Ancestor's Dragon: A new reader, I see! Always welcome. I wondered if I was stretching limits of believability with their kindness, but I decided that if everyone was against them, it would be even less believable, so there. :p

I just got out of my workshop, so things have been hectic as I get back into my normal routine. I don't like the integrity of this blurb, but it certainly could be a lot worse…

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"Stand down!" Isara shrieked in sync with Halsey and Worrick. The two had their sidearms out and aimed, triggers already half-cocked. There was no response from the wrestling duo, and if Isara was any judge the gun that Ralf had reclaimed slipped even closer towards Celes's head.

Halsey blinked at Worrick – the superior nodded, and Halsey's handgun spoke a brutal word in warning. The bullet sped an inch from the fighting Gallian's ear, but he didn't so much as blink, instead fiercely responding, "Don't stop me! I'm goin' ta –'"

"Stand down!" Worrick cut off. Ralf had no rebuttal except to struggle with renewed energy.

Nervously adjusting the blanket around her shoulders, she examined Celes – saw his injuries, the fading look in his one visible eye. Horrified, she saw him let the gun slip another millimeter down –

That was all she could take. "Celes!" she cried, unable to stand idly for any longer, trying to inspire him to keep fighting, to not give up.

Her voice had a sudden impact on him – not the one she intended.

He let go.

Before she could even comprehend what had happened, Ralf, unprepared for the sudden change of conflict, crashed to the floor. Celes peeled himself away from the wall – literally peeled, she saw, her eyes widening as she witnessed the carnage that the broken glass had made of his back – and stumbled over and away from the Gallian regular.

At least he tried to. Two reports later, his right leg buckled midstride in a spray of blood, and he went down, hard. Ralf had taken his shots from the floor.

The Gallian officers responded with a second set of warning shots right over his head, still hoping to get him to stop fighting. It didn't work – a third shot creased Halsey's brow. As he fell back, swear words on his lips, Isara running to catch him. Worrick finally bit the figurative bullet and put a physical one into Ralf's brain.

And just like that, it was over.

Isara unceremoniously pushed Halsey's cursing body back into a standing position, letting him find his feet himself, and ran to the Imperial's fallen form and threw herself down. Heart in her throat, she grabbed at his hand, shouted his name, about to give in to a full fledged panic –

"Leg," he grunted. Isara could have cried.

Hurriedly she looked down to where a single round – so one of the shots had missed – had hit his thigh, exiting through the other side. It was bleeding a lot, spurting red in a steady rhythm – without thinking, she whipped off her blanket and rolled it tightly around the wound. Even that wasn't quite enough pressure, as red began to soak through the blanket.

"It went through your thigh –"

"I know that," he grumbled. "It hit an artery – the femoral. Major blood vessel. Pressure… here," he ordered, grabbing the junction between his thigh and pelvis. Had this been a less life-threatening situation, she might have made a comment, but instead she followed his command to the letter, pressing her hand against his weaker grip.

"That'll help cut off circulation – won't bleed out," he muttered. A second later, his eyes rolled up into their sockets, and his head fell limply to the floor –

"Celes!" she screamed at him. There was no response.

Boots sounded on the floor around her – Halsey and Worrick. "We'll take over," the latter said, crouching down to tie a cord from – somewhere, it was a medical building after all – as a tourniquet above the wound. Isara shot up from her position, ready to take any command that might help save him.

She found herself rushed from one end of the large building to the other in the following minutes, fetching bandages, dressings, ragnaid, and – by the time they were getting the situation under control and she realized her exact state of dress, a fresh shirt.

After the two Gallians had finished treating the bullet wound to their satisfaction, all three of them coordinated themselves to lift up Celes's unconscious form into one of the beds. However, right after that last effort, she paused, leaning against the linens. Only then did she remember that she too had been on the wrong side of the late Ralf's violence – and every bruise, scrape, and contusion she had suffered chose to make its presence known in the rudest way possible.

That, added with every other experience of the past few days, was too much for her. Even as she felt herself collapsing into the bed, careful guiding hands around her helped her in. Unthinkingly, she snuggled closer to the warm mass in the bed – it was so much more comfortable than hanging off the side…

And for a time, there was nothing but sweet oblivion.

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It was not sun on her face, nor was it the scent of breakfast, nor was it a gentle waking touch. What woke her from her dreams was a burning cramp in her side.

Burning was an understatement. It felt like a combination of being shot, stabbed, cut apart, burnt, frozen, and beaten all while she fell through an endless abyss.

She squeezed onto – something – for dear life, a strangled cry escaping her even as she did so. Waves of agony forced tears out from between her scrunched up eyelids; sweat poured from her skin. She thought she tasted blood as she desperately gasped for air, trying to outlast the pain. It hurt more than Ralf's beating, more than being shot.

Time passed. Perhaps it was a few seconds – or maybe it was a few minutes – or maybe several days, she couldn't tell. There was only pain, throbbing with her pulse, where once there had been comfortable nothingness –

And suddenly it was over. Feeling uncomfortably damp and sticky with perspiration, she opened her eyes.

Slowly, she deduced that in her blind agony, she'd wrapped her arms around Celes's bandaged torso. A tinge of red colored her cheeks when she figured out what she'd been squeezing as if her life depended on it, a tinge of red that blossomed into a full crimson the moment she felt his arms around her as well.

But when she tried to pull away, a small bit of that same pain came wafting back, stopping her attempt at preserving her dignity in its tracks.

"Please, please don't be awake," she whispered, more to herself than to him.

It was not to be. She stiffened the moment she heard him retort, "As if anyone could through that." Her selfish grab of his mangled back must have been excruciatingly painful.

Upon a quick shift of her limbs, she realized that she'd curled into a half ball, pressed against the Imperial's upper body. Her hands were clasped together on the small of his back, his arms in a similar position around her.

If she hadn't wanted to die when Ralf was beating her, she surely wanted to now.

Her stiff fingers unwound themselves from each other as she hastily tried to slide away from him – once again, she barely made an inch of progress before rising heat all over her forced her to halt. In fact, that wasn't the only stopping her; Celes's arms stayed resolutely firm. Even if she hadn't been in such poor condition, she doubted she would have been able to escape the situation.

A complicated cocktail of feelings rose in her chest. Something in the back of her head asked if she wanted to escape – if she actually, in fact, wanted to become closer.

However, it became a moot point when Celes did the moving for her, extricating his arms from her and scooting back the couple inches necessary for the situation to become much less awkward.

At least she had her clothes on. Celes only had his underwear – she resolutely affixed her gaze onto his face. Briefly, she had the urge to try and peel his eyeband off again, but then she remembered that the last time she'd tried to see what was truly underneath it, she'd been beaten within an inch of her life.

Her fist clenched to suppress the obsession. If the fates refused to let her find out, she was better off not trying.

"Alright, Isara, I have to ask. What's going to happen now?" Celes's voice was weak and shaky, no better than her own must have sounded.

She could only shake her head. "I don't know," she said, resigned. "It looks like they were believing me, but as for you…"

"I'm still an Imp," he joked lamely. She offered a tight smile in response.

"Ralf…"

"Who's he?"

"The Gallian you just fought." The Gallian who had just been killed. Resolutely, she put the image of Ralf's dead body away. At least, as far as she could tell by the lack of iron scent in the air, that had been cleaned up a long time ago.

"They got him, right?"

She paused, not exactly sure how to respond. "Right," she offered tersely.

"Still got me," he noted, shifting his wounded leg. The blanket piled off to one side, exposing the bandaged tissue. It seemed Halsey and Worrick had done a good job of taking care of it – the wrappings were clean, no blood visible at all on the blank white gauze. "But you?" he suddenly asked in a change of subject. "How are you doing?" Surprised, she looked up to see him scrutinizing her, concerned for her health as opposed to his own. "Just how badly did he hurt you? I'm sorry I didn't wake up earlier, it's my fault –"

"Idiot," she cut off. "Why do you think it's your fault at all?"

"I saw the way he responded to you when we… got captured. You didn't have to fight for me at all, and yet when he attacked me after I bound his hand, you…" he trailed off.

"I what?" she demanded.

"You acted more like a comrade than an enemy."

She paused, brow darkening with frustration. "Celes, you are my friend. Get that through your thick skull."

"You don't have to be – "

Thinking fast, she took another angle. "Celes, you wouldn't deny a lady's wishes, would you?"

Just as she had suspected, he was struck speechless. That was good enough for her. "Friends, then," she offered pleasantly, casually uncurling her limbs from their balled-up position, offering her hand up to him.

The Imperial pinched his lips together, but gave in; cracking a smile, he took her hand, shaking it as best as he could in the close proximity. "Friends."

Darcsen she may have been in blood, but Darcsen she would not be named. She would return his kindness with her own.

Now all she had to do to finish was get him out alive.

Suddenly, Celes flushed to match her own action a minute ago, turning his head upwards resolutely – only then did she realize just what his superior position meant for his view, and she shifted to conceal herself a little more fully. She might have been wearing a jacket, but when unbuttoned –

"I think I can sit up," he mused. Before she could protest that he had been through worse than she had, he followed up on his words, propping himself up on his elbows.

That was as far as he got – an exclamation of pain escaped his lips the moment he tried to go any further. Tentatively, she suggested, "You really shouldn't –"

Deaf to her pleas, he tried again. Without thinking, she rose to her knees, offered her hands that were immediately taken, and dragged her weight back, using gravity to pull him upright. When she scrambled back up to put herself in the same position as him, a thought pulled at her mind – hadn't moving at all caused debilitating pain just a little bit earlier?

She wasn't going to argue with the results, though, she decided as she settled her legs into a slightly more comfortable position, immediately dealing with the problem of her open jacket with a few efficient movements.

"Get me out of bed," he ordered.

"Not a chance," she retorted back. "I may have gotten you to sit up, but walking around is not something you're going to do on that leg."

He frowned. "Bed is boring. I'm supposed to be the doctor here," he joked.

Wits dancing as fast as they could, she rebutted, "I'm not your doctor, I'm your nurse –" Only when the words came out of the sentence came off sounding more personal than she intended, not the factual statement she had planned it to be.

Celes took the statement at face value, fortunately. "Then stay with me."

The statement took her aback, as she asked, "Just why do I have to stay here?"

"Doctor's orders. I saw the bruises, Isara, don't try to hide them from me."

"I have to –" I have to talk with the Gallian brass, try to get you out –

"Arguing while you're in that condition is not going to be successful as long as you look like that, Isara," he pointed out. More benevolently, he added, "Now get us all something to eat. I'm starving, and you should be too."

She opened her mouth to argue, but her stomach took the opportunity to disagree with her thoughts with a long, embarrassing growl. Off balance, she could only nod to Celes as she slipped out of the bed, tottering carefully towards the building's kitchen.

Indeed, it didn't hurt at all to move. The thought made her smile even as she prepared two trays of hot breakfast – fresh this time, as she cracked open fresh eggs and fried toast from a loaf of bread. She refused to take the easy way out and simply open some rations if someone had asked her to prepare a meal, if the supplies, equipment, and time were readily available. As she worked, Celes struck up a shouting conversation with her about the slang used in her occupation, such as the earlier "a bit" expression that had confused him so.

Even when she returned, they kept the conversation going, moving into his area of expertise this time, where she learned more about the complications of ragnaid overuse. Proudly, she told him of her earlier treating of his wounds, where she had ignored the steadfast discoloration of the bruises, knowing that the wounds had healed – his bright, enthusiastic face when she told him that was worth any price.

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Slowly, I'm having these two characters orbit closer towards each other… I hope it doesn't come across as heavy handed.

But next up: Halsey and Worrick return with some news… breaking their little moment of happiness. Don't worry, though; escape from this dreary camp is in sight!