Tamsin thought she knew pain. She was centuries on centuries older than the span of modern history and a valkyrie to boot. Pain was as natural to her as breathing. Over her lifetimes, she'd been poisoned, nearly gutted; half drowned (as a result of being tossed off a cliff), stabbed, impaled, shot, defenestrated and likely had broken every bone in her body at least half a dozen times but none of those compared to the pain she was feeling from the dragon spear enchantment. Her veins were tiny and useless trying to push blood made of molten lava through them, searing every nerve ending on its cycle through her body.

She prided herself on being able to take absurd amounts of pain. Valkyries were proud, haughty even, and Tamsin was no exception but she didn't even have the presence of mind to be shamed at the embarrassing state she'd been deteriorated to by the enchantment. The pain seemed to grow in intensity with every minute. She had no idea how Bo had made it out of the mansion while half carrying her. She vaguely recalled being gently propped up against walls and then hearing the noises of fighting, but the pain erased parts of her memory. All she really remembered was being set down occasionally, her feet dragging on gravel and her head pressed against the smooth glass of the passenger's side of her truck. Her world had narrowed down to pain and pain alone.

She didn't remember being stitched up at the lab, or Bo being pulled away from her gurney by Dyson because she was getting in the way, or the drive to Lauren's; she didn't even register the sounds of her own wailing as the anguish had left her with a high pitched ringing echoing around in her throbbing head and she couldn't even really process that either. Seconds felt like agonizing years; conceptualizing time was pointless. She was in hell, she knew it. She was being punished for everything she'd ever done wrong and she had done a lot of things wrong. But still, just when she reached a new height of torment, it would get worse and yet she couldn't pass out from the pain, couldn't mentally leave her body and distance herself from it. Even hell couldn't be this cruel.

A millennia into the infernal wretchedness of her predicament, her upper body had been clumsily pulled up and braced against another body, the smell of anise, alcohol and fennel invading her nostrils. She had tasted the fumes of the absinthe in the back of her throat before the high-proof liquid even hit her tongue but once it had, she had gulped greedily, the green spirit spilling down her chin as the person pouring it into her mouth tried to get into the awkward groove of feeding someone else liquids.

The absinthe didn't diminish the pain, not really, but it made it very slightly more tolerable. She was able to hear things like Kenzi asking her questions and Lauren's incoherent babbling in the room across the hall when it reached loud volumes; she even managed to sort of respond to Kenzi's comments.

Eons later, she had conserved enough energy to make coherent sentiments and gestures not related to pain response and had asked, no she had begged Kenzi to free her from her torment. Whatever fate awaited her in the afterlife couldn't have possibly been any worse than how she felt. Tamsin knew that on some level she was being selfish, that if Kenzi put her out of her misery she'd be putting her death on the human and the dark-haired Russian would have to deal with that, but she didn't care. It would have been a mercy killing; she had been asking for peace. Peace she felt she didn't deserve, but the pain was too great, she wasn't strong enough. And the valkyrie prided herself on being strong enough, her whole sense of being orbited on being perceived as strong enough.

She felt despair consume her when Kenzi denied her; she wanted to yell that she needed it, that it was her only option, but her throat was drier than a desert and she had no saliva to coat it and could do nothing but beg through squeezing the human's arm. She had given up half because it had been foolish to ask the secretly softhearted thief in the first place and half because of the mention of Lauren. Her desire and willingness to die hadn't diminished in the slightest and only seemed to increase as time wore on and the pain swelled, but she wanted to say goodbye to the blonde doctor, at least. It was silly, but it helped her try and tolerate the pain. Tamsin even allowed herself to think that once Lauren was better, the doctor would see her state and oblige her request. Whatever she felt for the valkyrie, she was still a doctor, she would have to see the sensibility of her request. Armed with that hope, the Dark Fae had withdrawn her hand from Kenzi's arm and allowed herself to sink back into the feeling of every one of her cells being burned away but not burnt up.

It could have been shortly after that, but she felt like it had been the span of time it took to grow mountains, Kenzi must have run out of absinthe because her ability to have temporary control of her voice and basic motor functions disappeared altogether and every action she was able to make related only to expressing the pain she was in. Thousands of years passed. Maybe millions. She could have been dipped in gasoline and set alight to die a slow death and it still would have been less painful than this. There were exited voices near her but she didn't know what they were saying. The high-pitched hum had returned and she wondered more if that was the sound of her atoms screaming in pain than what the voices were saying. A span of time passed in which galaxies were created and planets formed and the excited voices returned.

Tamsin then vaguely registered being lifted off the short daybed, being carried a short distance and laid back down but for all she knew, she could have been imagining it but the light beyond her tightly closed eyelids was brighter. Epochs happened, whole civilizations rose and fell and there were more voices. She barely registered the pinprick of a needle into her arm as a sea of excruciating suffering swallowed it up. She blacked out so suddenly; she wasn't even able to feel the relief of being pulled away from the never-ending pain.

Maybe she dreamt. Time had been inconsequential and indeterminable since she'd been injured and reality was utterly meaningless so any kind of sensory stimulation couldn't be trusted. Tamsin felt like she was in suspended animation; surrounded by the blackness of deep unconsciousness so thick that she felt like she was hanging in a thick gel. Sometimes though, she felt like she was close to the border of being cognizant. Far enough away that everything felt like a dream and she couldn't have moved if she wanted to but close enough to where she could register her nerve endings starting to tingle with the hot burning sensation of the enchantment.

It was in these odd spaces where her body was trying to reacquaint her with the pain she'd been missing out on that she would hear it. A voice with a pleasing, soothing cadence that sometimes rose in pitch with an occasional question but the sound was far away and muffled so she couldn't make heads nor tails of it in the thick soup of not-quite-close-to-sort-of-conscious. The valkyrie wouldn't hover in that space very long; long enough to start to register the pain trying to push past the barriers of the viscous mostly dream state and then the voice and then nothing. She thought that maybe she felt heavy warmth next to her, limbs thrown over her midsection, weight on one shoulder and gentle streams of breath on her neck, but her senses couldn't be trusted and everything felt so heavy already.

Tamsin didn't know how much time passed. It seemed plausible that it was the same span of time that stars lived and died; modern man evolved from distant ape ancestors and had advanced civilizations but when she swam towards consciousness again, instead of registering pain trying to intrude on her respite, she felt only a severely bruised soreness in her abdomen. Finally she was able to register the world beyond the narrow scope of her pain she'd been living in.

There was a breeze coming from an open window that she could feel on the skin exposed above the sheet pulled up to her midsection and it was cool and crisp; it smelled like it had been raining. There was the soreness in her abdomen that felt like being brushed with crushed velvet compared to the pain she'd been in before, her head was throbbing but it was cradled on feathery soft pillows. The light beyond the valkyrie's closed eyes was uneven; too bright on one side and dim on the other which suggested it was dark out and a side lamp had been turned on. She didn't feel the tightness of the clothes she normally wore; she could feel the fabric of the sheet on the skin of her legs that weren't covered by shorts and the shirt she wore was too big and loose. There was a tight tugging sensation in the crook of her elbow that she associated with having an IV needle inserted and taped to her skin.

Tamsin registered someone moving around the room but was still struggling with trying to open her eyes. They felt like they were glued shut. She immediately recognized the person as being Lauren when the doctor started humming an invented melody someplace off to her side where the light was coming from, the soft sounds of rustling papers accompanying the tune. The valkyrie finally managed to force her gummy eyes open and she immediately slammed them shut against the soft yellow light of the desk lamp that might as well have been a supernova. The blonde fae opened them very slightly to adjust her gaze and tried to locate the human through the tiny slits she allowed herself to look through, noting that she was lying in Lauren's own bed. Turning her head to one side, she saw past the metal pole holding up her IV bag to Lauren hovering over the plain functional writing desk against one wall, flipping through stacks of paper stuffed into files, tapping a thin finger against the side of the folder in her hand along with her humming.

Relief at seeing the blonde human up an about flooded through Tamsin so quickly and completely that her whole body was engulfed in warmth for a moment. Without thinking about how useless her bone dry throat was going to be, the valkyrie attempted to call Lauren's name to get her attention, succeeding only in letting out a whisper of air that sounded like the other blonde's name only on the most nebulous of levels. Deciding against attempting the gesture again as it sent a raw scratchy feeling up her esophagus; Tamsin lifted the arm that didn't have a needle sticking out of it and brought it down with a hard cottony slap on the bed next to her, startling Lauren into silence and causing her to drop her papers on the desk, her gaze snapping to the valkyrie who managed to turn her chapped lips into an apologetic smile for having made her jump.

"Tamsin." Lauren breathed out, hurrying to the Dark Fae's side. "You're awake." She noted unnecessarily, sounding like some great stress had been mollified as she pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket and flashed it into the Valkyrie's eyes.

Tamsin nodded her head against the pillow underneath it and squinted against the bright light but followed it with her eyes as it moved back and forth in front of her face. Blinking the spots away as the flashlight was clicked off, she watched Lauren move back to her desk and pour some water into a glass from a pitcher, returning to the bedside to help her in her struggle to half sit up. Tamsin took the glass from the doctor so Lauren could stuff another pillow behind her to support her back and took greedy gulps from the glass, not caring that the process was utterly painful.

"Slow down," Lauren demanded lightly, half laughing. "You're going to choke."

As if in an effort to prove her point, Tamsin immediately sputtered and coughed as water entered her trachea, the doctor taking the glass from her with a shake of her head and setting it on the nightstand.

"Sorry." The valkyrie said sheepishly after her coughing fit died down. Though her throat was lubricated, her voice was wobbly and cracked from disuse and she frowned at the strained sound having not expected it. She took in the sight of the shorter blonde who was sitting on the edge of the bed and noted that her skin had gone back to its normal healthy shade and the skin around her eyes wasn't horribly bruised looking anymore, having faded to a collection of yellows and magentas that just made her look tired instead of dead. "What happened? Are you okay, doc?" she asked hoarsely, moving a hand as if to grab one of Lauren's but she decided against it and just rested it in her lap.

"I'm fine." The human reassured, pulling the hand Tamsin had in her lap towards her with both hands. "Bo and Dyson got the ingredients to make the tonic to cure me of Rona's poisons." She wrinkled her nose as she remembered the sharp tartness of the sour smelling concoction and absently ran her thumb back and forth on the side of the Valkyrie's hand. "I was back to moving around by the end of the next day. Dyson moved you into here and I put you in a barb coma to keep you from the pain."

Her thumb stopped moving and she tensed slightly. "They should have done it at the lab when you were taken to get stitched up." She said with a frown, her voice tinged with misplaced guilt. "But the Ash and the Morrigan said it would create too many questions and I'm pretty sure they were pissed you'd killed that bezlad."

Tamsin lifted her shoulders in a shrug. Given the chance, she'd do it again. She prodded Lauren into continuing by gently tapping the palm under her hand with her index finger a few times. "How long was I out?" she asked when the doctor didn't say anything.

"Ten days." She restarted the gentle movement of her thumb and frowned again. "Well, you were in a medically induced coma for ten days. If you count the time you spent incapacitated from pain, you were out for eleven, almost twelve days." She looked away again, focusing on the lamp on her desk before swinging her anxious gaze to the Valkyrie's face. "I'm sorry, Tamsin… if I had been more careful, none of it would have happened. I don't know how you could have stood that amount of pain for so long."

Tamsin felt the corners of her mouth lift involuntarily, her chapped lips cracking slightly. "S'not your fault." She said sincerely. "Kenzi took good care of me. Of both of us." She tapped the other blonde's palm again when she nodded, choosing not to tell the doctor about pleading with the dark haired human to kill her; if Kenzi hadn't mentioned it, she wasn't going to either. "You're out of absinthe by the way."

Lauren smiled and lifted her gaze to the ceiling. "Yeah, Kenzi told me when she and Bo came to check on you the other day." She lifted the hand resting on top of the Valkyrie's and ran a few fingers along the side of her hair, just barely tracing the outside of Tamsin's ear with her fingers. "It's okay, it went to a good cause."

Tamsin smiled and caught the doctor's wrist in a light grasp before she could pull her hand away and tugged on it tenderly. Lauren took the hint immediately as if she had been looking for an excuse and leaned over to bring their lips together. She had meant for it to be a quick kiss, just reassurance that the doctor was there; maybe several quick kisses, but when Lauren gently twisted out of the grasp the valkyrie had her in to thread her fingers through the hair on the back of Tamsin's head, the fae used her free hand to grip Lauren's shoulder and pull her closer as she ran her tongue along the human's lower lip to deepen the kiss.

Their quickening breath came out of their noses softly but audibly, mingling in the microscopic space between them, breathing each other in and out as their tongues danced against each other. Tamsin moved her hand that was still on top of the doctor's and used both hands to grip her just above the waist and urge her closer; any other time, she would have just picked the human up but her arms were slightly weak and she didn't trust herself not to some how mess up the IV still embedded in the bend of her elbow.

Tamsin's moan from the doctor settling herself on the valkyrie's lap with her knees planted on either side of her legs was cut short when her breath hitched as Lauren dipped her head away from the Dark Fae's lips to nip at the skin on one side of her neck. Tamsin placed her hands on Lauren's lower back and roughly jerked the other blonde's lower body forward, immediately regretting the overenthusiastic gesture when the action caused the inside of Lauren's upper leg to press into the wound in her side.

The doctor immediately rocked backwards and scooted herself further down on Tamsin's thighs when the groan that left the Valkyrie was one of displeasure, pulling away and slipping into doctor mode with admirable quickness as she lifted the side of the oversized grey t-shirt. Tamsin pinned the shirt to her side so Lauren wouldn't have to hold it and so her arm would be out of the way but didn't move her other hand from the human's hip. She wrinkled her nose as the tape was pulled away from her skin and the clean gauze patch was opened like a hinge on a door. The side of the gauze that had been pressed against the injury had blood on it, but it was hardly any and practically pink with the other fluids that had seeped out with it.

"How many stitches did I get?" Tamsin asked to take her mind off the subsiding throbbing sensation in her abdomen and the feeling of the doctor's fingers lightly ghosting around the red edges ringing the line of thick black sutures that looked like little spiders sprouting from her skin.

"Thirty-three." Lauren replied automatically as if she had stitched the wound herself. She carefully pulled the bandage the rest of the way off, folded it in half so the bloodied side was covered and pulled the white medical tape around it so it was in a neat little package. She leaned forward and kissed the valkyrie lightly, pulling away immediately after and getting off the bed, tossing the dirty gauze into a wastebasket between her desk and the nightstand. "I'm going to change the bandages." She announced, pulling the materials out of top drawer of the nightstand.

"You keep medical supplies in your nightstand, doc?" Tamsin teased, arching one eyebrow and letting go of the edge of the shirt so it fell back over the wound.

Lauren tossed a box of gauze pads next to the tape she'd pulled out. "Are you really that surprised?" she responded playfully, rummaging around in the drawer for something else. "They've got to be changed every twenty-four hours; it just seemed easier to have everything in one place." She pulled out a small spray bottle and gathered the items into both hands, shutting the drawer with the side of her leg and deftly climbed back onto the bed, straddling the other blonde's legs and splaying the items out on the lap in front of her. "Your shirt, please."

"Yeah, about that," Tamsin started, lifting up the hem of the shirt and holding it against her ribs again. "Not my shirt," she moved her legs under the sheet, causing the doctor to rock side to side for a second. "Not my shorts, and I don't seem to be wearing any underwear. You know anything bout that, doc?" she wrinkled her nose, feeling like the confident tone she'd intended was ruined by her not quite revitalized vocal chords.

"I put you in a coma for over a week and your clothes were disgusting and bloody." Lauren replied factually while opening two packages of gauze in rapid succession.

Tamsin hummed like she didn't believe her and returned her free hand to Lauren's hip. "If you wanna take my clothes off, you just have to ask, doc. No need for pretense."

"Please; I'm a doctor, Tamsin." The blonde human replied with a laugh in her voice as she sprayed the gauze with whatever was in the bottle and patted it gently against the stitches. She didn't point out that the valkyrie had been practically convulsing with pain when she'd redressed her. She smiled as she positioned the dry gauze pad over the stitches when she felt Tamsin's hand glide up from her hip to stroke the skin under the bottom of her shirt.

"M'I gonna live, Doctor Lewis?" the Dark Fae asked in a half singsong, feeling her skin being tugged slightly as the new tape was applied.

"As long as I have something to say about it." Lauren responded in the affirmative, nodding as she smoothed down the last piece of tape and pulled the t-shirt down out of Tamsin's hand. "We have to watch for infection." She continued thoughtfully, absentmindedly running her hand up the arm of the valkyrie that didn't have a needle in it and leaned closer, mindful of the wound.

"So no drinking until I say so." Her voice dropped slightly as she kissed the curve of Tamsin's jaw. "And no pulling out the stitches until I say so." Lauren felt the other woman's hands on her back when she continued to lead a line of kisses down her neck and over the exposed skin of one shoulder from the large neck of the too big tee. "And no strenuous activity until I say so." She lightly bit the skin she had been murmuring against to keep from chuckling when Tamsin let out a frustrated sigh.

"Shoulda just let me die, doc." Tamsin muttered. It had been a joke, but she regretted it once she'd said it.

Lauren moved to cup the valkyrie's face in her hands, worry written on her features but she didn't comment on the poor taste of the joke; pulling the other blonde up to kiss her fiercely. She pulled away when she felt Tamsin's hands starting to repeat the action that had brought her pain in the first place and rested her forehead against the other blonde's to catch her breath, putting her arms around her neck.

"So," Tamsin started, her voice sounding gravely from the huskiness and her dry throat. She pulled back and tilted her head slightly to one side. "Since it seems like I'm gonna have all kinds of free time coming up, you wanna, like," she shrugged. "Go on a date or something?"

Lauren regarded the other woman carefully, trying to figure out if Tamsin was asking her out because she actually wanted to go on a date or if it was the next best option since she'd had to be a responsible doctor and veto their increasing physicality for a while. The valkyrie's expression was hopeful though and Lauren gave her a lopsided smile while nodding her head. "Are you even going to be able to plan a whole date without drinking?" she asked skeptically, kissing the corner of the taller blonde's mouth.

Lauren's arms lifted as Tamsin shrugged. "Nah." She conceded easily as the human's fingers wound through her hair and tugged a little. "Pretty sure I'm gonna talk you into letting me have a couple glasses of wine."

"You're not that persuasive." Lauren remarked before languidly kissing the Valkyrie. She felt Tamsin's mouth smile against hers because they both knew she was.