019: BROKEN PIECES
Corosa did not even want to know. He knew they were out of money, having restocked on ammunition as soon as possible, and he knew they had nothing to sell – his own weapons aside, which he hoped had not been sold – yet somehow Satero had gotten enough alcohol to almost drink himself into oblivion.
Huh. They were near...Geffen, weren't they? Corosa shuddered. But he was far away enough to think logically. What little he knew of Geffen gave him no reason to bring to mind the sort of situation Satero looked like he'd just rolled out of. A situation that most likely involved a fight. Corosa had gotten blood on his fingers, when he'd reached down to make sure the thing that was supposedly Satero was actually living. Geffen? Tavern brawls? Well, Corosa wouldn't know.
He looked down in Satero's direction. The idea of Satero engaging in tavern brawls was not a surprising one. Possibly he'd won. Or he'd run away before he could lose. Corosa didn't know. He'd only just found the mastersmith, sprawled out in the middle of the road, and that was only because Corosa had walked over his arm.
Aside from the initial swearing, Satero hadn't given any sign of life. Now he finally made an effort to speak, which wound up in him muttering something unintelligible. It sounded vaguely like 'don't ask', albeit with five times as many syllables.
"I wasn't going to," Corosa said, voice deadened by lack of sleep.
Satero groaned. Corosa was frankly surprised that he could still pull off such a complicated task.
"Ya. Soun' like. Shi'," Satero said, taking the effort to pronounce properly. But there was a too-long pause between each word, disconnections, and Corosa was sure that Satero was only managing by sheer willpower.
"We're up early. It's not even the crack of dawn." Corosa was tempted to wholly blame Satero for his insomnia.
"Uhm. Yeah. An'..." Satero drew out the 'a', while trying to put together the rest of his sentence, which came out garbled despite his efforts. He made a noise that would have been a curse if he'd been sober, and fell silent.
"I'm up because you weren't there when you were supposed to be," Corosa said, though Satero had not asked.
Corosa revealed that much, but did not admit that he had nearly driven himself into a panic when he'd realized. Into as much as a panic as a man working on less than an hour of sleep could get, anyway. Possibly a little more than that.
Men like Satero did not walk in and out of one's life. And if someone like Satero did, Corosa would be convinced that something was dreadfully wrong. Corosa knew himself to be far from social, yet there was always a lingering sense that if Satero did leave, he'd just have lost something important. Twins? Corosa didn't like to think so. But the possibility was there. The possibility was more than simply 'there'.
He sighed and carefully set his guncase down, now severely battered from their previous encounter with the assassin-and-archer-turned-thieves. Despite the abuse, it was still serviceable. And considering the unlikeliness of Satero getting up, Corosa instead chose to sit down, not at all inclined to try and persuade the mastersmith to move. No doubt Satero would bitch mightily come morning. Corosa would blame the alcohol then.
"Look. Wha' I got." Satero somehow managed to find Corosa's knee while both drunk and blind, a feat Corosa thought deserved some sort of reward. His attention, maybe. He shook himself out of his thoughts and substituted touch for sight, finding Satero's hand with his own. Corosa frowned to himself, running his fingers over flesh and over something that was definitely not flesh. Something hard. Wet. Cold.
The mastersmith grabbed his hand and squeezed.
Corosa's skin broke on the glass shards Satero was clutching between his fingers.
"What the hell?" Corosa asked, wincing at the sting. Natural instinct told him to yank his hand away. Intelligence told him doing so would slide the shards over his skin and leave even worse cuts.
"I won," Satero said, in a sing-song voice.
Insane, Corosa decided. The mastersmith was utterly insane. Running on alcohol only made him worse.
"You. Bleedin'?" Satero asked. His fingers snapped down around Corosa's palm once more. Corosa swore at him, before he started to wonder what sort of damage Satero was doing to his own hands.
Satero answered his own question. "Yeah. Mm-hm. Huh."
That was all the warning Corosa ever got.
The next moment the mastersmith yanked down on his hand, hard, harder than a drunkard should have been able to pull. Corosa felt like the bastard was trying to dislocate his shoulder. Something in the corner of his mind clicked, realized that pulling back would conclude in the dislocation of said shoulder, and promptly decided that his body should go entirely limp. He landed hard on his knees. Both fortunately and unfortunately, he did not land on Satero.
And he forgot about everything else in the light of what happened next.
It was almost the same like before, he thought inanely. Hard, where Satero's teeth were concerned. Wet. Not cold, far from it, but the shock was nearly enough to make him go numb.
He could not move his hand away. Blades on all sides. Top and bottom, Satero's teeth; behind, the shards between Satero's fingers; and worse still what Corosa's fingers encountered in front. A different sort of blade, maybe, but still one nevertheless.
Satero's tongue curled around Corosa's index finger. Slow. Almost gentle.
Corosa swore, risking the threat of more scrapes by trying to twist his hand free. It did result in more, and failed to result in freedom. He tried again, but faltered briefly when Satero probed at the deepest cut. The cut stung like hell upon contact. It felt as if Satero was trying to widen it.
"Get...ah. No. Shit, no." Corosa wondered whether he ought to try stomping on the man. He wondered if that would result in him losing all his fingers. He realized that would lead to no end of trouble. And his own suicide.
Satero made a soft noise, a sort of hum, raised himself up until sitting, licked another cut. The sting was not as bad as the contact. Corosa wished desperately for another hand. Feet weren't nearly as versatile. In the absence of his other arm, he tried to maneuver his fingers out of the way instead, curling them away.
Satero's teeth started to close down.
Corosa's panic, slow in building, took on a burst of speed.
He swung his knee up and down into Satero's stomach, jerking his hand back at the same time. Glass and teeth both dragged across his skin. The pain was secondary to the fact that his hand was free from Satero's tongue, although the mastersmith's nails were still digging into his wrist. And Corosa's mind could not decide whether that was worse than the fact that Satero's other hand was too high up on Corosa's thigh for his own comfort.
Corosa bit back some manner of noise when Satero's grip dug in, nails and hands both painful and too-warm, even through cloth. Corosa slammed his knee in again, putting more weight behind it.
This time it elicited a better response. The mastersmith let off a stream of vulgarities and tried to shove Corosa off.
"Oh, you bitch," Satero muttered, voice reflecting a worrying amount of pain, words far clearer than they had been before. "You--"
Corosa did not wait to hear the rest. He slid his leg off and twisted his hand out of Satero's grip, then made what was thus far his most undignified retreat -- a mad scramble backwards that was only stopped when he was up on his feet and he tripped over himself.
He stopped then. Partly to catch his breath, and mostly to try and recover from what had just happened.
A glance backwards revealed nothing. It was still too late at night for that, still too dark, and there was no noise. Corosa took another few steps away, halting quickly, half-expecting to walk straight into the mastersmith. No such thing happened. Only when he tripped himself up again did he stop worrying.
He flexed his fingers, numbly taking stock. All digits present and accounted for. Felt like a multitude of small cuts. They'd scab over. Bother him like hell for a few days, especially the ones between his fingers and on his knuckles. All that was going to be inconsequential, considering the fact that he would, eventually, have to deal with Satero. If he wasn't so drunk that he'd forget everything by morning, something that Corosa made note to desperately pray for.
But those last words. 'Oh, you bitch.' Too sharp, too clear, too much like the daytime Satero when he hadn't been anywhere near alcohol for at least two days. It was too immediate a change. People did not sober that quickly, not in Corosa's experience, especially when they were as drunk as Satero had been. Had seemed. At first.
Corosa looked backwards again, eyes narrowing even in the dark.
"Satero?" he asked, warily.
He did not know what he'd been hoping for.
A response. Yes. But what sort?
The silence provided no answers.
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A/N: School's a bitch, which explains the lack of updates. Alas, I have not forgotten about these two, and they will suffer. Corosa 'specially. Since Satero is probably a damn masochist or something, fuck him.
So, uhm, about this chapter...
Oh god. Things are happening. ;;
(Almost 20 chapters and 20k words and I'm stillworrying that this all went too fast. Thus I think I need to start revealing a different side of at least one of the cripples.)