Sarah closed the front door with her butt, unceremoniously deposited the bags, and leaned against the door, head resting against the smooth wood grain, for a minute. It took an exertion of will to peel herself off, but peel she did, and staggered, trailed by a litany of language that would make Blackbeard blush, to her guest room. She elbowed the light on, smacked her funny bone against the wall in the process, reeled over to the bed, set her burden down with rather more care than she had the bags, shook her arms out, and glared at him.
Well, not at him, not really; at the situation at large, but it's not really possible to glare at something conceptual, so she settled for glaring at Jareth. He, being unconscious, did not glare back. She shook herself out of that after a moment, marched resolutely back to the foyer, and put away the refrigerated and frozen groceries. If her unexpected guest hadn't expired on the walk home, he'd last the time it took to put away milk, eggs, ice cream and…shit. She'd forgotten the cookie dough.
"Hell, damn, fuck, shit, ass, hell, fuck, damn, wait I already said that," she muttered, a staccato marching beat, one syllable per step, on her way to the bathroom. First aid kit. Disinfectant. Antibiotics, left over from Jocelyn's ear infection. Painkillers, from when Sarah had broken her arm five years ago, damn, she hoped they were still good. Dental floss for stitches, she'd heard it worked well for that, unless – she checked, hurriedly; good, this was unflavoured. She had thoughtlessly washed a personal area with mint soap once, and shuddered to think what mint would feel like in raw flesh. There, there, and there, and she swooped it all up, deposited it quickly in the guest room, and forced herself not to run to the third of four bedrooms, which served not as a bedroom at all but a project room.
Feverish rummaging produced what she sought; her yardstick, three rulers, and her sharpest needle. She swallowed hard, caught her breath, took them back to the guest room, set them down beside the items from the bathroom, and swore again. This trip produced a bucket of water – thank god it came warm from the hose, heated by the day's sun – and an extra-large garbage bag, which she sliced up the seams and, finally done swearing, stretched out on the bed beside Jareth, who, to her total lack of surprise, hadn't so much as twitched.
He did stir a little as she moved him. She heard his breath hitch, and muttered an apology despite the near-certainty that he couldn't hear her. The bag barely crinkled under his slight weight. Sarah pulled another face, retrieved the scissors from the nightstand, and set about finding out what she could do.
His clothes, all three to five layers of them – their excessive raggedness, and the blood gluing them together, rendered counting all but impossible – wound up in a heap on the ground, to be cleaned up after, and half his hair followed. She would think about the implications of three to five layers of hobo clothes on the Goblin King sometime later, she informed herself, after she finished doing something about the body under the clothes.
She could just about count his vertebrae from the front, and probably could have used his ribcage for a xylophone. She couldn't do anything about that. Scabs crusted his left side, and bruises blackened it; closer inspection showed, to her queasy surprise, deep lacerations, as if from some large animal's claws. Her hand shook a little as she held her fingers up to one set; they were spaced a bit too widely for a hand the size of hers, and a few of them showed stark glimpses of bone underneath.
"Those are going to need stitches," she informed herself, and blinked as the words cut off the distressing squeaking sound that had been bothering her. Irritation rising, she realized she had been whimpering. Damn, damn, damn, that wasn't going to help – not that she could probably help much, either; even untrained, she recognized those lacerations as serious, and those were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Well, nobody else could see him, which meant she had to do what she could. Inhale, exhale. He might not make it, but if she did her best, then at least it wouldn't be on her conscience.
She cleaned out the scrapes and the morbid cuneiform of wounds. She stitched the cuts and taped gauze over the expanse – it looked, she decided, almost like a burn, like he'd been dragged on asphalt or something, and when she moved his right arm something grated, which a moment's investigation proved to be the collarbone, and what the hell was she supposed to do about that, now?
And it had scratches over it too, so she stitched those as well, and one thing led to another, until she found herself sitting on the edge of the bed, shaking not with nerves but with exhaustion, staring at a thin figure that resembled a mummy more than anything else. She'd never put a dislocated joint back in place or set a bone before, and she never wanted to repeat the experience. Or stitches. Stitches, she had decided, horrified her; so did the wet scraping crunch of realigning broken bones; but neither bothered her half as much as the cuts – what the hell made cuts like that? – or the grey veining spreading up from anything that broke the skin.
Slowly she looked down at herself. She'd started out in blue jeans and a green tank top; they were all black now. Black? She blinked hard. Shouldn't they be red or brown? But no, black they remained. Perplexed, she pulled up a hem of her shirt, sniffed it, and wrinkled her nose. Not a normal blood smell, not…Looking back at the unconscious figure, she caught her breath, a lifetime's myths and fairy tales running through her mind.
Black blood, where it met with oxygen. Okay. And the veining, the – infection? Poison? – had a sick reddish cast to it, like rust. Cities were full of iron. Some supernatural creatures, like the sidhe of Celtic lore, were said to be allergic to iron.
If they were allergic to iron, then their blood couldn't contain it, and college zoology had taught her, along with how to stretch a research paper without fucking with font sizes and how not to light a Bunsen burner, that octopi have copper-based blood, with oxygen bonding to molecules of copper rather than iron. Sarah blinked once more, closely scrutinizing her guest's face, ignoring the clumsily stitched cuts across a scraped cheek. Yes, his lips looked distinctly blue. And his blood oxidized black. Silver.
"Shit," she breathed, but she said it like a revelation, and then she ran – ran first to her room for the little tray of jewelry on her sideboard and then to the kitchen, for the coffee grinder.
"Sorry, Andrew," accompanied the plink of a necklace her ex-husband had given her, the only piece of real silver she knew she had. The machine snarled to life, making her jump, and suddenly, to her immense surprise, she found herself crying in hard gulping sobs that left her leaning hard against the ugly yellow countertop, weeping for…for the amiable but final dissolution of her marriage? For the daughter who spent half her year down in San Diego with her dad? For the near-stranger lying on death's doorstep in her guest room?
She regained control quickly enough, turned off the coffee grinder, peered inside, sneezed into the crook of her arm, and tried again. A lump of silver lay there, surrounded by fine gratings. Calmer, now, she heated a cup of chicken broth and stirred in a pinch of silver shavings, trying to think of the relative size of an iron supplement. Damn, that chicken broth was supposed to be for supper, too, and…damn, she'd forgotten all about supper.
Well, she could take care of that in a bit. The mug found a home on the nightstand; the poor disemboweled, bloodied plastic bag joined the pile of Things To Be Cleaned Up Afterwards, and, carefully, carefully, she pulled blankets up over the limp figure on the bed. He formed a sickeningly small lump therein, until she slipped an arm behind him and propped him against her to enlist gravity's aid in getting some of the broth and with it, the silver, down him with a teaspoon. Quite without her permission, her hand had resumed shaking; if he hadn't proved totally unresisting, more than half of it would have ended up on him rather than in him. It didn't help that, the few times he stirred, he tried to hide against her.
As it was, cleanup from Operation Chicken Broth occupied a good (for a given value of 'good') fifteen minutes, and getting the mess of ex-clothes and bloodied hair off the floor, and the floor itself cleaned, another half an hour. Finally, hands on hips, she surveyed her work.
The room looked a bit as if it had been hit by a tornado. The bed was rumpled. Jareth, thankfully, looked a bit less like a corpse. One more thing – no, two more things – and she could go to bed, goblins be damned. Squelch or Squarp or whoever it was could get its cookie and bubble wrap the next day.
It had been years since she'd used the baby monitor for Jocelyn, but she kept it in her nightstand, in case the child fell ill. She turned the little monitor on and set it on the windowsill above the guest bed, and, taking the other half of the unit with her, headed for the washing machine, pulling her shirt off as she went. If it made a satisfying thunk into the washer, she was too tired to notice, or to lament the cool air on her bare legs as her pants followed.
In her underwear, Sarah Williams stumbled back to her bedroom. The dryer could wait. The cookies could wait. Fucking everything could wait. She was asleep before she hit the covers.
"Hey! Hey! Lady! Lady, wake up!"
"In a minute, Jo…you. You aren't Jocelyn." She ached. God did she ever ache. She cracked one eye open and peered over her shoulder at the earnest little face staring at her. She ached, she'd passed out face-down on top of her coverlet, and the goblin from her car had taken a seat on her seat. Damn it all, the only one allowed to sit on her ass was her. "Hey, you."
"Cookies?"
"Yes," Sarah sighed, shedding not one but three goblins as she rolled over and sat up, scrubbing sleep from her eyes with a forefinger. "Say your magic word."
Three gnarled faces stared up at her. Three pairs of eyes widened in dismay. Three voices chorused "Pleeeeeease?"
"Of course." They followed her eagerly into the kitchen, either refraining from comment upon the white plastic monitor she snagged along the way or, more likely, just not noticing. She breathed another silent curse at having forgotten the cookie dough, gave them an extra square of bubble wrap to make up for it, and departed to take a shower. Rearranging half of someone's skeleton made for hard work, sponge baths really aren't sufficient for removal of blood, and she felt gross as well as sore. A shower could come neither soon enough, nor, apparently, hot enough.
She leaned back into the water like a plant to sunlight, squeezing her eyes shut as she stuck her shampoo-lathered head back under the faucet. Three scrubs and she still felt icky. A crash issued from the living room – goblins are much like children, and Jocelyn had been a tomboy since she'd been anything but an infant, but even the hardiest Tonka truck only stands up to so much abuse.
Reluctantly, she rinsed off, scrubbed herself dry far more roughly than any maternal figure in the history of the world would advise, threw her clothes on and hurried out to the living room to…be hit in the forehead with a plastic tire. She caught it reflexively as it fell and look up at the goblins, eyebrows raising.
"All right, guys. Remember the rules?"
"That Is A Shoe, Don't Eat It?"
"Pancakes Are For Eating, Not Wearing?"
"It Isn't A Slingshot, No Matter What?"
"Nope."
"No? Keep going! Keep going!"
"Put Things Back Where They Belong?"
"Warmer," she sighed.
"Warmer? Lady wants it warmer! Go put it in the beepy box!"
"No! Guys, no, that was a figure of speech."
"Lady, whossa figgeruvspee-"
"Hush!" She half-groaned, half laughed. "Remember: If you break something…"
"If we breaks something," five voices – the thing with goblins is that if you leave them alone, they multiply – chorused dejectedly, "we haves to go home."
Sarah raised an eyebrow sharply. They stared at her, slowly drooping. One of them opened its mouth to speak.
"Well?"
Its mouth clapped shot. One of its companions looked soulful at her. She raised her other eyebrow, and they disappeared with a disconsolate pop, leaving her to check in on their misplaced monarch and make coffee and breakfast, in that order, unfortunately. The monitor had woken her a few times during the night, to the sound of labored breathing, but fortunately never to silence, and she was pleased to note his lips had almost entirely gone back to a colour not normally associated with corpses.
Remembering how warm he'd been the day before, she put a hand to his forehead, and almost jumped back when he leaned into it. This time, she knew the quiet whimper wasn't her, and felt a bit bad for ranking "coffee later" as an unfortunate matter. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't even merit a blip. She sat a bit grudgingly on the edge of the bed to check him over; she didn't know if he actually did look a bit better, or if she was just deluding herself. Either way, she changed a few bandages and washed another antibiotic down his throat with the last of the water, which proved more problematic than last time, because, though he didn't stir again, he was shivering hard.
She piled another couple of blankets on him before she left to make breakfast, and had to laugh at the tiny lump he made in the bed. Poor thing. She was probably a horrible person for laughing at that, but what else was she supposed to do? Freak out about something she was doing her best to fix? Much like snapping at the man she'd waylaid yesterday, that wouldn't help anyone at all.
Breakfast was scrambled eggs, an apple, and coffee, for her, and more broth for him. She noted with concern that he was still shivering, which confirmed her suspicion that his temperature was not normal for a whatever-he-was. He half-woke, though, as she spooned the last bit of silver-spiked broth down his throat, and flinched violently away from her. If he'd had more strength, he would have run into the headboard.
She caught him reflexively and held him protectively against her while he hid his face against her shoulder. It caught her off guard; she'd spoken to him, what, five times before? Nowhere near enough to know a person well, but he'd seemed more together then. Then again, something unpleasant had obviously happened, and if he was thinking straight, she was Theodore Roosevelt, which she knew for a fact as bullshit.
"Hey…hey, it's okay." This, however disconcerting, she knew what to do with. Amazing, the things one learns from having children. She stroked his hair slowly and gently and hummed under her breath until he stilled, one hand clinging to the front of her shirt. If he'd been in his right mind, it would have earned him a glare that had reacquainted lesser men with the charming childhood habit of wetting themselves.
It was the hand she'd almost crushed yesterday, pale and thin and heavily bandaged. She disentangled it gently, placing it on the blankets and covering it with hers. Something in the sensation jarred her; moving her hand, she realized what it was.
Someone had taken his gloves.
Suddenly seething with rage on his behalf, she clenched her other hand into a fist so tight her palm would bear four red crescents til sundown. Whatever else had happened to him could have been accidental, could still be accidental, but either someone had deliberately taken them or he had for some reason mislaid them and as far as she knew, he always wore them.
As far as she knew? She growled under her breath, shaking her head sharply in frustration. She didn't know, though, that was the thing. She'd hardly talked to him. He was a stranger, and she realized she'd been stroking her thumb lightly along the back of his hand, but it wasn't the back anymore, because his hand and turned to wrap loosely around hers.
Her throat tightened in empathy. She wrapped her other hand around his, and almost immediately unwrapped it, blinking incredulously at the little indents in the heel of her palm. Astonished, she turned his hand and gently uncurled the clinging fingers. At the tip of each there curled a wicked black claw. Something dull caught her eye, at the end of one. It was with a sick feeling that she removed the clot, horribly certain what it was even before she sniffed it. Shuddering, she pinched it into a tissue and threw it in the garbage and, perhaps in some hopeless wish that the sizes would not match up, looked closely from his hand to the gouges on his face, the gouges that matched the lacerations crisscrossing any damage that had broken his skin.
"I think," she announced, after a long moment, "that I am going to go throw up now."
