Corvo spends some time recovering from being shot during the previous mission. Character interaction fluff.
[ This chapter has the surgery scene, scroll down to the first line break ( --/ ) if you want to skip it. Other CW: drug use and addiction references ]
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Corvo woke to Peiro digging the bullet out from under one of his ribs.
It didn't hurt as much as it could have, Piero had done a good job dosing him with painkillers, but it certainly wasn't enjoyable, or exactly unfamiliar.
Old panic flooded through him, worn into his nerves by a few too many similar experiences.
Piero stopped what he was doing.
"Corvo! Hey. Look at me please. Look at me. Its okay. just try to calm down. Its okay... I'm sorry, I was afraid you'd wake up like this, it wasn't safe to give you more hysper. Just let me do one thing here, okay? Samuel, hold him please. Now, on three... One."
Piero deftly twisted the instrument buried in Corvo's side and pulled the bullet out.
Corvo tried to scream but instead he tugged aside from Samuel's grasp and was violently sick over the side of the table.
"No see, I told you. Too much hysper and he'd have done that fully unconscious, and you'd be lucky if he had any lungs afterward..." Piero's voice faded into an unpleasant haze of things he couldn't quite remember later.
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Corvo blearily opened his eyes, taking in dust drifting lazily through sunbeams. What he could see vaguely registered as Piero's room in the back of his workshop. Probably it had been the nearest and easiest place to move him to while he recovered.
Guess I'm not dead after all.
He felt stiff and his side ached in a terrible, bone deep manner, though he could tell the worst of it was being held at bay by painkillers. A familiar prickling sensation was at work there too, Sokolov's elixir.
He turned his head and noticed Piero sitting in a chair close by, reading a folded sheaf of newspaper.
Corvo tried to ask how long he'd been out but his mouth didn't seem to want to work properly, no sound came out and he ended up coughing instead.
Piero looked at him and brightened. "Ah, you're awake. I trust you know better than to try and get up by yourself right now?"
Corvo managed to contain his coughing fit and wait out the accompanying waves of pain it brought.
"Yeah." he said slowly. "Not my first time like this."
"Hm. You've lost a genuinely worrying amount of blood, but you'll be happy to hear you're healing very rapidly in spite of it."
Good. maybe I won't have the chance to get addicted to poppy nectar again.
Piero sighed dramatically. "That tonic of Sokolov's might be better suited to farm animals than the subtleties of human maladies... but I will admit it has significant healing properties, when it comes to patching up simple holes in a person."
"Still," He added. "You'll need help to get up for the next two days at least. Believe me neither of us will enjoy it if you pass out somewhere and pull all your stitches out."
"I'll remember."
"How are you feeling by the way?"
"Hurts." He closed his eyes and tried to consider a more useful answer. "Not that much yet, but the painkiller's starting to wear off."
"I'll get you some more, but eat something first or it'll make you sick."
He sipped slowly at a pint mug full of water while Piero left to get food from the kitchen. He came back with soup and tea and leftovers of a cold meat pie, and finally a terribly bitter spoon of poppy nectar washed down with a sourgrape brandy that did a passable job of killing the taste.
It put Corvo to sleep again almost immediately.
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The next few days were practically pleasant compared to previous times he'd been seriously wounded. He didn't have time to get restless and terribly bored. Or worry much about developing a dependance on painkillers.
Piero had taken his room in the loft for the time being, and Cecelia took turns keeping an eye on him. When Corvo was awake enough Cecelia asked him about previous adventures and he told her stories about Pandyssia and other lands outside of Dunwall.
Havelock visited and told a blustering story about naval warfare he fell asleep halfway through.
Samuel came every day to play cards and tell him dirty stories that hurt to laugh at but cheered him immensely.
Lord Pendleton tried once to get his attention for something that sounded serious and Corvo pretended to be asleep until he gave up and left.
Piero was the one around most often, even though Corvo was pretty sure his condition didn't warrant Piero's direct attention or fussing over.
But he wasn't unwelcome company, and, well... He was no prince of pandyssia, violet eyed and gorgeous enough to drive abandoned lovers to madness, but he looked well enough. His voice was gentle and his manner was kind, and he made good conversation without being pompous about his intelligence. (Though Corvo wasn't sure he made good conversation in return, being in pain made him irritable and terse, and being on enough painkillers to ignore that made odd things seem very funny.)
Piero apparently thought Corvo wasn't bad to look at either, small glances when he thought Corvo wasn't paying attention.
He thought he half woke from a nightmare on the first bad night to notice Piero holding his hand, but he'd been practically floating on a haze of painkillers and wasn't willing to trust the memory was entirely real.
Corvo tried meeting his gaze once but Piero had looked away quickly. Sy vien, is he flushing? Corvo decided not to press the issue.
In a few days he was well enough to give Piero his room back and climb the stairs to his own in the loft of the Hound Pits. The bed was made and everything was more or less as he'd left it.
The smell of Piero's sandalwood aftershave lingered there though, it was oddly comforting and familiar.
By the second week he felt ready to go out on the next mission.
Whether he was truly ready or not, honestly, because the Loyalists informed him they knew where Emily was, and nothing anyone had to say would keep him there resting another night.
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Author's notes: Gruesome detail: I can't remember where I read this but apparently early forms of anesthetic like ether and chloroform carried a risk of making people vomit while unconscious and inhaling stomach acid into their lungs, which tended to be fatal or cause severe and permanent damage.
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