Tesla was on fire.
Everything had been strange and surreal at first. The priests had pulled him from their lightless dungeons in thick ropes. They did not like to set such big fires indoors, and they couldn't have gotten the crowd of clergy and attendants all in the room. At first he was struck stupid by feeling sunlight for the first time in weeks and the sting of the wind on his cut skin. The torture and deprivation had made the real world strange to him, and time and distance dilated absurdly.
Tesla barely understood the speeches and prayers. He watched dumbly, passive and numb, as they prepared the pyres.
The woman tied to the one next to him was already dead. She'd confessed - to more than just being a witch, which as far as Tesla could tell she ...wasn't - so they cut her throat before they set her alight.
Tesla had not confessed. They wanted wild stories about some witch fortress out in the mountains, about organised groups of witches living cooperatively and working against them, about curses on whole cities and orgiastic rites and devil worship and - and plague rats summoned in revenge against them. They wanted a made up enemy, an end to justify their means.
They were going to kill him either way. If he was nothing else he was as stubborn as the day was long, and he wasn't going to make up crazy fabrications about organised witch covens and deep-throating the devil's barbed cock just so some sneering acolyte would pat him on the head and knife him before they set his corpse on fire.
So Tesla was burning. He had been burning since an acolyte - hooded, of course, as all their executioners and torturers were required to be - had come up and shoved a smoking torch into the pyre beneath the stake to which he was tied.
He screamed a lot when they came to set the fire, suddenly galvanised into action by the realisation that this was it. He wondered wildly if being too proud to confess to witching was a mistake. Maybe it would have been better to die quietly.
But he had no breath to scream anymore, and nobody would help him even if he had. Now it was just the bubbling of his own goddamn feet and the greasy wreathing smoke in his face.
He did not really understand that something new was happening outside the suffocating smoke until a long, wet slap of blood hit him in the face. Then he blinked his remaining eye. It stung. It sizzled in the smoke and fire.
Something was certainly happening but he was still not sure what. It was hard to see - or breathe - through the smoke. It stung in his lungs and eyes and all his injuries, and he had not been all that lucid when they dragged him out of the dungeons in the first place.
But now he could hear screams - huge, full-throated, panicked screams right from the chest, the kind of screaming a body gave into when there was nothing else for it to do. Helpless. At this point, Tesla felt he was an authority on screaming. He'd practiced a great deal of it recently.
Tesla's muscles twitched and ticked, spent with all his efforts to break his bonds through pure force of his panic. By the time the wetted rope burnt through, he would be worse than dead, but he pulled anyway. He couldn't stop himself. His feet were burning still - had been, at least, although there were places where he couldn't quite feel that pain anymore, so that was probably bad - and his legs were blistering. He sagged there for a moment before his dizzy brain noticed that he, Tesla, had stopped being able to scream and dissolved into croaking retching and gasps of pain some minutes ago.
He'd expected - had haunted and tormented himself with, as he waited - the pain of wood fire burning him, and his feet were pretty much just as he'd imagined, but -
But the smoke was worse. He'd never even considered the smoke, but it was squeezing like a fist around his heart, blistering all hot and acid in his throat.
Something slammed into his post with an enormous crack. It broke, and Tesla barely felt it dig into his skin where it splintered. He just - the next wrench of his arms dislodged him, against all expectations, and the post tumbled to one side with a big thump and Tesla stumbled forward.
He took two agonising steps on his blackened feet before he crumpled. On his hands and knees he scrawled away from the smoke and the heat - not to anything, not with any destination in mind, just away.
The fires were loud when you were in them, but outside that, it was quiet now. It took him a second to remember, but there'd been screaming. And now all he could hear was the sigh of the wind and the crackle of a nearby fire. There was no more shouting.
Tesla coughed, and it hurt so much he gagged, which absolutely did not help. The air was clearer here, but he still couldn't, he - it was like he'd taken all the smoke with him when he crawled away -
"Huh." Something hit him - gently, relatively speaking - beneath the chin, lifting his head up. Tesla forced his eye open. It stung and wept freely.
It was... a boot. It was tall, bloodied and made of dark scuffed leather, with an unfashionably high heel. Tesla squinted further up and found it connected to one of the longest legs in the world, and then he kept going - up - up - up - the man was towering and absolutely filthy with gore, and now he stared down at Tesla. Tesla's eye was not clear enough to read his expression, or even really pick out details on his face.
He drew in a breath. It rattled and whistled. He felt his throat contract like he wanted to cough again, and he cringed and tried to force the feeling back down. It didn't work very well.
"I've never seen one of you guys survive ," admitted the towering man, looking down upon Tesla.
Tesla squinted harder. The man's mouth spread wide in an expression like a smile: thin lips pulled back, teeth on display. "But you're in shitty shape, aren't you?"
Tesla lost the fight against his cough and squeezed his eye shut again. Everything was still smoking. There wasn't a part of him unhurt.
The man scoffed in the back of his throat and dropped his boot. He turned away to riffle through the pockets of the people sprawled around. There were so many bodies, killed so messily, that Tesla could smell them over the fires.
There wasn't going to be anything for Tesla here. Nobody was coming to help him, and anyone who came for the others would... they would...
Instinctively, Tesla turned his face toward the fires again, cracking his eye open to squint there. There were still people in there. Bodies, probably - his had been one of the last lit.
Some vestigial instinct kicked in. Tesla heaved up onto his hands and knees and then staggered to his feet. That hurt. And they were cracked and - dark. Not bleeding, even, just sort of oozing in places. He gasped out another disgusting breath.
Okay. He didn't have the reserves of energy left that he would need to sustain panic for very long.
The body nearest to Tesla had clothes. He ripped free the least bloody parts and wrapped his feet with shaking hands and weak fingers. He didn't know what else to do, and at least now he didn't have to look at them. Then he stole the man's waterskin and drained it. It made the pain in his throat roar but he was thirsty enough that this did not stop him.
And then.
He stood, carefully, painfully, and thought.
Tesla was not thinking very clearly, and thinking did not get him very far. He went in frantic circles like a dog chasing its tail.
The man - the tall man with the long boots - cut off someone's finger to get his ring off, swearing grumpily about his fat knuckles. There was no sound, so his victim was probably already dead.
"What're you doing," Tesla croaked.
He sounded like he'd been gargling sand, and is voice mostly did not come out. He touched his throat, but nothing seemed that wrong... on the outside.
"Violatin' the dead," said the man, which, yeah. But that had not been what Tesla meant, and now he would have to speak again to get more answers.
He dug up another waterskin. Pretty much everyone carried them - their water would come from the sanitary fountain. There was one in every parish.
This time he dumped some over his remaining eye, cleaning out the smoke and dirt. His vision cleared a little. He took a huge gulp from the skin. It hurt, but it also helped.
"I meant - why here?" he asked. If all the man wanted to do was loot the dead, there were plenty of cemeteries and crematoriums, where he wouldn't have to kill anyone to get their stuff.
"Don't like priests," said the man, standing up with a fist full of skinny golden chains that glinted in the firelight . "Why hit a merchant caravan when I can fuck up a whole auto de fe?" he said, and then he gave a wild, giddy laugh. "Don't know if you noticed, but they had fucking guards this time."
Tesla had not noticed, and would not have done so even had he been in any state to appreciate them - he had never attended an auto de fe before this one. He wasn't that squeamish, but he didn't enjoy soporific sermons and godly whining. He wouldn't have known the difference.
Recent events had not given Tesla any greater appreciation for doctrine.
The man who'd interrupted his execution finally turned back around to see him again. With his eye mostly clear, Tesla could get a better look at him.
He was taller than Tesla by more than a head even without the extra height of his boots, and skinny enough that his proportions looked strange - like an odd, elongated version of a human made almost entirely of limbs and angles. He had an angular, sharp face and a wide mouth - and an eye patch, almost obscured by his tangled dark hair.
His remaining eye was large and slanted, and coloured an absolutely unearthly violet. Tesla'd bet that it glowed once the sun went down.
There was no way he was wholly human.
Tesla was here - ragged, burnt, mutilated, struggling to breathe - because somebody had suspected he might possibly be a witch, or at least a heretic who did not sufficiently hate witches and might have met one. This man? One look at that burning violet eye and you knew he was a witch.
"What are you staring at?" he barked at Tesla. "What? You feel bad for the priests?" he sneered. The expression narrowed his eye to a slit.
Tesla took a breath, flinched, and then thought better of speaking after all - and of telling the man that he'd been staring at his eye. Instead he pointed at the other one, where the patch was, and gestured back to his own face with his blistered hand.
With legs that long it took the witch an alarmingly short time to cross the distance between them. Three steps. Even on a day when he was healthy Tesla would have needed five. And then the witch was right there, towering over him, throwing Tesla into his huge shadow.
He flicked Tesla's hair out of the way with long and quick fingers. He did not look horrified at the ruin of Tesla's eye beneath it. Instead he let out bark of laughter.
"Yeah, they'll do that," he said, sounding more matter-of-fact than sympathetic. "Won't matter," he added, equally indifferently. "There's no way you'll last the night."
Tesla twitched. The protest he wanted to make came out as a very painful grunt, which just made the witch smile at him. His teeth had blood between them.
He looked Tesla up and down, in a way that looked - well. Tesla wouldn't have expected anyone to look at him like that. Not in the state he was in .
"Pity," he said.
Tesla wanted to think the witch was wrong, but he also knew how fast severe wounds could go bad. He hadn't seen a lot of them himself until this past few weeks, but... once they went bad, people died quickly. If he could see a healer, perhaps...
"Hey," said the man looking pointedly away from Tesla's ruined face. He toed one of the bodies and it clinked with the sound of a bare sword hitting metal. "You're a tough fucker, right? A young man, too. You wanna die with a sword in your hand?"
With the body moved, the blade beneath it was revealed. It hadn't even got bloodied.
This was the most sympathy Tesla had been shown by anyone over the last few weeks... by a lot.
I'd rather not die, he thought, but it seemed too hard to say it. So instead he shook his head wearily and let the witch interpret that as he wanted to.
He eyed Tesla again, and something tight and annoyed tugged at his mouth, like Tesla's refusal had hurt his feelings. And then he seemed to dismiss him entirely. "Whatever. You're pretty pathetic anyway. You go die in whatever way seems better to you."
And he turned away.
Tesla coughed. Flinched. Wondered if maybe he was right. It would certainly be an easier way to die. And in its own way, the offer was a kind one. The witch was obviously very good at killing people, and there was nothing in it for him if he did Tesla too. There hadn't been much kindness lately.
He collected two more waterskins and a belt knife from the bodies, and then when the witch had finished taking everything of value and stalked away from the bodies with purpose, Tesla just... followed.
He wasn't thinking clearly, his vision was blurry and he was dizzy, so he was not exactly stealthy.
Despite how much longer his legs were, and how much distance he covered, the witch caught on fast and then he turned back to Tesla, scowled over fiercely and hissed, "You've got to be kidding me. You are not fucking following me."
Tesla almost walked right into him, so dazed and confused was he. He came to a jerky stop and nearly toppled at its suddenness.
The witch rocked back on his heels and stared balefully down at Tesla. "If you wanted me to kill you, you should have taken my offer before. You're not worth getting my sword wet again and I've got nothing for you, so stop fuckin' following me. All that's gonna happen is you'll keel over and the animals out here will eat you."
Tesla shook his head. The man made a disgusted noise and turned away without further conversation.
Soon he left the path through the forest for a trail that looked at best vaguely like a game trail. If Tesla hadn't been able to hear his long strides crunching ahead he'd have lost him in the underbrush.
He almost didn't notice when the sounds of stomping through the forest actually got louder, rather than fainter, so fixed was he on just following them.
But then the man re-emerged from the shadowy shapes of the trees with his snarl fixed firmly in place. Without pause or hesitation, he shoved one hand under Tesla's chin and wrapped his broad palm and long spidery fingers around his throat.
With more strength than Tesla had ever attributed to a single person, he heaved and slammed Tesla's whole body into a tree trunk so that the branches trembled with the impact. A leaf fell down from above, fluttering between their bodies.
Tesla choked and despite his existing injuries, he could feel it when something gave way in his throat with a strange wet noise. The next breath was just a vile grinding sound.
The witch leaned in close, so close Tesla could feel his hot damp breath on his ear, down his throat, and he twitched in response. "What the fuck," he snarled against Tesla's hair, "Do you have a death wish? Are you trying to provoke me? You don't want a nice quick death in a fight, is that it? You want me to use my hands? Snap your neck like a little bunny rabbit?"
His breath was almost as hot on Tesla's skin as the fires had been. He closed his eye for a long, timeless second and shuddered.
He flexed his hand on Tesla's throat and, honestly, Tesla did not doubt for a second that he could in fact snap his spine.
This time when Tesla cracked his eye open and tried to speak, it was air and nothing - not even a croak went past his vocal chords. "If I'm not going to survive the night, what do you care?"
"Because I don't like being followed, you stupid little shit. You're annoying me!" His voice was sharp as a whip and his eye was wild. In the lower light of the forest, it seemed to glow.
Tesla stared sullenly back and said nothing.
The witch clenched his jaw, seethed for a minute, and then dropped him. Tesla sagged, gasping painfully, held up only by the tree.
"What does it matter," he muttered, although Tesla did not think he was really being spoken to, "Some crazy stupid asshole wants to spend his last day alive following me ten leagues through a fucking forest. Fine," he added, louder and more direct, "do what you want."
That was the last time he spoke to Tesla on that journey.
Now that he'd stopped actively trying to leave Tesla behind, he was a lot easier to follow him. He followed step by step, until sunset reached the forest, and even beyond, stumbling after the steady thump of the witches boots in the dark.
It got harder and harder, not just because of the lighting - Tesla knew he was running hot, and he also knew he was running on fumes. His limbs shook with every step. Still, he followed.
At least until he stopped, vomited up a pint of watery bile and, twitching, fell on his face.
The last thing he heard were the witch's boots growing louder in the distance: thump - thump - thump.
Tesla woke up, which was, frankly, his first surprise. And maybe kind of a mistake.
He had not expected to wake at all but now that he had, he found himself in a spectacular amount of pain: chest and throat, skull, all the places the fire had licked at his skin.
It took him a moment to realise that his feet did not hurt, and that made his stomach flip queasily. The feeling in his feet had been gone only in places - had they been lost, both of them, to the burns? He felt like they were there, but - but amputees often reported that they could still feel their lost limbs.
Tesla blinked his eyes open and discovered again that his visual field was lopsided and narrow, at which point he had a hazy recollection of what had been done to him, and that his left eye wasn't there. Oh. That. That also explained much of the headache.
The roof above was wood, but very roughly made and he could see daylight through the cracks at the corners where it met the walls. One of them had something green growing through it.
It felt weird. He grunted and tried to raise one arm. The arm moved - weakly, but it moved - but the soft effortful sound he expected did not emerge from his throat. It was just air.
He touched his face gently. Ow.
There was a crash, and then a high voice - a woman. "Ah, ah, no, wait-"
He couldn't see her, and he wasn't sure if he could really turn to look, but a tiny glowing light zoomed closer from somewhere else in the room and slammed into Tesla's hand, smacking it away from his face. "What-" he started. Nothing came out.
"Ah! Tsubaki, no! You're going to make it worse." Another crash, and then finally the voice's owner stumbled into Tesla's line of sight.
She was a witch. She was very obviously a witch. She looked young, with wide, pretty eyes and long chestnut hair. Out of one side of her head grew the fine end of a tree branch. It looked perfectly organic as it followed the shape of her face from behind her temple to the curve of her cheek and jaw, and several small and delicate flowers bloomed there, all different shapes and colours. They even smelled like flowers, like fruit blossoms in early spring.
She snatched the glowing thing from where it was zooming angrily around his head and brought it back to the branch - the glow stopped and another bud formed. A second later a minute camellia unfurled just beneath her eye. "Sorry," she said, and then, rapidly and all in one breath: "but please don't touch your eye."
Obediently Tesla dropped his hand. The witch beamed at him. Her smile lit up the room - and that was not a metaphor. As she smiled the blossoms lit with a soft and subtle glow, and because they were indoors, the change in lighting was obvious.
She tucked a spill of shining hair behind the blooms. "Let me get you something for the pain - then we can talk."
She brought Tesla tea and, embarrassingly, helped him drink it. When he swallowed and his whole throat lit on fire with a burning, throbbing ache, she looked sympathetic but remained insistent.
"I know it must hurt," she said, chewing her bottom lip and looking at him with her big, guileless eyes, "but it will help."
So Tesla drank, and then she left him upon the bed wedged into the corner of the room and went about picking up the things she'd knocked over when he woke. By the time she was done the bitter tea had kicked in and Tesla was feeling marginally closer to human.
It still hurt, but it was a little more distant now, and Tesla could breathe through it. Cautiously, he sat up. There were burns pretty much everywhere and they hurt fiercely.
His feet seemed to be a bump beneath the blanket that had been thrown over him (probably to account for the chill let in my the slap-dash construction of the building), but they didn't... he didn't feel very connected to that bump. He certainly couldn't feel the texture of the blanket and...
The witch pulled a rickety wooden stool up next to his bed with a scraping noise and perched on it.
"So, I'm Orihime," she said, "and Nnoitra says he didn't know your name - or, er, he didn't seem like he knew your name. He says you followed him from an auto de fe, right?"
Tesla opened his mouth. Nothing came out again. Carefully, he nodded. It wasn't a good feeling, but after the tea it did not hurt to nod.
"Okay, um. Can you make any noises at all?" she asked it like she already knew the answer and hoped very much that she was wrong.
Tesla tried. He could click his tongue, smack his lips, even whistle a little, but he could not make any kind of voiced sound. Nothing that he associated with... well, actually speaking. At first it seemed like maybe if he tried for louder sounds he'd get something, but all that did was make it hurt more.
"I was afraid of that. There's not much more we can do to fix your throat. You should be able to eat and swallow and breathe, but I don't think you'll be able to make, um, sounds."
Tesla looked at her. He knew his expression was about as telling as a rock face, but he couldn't muster many feelings about the situation right then.
"Um, okay," she said awkwardly, in response to what must to her have been a very unhelpful non-response. "Ah, well, but we did well with everything else!" she hastened to tell him. "We did a lot of work on your feet and your eye, and, you had - you had fluid in your lungs for a few days, that was really worrying, but we did it!" She smiled so her teeth showed, and flexed one arm, showing off her nonexistent biceps.
Tesla blinked slowly.
She lowered her arm.
"Right. Well. You're going to be okay, as long as you take care of yourself."
'How long?' Tesla wanted to ask, but the sound wouldn't emerge - of course it wouldn't. He got not even the tiniest whisper of a voice.
Orihime was watching his mouth though, and she nodded to herself. "A little over a week. Although you weren't awake for most of it... which is fine! We'd definitely expect that, considering your condition."
He nodded slowly. A whole week. That seemed like a long time. He glanced toward his feet again.
Orihime gave him a cheerful smile, which seemed to be her default expression. "If you feel up to it, we can try a little bit of walking. It took us all an entire day to fix your feet -" she gestured, and Tesla had the abrupt realisation that when she said 'us all' she meant herself and the flowers growing out of her head, "- but I'm completely confident that you can walk on them again if you need to. It's more about letting the rest of your body recover now."
She looked fit to burst with pride and excitement. Tesla remembered what his feet had looked like when he'd crawled from his pure. If she was right, she more than deserved to be proud of herself.
He still hurt, but he wanted to know, to prove it. He nodded. She nodded back, equally determined, and helped him pull back the covers.
The things at the ends of his legs were still roughly foot-shaped, although they were scarred well beyond Tesla's recognition of them as his feet. The scars were set in folds and rivulets, which were all livid and ugly colours. However, beneath the scarring and the strange numbness that gave his skin, they were still pretty much feet.
His burns hurt in a great many places, but Orihime helped him stand and the feet supported his weight. The scarring on their soles made it hard to tell when they were firmly upon the floor, and his first few steps were less like 'walking' and more like an unsteady 'lurching'.
But he could move under his own power. On his feet. Just one foot in front of the other.
"Okay," said Orihime, after a grand total of five minutes of tottering left him feeling drained and exhausted, "that's enough, back to bed now."
Tesla glanced unhappily in her direction.
Her face grew pinched. "You need rest."
He thought about protesting. Rarely was anybody else as stubborn as Tesla when he put his mind to it. But by any definition, she was an extremely talented healer, and he was already tired, so he did what he was told. Grudgingly.
Still, he felt a lot better going back to bed when he knew he could still walk.
The rest of the day passed in a million cups of tea, four very awkward bathroom breaks and the endless stream of Orihime's chatter.
"It's no wonder you were out for so long," she said while she was cleaning what looked like a small, wickedly sharp saw to Tesla's eye. It resembled something he'd seen in the deeper dungeons of the church, and he did not like to look at it long. "What with you making it all the way here from Blackhill. That's a ten league walk on a good day."
Tesla looked up from the gleam of the saw.
He had not considered how he'd gotten here, or where 'here' was - he was mostly just pleased to have ended up in this place of relative safety.
'Where am I?' he mouthed. Orihime didn't notice and he clicked at her until she looked back up and then mouthed it at her until she figured out what he was asking.
"Oh! This is Havenskeep. We call it that because it's... Well, it's not really a keep exactly but it's pretty protected. There are a lot of witches here. We're pretty high up, though, and not that easy to find. I'll show you around more when you're feeling better - you can meet everyone!"
A haven in the mountains. Full of witches.
Perhaps the priests had been on to something after all.
Except the priests were all dead, of course.
Tesla felt a tiny smile cross his mouth.
Orihime smiled back gamely, although he doubted she knew what had caused the expression on his face.
It did not last long, though, before his face feel back into a frown of confusion.
As far as he remembered, he hadn't made it all that way on foot. He'd barely made it past nightfall. He remembered collapsing. He remembered the taste of bile, the smell of dirt and the thump-thump-thump of the witch's boots, like a pulse.
Orihime was looking at him now, watching the feelings cross his face carefully. "Nnoitra said you followed him almost to our gates. Don't you remember?"
Tesla frowned harder.
That he did not.
"It wouldn't be strange if you didn't," she conceded. "Anyone who was that sick probably wouldn't remember everything." She gave a nervous little laugh. "You're lucky Nnoitra thought to tell Ichigo you'd collapsed out there -you were close by, but we'd probably have missed you until patrol otherwise. And, um, I wouldn't have thought Nnoitra would usually... well, Nnoitra is..."
She paused. Her hands fiddled with the saw. She glanced toward the door as though mentioning his name might summon the man.
She never did finish her sentence.
There was no way in hell that the distance Tesla had gone on his own was ten leagues. He guessed it was distantly possible that he'd crawled to his hands and knees and stumbled on his blackened feet and kept following the steady pulse of Nnoitra's boots through the night and he simply couldn't remember it. He seemed to have forgotten most of the last week, if Orihime could be relied upon. So maybe that was true.
But... Tesla did not think he had had the strength.
He frowned, trying to remember the witch. How he'd offered to kill Tesla himself, put him down like a hydrophobic dog like it was a real kindness. How he'd gripped his hot throat tight in his hand and slammed him into the trunk of a tree.
"It was lucky you were able to make it so far," Orihime said softly.
Tesla did not think he'd had the strength to get here on his own, but the alternative?
The alternative seemed even less likely. Surely.
'Lucky,' Tesla mouthed pensively.
Orihime could not hear him and did not look up.
'Yes. That must be it.'