Cruxis' own Kratos Aurion wasn't someone easily pictured in the domestic tableau, so this was as unlikely a story to believe as it was to describe. He was standing just outside of his west central Tethe'alla safehouse, draping various of Lloyd's clothing articles from the rock shelf nearby the door. Morning sunlight was just beginning to blink over the eastern horizon, severe and settled upon the tips of ryegrass, and planting sunspots beside burrows. The air was honeysuckle infusion and summertide cologne, a mélange of welkin zephyr and well-dried plant husks that encouraged the steep of deception into casual feelings the Seraph did not deserve to entertain. The sky was lazy and blue, infecting a monastery calm just by the unbelievable scope of it – beneath it, Kratos could not walk a straight line without hedging supplicative thoughts for his son just inside of the shelter.
He understood that this thing that had happened to Lloyd couldn't be changed, even while it changed him and everything surrounding him. It rendered Kratos a saw without its teeth, out here in this place of jaded control and confession. It made him feel filthy, dully tearing; a tool without use. He could neither build up nor break down from this. He didn't consider himself human enough to be worth more than his function, and he could still wear on himself the long way, until he spilled feelings in rills that didn't matter anymore. Up until this point of his life, he'd been strenuously avoiding a boundary that he couldn't remember ever crossing. Whenever he tried to think about what it was, all he saw was Mithos, and he saw helplessness and hope and small hands and one-armed hugs, but there was a cavity in his chest large enough to hold a thousand sincere vows. Only recently it'd struck him that he was no longer certain as to which little boy each vow had been given, but he guessed now, as he shook out the torn pants of his blood relation, that it didn't matter anymore because he had broken every vow to the both of them – every vow except for one.
He'd washed Lloyd's shirts by hand like this after every major dressing change, daily, until the frequency of it fled the realm of sensible: the clothes weren't much by way of seemly, they hindered the bandage changes, and Kratos found less and less reason to make more and more work for himself as days passed by in such sterile repetition. For the time being, letting Lloyd shirtless saved Kratos both time and toil. Lloyd didn't have much by way of wearable garments, anyway: the pants worn when Lloyd was found in Holding-One, torn and coppered by bloodstains and disheveled care even before that; the set of nightwear, procured from the House merchant, that matched his scars a little less pronouncedly.
Pushing that image aside, Kratos made his way back into the safehouse and stiffened involuntarily. Tensed his shoulders, because it took him a beat to catch up to the cause behind his own reaction:
Lloyd lay on his side.
Which was not how Kratos had left him.
Lloyd lay on his side, in an entirely natural way, as though he'd rolled over in his sleep.
Kratos, as the self-appointed repositioner of his son's abused limbs, had been rotating him almost hourly since they'd taken refuge here to prevent the development of pressure ulcers during Lloyd's long convalescence. For this reason, for Kratos, a glaringly noticeable voluntary movement was legitimate. It was the improvement that meant Lloyd was asleep instead of passed out. Although his son certainly couldn't have picked a less comfortable position – what with his arm in a sling, and itchy gauze against his temple, and bruising that was everywhere on his previously wrenched hip – it was still the first that Lloyd had moved on his own since he'd been brought to the shelter.
He wouldn't call it rushing, but Kratos materialized at Lloyd's side in an instant and rested the backs of his knuckles against the boy's forehead and then throat.
There was no fever.
Indulging himself in a private sigh, the Seraph sank onto the sofa close to where his son rested. He looked post-stress, and maybe he was a little bit ecstatic, too. He was aware that his glands were shooting out cortisol but that he wasn't reacting to it in a very human timeframe. It was during the early hours of only that morning that Lloyd's fever had finally broken. Kratos lost his breath and, more briefly, lost his orientation when by routine he'd felt for the vestiges of temperature in the darkness before dawn and had been unanswered by the usual expectation of sticky heat. Lloyd had been in a febrile catatonia for entire days at a time, almost the entirety of them unconscious, with Kratos prudently using that time to titrate his sedation again. This time around, Lloyd had wholly acclimated to the adjustments, quiescent by the vacancy of his nightmares. Yet the fever had remained, a tenacious possessor of his son's sleeping willpower and enfeebled body, proving to be the most rampant of all of Kratos' adversaries and the final barrier between malady and Lloyd's peaceful transition from synthesized oblivion to the wanting arms of Morpheus. There had been many frightening hours of fire inside of skin and cold rags and diaphoresis, when preadulthood mortality was real, when dying was all-consuming, before being shoved back into its microcosm by a soundlessly raging father.
Nonetheless, the fever had become slaked. It'd finally died to its own ravening course – not without leaving behind its tracks, but at last there was no further risk.
Because Kratos would ensure that there would be no further risk.
Relief was an impelling and heady adrenaline that found an Angel his legs again and carried him away from the sofa, where he began moving things around on the countertop to generate a general backdrop of sound for Lloyd, who – the Cliffs be praised! – had begun to stir in his cocoon, completely spontaneously if entirely gingerly, and Kratos was allowing Lloyd the several minutes it took for him to wake up naturally in as many days.
There came the spine of a sigh – a puff of breath without any of its hot air – and then a bitten-off groan as consciousness graduated to responsiveness and Lloyd must have realized that he was hurting one-hundred ways to hell. Kratos saw Lloyd's eyes peel open, but only into tiny, light-bearing slits which all the more defined how astonishingly pale his face had become over time. It was almost exotic, the way his eyes modeled dark circles like cadmium and coal against his skin tone even though all he'd done for so long is sleep. It made him appear simultaneously younger and older than he was; withered by infirmity yet sharpened by the survival of it – so sharp, in fact, that there wasn't even the usual lineament of musculature from where the fever had eaten away at his cheeks. His had been a partially preserved health, navigated by foulest infusions, and compresses of eucalyptus and cloves and tea tree and caraway, and swathes of blanket, and a distraught parent. Now, with lead for limbs and gulps for breath, Lloyd twitched his shoulder as if making to turn onto his back but abandoned the movement straightaway and groaned again – this time with more feeling. It felt a little like he was sliding skin over seashell when he hauled himself so much as an inch, but then, when he ignored the warnings and tried to move again anyway, a huge blast of pain lit him up from the inside out until he thought that if he loosed the racking cough building like a miasma in his chest he would be coughing out his own seared bone. He couldn't discern in what he was wrapped, but it didn't feel like he was on a bed; at the same time, he didn't feel like he could ever leave from it. There were sandbags over his chest, pressing into the thousands of fire ants that must have been mustered all along the curve of his left shoulder in a patchy crawl. He felt the weight of them and felt the scratch in his throat drive upward when he tried to take deep breaths to prevent coughing from the smoke of the pyre that had surely been made out of what was once his chest wall. He couldn't remember what was the last thing he was supposed to remember. All he knew was that he was opening his eyes outside of his own death.
And did he ever want to breathe.
"Where... am I?" He rasped at the room at large, cringing hard at the re-ignition of pain through use of his vocal cords. He couldn't hear the way his voice cracked and warbled, but he could feel it, which was worse. He'd already asked this question before, but this was the first time he was asking anything without a fever, and with the way his throat was squeezing out the words, he was half-convinced he'd gargled razorblades and root spines in some recent happening. For a second time, he almost coughed around the sensitivity.
"In Tethe'alla," came an answer, framed in a familiar voice but not in such a familiar tone. The speaker sounded perturbed – when his boy suddenly winced his eyelids closed again, Kratos swore that he'd seen that very same expression on Lloyd's face not too long ago and sooner than he'd ever wanted to see it again. "But not in Centrum. You're safe, with me."
A mug, crudely clay, was urged to his lips. It was brimming generously with water, and Lloyd tried to help himself but found that the sandbags weren't on his chest; the sandbags were his chest. And with concurrent movement the fire gave a great throb deep in his body and his limbs, and his skin ached and pulled in such a way that felt raw like a scarecrow stashed and stitched.
"Uh... mm... Okay."
He found it much simpler to just accept the answers, despite the questions rippling in their wake. He also accepted, more gratefully, the awkward manhandling that went into the aid of lifting him upright and delivering several long seconds of water for his parched throat. He gasped when it was over, even though it was the simplest of feats and he didn't mean to; even though the gasp recoiled his rib cage and sparked another cramp of pain within him that drew sparing shudders from him as he held himself through it. At least his throat didn't feel as badly sanded down now. He could tamp the latest wave of nausea caused from moving, but he still hurt indeterminately. His focus of attention was this fiery, rib-resonating rendition of what used to be muscle function. His chest went tight and numb all at once, and he knew something was wrong because it took effort to breathe around the stiffness. There was a tremor working through his anatomy, but he could almost swear it was being echoed by a twin tremor outside of him. From Kratos? Impossible.
Kratos has never been terrified in his life. Sorry, but I just don't see it.
"How long've I been out?" For this was something in the radius of import. This was something in line to ask, he knew. Things weren't okay, and he felt that more than he knew it, at least.
There was a pause – Kratos had to actually estimate how long Halle may have had hold of Lloyd before Kratos finding him – then Kratos' voice beat out, steady. "Approximately nine days." Steady, steady. "More than one of those days was spent under sedation."
"N...Nine...?" Lloyd started in surprise – tried to breathe around that jolt of shock, and quivered. He'd somehow lost nine days of his mind to the ruin of his body. This was serious – something beyond serious. Suddenly it scared him that he couldn't remember what had happened to him in his most recent block of existence. "How," he was scrambling for a hold, any hold – because like hell had Kratos ever offered him one. His skull was hot, punching agony against the constraints of the bandages he didn't even know he wore. "How could I have been here for– where is–" Confused eyes narrowed on Kratos, in a hunted look. "You," Lloyd tried to sit taller, but Kratos wouldn't let him, "were on Derris-Kharlan."
"I was. However–"
"No-no. I'm one-hundred percent sure I remember you leaving for Derris-Kharlan."
"Yes, Lloyd – but–"
"Where's Yuan?" Lloyd's voice, dry, now sounded shrill with undeterred panic. "Does Yuan know where we are?" He was thrown, Kratos knew. He was confused and in pain and trying to assign a timeline to this labor of rescue and how precisely Kratos fit into it all. His heart rate was tripping over itself.
But so was his father's, if only Kratos would show it. That Yuan was his son's first plea of desperation amidst the savage blankness was enough to break up something inside of Kratos. Frozen misery scaled his emotions – its ascent directly proportional to Lloyd's skyrocketing fear – before it leveled off and shriveled back down to size. Because Lloyd's humanity and capacity for emotion far exceeded Kratos' own. Because Lloyd's place amid Yuan's good graces was a petty thing to be upset over, and it ignited Kratos. If anything, Yuan had come through for Lloyd just as Kratos had asked him to.
Kratos tried for patience. "I'm not certain that he does. I don't know where Yuan is, but I know that he wasn't in Centrum with you."
Lloyd tried once again to shift position – his frame was lighter than memory in his father's hold, despite its weight in suffering – and was momentarily shut down by the explosion of jaw-stuttering pain that boiled over into every pocket of tissue in the left- trunk of his body. His veins stood out web-like as if marbled by acid, distended by a rift of blood pressure wide enough to drive a hearse through his vascular system. The fire ants were gone from his shoulder, replaced instead by the rigor of the dying. He choked on a whine, (something'swrongsomething'sbroken) he flinched into the space between rent thoughts of I'm dead and Am I alive?, and he was delivered out of it halfway to raving, halfway to blinded.
Kratos suffered all of it – the entire episode, as fast as it had come on – with a paralyzing helplessness, with little signs of dolor; heart quailed and tied, and hands purposely unclenching so as not to mark the wing of his son's shoulder with yet another pain-triggering fingerprint. As Lloyd trembled rootlessly in his arms, devastated by a ferocious contraction, chin quaking while harsh, gusty cries spilled soundlessly from him, all Kratos could do was sit, and hold, and wait it out.
Eventually passed the first wave of fire, Lloyd was left wanting, panting, for answers. His whole body ready to fling itself. "Wh-What happened to me?"
"Please," his father settled a hand upon his good shoulder, and Lloyd couldn't remember Kratos ever using that word with him. "Calm down. You'll aggravate your injuries."
Lloyd attempted to look down at himself but quickly aborted the action when his vision began to spot in lavender circles. He softly keened and went a bit more boneless in Kratos' grip, the hysteria leaving him in one great rush of breath. He became still; as still as the sky that he hadn't seen in excess of a year; as still as his grief, as his freedom waived for virtue. He focused on the scraps of scent: cinnamon, clary sage, the sedating jasmine – they, the varied but familiar smells of the woodland, even though he couldn't expressly name what they were. These were fragrances that he recognized from a childhood spent in the forest encroaching Iselia. The aromas did nothing to calm him as much as the remembrance did. He listened to the slipstream cadence that was Kratos Aurion's breath over the quiet, how it whispered when he prepared himself to speak.
"How bad is it?" Lloyd asked, his eyes banded closed like his life's balance depended on it – which, at the moment, it sort of did.
Kratos removed his hand from his son, braced to report. It was mentally noted that Lloyd had asked for the present assessment of his injuries and not for an opinion of how they got there. Kratos decided to shelve that for now. "Your fever broke only this morning. It was secondary to the... wound... in your chest." For only a moment, Kratos looked downright ill, like he'd somehow constructed a burial place out of the details in his mind. "You've had a very close battle with sepsis. The infection nearly killed you."
Lloyd listened, a faintly horrified expression branding its burn across his face, as Kratos continued with precious little mincing of words. The Seraph wasn't being at all cavalier about the way he left nothing out. Lloyd had asked, and facts would he be given.
"By the looks of things," Specifically vague, "you suffered an almighty concussion."
That explained the pounding in Lloyd's head every time he moved it, and the dizziness besides.
"You regained consciousness a few times on your own, but you weren't altogether coherent either time. Your right arm is immobilized to alleviate the second-degree sprains of your shoulder and elbow. The damage to your right hand is... could be extensive. You'll notice the gauze in–" Lloyd swallowed down more nausea at the wording– "and around it. Beyond that, you have a number of stitches that can't be removed yet – in your scalp, face, and extremities."
Automatically, Lloyd's fingers of his less-damaged hand – the only hand that he could move – searched across his cheek, then arched up to his brow, all the way to his head. The feel of sutured skin reminded him of a cross-stitch embroidery that Colette had made for him once, a lifetime ago. The incongruity – of thread, epidermis, thread, hair, thread – almost brought up his gorge. His Exsphere remained an opaque, unresponsive blue.
"I can't be certain of the degrees of severity in your torso burns. The trauma there is repeated, making it difficult to separate the damage of one cautery from the next."
Somewhere around that point, Lloyd stopped cataloguing the damage. He heard the litany of abuse – he did, it was mind-numbing – but he had already moved somewhere ahead of the language of his reunion with Kratos.
What Kratos was actually saying – what Kratos was trying to say – was unpronounceable. All the same, Lloyd made it out. The message was damnably clear: you almost died because of me, and I almost let you. If that wasn't the wake-up call for a priority reshuffle then nothing was. These feelings of terror, of watching a body barely pulling through, were studded with denial and so deeply repressed within his father that it surprised Lloyd to be able to identify them. He allowed Kratos to drone on so that he could leash the strays of speech and use them to drag his intent out of his chest – because the last time he'd spoken to his father, it had been in argument; he rallied himself to avoid repeating the standard.
"You should be able to walk, but you'll have to adjust for compensating muscle; I don't want you to pull–"
"I guess you saved my life, then," interrupted Lloyd, dumbwitted by such a comprehensive feeling of loss he couldn't explain; starkly paler than only moments before but bowing his head as though it was owed to deference, and for the first time ever in his life Kratos didn't have any idea what his son was thinking.
Lloyd was capitulating; the look that passed across his face was fleeting and shipwrecked.
"Look, Kratos–"
"Your dressings need to be changed," redirected Kratos, instantly, reading the commiseration in his son's tone and quick to infer what Lloyd was trying to do.
"Kratos, seriously. I'm really sorr–"
"–but I'd have to sedate you for that. Seeing as how you've only just awakened, I think we can prolong the change another day."
Lloyd looked up at him, openly confused that Kratos wasn't allowing him to speak, and the crushing vulnerability painted all over his features inspired a paternal tenderness within Kratos, cutting a broken shard out of his heart that he would've all but handed over to his son if only it wouldn't make him bleed, too. Lloyd's eyes were despair and disbelief, like he was embarrassed over the need to apologize to his father but even moreso hurt by the realization that his father wasn't going to let him. It made Lloyd all the more self-conscious. It made him feel eaten up inside, where the pain attached to belonging and knowing that he didn't belong and never had belonged to Kratos. It made him feel worse than idiotic, and he recoiled from the feeling of not being understood, even as he moderated it with the easy excuse that Kratos had never understood him.
Kratos, sensing this departure, seamlessly fell to pieces on the inside. Anger, disappointment he could take from his kid – and had, after all, already, in the very last clash of contact he'd had with Lloyd at Centrum; the whole event for which Lloyd was now apologizing! – but suspicion? Distrust? If there was anything that Kratos was good at reading, it was anathema, the nonverbal; the aggrandizing rejection in his child's face that effectively shucked away another layer from his iron heart. He didn't take pleasure in carving this silence into Lloyd, but Kratos had to stop him because, dammit, Lloyd wasn't the one who was supposed to be apologizing. Kratos was the one who had conceded to their need for an actual conversation. So, he leveled his eyes on Lloyd in a resolute address. He felt a little bit ambushed by the situation, but he wasn't nearly as blown away as when he really – really – took in the image of his son and discovered what made him even more uncomfortable about doing this.
It was his chin.
Lloyd had his mother's chin. It was something that Kratos, fairly, might have noticed while she was still alive, but to be honest he didn't know at what point he'd forgotten. Its stubborn upturn, when she wanted to be difficult – Lloyd emulated a less bossy version of her–
"Stop."
"Stop?"
"Yeah. There. S-Stop." And Lloyd looked suddenly sad. "Why do you always look at me like that?"
Kratos didn't know where to begin, but he knew that he didn't want to begin with Anna.
There was a while of the loudest silence either of them had ever heard. Then:
"This is all on me."
Self-blame touched Kratos' voice to finely pressed ash; dust, dead and dry, despite his living compunction. Yet never before did he sound more human to Lloyd. The automatic silence that descended was bracing against the two of them, and beneath it Kratos read Lloyd's surprise from the tight hunch of his son's shoulders and the way that his throat visibly worked to swallow down the objections dribbling feebly from a source owed purely out of a merciful compulsion to kinship. It felt like Kratos was toppling right along with him into this pitfall of feeling that was all memory mirrors and inhaled glass and the polemic that held back all of the lies drafted somewhere in-between the lines of a father's heart and a father's absence.
Kratos sat down again, feeling heavy and old, replete with disgrace. His hands were ice, so he did not move to touch his son with them again. "The most important thing for you to remember is that this is all on me," he quietly repeated, gazing solemnly at Lloyd as though he'd just lost a limb. "That is without dispute, Lloyd. I've never believed otherwise. None of this is your fault."
Lloyd, suddenly recognizing what this was, sent his uneasy stare to the floor in some search of a passageway out beneath the implications of his father's gravitas – but only briefly – before raising his eyes again in acknowledgment of the confession. Because he wanted to take in hand this dream of chance and change, as painful as it was to want. To him, Kratos was a harsh light; the glaring edges of an inclusion within an otherwise flawless diamond. It was the first time, in this very moment, that Lloyd found the indomitable Seraph proffering humility as much as power – the former, much to Lloyd's discomfiture, spurring his own impulse to swallow the bitter pill and deny any apology from his father to himself, even though the admission of the truth was what he badly wanted from him, more than Lloyd wanted anything else. It had to be compassion that was making him want to save face for Kratos. Either that or it was because he was family and he didn't want his father to owe him anything, didn't want to see Kratos Aurion stooping to Lloyd, to see him reaching for anything lower than his own comfort. There was a barely perceived grief within Kratos that centered around Lloyd and always triggered Lloyd's empathy; that pressed against Lloyd like chains against arteries, and also like a healing ritual over bloodstains.
What was happening right now was important. And they both knew that it was.
"I never dreamed–" Well, that was already a lie. Kratos started over again, undoing the knots of a happier ending. It was a different message that he wanted to give Lloyd. He took all of the time that he needed to, to relax his outward tension, to imbibe in the gentleness of his son's calm-faced reverence. Kratos spoke in a low voice, "When you were born – before you were born – we spent our lives running from Cruxis. It was futile." Kratos' head dipped, the cold in him now the cold of bitterness. "I knew it was futile from the beginning. I learned the hard way that I was right." Sometimes what was futile was right, and what was right killed an innocent – killed her – and Kratos had been morally imperiled ever since. "I, also... When your mother died..." His voice sounded like rocks being crushed together. Lloyd did not miss the falter, the flat look in Kratos' eyes, calling something awful into the world. "The lesson I learned was that of compromise. When I found out that Cruxis had taken you, compromise was the only consolation left to me. I held onto it. Desperately. Stupidly."
It was cold and broken, the way he loved Lloyd but didn't wholly commend himself to it. If there was anything by which he felt strongly, in regard to his son, he chalked it up to the absolute craving thirst of Lloyd's expression right now. Irises, contractile brown and flustered, crushed, ashamed, (but how could eyes like that look so hopeful?) flared with emotion beyond the bloodshot marring and begged him to just shut up and begged him to just keep talking.
Kratos continued, "I've never minded sacrificing myself. Believe me, it should've been me all along. I...
"I should have taken you away the very day you were arrived to Centrum. But I was reminded again of the futility of it. To that end I folded to compromise. I thought that as long as he wasn't hurting you, you would make it. You could survive.
"I threw myself into his work.
"I was afraid." Kratos finally emoted. He huffed out a laugh, which sounded more like a sob, a recess, a convulsion. "I didn't know if he wanted you because of Anna or if he wanted you because of me. I still don't know. And it still scares me.
"I was afraid because I didn't know what the Cardinals wanted from you. I was afraid because I didn't know what Yuan might want for covering for me. I was afraid because I didn't know you, but what you wanted was the only thing made clear to me and the one thing I couldn't give to you because of all of the other things I didn't know.
"I am sorry.
"For every right stripped from you, I am so, desperately sorry. Your life is what it is because of who I am. This entire nightmare is because of me and your connection to me. Yggdrasill's delusions are because of me. This," he reached out to palm his son's bruised shoulder, and Lloyd made the effort not to flinch away, "is because of me."
His father's gingerly touch, barely an eggshell graze of contact, may have been unpracticed but it was infinitely gentle. Lloyd listed forgivingly into it, into him, and Kratos responded with immediate satisfaction-mingled-nervousness at the relentless proximity of his son in relation to himself.
He looked again at the membrane splotches of abused skin, like melted, rotted pomegranate husks, ringing Lloyd's eye and their sharp taper into the line of his jaw, and he forcibly reminded himself that his son was stronger even than what had caused that, and strong enough to overthrow the heartache battering around his ventricles like a sledgehammer. Kratos could feel the very strain of his own worry, an actual sensate brokenness from fatherhood discarded; from faith defined and cast out, and checkered parental involvement. His hand drifted weakly back down to his side, and he ignored the blood punishment on Lloyd's face that was his fault – that he'd caused – because it reminded him too clearly of who he was and the aloneness inside of him that reflected so obviously on his son's life, in all of the worst ways. It was like ink running through a leaf of paper to blot the next sheet, and then the next, and the next, and Lloyd had nothing to do with it but was stained all the same.
"I only wanted to protect you." From this eventuality– this eventuality, issued from the nightmare places of his mind. "My absence brought you here. It made sense that my absence could send you back. You were so much safer on Sylvarant. I don't know what to do." It seemed suddenly like Kratos was talking, with a great level of heartbreak, to himself. "But," he made himself face Lloyd, his boy, eye-to-eye, and there was this: "I won't let him hurt you anymore."
The silence fell, then swelled, then broke off into little pieces of throttled memory, powerful and dark and rail-thin where they pierced-open clots of bad history in a symbiotic bloodletting between them. Lloyd licked his lips, something firm and cathartic about his melancholy bewilderment. He had imagined, many a-time, how this conversation was destined to go, but nothing he envisioned had ever come close to this mountain-ton weight of a soul breaking in real-time.
He hadn't thought it would hurt so much to feel happy.
"You didn't," Lloyd stopped, hesitating. True to form, he wanted to spare Kratos the ugly nature of his sins and all of the upheaval they had already caused in Lloyd's young life. He regarded the unnerving storminess of his father's visage, a halfway forgotten expression of repentance; continued, cautiously, "You didn't have to save me. You just needed to be with me when I needed you." Lloyd understood – maybe not comprehensively, but he'd sensed that Kratos would have to travel over this debt owed him, stumbling over every step of regret along the way, down into the cellar of Kratos' personal hell where he'd suffered in every single one of his yesterdays without Anna.
And Kratos... didn't know how to share the guilt he had with Lloyd. Because Lloyd was his son, and sons were supposed to look up to their fathers, and it wouldn't be fair for Kratos to dump that burden on his kid on top of everything else.
Then, more vehemently, "I don't need you to save me, Kratos. I just need you." Lloyd didn't know how he was supposed to be handling being somebody else's shame, but he knew that he probably wasn't handling it very well. He sank forward angrily, further into Kratos' side. "You were right; I can't do this on my own. I am outnumbered and outgunned. And outclassed.
"I'm sorry I said what I said to you, back in Centrum," Lloyd finally referenced their previous argument. "I was just frustrated that you didn't see it. That you didn't want it."
Kratos very loosely took hold of Lloyd by the wrist, momentarily consumed by the abrupt and overwrought pitch of emotions in his son's tone. His child was understandably upset. The hurt was completely justified, and it, too, was faulted to Kratos. He wanted permission to be here for Lloyd, but touching his son did not come naturally – jolted him in an astounded fashion – but he'd give anything for a completely transparent conscience. Just for this one, single apology.
"I'm sorry."
The most important apology of his life.
"I thought you'd be safer if I weren't there. It upsets Yggdrasill every time I'm there."
It upsets me every time you aren't, Lloyd didn't say. "I'm sorry, too," he echoed instead.
Kratos shook his head, discreetly trying to pull away even though his boy felt the vacancy like a nick to the lung. Lloyd was struggling, exhausted by the extensive exhibition of his father's worthlessness. "You shouldn't apologize to me, Lloyd. You don't have to."
"I do."
"No. I owe you your life."
"I was still wrong." Lloyd was abjectly frowning, all but spent from this confrontation. He blinked back the moisture in his eyes and wished that he could force Kratos to understand his whole life in as few words as possible because Lloyd was tired and afraid and so unbelievably lonely and homesick for him, not just for anything familiar. "Kratos, you're important to me. You're my friend." Because he wouldn't say you're my family. Because he knew plain terms wouldn't be well received; Kratos was too uncertain of his position in Lloyd's life.
You are just like your mother, Kratos almost blurted out, wanting to humanize me. You rope me in, when all I'm trying to do is run away from you. "I'm sorry," Kratos couldn't repeat enough.
"I understand," Lloyd said.
He didn't.
Kratos sighed out the weakest, saddest wisp of a chuckle. "I know. And that grieves me. Righteousness isn't always worth its cost."
"That isn't true."
"Swear to me that you'll make yourself believe it is, Lloyd."
And Lloyd ought to have been applauded, then, when he summoned up enough strength for one last pressing glare at the Seraph. "It isn't true." His face was completely washed out of complexion, but his defiance was resolved in the almost convincing set of his jaw.
"It is true," refuted Kratos. "As long as there is a Cruxis, you need to take it as law, Lloyd, please. Make yourself believe it, for as long as Yggdrasill is alive."
"Then," Lloyd snapped, jumping on the opportunity, "you have to believe that we're stronger when we're together."
Kratos' lips tightened grimly, dourly. "You wouldn't be the first partner I lost on that bet."
"This isn't about odds. This isn't a gamble. This is truth." Family. "We kicked ass when we were together in Sylvarant."
With one hand Kratos scrubbed the grit of weariness from his eyes so that he wouldn't have to look at his bullheaded, impossible, perfect son and list for him all of the ways that he was wrong. "I was your enemy then."
"No, you weren't."
"I was sent by–"
"And you weren't the first person who we changed into our friend," settled Lloyd, adamant in his self-blooming optimism.
Kratos did not take it for optimism. He announced, stiffly, "I will not cavort in your suicidal ideation of goading Yggdrasill."
"That isn't– I'm not– Dammit, Kratos." Lloyd's eyes were hot again, but like a desert; dry and delirious in that way of being corporeally sapped. He swept his fingers through his hair – when they caught again on the sutures, his face changed to the color of lightning, and Kratos wasn't sure if Lloyd was in the process of losing his temper with him again or if he was honestly coming unhinged from the mess being made of his constitution. Lloyd's hand was shaking. A tremor ran unchecked along one contused edge of his jaw.
That was when Kratos pulled away his son's hand and held it in the hard grasp of his own. "You are alright, Lloyd," he soothed, his voice now ever so much more neutral. His boy's fingers felt wand-thin, encased as they were by his, yet their span was so much larger than the memory of toddler-sized upraised palms. "You are going to be fine. You are already healing. He will not take you from this place. I will stay with you. You are safe."
It was so rare for Kratos to speak to him in concrete terms. His father's murmurs rumbled pleasantly through his clogged ear in platitudes of safety and promises of soundness, and whether or not they were mere mindless consolation didn't matter right now because Lloyd believed him. He felt the sympathy in the spirit of Kratos' words, the leniency that was hidden in Kratos' careful hands, and they felt like protection. They felt like having a father. "I want to go outside," Lloyd mumbled, pain-tired, with eyes already closed. He was slack through the extension of Kratos' touch.
"You will," Kratos assured him, "when you are able to. Not today."
"But… it's so close."
"You cannot keep your eyes open. You are unable to sit up by your own strength. I will not expose you prematurely – unnecessarily – to additional sources of infection."
"But..." Lloyd was fading rapidly, stubbornly arguing for stubborness' sake. Of course he would.
"Will you drink more water?"
Lloyd turned his head in a barely perceptible no.
"You should, Lloyd." And Kratos lifted the mug once again, but Lloyd was already fast asleep against his arm. Kratos paused for a time before setting down the mug and turning his charge gracelessly into his shoulder, freeing up one hand to support Lloyd's head and the other to support Lloyd's less injured shoulder while he lay him down. It was like taking an uncomfortable step backward in time, seeing Lloyd dead to the world once again. This body is alive, Kratos reminded himself. This body is blood and breath. This body is mine, and mine is his.
You have to believe that we're stronger when we're together.
If there were any truth to that statement, Kratos sought for the advantages of it as he renewed his vigil at his son's side.
Lloyd woke into a zombie-like state twice more that night, and both times Kratos forced water into him and sent him back to sleep. The following morning found Lloyd more alert – and on the heels of that alertness, unfortunately, more critical of his circumstances and more impatient with himself because of them.
"I want to go outside," he declared, a little more assertively than yesterday. Kratos had him propped up with a nearby bowl of broth and had, having blundered his way through eloquence, offered to feed him before Lloyd, in mortification, insisted on feeding himself with his left hand. He'd managed five good spoonfuls thus far, but even in this his progress was cumbersome and noticeably wearing on him.
"I swear on the Nine Elementals – you will go outside. Only not today; we'll move you to the couch whereupon I'll change your dressings. I've delayed long enough as is." Kratos knew that he couldn't keep overruling Lloyd's intentions, couldn't keep fobbing him off with promises of a future time and readiness, but Lloyd was still in no condition to do more than sit and exist.
Lloyd nudged the bowl away with a disheartened sigh. "I can't eat anymore."
Kratos glanced over at him from where he was arranging medical paraphernalia. "You should try," he pushed.
"Can't," Lloyd whispered, eyelids fluttering closed. "I'll puke."
Kratos surveyed the young man reclining against the cushion seats. He looked even more haggard than he had the day before, greyed beneath the purple beneath his eyes, and generally sicker. He was expending more energy than had been regained, working dreadfully to heal when what he should've been doing to heal was rest. He repeatedly declined sedation when offered to him, insisted on sitting up as often as he could, and nurtured no appetite whatsoever even when the vegetable broth was foisted upon him. From here Kratos could smell the bay leaves he'd added to shield Lloyd's palate from the bitter flavor borrowed from the cabbage.
"Take a few sips of water, then, and lay back down. We'll move you at a time when you feel better."
"No. Now." Lloyd swallowed the sprout in his throat and forced open eyes pain-dark and stinging from exhaustion.
Kratos found a stopping point in what he was doing and came around then to his son and crouched on his haunches to level with him. This close, he could see that Lloyd's pupils were two different sizes. "Lloyd. Listen to me." He respectfully maintained Lloyd's personal bubble because it was the least that Kratos could do; Lloyd had virtually zero control over his life right now. From that perspective, Lloyd's obstinate behavior was actually quite reasonable. "If you strain yourself too early, your fever is likely to return. That's a risk that neither of us wants to take, and it's a very avoidable one."
"Very avoidable," Lloyd parroted Kratos, blinking.
"If we're moving too quickly, you can tell me."
"It's just... a couch. It's just moving from Point A to Point B." Lloyd paused for a breath. "I can handle it. I'm laying here or I'm laying there. If it's all the same, I'd like to move to Point B. I'll lay there for the rest of the week if you ask me to, just please– let me move."
"Will you let me give you an anesthetic?"
Lloyd shook his head with a wince. A vein in his neck stood out starkly as he clamped down on pain.
"How come?" Kratos made damn sure to school his tone to softness; this was yet a boy with whom he attempted to reason. A frightened, terribly hurt boy.
"I've already been asleep for... for... I don't know... almost two weeks? I keep losing track. I don't want to be put back under again."
Kratos read into it: I don't want to be a sitting duck, was what Lloyd didn't say but was what Kratos gleaned, even though Lloyd was already as defenseless as a fawn. He searched Lloyd's eyes in earnest. "Do you trust me?"
"Of course," Lloyd answered candidly; miserably, because his answer threw light on just how irrational he was being. "I know I don't make any sense. I just... I'm just... tired."
But Kratos understood paranoia – as much as paranoia could be understood – and it was, indeed, paranoia that had his son more than a little uneasy about being knocked out beyond his circadian ability to awaken. Perhaps what Halle did to him had scarred him in more ways than one. "Alright," he agreed. To his credit, Kratos nodded patiently, understandingly. He'd had plenty enough practice with illogical thinking, in himself if not in anyone else. Insofar as he was able to, he allowed Lloyd to direct his own care. "No medicine. Thus and so, we move," affirmed the Seraph, pushing up on his knees to stand over his invalid child.
"Thank you," Lloyd whispered just as earnestly, sinking back into pliant cotton, eyes closing under mismatched lids; consumed by his relief. It was obvious that he had anticipated a different outcome and had been fighting it with all of his body.
Kratos stared at him, quite taken in by the reaction and wondering if Lloyd even realized that Kratos would never have been able to say no to him for something like that.
Suddenly, one of Lloyd's eyes – the one with the blown-out pupil – pried open again to watch Kratos watching him. "Do you smile, like, ever?"
"What's your pass-word?" Kratos asked him.
"Oh, um..."
It was the second time that day Kratos had asked him for it. He'd given a word for Lloyd to memorize at the start of the morning and, after an unspecified interval of time, had requested Lloyd recite the word back to him. It was cerebral testing to assess any lingering symptoms of concussion, if Lloyd's symptoms could even be attributed to the concussion at all – he was also up against physical overexhaustion, post-trauma backlash, unmanaged pain – and, of course, Kratos was apprehensive about the possibility of another fever. Any number of these things could've been causing Lloyd's stress and affecting his memory.
"I can't remember."
"It's 'home,' Lloyd," sadly supplied Kratos, though he supposed he, too, would want to forget a word like that one. "Your pass-word is 'home.'" He realized since hour-one that he was psychoanalyzing Lloyd's responses – for no other reason than that Lloyd was his son – but I can't remember on a memory test – specifically that test – quickly bloated into I can't remember home, and that was a misinferred double-meaning that struck a blow to Kratos like a bullet bursting through the reverie of his past and bleeding away one final, precious thing from it. It was the significance of Lloyd forgetting the meaning behind the word more than it was the significance of the meaning itself. For Kratos, 'home' was an alienated term – and practically so. If he'd ever had a home, a shield between himself and the world, it was a shield long broken in his ambiguous battle between sin and self-evolution. But for Lloyd, 'home' should resonate with sentimental nuance. He was still so young, and even though he had had more than one home – and one that Lloyd remembered over the other – the connotations should still associate to that central place of peace where the overtones of love and security and memory combined within the heart into a classic, almost hormonal tangibility. 'Home' was institutionalized by the human and elven and half-elven races, all. 'Home' was something that evoked feeling, more than any other word in any other language. Kratos deserved it when that feeling had been lost to him.
But Lloyd didn't. Never Lloyd.
"...I think I knew that. Sorry."
Kratos turned to the couch, tucking linens into their corners. "It's nothing to apologize for," he said, convincing himself more than he was trying to convince Lloyd. Kratos knew that he was maudlin. When he faced his son again, it was with a very closed, very doubtful expression.
"I'm fine," insisted Lloyd, having interpreted the face that his father now wore against him. Lloyd must have hung around Yuan too long, to be able to do that. "Honest. I can do this."
And that familiar pluck of Lloyd's personality was what pacified Kratos' inner misgivings. The plan was a go, albeit modified by fatherly concern. Because Lloyd refused to take any barbiturates, Kratos required he sip a little on that spirit-water again, if only to file down the sharper fangs of pain upon being jostled. Kratos made it clear that this was non-negotiable. He said that needless torture had already been delivered in plenty.
So, Lloyd swallowed his malt while watching Kratos go about his preparations. He stopped when he felt the pulls and aches in his body submerge into the feeling of a warm saltwater bath, and his lips were looser, and he was feeling seventeen years old again with Kratos – all dark and huge and reliable – setting up camp under a steadily darkening sky, and he was touched by the little sparks of fledgling campfire.
After that, it was a matter of Kratos getting his shoulder underneath Lloyd's and lifting his son to his feet. Lloyd gasped. It maybe didn't hurt as much as it was meant to, but he still felt the sensation of his stomach dropping at the same time as he didn't feel his legs underneath him at all. Even stooped over, Lloyd wasn't that much shorter than Kratos anymore, yet Kratos maneuvered him effortlessly onto the couch, to the dizzying effects of his concussion. Or maybe it was the alcohol. Or maybe–
"I think I have a ruptured eardrum," Lloyd proposed, watching uselessly as Kratos positioned his damaged legs for him. They were long and bandaged and did not feel like a part of the rest of him; more like two deadweights of bygone transportation.
Kratos uttered a hum of agreement. "It will heal," he offered, softly.
"I think that's why I'm so dizzy. Well, that and the concussion. And the head trauma. And the blood loss. And the drink. And the not-moving for so long."
Kratos wanted to tell him to stop, just stop because he didn't want all of it thrown in his face again – living through it in real-time was one time enough – though he supposed he ought to be impressed by Lloyd's active recall, even if all he recalled were strikes against him.
"You will be fine," determined Kratos. Again.
"I know," Lloyd relented, gazing up shortly at the ceiling of the shanty and picking out the browns and greys of wood-met rock. "I will be fine."
"What's your pass-word?"
He sighed. "Dunno, Kratos..."
That was probably to be expected, probably the whiskey's fault this time, although it was more than a little disturbing that Lloyd could recite his ailments with morbid specificity and surety but nothing else.
And Lloyd's eyes flitted back down to him, singularly inquisitive, seeing more than Kratos probably meant to let on. "Calling a Horse a Horse."
"...Excuse me?" Kratos fixed Lloyd with a scrutinizing once-over, halted in what he was doing to pay his son his full attention.
"Calling a Horse a Horse. It's the name of an old lesson that Raine used to teach us in school. About language and phrases and word meanings. Stuff like that," Lloyd explained, slowly, as if he were in the nature of teaching, and in detail. He didn't usually go into things that were exclusive to his past, so what he was saying to Kratos either was important to him or he'd had enough drink to ease his inhibitions and he didn't care. "It was about saying what you mean when you can't think of any better way to."
Kratos was brick-wall silent.
"It's okay sometimes to call something just what it is if you can't think of fancy vocabulary words for it. I was always dumb with words, so that lesson stuck with me."
Kratos didn't display confusion the way most people did. Most likely it had been trained out of him centuries ago. Instead, he frowned when he didn't understand something, as he did now, waiting to see what Lloyd was getting at.
"You keep asking– The pass-word. I'm..." Lloyd, with outstanding composure, cut off his vocal frustration and then reorganized it into a more comprehensible delivery – and maybe this was a practice introduced to him by Yuan, a fruition of all of the ways that Yuan had been working with him to cull his dissatisfaction and impatience in Centrum. He began again, in sobered awareness, looking for all the world unhappy with himself. If anything, he could actually think more clearly now that the pain wasn't in the forefront of his mind, doused as it was by whiskey-warmth into a constricting but bearable soreness. "I'm very aware that I can't remember – or that I'm remembering some things wrong. I'm aware," Lloyd acknowledged disappointedly, solemnly. "I know it's bad. You don't have to pretend it isn't. But, like you said, I will heal. No use worrying about it. I'm in the best hands."
Kratos opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, noticeably taken aback. His chest was tight again, in all of those places that meant joy, that meant he might be falling away from his mistakes if even a little. He was a man momentarily frozen by sunlight in this impossibly mature and clear-minded, serendipitous reassurance being gifted to him by his son. It was a tonic for his wayward conscience. He came around the couch to sit nearby, just at the edge of Lloyd's reach, and there was a gentling of the line at one corner of his mouth.
Then he placed his hand on the back of Lloyd's neck and pulled him in to touch his forehead against his own, and got lost in Anna's compassion like he thought he never would again.
"You will heal," said Kratos, for the countless time. Thank you.
"I know," said Lloyd, for the countless time. You're welcome.
Lloyd had managed to tuck away two more spoonfuls of broth before he dozed off quietly into a still sleep. This time, Kratos was accepting of the hush that had fallen over wan features. His boy had been moved, both physically and mentally, and he needed to rest and restore himself. They both did. But it may not have been enough when Lloyd woke again in the late evening to his next hurdle: the hour of his dressing change.
Kratos was ready, if agonizing over it. They shared in each other's mutually measuring stare – Kratos to Lloyd, to gauge if Lloyd could take it, and Lloyd to Kratos, considering that maybe Kratos couldn't. "Won't you take a sedative?"
"I can handle it, Kratos. Besides," soothed Lloyd, mildly, and it still stunned his father that Lloyd was comforting him instead of vice-versa. "I deserve to see what I look like underneath all of this gauze."
"You don't," Kratos argued, almost bitterly.
Lloyd's optimistic willpower softened itself just a little, in light of what his father must have gone through these past several days. Empathy rose like the need to breathe, filling the glands of his lungs and easing moxie into something slower for his father, something more conscientiously manageable for the sake of the man standing over him who didn't know how to press his way forward through the grim necessity of this situation that would bring his boy more pain. The person of Lloyd Irving had always taken on life with an absurd momentum, and Lloyd had been warned more than once, by more than one companion, not to be reckless. He was forcibly aware of his own overenthusiastic habits, which is why Lloyd currently found himself trying to be fair and offering a patient grin to reinforce his father's shaky resolve. "We'll work this out. Together. I'm going to be fine, Kratos. I trust you."
Kratos did not imagine that Lloyd's intrepidity could possibly be feigned; nothing ever seemed to shake him up – nothing in regard to his own self-preservation, anyway. Hell, recent scenarios aside, Kratos couldn't remember ever seeing him so much as flinch from something outside of himself. Kratos used to be like that, but he was made of something different from Lloyd. His callousness and repeated loss at the ruin wielded by his own hands carved him out of stone. For Lloyd, it was vows cast in friendship and looking forward in hope. Lloyd inspired, just by being alive. Kratos had to keep him alive.
"Rest your head, and limpen."
"Relax."
"…Mm?"
"'Relax,' not 'limpen.' Is that even a word, anyway? Was it ever?"
Kratos' outward expression was one of indifference were it not for the modest rise of a single eyebrow tempering its severity. Lloyd was trying to humanize him again, but he could hear the playfulness in the tone and see the oblique play at tongue-in-cheek humor. There was more than the Babel of era-specific vernacular separating him from his son, but a quick study of Lloyd's side-eyed mischief and he wouldn't ever believe that his semi-estranged son was at all offended by his language. There was silent laughter in the shamelessly buoyant smirk. Kratos didn't smile, but the carefree fiber of Lloyd's mood served to loosen the corded tension that had made tensile knots of his own shoulders. The quick burn of slackening muscle was like a wasp's nest gone to air. Kratos breathed out, an almost pining sound.
And Lloyd... Lloyd must've noticed. He looked half-expected to unleash one of his trumpeting laughs.
"'Relax,' then, if it befits you."
"If it what now?" Lloyd teased, then hastened to intercept the rustle of bemusement before it hit him in the face, "I'm joking, I'm joking. And relaxed. And now so are you. Let's do this." He blew out a heavy evacuation of breath and closed his eyes. It was in that moment Kratos realized that, as ready as Lloyd was, it had to be partly for show; Lloyd hurt on a good day, and didn't want to hurt anymore, especially not by the right hand of Cruxis, but there was no one else to choose. And, sadly, at least Kratos had practice in the matter of the blood that Lloyd's shed...
He began proceedings, peeling back the medical dressing at Lloyd's shoulder and legs before moving on to more delicate areas, and even that required some tactical dexterity. Skin stuck to bandages like harvested sap, every now and then drawing shrinking movements from Lloyd that were the involuntary twitches of response. Lloyd's pain receptors went into overdrive, yet he was not overcome. Instead he watched and he helped and he breathed valiantly through it all.
"What is that stuff?" Lloyd asked, curiously, of a particular poultice that Kratos was applying to his elbow. "It looks like bird seed." There were stray little grains of a strained-out brown where originally, had they not been boiled for the last several minutes, they hued similar to the Aurion eye color.
"Linseed flax," answered Kratos as he carefully wrapped muslin – using only two layers – around the sprained joint. "It calms inflammation. I'm surprised you don't know that."
Lloyd was quiet for a long moment, thinking, observing. Then: "Where did you learn that?"
Kratos offered no answer to that question and instead fell to his work in silence.
"It feels kind of gross," Lloyd continued after a while, speaking into the muteness. The linseed paste was, for all its avail, a messy creation. "I can't believe you've been doing this to me in my sleep." There was a considering lull – and Lloyd's smile was lopsided and peaking – before he found his father's gaze returned to him.
"You also had bread and milk."
"Huh?"
"Bread and milk poultices draw out infection."
"Ugh… Please, no. Stop." Lloyd scrunched up his face, his stitches (that were almost ready to be removed) cutting into and around his features and exaggerating them as in a caricature. "I love food. Don't do this to me. Or to food."
Kratos made no further comment and dutifully bore on, answering questions as they were asked of him, methodically cleaning Lloyd's wounds just as he had so many times already – the difference being that his charge was presently awake and watching. If he hadn't already scrubbed himself down to the fingernails, he'd grab Lloyd by his chin and make him look away. But this was Lloyd's body right now, and Lloyd needed to know it.
The next while of the evening passed in this vein: steady hands mending over Lloyd as in sections of a quilt, the occasional snip – or quip – of conversation from the latter, a few hisses of pain and questions about witch hazel, a frustrated baritone and a level baritone in return and it was all at once surreal to Kratos how much of his own voice he heard in his son's, whose voice wasn't solely drug-deepened low or pain-edged low. Lloyd sucked it up and very nobly endured all of the therapeutics that Kratos threw at him, even cracking a joke here and there, and turning, and, yes, 'limpening' on command. Until Kratos moved onto his chest. It was then that all banter ceased and not a single witty comment was volunteered when Kratos cut through the bandages bracketing Lloyd's thorax and exposed the goring that had nearly claimed his son's life. What were initially thrust wounds, opened and reopened and burned closed recurrently, had become a heliotropic splashboard that took up half of Lloyd's torso. Much of the flesh had been seared away in a halo around two scorched gaps, resembling a gorge where there used to be skin. The outer ring was of a significantly shallower depth, and his body there was all domino scales. The rest of his chest looked like the larva of a Trilobite beetle, like wet ash on soaked succulent plant leaves. He was an eyesore of black and pink patches, charred cells, and eaten-away meat; birch bark after a storm.
"Freaking h-hell–" Lloyd swore, feeling faint at the true sight of himself, and when Kratos looked up it was to Lloyd looking down in rapidly overtaking panic. He was craning his neck in a way that Kratos thought certainly must be painful for his shoulder. What little bit of color left in Lloyd's face immediately paled away, and, along with the craters in his chest, the effect made him look cadaverous. He couldn't believe that Kratos was trying to tell him that this was greatly improved from what it had been.
The scent of old blood was dichotomous; stale while somehow still smelling wet, though not in an acrylic sense. It was thick, organic, guttural tissue death over purulent shards of wet crystal. When Lloyd went to speak out, he choked and it sent him into fits of breath and apnea. It was like closing a roomful of doors all at once.
Kratos bathed the damaged area; in self-prepared cleansers, in healing invocations (Lloyd vaguely heard snippets of "Virtue everything with Your Light, Lore and Wind …" and "I implore you, 'til Shadow swallow me whole again …" and Lloyd knew that his father's were very inherently different from Colette's prayers) and liniments that stung against the ridges and valleys of gaping flesh and drew tremulous groans from his charge while fingers prodded and drained in requisite irrigation. At the end of fifteen minutes, Kratos layered over the entire scope of damage with ointment to protect and relieve, to act on the properties of the antiseptics.
At the end of twenty minutes and the application of fresh gauze dressing, Lloyd was sweating buckets, his entire frame shaking like a Viper's tail. When Kratos looked up from the work of his hands in a personal canvass of his child – his poor, despairing child – his eyes tracked the course of sweat beading over Lloyd's sutures.
Kratos hooked Lloyd's chin in the crook of his forefinger and drew the boy's gaze from himself. His son's eyes were red-rimmed and sleek with a coat of unshed tears. His lips were dusky and he'd nearly chewed straight through the vermilion border. "Will you take a sedative?" Kratos quietly asked.
Lloyd mustered a shivery jerk of his head. It was definitively a nod this time. Even heroes of his ilk had their limits.
Kratos fed him sedative in broth and lay him down to peace, and Lloyd was smiling off-centered just before he slipped into unconsciousness and uttered the word 'home.'
Lloyd slept through most of the next two days with very little coaxing. His body was hungry for the reprieve that did him no end of benefit. One of the times he awoke, it was to find that his arm sling had been removed; the next time, his facial stitches had been let out. He was unusually inert but trustingly followed all of Kratos' orders. He practiced standing with him, and walking a little, and profusely thanked Kratos for his foresight in the physical therapy that had saved his legs from a more serious atrophy.
One afternoon, Kratos and Lloyd were sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, knees opposite of each other. Kratos held Lloyd's right hand between them, nearly in his lap. The gash wound was being unwrapped and assiduously studied. "It's looking well."
"It's looking disgusting," corrected Lloyd, bluntly perplexed, roving over the hole that used to be his palm. Well, it wasn't so much of a hole now. Thin, fine sheets of baby skin now covered over it in an almost transparent magenta, requiring less and less gauze to fill in around it as it had healed over. Veins and arteries were visible filaments as in the inside insect wing of a Gold Beetle. "And it itches," Lloyd added, trying not to jostle his knee in his edginess. He was sitting up on his own now, but it heaped restlessness upon his physical limitations. "Actually, my everything itches."
"You are making new skin. It is likely to itch for several weeks longer." Kratos spoke without looking up at Lloyd, disposed over the wound as he was. He changed out the old dressing and lined new gauze with a fresh measurement of that powder stuff Lloyd thought looked like some kind of soda flakes. Kratos had informed him that it was used to absorb moisture – because the last thing he needed was for the hand to be taken by gangrene. In point of fact, Kratos placed a lot of emphasis on keeping the hand dry and protected. He positively forbade exposure. Lloyd thought he was just being nitpicky since nothing really much happened to that hand – it being held hostage by bandages and all – but oddly enough even sweat seemed to be a thing that Kratos worried about. "Itching is good. Itching means healing."
"Itching means itching. It's even itchier where the burns are."
"Don't scratch."
"I know," returned Lloyd, long-suffering. Kratos' commands were always such statements of the obvious. "I'm trying not to."
"I can apply more balm to the worst areas, if you'd like. It may soothe the itching," Kratos offered, in a constructive sympathy.
"Thanks," Lloyd breathed, and lapsed into compliant silence while Kratos finished working on him. He was trying to be patient, but it was the toughest thing to do when today was the day.
Kratos had promised him that, if Lloyd passed muster, he could be taken outside.
After a few more minutes, Lloyd piped up helpfully, "I can barely curl my hand." He tried to whenever the gauze was out, but it set off a crinkling sensation every time, like he was feeling someone else's pulses over his own. "My grip strength is… Will… Will it get better?"
Will I be able to hold my sword ever again?
Kratos glanced up into Lloyd's face, admiring how focused his son was trying to be on the task at hand when he knew damn well that all Lloyd was thinking about right now was how short a distance they were from the front door. And Lloyd faced his scrutiny head-on. There was a short white line over one of his eyes. It was by no means the only mark on his face, but it was where the worst of his stitches had been taken out, and it was visually impossible to overlook. It lent a speculating arch to Lloyd's brow, as though he were belatedly curious about everything within his realm of regard. Kratos believed the scar would thin out over time, enough to melt into the brown of his brow line. He hoped so, anyway. It was distracting – in a cynical frame of reference, if one knew what it was. His eyes traced the scape, unable to help himself. It was easy to guess that it had been caused by something sharp being where something sharp oughtn't be, though Lloyd didn't talk about it or any of the other wounds apart from what directly pertained to their care. Like the hole in his hand, Lloyd didn't tell Kratos how it'd been caused, and Kratos was too unsettled by it to ask him.
"You will be fine." It was a non-answer.
"Is it time now?" voiced Lloyd, hopefully. In anticipation, he'd had his boots on since just after breakfast.
Kratos evaluated him – privately, though he made no secret of what he was doing. Lloyd did not fidget under his father's long, fixed stare – he'd already told himself that he would abide by the Seraph's judgment – and Kratos knew that it would kill him as much as it would kill Lloyd to deny his son this.
"We won't go far," he cautioned.
"We won't go far," vowed Lloyd, repeating after him.
"When I tell you to, you will return indoors without argument."
"I promise," consented Lloyd, "I'll come back inside without a fight."
Kratos gathered up the old dirty wrappings into a pile and stood to wash his hands. "If you feel at all poorly you will tell me at once."
"At once," agreed Lloyd, on his most perfect, obedient behavior.
When he returned to Lloyd, he took to his knee and took Lloyd's good hand and, looking him levelly in the eyes, he said, "Very well. It is time." The excitement bursting forth from Lloyd in a loud whoop inspired Kratos to tack on, "Don't overdo it."
"I won't overdo it!" Lloyd laughed heartily and made grabby hands at his father. "Help me up!"
Kratos, caving, bent forward and slung Lloyd's arm over his shoulder. Together they rose and moved to the door as one. After a final sidelong glance of concern, Kratos threw open the door.
And outside they walked.
Lloyd took his first few steps into sunlight – Kratos, a warm presence hovering just at his elbow – but he stopped immediately and winced against the harsh brightness, both hands instantly coming up to cover over his weak, wanting eyes, and when his bangs drifted over his fingertips he did not swipe away their protection. Instead, he stood rooted in place for several long moments, long enough that Kratos was ready to suggest they return indoors and try again another time. Then gradually, in tiny lengths at a time, Lloyd spread apart his fingers to permit more and more sunshine to fall in shimmery bars against his closed eyelids. This was different from the fluorescent lights of Centrum or even the wild, non-linear flickering of a campfire at night; this was an intensity striking out at him and it jarred his senses to whirling.
But he could hear birdsong.
In piqued yearning all of their own, Lloyd's hands separated a little, while his eyes remained shut.
There were birds somewhere nearby. And he was standing there, outside, listening to them. He didn't know what species they were and he didn't care – they were different from what he'd hear in Iselia, but the sound was achingly familiar all the same.
His hands fell to his sides, unblocking his face against the might of the sun. He felt a mild breeze travel across the dips and scars of his face in fondly scuffed greeting – an actual earth wind, not air conditioning! – and with its salutation came fragrance; the smell of weather, and rock untouched and undisturbed from native roosts; the perfume of grass, and another draft of wind from this completely unmanicured nature that drew from him a lively shiver and spilt from his heart vicarious joys. There was telluric bouquet; scents of bulbs and sedge and the denser aesthetic of root plants.
Slowly, he opened his eyes, then more, a little more – then wide.
There it was: every thing, a full meadow unspun before him and a fertile blue sky stretching endlessly above him. Sunlight cupped the world and slanted down in glowing sheets upon gentle, pendant greens and flowering seedheads, on Crested dog's-tail and galleries of apricot-coloured grasses waving reedy in open, daylight air – all brilliantly arresting to the unpracticed cornea. It was a setting as if divinity tripped a fuse and the entire world had exploded into (quiet, raging) life. The sun suffused everything in daisy yellow golds.
Lloyd seemed stunned. Speechless. There was a note of disbelief in the awestruck expression on his face. He stood aside Kratos, nestled for balance against his father's tall form. His breath stammered, hitching as he swiftly and brutally re-composed himself. He sounded choked. It had been a long time since he could see until he couldn't see anymore, so vast was the world; no walls or hallway corners to interrupt his view for what must be leagues and leagues of unbroken grassland rolling out in all directions. (but there were birds, which meant there must be a tree line somewhere that he wasn't seeing) The processing of it, of listening to his own breathing among it all, finding its place– With Kratos as a crutch he took another few steps forward, momentarily shoving his face into the Angel's strong shoulder when sheer vision became too overwhelming for him.
Kratos looked down his side at him with an unhappy pang, and drew the hand of his opposite arm protectively over the nape of Lloyd's neck, not quite touching him but ready to offer all the comfort his company was able to inspire should Lloyd desire it. But then, suddenly, the support of his arm was brushed off and he was left in motionless beholding as Lloyd took a few steps forward on his own. The image reminded Kratos of one witnessed many lifetimes ago; a newborn foal, wobbly on its legs. Lloyd was a picture of that very same wavering determination, careful but willful. It wasn't an unpleasant bubbling of feeling that stirred in the pit of Kratos Aurion's stomach. He watched his son teeter forward with one final footstep–
–when Lloyd suddenly abandoned all delicacy for himself and dropped on his hands and knees and pressed his face into the ground. He jerked in rigid seizure, one time, as if yanked by invisible strings, and then he slumped forward and kissed the earth, in turn kissed by the sun on his back. His shoulders began to shake – violent, passionate heaves bereft of their sick, stricken control – but he wept quietly, like a person who didn't remember how to, who wasn't sure if he was even allowed to. He made a fist in the grass, raked soil and storm-stained earth beneath his fingernails, touched the heat in the dirt, in the fen of groundwater against his digging fingers. He felt the suction of mud around blades of tall grass and he cried harder and all the more silently, tears minnowing over the rondure of his cheeks. He smelled meadow-wood, and sobbed pearl-dropped crystals into the zephyr wind with such a force as he no longer believed he possessed. He hadn't consciously allowed himself to cry – not after some ambiguous point of time following Dirk's death, even since before being abducted into Cruxis – and now it all came pouring out, and the relief was so heavy, heavy like a riptide wave, that it bowed him a little more into the ground, buckling him under a downpour blast of desperate, communing emotion. Quite beside himself, he cradled his head under his bandaged hand; melded with terra. His heart alternated between wildly tight splaying and hammering, and the salt on the sky scraped his teeth, and the loamy taste on his lips where the world caught his tears, all of it meant– he–
He was free.
Kratos took in the whole quiet scene, watched him as Lloyd repeatedly clenched grass in his good hand. At one point it did look like Lloyd tried to wipe his tears on the back of his wrist, but it was pointless. Even without being able to see his face – even with only the view of those broad, weak shoulders hiking in breathless elation – Kratos could tell that it was pointless. But that Lloyd tried, just once, was so human a gesture that it transcribed for Kratos the very brightness of Lloyd's confusion, the plaintive vigor of his rejoicing.
"When is it?" a tear-rasped voice overpowered his silent musing.
When, not where. Kratos cleared his throat, softly replied, "Summer." His murmur was without inflection, all sanded down shale and enfeebled by a portion of the feelings to which he bore witness.
"Summer," Lloyd whispered. He had been abducted in the springtime. Obviously not of the same year, but it had been springtime and Lloyd was walking with Colette along a forest path toward a village before his entire world changed to pith helmets and restraints and untellable pain, and that was the last time he'd ever been outdoors.
That was all over.
Giddy appreciation punched through his chest in a helpless rush and replaced breathlessness with delight. Another sob filled his throat and he swallowed it down, briefly, before it burst out of him with the rest.
That one had been audible from where Kratos was standing. He stopped staring at his son's back and instead stared somewhere in the middle distance, biting down hard against the raw vulnerability in such powerful display before him, and painfully considering that Lloyd may have suffered his awareness through his loss. It was how Kratos felt all the time; knowing that he'd lost time even while time ended, innocent of its own sure passing. But the feeling was new to his son, and one he wished he could dispel for him.
Kratos stood for hours in silent testimony of his son's broken, rapturous happiness.
Lloyd had, eventually, been taken up by Kratos and urged – shakily – back inside, but it wasn't until cumulonimbus began to carpet the once-empty sky, ushering with it the threat of rain. He sat at the entrance to the hideout, legs criss-crossed underneath him, a hush over him and his eyes alive and imploring as they beheld the storm outside. A staccato rain had issued from the dark ruins of sky, pouring down clear and neat.
Lloyd watched it rain, entranced.
He hadn't moved – wouldn't be moved – from the open door since they'd returned inside, refusing to budge now that he'd been reacquainted with the world beyond. He hadn't spoken a word either but had allowed a light anesthesia as Kratos wiped the dirt from his fingertips and moved around him in preparation of supper. Every now and then a stray breeze would blow in that would make Lloyd smile for the thrill if he weren't feeling so weak.
A sudden weight fell on him as Kratos dropped a blanket over his shoulders. "Keep covered," he heard Kratos say, and you're still very weak Kratos didn't have to say. Lloyd obediently adjusted the blanket around his frame and continued peering outside, spellbound.
Kratos finally joined him at the doorway. He took a spot next to him on the floor and slipped a bowl of soup into Lloyd's limp hands. Vegetables, no meat. Kratos was being very careful with how solid the solids were, unwilling to cause upset to a stomach that hadn't had much more than liquids in over two weeks.
They ate in companionable silence, side-by-side; there was something just off the rim of Lloyd's eyes, and from his one-quarter profile Kratos couldn't tell if it was sweat or tear tracks, and no words needed to be said.
Even when Kratos discarded his bowl and spoon quietly to his side, he continued to sit with Lloyd, staring off into the great outdoors, trying to picture it the way that Lloyd probably was. It was quiet for a long time. When Kratos finally looked over at him, Lloyd was asleep; his bowl loosely held in his lap, his chin slightly dipped toward his chest.
With very gentle prompting, and some bodily hauling, Kratos transferred Lloyd to his bedding. There Lloyd slept peacefully through the entire duration of the storm.