Chapter 2: Call and Response
Eir first encounters Dean Winchester facedown in a ditch. The setting is not unusual for either of them. She is accustomed to finding wounded warriors in such places, in the immediate aftermath of battle or in later days of drunkenness and despondency. He is new to hunting alone, and is already more acclimated to regaining consciousness in abandoned places than he cares to admit. Certainly more than he would admit to the brother who cut him loose months ago, or to the father who has absconded with the entire safety net.
What is unusual is the attraction. She is conscious of soldiers all over the world as they fall, but she is usually pulled by large concentrations. His individual need rises like a flare, yanks her from a lazy afternoon in a veterans' ward and deposits her a hundred miles away in a roadside ditch. As ditches go it's on the unpleasant end of the spectrum, containing slimy rainwater and a tangled heap of slashed skin and broken bones belonging to one dead creature of indeterminate species, and one nearly dead human.
Venom burns in his veins, corroding them further with each sluggish beat of his heart. He doesn't have time enough for her to be gentle. Eir plunges her hands right into him, sifting tainted blood from clean, hissing softly as the poison she draws out of him drags barbs through her own system, until she isolates and expels it.
The speed with which she knits bones and muscle and organs back together is brutal, but necessary to prevent his body shutting down. Urgent, forced healing is excruciating; she knows her touch causes as much pain as it ultimately relieves. Eir doesn't mind the agony bolting through her own body like lightning, but she usually tries to be delicate and respectful of mortal perception. He's fortunate to remain unconscious.
When his blood runs clean and his breathing is easy, she cradles his head in her lap, lingering over his upturned face. His tall, solid frame reminds her of her earliest charges, beautiful Norse warriors with their broad shoulders and strong hands; the way their muscled bodies moved in quiet moments of gratitude. His small, even features are more evocative of the Others who mingled with her people as they moved west.
In sleep they have all looked the same: young and vulnerable. This boy has a sweet, almost delicate face that belies the combat experience she reads in his body and the old hurts roiling just under his surface. He's chronologically young, but already world-weary. And yet, at his core is something irrepressible. Something bright and golden. It rises like helium and feels like sunlight on a late summer afternoon. She indulges the whimsical image of that warm golden energy seeping through his skin to burnish his hair and eyelashes, scattering gold flecks across his skin and in his jade-green irises.
She is suddenly aware that those green and gold eyes are fixed on hers. She's been so fascinated by his interior that she missed the signs of rising consciousness. She's still entangled in his energy, her fingertips searing pink patterns on his chest as they close the last of his wounds. And she has forgotten to cloak her physical presence; he watches her register his attention.
His mouth curves up at the edges for a millisecond; then one large hand grips both of her wrists and all traces of sweetness and vulnerability flee his face. "What the hell -" Eir hears just before a white-hot bolt of panic repels his grasp and zaps her to safety far away.