It's easy to forget that what he's doing is completely insane as he all but sprints through the tunnels leading to his lair.
The boy's breathing is shallow and, as he worries, he forgets the other things he should be worrying about too.
He's just like me.
It's terrifying, alarming; Erik has never felt such an instant kinship to anything. He'd seen other children abused, he'd been upset, maybe even stepped in a few times, but never once has he felt so...connected, for lack of a better word.
But he doesn't have to worry, doesn't have time to worry in fact. His most pressing problem is the child's condition. The rest of his, well, whatever it is, can be dealt with later.
A quick boat ride to his base of operations passes by in a blur (somehow he manages to hold the boy with one arm and paddle with the other and he doesn't think about why he doesn't just set him down) and he wastes no time in stepping off the boat and walking to his washroom.
It's an ornate little thing filled with all the amenities a Parisian bathroom can possibly have, including a full sized tub with running water, which Erik turns on as soon as he enters.
He doesn't want to fully submerge the child, he's not sure what kind of shock that would have on the emaciated youth's system, but he does want to use hot water to clean him off.
He carries the boy in one arm as he bustles about the room, grabbing towels and wash clothes and soap and medical supplies and anything else he thinks he'll need.
Keep busy, that's his plan. Think later, react now.
Erik sets the boy down for the first time since he's picked him up, leaning him against the standing tub as he does so. The tub fills quickly and the Phantom picks up a bucket he's brought over and dips it into the water, filling it nearly to the brim. He puts it down by the youth and kneels down on the floor in front of him.
He saturates a washcloth in water and, first and foremost, goes about cleaning any mess out of the child's wounds.
Dirty pools of water begin forming around the two of them, as mud and other debris fall off the thin frame in clumps. The phantom pays little mind as his immaculate bathroom floor and clothes are quickly ruined, focusing instead on the boy himself.
Erik realizes, the more he cleans, that the child is even paler than he had previously realized. His skin is almost colorless and the blue of his veins stands out in strong contrast. Even more cleaning reveals a red line on the boy's face.
Erik's brow furrows and he runs his cloth up the side of the wan face, following the red as he does so.
He lets out a single, angry exclamation as the entirety of the scar, an inverted star dripping a red line down to the bottom of the boy's face, crossed by another line directly under the eye, is revealed. He drops the washcloth and lets a single finger ghost over the intricate line.
Horrible.
The cut couldn't have been anything but intentional. Someone had carved it into his skin. Erik stares for a few moments longer and shakes his head.
Well, horrible or not, he isn't surprised. Humans are despicable. He's never had a hard time believing that before.
This newest piece of evidence is just another to add to the pile.
Turning attention away from the scar, he notices something else interesting. The boy's newly cleaned eyebrow is white.
And not the sort that comes with age or stress, a sort of pale gray or silver. No, it's stark white. Bright white. Whiter even than the fabric of Erik's gloves, although that's partially due to the amount of mud on them. In hindsight he realizes that he should have taken them off.
He runs one of his gloved fingers over the other eyebrow and enough dirt rubs off of it for him to realize that it's also white.
His first assumption is that it's dye, but a quick rinse down of the boy's hair has him realizing that the color travels all the way down to the roots.
Interesting. He's beginning to think that perhaps it was more than just a disfigured arm that had lead to the child being involved with a freak show.
Speaking of the arm, well Erik doesn't want to have to dwell on it for any longer than is necessary and it's rapidly cleaned and covered with a towel.
He dries the boy off after finishing his cleaning and he wrap bandages around the youth's chest and back quickly and efficiently.
The wounds are mostly superficial. Painful, but not life threatening. The real threats are possible infection and the boy's obvious malnourishment. But, Erik has solutions to and time enough to fix those two problems.
He scoops the boy up and walks him to the living area. He gently sets his patient on one of the couches and wraps two dry towels around him to help him maintain some of his quickly fleeing body heat. (A brief thought crosses his mind - that he should probably go about acquiring some more blankets if he plans to have the child stay with him - but the idea that anyone would stay with him is ridiculous enough to make the idea disappear before it even truly forms).
He walks into his own bedroom, paying little attention to the coffin that serves as his bed, an addition he'd made to his lair during a particularly somber period of his existence. It's been there for years and, while potentially alarming to others, he's never had others to deal with and, to him, it's little different than the dresser he's digging through, where it becomes increasingly obviously nothing he has will fit the boy well. But he assumes the short-sleeved, black sleepshirt he pulls from neatly organized drawers is better than nothing.
He walks back into the living area and tugs it over the boy's head.
The tailored fabric nearly drowns his tiny guest, the collar of the shirt all but falls off the his clavicular bones and ends far below the knees, but the bandages covering the child's chest, shoulders and arm with the addition of the black shirt are enough to provide him with something resembling modesty.
Erik picks up the boy's left arm, covered by bandages even though there's nothing physically wrong with it and slips the little black glove (the only part of the boy's dilapidated wardrobe he had bothered saving) over his hand.
He knows what it's like to want to hide.
And Erik isn't going to deprive anyone of their ability to do so.
He finishes and sits down on a nearby chair and realizes that his job is pretty much done. The small, sickly, pale, white-haired, horribly beaten, horribly scarred and gruesomely disfigured child's breathing has evened out into something less like unconsciousness and more like sleep.
React now, think later.
Well, it's later, and Erik doesn't know what to think.
A/N: Writing from such a limited point of view after writing omniscient for so long is a lot more difficult that I expected it to be. It's kind of fun though, you really have to get inside of a character's head instead of using the rest of their environment to convey what's going on. It's definitely different.
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