[Hold]

"Ow! Fuck!"

Yuriy glanced up from his work, white-blue eyes sending a flat, unsympathetic stare her way, and Jayda felt distinctly nauseous as he pulled the curved needle and thread through the skin and meat of her thumb with a pair of forceps.

"Stop moving." He told her, and there wasn't much in the way of emotions in either his tone or his face, but Jayda got the funny feeling that she was trying his patience. Given the man's normally stoic self, that was saying something.

"Sorry." She managed through grit teeth, and, goddamn, that hurt! Her eyes watered so much that everything went blurry, and she was clenching her jaw, trying to keep her throat closed so she wouldn't whine or curse or shout or scream or do any number of the things she desperately wanted to do.

She'd decided to go with the tried and tested method of refusing to breathe when in extreme pain, exhaling quickly and then inhaling sharply every minute or so for the –in her opinion- very flimsy reason of needing oxygen to live. Most of her willpower was directed towards not jerking her arm away on reflex, because the stitch Yuriy was working on wasn't finished, so it was still connected to the thread and the thread was still tied to the needle and the needle was still held in the forceps that were still in Yuriy's hands.

In short, if she moved, she'd rip the stitch right out of her thumb.

It helped if she focused on other things, like the texture of the table, or the bit of hair in her eyes, or the heat through the latex glove of the hand that held hers still, the palm of his hand against the back of hers, fingers wrapped around the backs of her fingers, keeping them curled, while the side of his thumb propped hers up, kept the digit from bending...

Idly, with a little voice in the back of her mind quietly asking if she was in shock, she wondered if that counted as hand-holding...

Yuriy tugged a little too hard on the thread as he finished tying the second stitch in her thumb, and she hissed suddenly, reflexively tried to pull away without meaning to. He was quicker than she was, though, one hand slackening the thread, the other holding her hand in a vice-like grip that hurt more than it should have.

Wincing, knowing that he was deliberately putting too much pressure on her hand, because it wasn't that hard to restrain her, –she wasn't exactly a body builder, y'know?- she met his eyes. When grey irises met white-blue, the person -the thing- she saw was not her friend. It wasn't even her sort-of-friend. She looked into those eyes and saw something that should not have been there, something not right, and it made her think of wolves and cold and prey and not safe.

Jayda didn't know what it was, but she knew she was on thin, thin ice.

She froze almost instantly, instinctively, not even half-way through completing the reflexive retreat. The cold in his eyes remained, and for several long, painful moments she stayed very, very still. Alarmed, not quite frightened, and acutely aware that something was wrong, she watched him and he watched her, and then gradually, little by little, the cold in his eyes began to seep away. As it did, slowly, deliberately, she relaxed the muscles of her arm, just a little bit at a time, began to unclench her fingers as best she could with their movement so restricted, carefully, cautiously.

And then it was as if nothing had happened. The painful grip was gone, the cold had all but disappeared, and the breath that she hadn't realized she'd been holding eased out of her lungs.

She didn't move again until Yuriy was finished the third and final stitch, waiting until he cut the thread and released her hand. She nodded her thanks, not knowing what to say –not knowing how to say what she thought she should say.

All the while, Jayda questioned herself, uncertain as to whether or not she'd really tried his patience that much, or if he'd just confirmed what she'd always thought; he was as unstable as the rest of his group.

Wordlessly, she stood and returned to cooking, her back to the redheaded man. She could feel eyes boring into the back of her skull, and the little hairs standing on end on the back of her neck had yet to come down.

The others would be back soon.

Jayda wondered if that was a good thing.