unintelligible but rolls over onto his side, revealing a dark spot on the pillow as he does. Damn, she should have spotted it quicker.
The gauze comes away far too easily when she lifts, the tape wet through with blood. At least it doesn't pull the skin, she thinks absently, but god, there's so much red – soaking the bandage, trickling down his neck, welling up from the dark-edged slice traveling along the back of his ear. Up until now they'd been trying to stop the bleeding with pressure alone, but it's clearly not working. Solo is visibly paler than he was an hour ago, and she's not changing the bandages any less often.
"I'm sorry," she says, replacing the old gauze with fresh and then pressing down. Solo stiffens and makes a sharp, tight sound but beyond the initial flinch he doesn't resist. "I'm going to have to stitch it, but I need you to hold this in place while I get the supplies." When he doesn't move, she takes his hand and puts it over hers on the gauze. "Hold this," she says again, firmly, and waits to feel pressure on her hand before slipping it out from under his.
God, she wishes Illya were here. This would definitely be easier as a two-person job, but she's made do before and she'll make do now. Doesn't mean she can't wish for an extra set of hands.
She lays out her tools on the metal briefcase – the target of this operation – before washing her hands as thoroughly as she can, then douses the metal with the isopropyl alcohol included in the kit, which... On the one hand, better for sterilizing medical equipment. On the other, you can't drink isopropyl alcohol, and by the time this is over both she and Solo are going to be desperately wishing they could.
At least he's still holding the gauze in place, she sees when she comes back out of the bathroom with her impromptu surgical tray. It looks to be about all he's capable of doing, though, and she sighs in spite of herself. At least there's enough light out here – trying to get him off that sofa would be too big a task for either of them at this point.
The roll of bandages is put to work holding his hair out of the way; there's enough gauze and tape that hopefully she won't need it for anything else.
"I'm so sorry for this," she says in advance, and gets to work. Solo more or less passes out when the alcohol hits, which is all the better for both of them. It takes an agonizing half hour of hunching over him and cursing her needle, her hands, and the blood that coats them all to get the slice sewn up with nearly twenty tiny stitches. It doesn't look like the cartilage was cut – nicked in one or two places, perhaps, but not severed – so there's a good chance this will heal with nothing worse than a scar. But she's not a doctor, and ears are strange and delicate, so it'll likely be a gruesome scar. Oh well. That's what hair is for, isn't it?
She cleans him up one last time before affixing the gauze (liberally smeared with sulfacetamide) and he looks significantly less like a murder victim when she's done. He's also still unconscious, which is really just as well.
She rises stiffly, gathers her tools and her handfuls of bloody gauze, and goes to scrub off her entire body, and also perhaps remove her skin.
Illya comes back to find her dozing. She startles awake when the door closes behind him, but doesn't bother apologizing; he knows that she knows better, and a reprimand does nothing after the fact.
"Are you all right?" he asks instead, and Gaby almost laughs. She can still feel Solo's blood on her hands, even if she can't see it.
"You shouldn't be worrying about me," she says, voice scratchy with sleep.
"Sometimes it is harder to hurt than be hurt," Illya says simply. "I'm sorry I wasn't here to help."
She waves off his apology. "You had work to do, it's all right. I managed."
"And Solo?"
"I had to stitch it," she admits. "It wasn't stopping, and he was losing a lot of blood."
"Ah."
There's no way to tell what he's already heard or seen, that this is merely confirmation. Well, there probably is, but she's in no state to be figuring it out right now.
He turns to look at Solo then, and faint lines appear between his eyebrows. "Hair is not fashionable like this," he says, and Gaby snorts a laugh. The bandages are still wrapped around his head like a bizarre scarf, holding his hair up in an unnatural position.
"I can't believe that's the first thing you notice," she accuses, but her spirit is lighter than it's been since she hauled Solo in nearly six hours ago, his blood tacky and wet on both of them. "No, wait, yes I can."
"Has he taken any medicine?"
"Some painkillers when we first got back, but nothing since then. I thought it'd be better to let him sleep through the worst of it."
Illya gestures to the gauze, clean but for a thin line of rusty brown. "Can I look?"
"Go ahead, but be careful." She doesn't need to tell him; Illya's hands are always deceptively gentle with his partners. Unsurprisingly, Solo barely stirs as Illya peels back the dressing, just murmurs something and sighs before settling again.
"These are quite good," Illya says softly after a few moments' observation. "Could be neater, but is very difficult spot to stitch." He smooths the gauze back down, running a finger over the tape to reseal it, then lets his fingers skim downward to rest on Solo's pulse point. "Good," he pronounces shortly. "A little warm, but is to be expected." He lingers there a bit longer, like he's forgotten to move, then brushes his fingers so lightly against Solo's jaw that she may well have imagined it.
Abruptly, he straightens, and turns back to her. "You should sleep," he says. "I will take first watch."
She would argue for the sake of it, but today has been long and grueling and she feels like she's the one with large amounts of missing blood. "All right," she says, and that's that.
She wakes to sunlight filtering through the grimy window and sharp groan. "Jesus Christ," comes Solo's voice, rough and irritable. "Who took a machete to my—" he breaks off, and there's a second of silence before a hiss and a choked noise she can only interpret as pain. She comes awake quickly at that, and swings her legs down from the arm of the chair she's been curled up in. Not a real house, this safe-house; just a tiny kitchen, a tinier bathroom, and a rather depressed living area. No beds to speak of, and only Illya had braved the floor last night.
Illya, who from the sound of it is currently braving the shower as well, and she has to wonder what he'd gotten up to in those six hours yesterday. Something messy, no doubt. Blood on all three of them, then, as it so often happens.
"Are you all right?" she asks Solo, all but falling the rest of the way out of the chair. It seems that her back would have preferred the floor, after all.
"Well, I still seem to have two ears," Solo allows, gingerly exploring the gauze behind the left one, "so I suppose I really can't complain. Did you stitch me up yesterday?"
"Yes," Gaby says, and comes over to look for herself. The area is inflamed – red and a bit warm to the touch – but it looks more like healing than infection, and the bandage comes away clean. "How do they feel?"
"Oh, no, the stitches are fine," he assures her with one final wince as she re-tapes the gauze. "It's the rest of my face that seems likely to implode in the near future." The black eye is quite remarkable, but the bruises on his cheek don't look bad enough to indicate a cracked bone beneath. She presses lightly on it to check, and gets nothing beyond a quick inhale.
"Nothing broken, I don't think," she concludes. "Some of the cartilage in your ear was nicked, but I think we can wait until we get back to worry about it. I'm sure Waverly knows a surgeon who can fix your face."
"I'm wounded," Solo says flatly. "Literally wounded, and you insult my appearance. Cruelty, thy name is Gabriella Teller."
Gaby snorts. "In that case, you'll be buying Cruelty a round of drinks as soon as we're back in London. I did save your ear, you know."
"I don't know," muses Solo. "I think I'd be quite dashing with a missing ear. Very devilish, very Van Gogh."
"How would you wear your sunglasses then?" Gaby asks innocently, and Solo sighs theatrically.
"Fine," he concedes. "I'll buy you a drink, on the grounds that my impeccable summer style has been saved by your nimble fingers."
"Arschloch," she says pleasantly, and Solo grins back, black eye, bandaged ear, and unfashionable hair notwithstanding.
And when she leans over to kiss his cheek, his laughter is warm and soft against her skin.
Title comes from a line in Archer, though I'm sure it's been used in plenty of other contexts before and since. As to the rest, I have no excuses. so thanks for reading! but also, like. sorry for making you read this