Azar woke slowly; her head feeling like someone had stuffed it with wool. She was somewhere comfortable, covered with blankets. As she tried to move, she sucked in a pained breath, letting it out again as an inaudible hiss. Her entire body hurt, with several sharper pains radiating from her left side. She kept her eyes shut, remembering. She had been working on a new stunt, successfully completing the complex twists and flips. She had grabbed the bar of her trapeze, only for one side of the worn straps to give out; sending her tumbling down, down, down...The last she could recall was slamming into the hard ground…
Azar stilled suddenly. She could feel something heavy near her being shifted. Carefully, she cracked open an eye. Cyrus was next to her, carefully cleaning- Azar abandoned all pretext of being asleep, eyes flying open and gasping. "Sarkan!" she managed to whisper, wincing at the roughness of her voice.
Cyrus looked over her, startled. "Azar! You're awake!" he said happily. Then his face fell abruptly as he looked down, at Sarkan's limp form. The Trickster was laid out on his stomach, with his back exposed. His runes looked like they had been freshly branded, an angry red color that oozed clear pus tinged with streaks of blood. Cyrus had been in the process of wiping the wounds clean with warm water when Azar had woken up.
"What. Happened," she ground out, looking back and forth between Sarkan and Cyrus.
Cyrus closed his eyes, his head bowing. "You...you fell. Cita got me and Sarkan. A-Athanasius was there to t-take you." He looked at her, face crumpled with misery. "Sarkan s-shielded you. I…I used my own powers to heal you enough so that Athanasius couldn't take you. I don't remember much afterwards," he said, voice dropping to a whisper. "Sarkan and I collapsed. I woke up a while ago. Ilkin moved you and Sarkan here, for some privacy."
Azar's gaze flickered around the room, taking in the familiar sight of Sarkan's bedroom. "How long have I been out," she asked voice still raspy.
Cyrus shrugged, wiping away more of the pus and blood. "...The others are worried, but they'll be happy to hear you're up."
Azar nodded slowly. "I still hurt," she stated. "Why?"
Cyrus flushed. "I couldn't heal everything," he confessed, wringing out the now-stained rag and getting it wet again. "A lot of your bones are still cracked. I can try and heal them the rest of the way once I've wrapped up Sarkan's runes." Azar hummed noncommittally, watching the not so young boy carefully clean the rest of Sarkan's wounds before applying a thick layer of healing balm. He moved with purpose, hints of grace bleeding through on occasion as he wrapped a light layer of bandages over everything, awkwardly shifting Sarkan to complete each pass. He had truly matured, in the time she'd been unconscious, she realized with a mental jolt.
AN: If Kooza had a normal time flow, this would be about two weeks after Azar fell. Cyrus woke up a week earlier and has been helping Ilkin keep everyone else from panicking.