-4 -- Two steps forward, one step back.

"A sucking chest wound is just nature's way of saying, 'slow down there, chief.'"

-- A wise(ass) punk kid

I promise it gets happier soon. Less torture and more awkward moments.

--

Nuada's improvement was hard-fought but recognisable. Every day, he spent more and more time conscious, and rejected food less and less often. His pulse steadied on the third day, which seemed to relieve much of his pain. He regained his motor abilities in pieces, until at the end of the week he could move his limbs and grip his sister's hand with ease. His vision was slower to return; he seemed able to process movement, but nothing else, and his eyes did not focus at all. The dilation of his pupils was sluggish at its best, even when Nuala turned off the lights in the room and let in the sun through the window.

To the great concern of the nurse staff, Hellboy and Abe pushed the bed up against the wall to be closer to the window. When the sun came up, it shone brilliantly through the glass and washed over the ashen prince. Every day at dawn the light reached over the horizon and stretched out its golden fingers to warm him; in that early moment, the sun seemed to exist only to warm the prince, and with a smile and a sigh, the prince seemed to exist only to worship the sun.

It was at the end of the week that Nuala approved him as fit to travel. On a wheeled gurney, escorted by his three guardians, Nuada stayed conscious all the way from the hospital room to the plane. He drifted off sometime during the first hour of the flight, and slumbered deeply. Red, Blue, and Nuala took shifts monitoring him, though the compliment of equipment was considerably less extensive on the plane than in the hospital.

In the third shift, Red noticed a change in his breathing, and immediately awoke Abe by tapping him incessantly on the arm. "Abe. Abe wake up. Somethin's wrong with Prince Big-n'-Bad."

"Hm?"

"He's breathing funny. All scratchy and uneven."

Abe shot out of his seat and practically teleported to the other side of the cabin, where lay Nuada. "Did you try to wake him?"

"Yeah. Doesn't work." Red followed at a more even pace.

He waved to the seats where previously he lay. "Check on Nuala."

He hesitated, then turned back and nudged Nuala's shoulder gently. "Uh, sorry Nu, but… you have to wake up."

She stirred a bit and awoke slowly. "Red? What is wrong?"

"Your brother is breathing kinda funny, Abe is taking care of him but wanted me to check that you're alright. Are ya?"

She blinked, bewildered. "Yes. I don't feel anything from my brother."

Abe listened and prodded and monitored, trying to determine the cause of the issue and narrowing it quickly down to the lungs. "I need one hand please."

Red sprinted from the other side of the plane, Nuala following after. Under Abe's direction, they sat Nuada up and allowed him to hunch forward slightly. Abe pulled his arms forward then up, where he directed Red to hold them.

Feeling very silly, Red held both the prince's narrow wrists in his left hand, keeping them over his head. "What's the point of this?"

"It opens his rib cage and allows his lungs more room to expand. Nuala?"

"I don't feel anything from him at all; our bond is gone silent." She wrung her hands frantically, then moved to the head of the bed and planted her palms against her brother's back. "Left lung, two inches, anterior wall. Part of him just isn't there."

"What do you mean?" Red wondered.

"A part of the wall of his lung is gone. It's just a hole," Abe read from her mind with clear horror. "Ragged. It isn't bleeding internally because the lung is already half collapsed."

Red growled. "Shit. How does he just end up with a hole in his lung, just like that?"

"When I find out, I will tell you," Abe promised patiently. "But the sooner we get his lung working again, the more sure his chances of survival. We need a healer."

"We're already over Scotland, we should be landed in twenty minutes or so," he reported. "We're putting down just outside the city; it should be another half hour by car to the drop point at Cowgate."

"It's not going to be very dark. Please try to remain inconspicuous, there will be many people about."

Red rolled his eyes. "Don't worry about me, fish man. Oh, and there's the half-dead elf we're hauling about, that's bound to raise a few eyebrows."

Abe cut a sharp look at him in chastisement.

The pilot's voice came over the intercom speaker. "We're descending to land. Anyone not directly involved in whatever it is you all are doing, please be seated and put on your seatbelts. It's going to be a wee bit rough."

Abe nodded for Nuala and Hellboy to sit, and took over the task of steadying Nuada. The landing was indeed bumpy, but Abe had no trouble maintaining his own balance-- until he began hearing the echoes of Nuada's mind through his sensitive palms. Direct contact with the elf should have registered as a bad idea, he at least should have concentrated on not listening; but Nuada's wrists felt so much like Nuala's that Abe's mind practically fell open.

By the time they were on the ground, Abe was more than willing to pass Nuada to Red and retreat to his lover. Nuala sympathetically set a palm against his back, knowing what he heard. She smiled a sad smile for them both. "It will be better, soon. Either he will live, and heal, or he will die, and be reborn. All things pass."

"Strange words from an immortal," Abe replied, slipping an arm around her waist tenderly. If he lives and heals, how much of his madness will disappear with his pain?

Nuala did not answer, because she did not know.

Red lifted the prince easily and held him practically in one arm. Without something clever to lighten the mood, he was entirely outside of his comfort zone; this showed in his grim silence.

Nuada wheezed painfully and gripped Red's forearm for reassurance that he was not being thrown. The last time Red grasped the pale prince, it had been in violence; they shared the moment of déjà vu, awkwardly meeting eyes for a moment. Even without a mental link, the question was clear.

I win, Hellboy had said. You live.

This moment passed. Nuada relaxed in his hold and adjusted to the sensation of being carried as the warmly lit interior of the plane turned into the damp chill of a Scottish night. The metal cabin walls had dampened the sounds of the earth. Now, in the open air of the island Balor called home, the voices of all the natural world sang their quiet, constant song. The nearby mountain had a whalesong tone, slow and deep, sounding in his elven bones. The insects and frogs in their gracefully coarse summer chorus were more beautiful than any artificial symphony, manmade or even elven. The night birds and bats, their wings made sounds so quiet a human would not hear them, but the whistle of feather edge against the wind was sweeter than flutes, and the answering whispers of the trees-- ah, the trees!

Nuada gripped Hellboy's arm again, eyes closing and lips pulling back in a grimacing smile. Sister, do you hear them--! Oh how lovely, how is this world so glorious, do you hear home? Do you hear the night as it sings, the waves of the ocean so very close, so very close, like mother's hand, do you smell the ocean? The mountains are singing, they yet sing, I thought they were silent, I thought we all had died--!

Nuala brushed her hand over her brother's brow as they piled into the taxi, but remained attached to her husband's side. The link between her and her brother cracked, weighted down with a mad joy so acute it was painful. She closed her eyes and buried her head against Abe's shoulder, weeping again but feeling her brother's soul waking, his heart beginning to beat again. It was wonderful, and it hurt.

Abe understood; he always did. It was the one thing she loved most about him, and he understood that, too. He held her gently, stroking her hair and letting her share the emotions that otherwise might have broken her. He met Red's eyes across the cramped taxi.

Hellboy had his feet pulled up, but his legs still occupied most of the floor space and then some. Nuada was draped across his lap, uncaring for physical comfort as he abandoned himself to the song of the land. His wheezing had grown more disturbing to the ear, adopting a kind of wet sound that was herald of ill news for any creature. Across from him, Blue and Nuala huddled on the seat, and behind him the cabbie drove without speaking to them, already briefed on where to go.

"I know I'm not in the little psychic love triangle," Red grunted, shuffling uncomfortably, "but I just gotta say… this is really, really fucked up. Nuala, I-- Nuada… I'm really sorry. I didn't know they were going to… to do this. Or I never woulda given him to them."

Nuala and Abe smiled simultaneously that same sympathetic smile. "It's not your fault," she told him. "I know you did what you believed was best. We were, all of us, deceived. Now it is time to make it right."

His expression darkened ominously. "Yeah. Yeah, it is that."

The taxi arrived at the caves on Cowgate, just beneath the George-IV bridge. Somewhere in the old store rooms, the driver told them, was the entrance to the Underground realm. Parts of it were built by trolls, and then built atop that were the homes of humans, which then were built atop by more humans and left forgotten under the city. Now, only the occasional haunted tours company and sometimes the odd theatre venue ever took to stay there. The Fae of the area made quite certain that all knew who belonged where, though, by haunting the place thoroughly by trick and magic. The driver let them out when the street was clear, tipping his hat to them and driving off into the thick har of the Edinburgh night.

The lot of them scrambled into the old storerooms as quickly as possible to avoid too much attention-- in a country with one security camera for every three citizens, being seen in Britain was never a task of shutting up a single person. And without the support of the Bureau, Hellboy and his current company simply did not have the resources to cover their tracks.

Not that Hellboy had ever been particularly concerned about covering his tracks. But now, he was carrying an elven prince who was through flirting with Death, and was now making serious advances on the Grim Reaper. The mental image, while amusing, drove him to march a little faster into the musty caves.

They all had to duck a bit to prevent knocking their heads on the low archways where doors might once have been. The smell became damper and mouldier as they descended staircase after staircase into a room where the scent of humans was only a few weeks old. Indeed, there were still metal screws and bolts on the floor.

"This must have been a theatre venue like our driver mentioned," Abe noted, attempting to distract his lover from the madness and pain of her brother. He brushed a wad of gaffer's tape out of their way with one foot as they passed. "Look."

Red snorted. "You'd think a lot of unwashed hippies would at least have a little more respect for their surroundings."

"Says the man who used to throw his beer cans in the river-- until I started throwing them back," Abe challenged good-naturedly, relieved as he felt a little glow of amusement from his partner.

Nuala pulled them off to one side, past a row of stalactites dripping with rainwater from the surface-- the storerooms were indeed old enough to have collected the architectural trappings of natural caves. "This is it," she announced, then spoke words in elvish that neither of her surface-born counterparts understood. True to her command, the wall shuddered and pulled back, stones separating in an uneven line and pulling back, arranging themselves into a proper doorway.

"With troll doors like this," Abe wondered, "Who needs goblins?"

Nuala flinched and hesitated, a hand seeking her brother just as he uttered a smothered cry. By way of explanation, she told the others, "We knew a troll who helped to built these caves. They are as familiar to us as our personal rooms. We played in these tunnels as children, and he hid here for a time during his exile."

"Maybe when he's healed some, you two could visit--"

"He's dead," Nuada whispered, but he may as well have screamed it.

"You killed him," Nuala told him even more softly.

"Wha-- oh. OH. Oh god. I'm sorry." Red's knees felt weak, and he felt like the biggest asshole in all the world. "I didn't know, I--"

"You were enemies then," Nuada breathed. "On the opposite sides of a battle unfair to you both. To us all." It was the most lucid thing he said in months, and the most peaceable thing he'd said in centuries. Its significance was not lost on Nuala, who smiled on him mentally and gave him all the warmth her heart could spare.

It was, however, lost on Hellboy. "No battle is fair. This war was wrong. I treated the troll like a creature, but I spared you like a man."

"A human raised you," he reasoned, pausing to push a little blood out of his mouth with a weak hiccup. "I look more humanoid than Wink, and therefore you treat me more like a human. Humans fear what they do not understand, and hate what they fear--" he would have said more, but something in him seized, cutting off his words and his breath. Instead, he coughed and shuddered, gold eyes closing to the world he could barely see.

Trusting them to understand the need for haste, Nuala walked so quick as to be running, through the familiar tunnels, footfalls echoing in the stone corridors and in her long memories. Every sound and smell led the way, the flagstone carrying her feet where she needed to go. Though the healer's home was not in the same tunnel, nor even the same sector as when she last visited a hundred years before, she found their way to the right door without doubling back once. She whispered a thank you to the spirit of Wink in the stones, and pressed open the door to the healer's home as she announced their arrival.

"Please, your help for my brother; he is gravely ill and dying."

A wrinkled crone in feather-light white robes floated from the back room, looked them over with some surprise, then bowed low. "Your highness-es. Please, place him upon the cushions here, and I will do my best."

Red crossed the room in a single step, kneeling and very carefully placing the broken prince on the pile of cushions that dominated the centre of the healer's workspace. He moved back a bit, but did not stand. Nuala sat beside her brother, holding his hand and suffering with him as he gave up his blood by the mouthful. Abe knelt at her side, a hand on her shoulder.

The healer spread her palms flat and held her hands horizontal, moving them over the prince in flowing sweeps. "Human poison," she noted. "This is human sickness, long entrenched in him. He surrendered to it, but now he fights it again? The seat of his breath and the walls of his organs are worn, disappearing. He is alive but has no right to be."

Hellboy was about to demand the healer talk straight and tell them if she could help or not, but a movement from the ground caught his attention. Nuada stopped coughing up blood, and was lying very still; however, his breathing was stronger than it had been, and seemed to improve as the moments passed.

"There is a strength in him," the healer said after awhile, her hands moving closer to his ribs and pausing there for a longer moment before continuing on. "And also a great madness. With patient care he may live, but…" It may be for the best that he does not, she did not say, but they heard it in her voice.

"Patience, we have," Nuala said more to her brother than to the healer.

She nodded once, slowly. "Very well. He ought remain here for a week at the least, then take him home and keep him safe on your island until he is strong again. He is deficient in the elements of earth, water, and fire; the wind alone is a fickle thing to sustain him. I will stabilize him until he can begin healing." She was silent a moment, then added very carefully, "I cannot heal his mind."

Nuala used her pocket kerchief to mop away the blood drying on Nuada's face. "With so many years, there may be none but the Mother who can heal such scars."

The healer did not respond.