Author's Note: Wheeeeeeeeeee. I'm working on it, I swear.

IODH: Not mine.

Nobody Important

Chapter Twenty-Four: Bloodbath

In which anatomical limitations are explored.

By: N3k0

The tent was relatively small, and unlit. Before he entered, Ariel placed a hand on his shoulder. "You understand, no matter what you do, she might die anyway." Martin stared at her dully. Did she honestly think he didn't know that? Or ... it was because she thought he was the Heir. He couldn't put himself in any kind of danger, because he was the Heir, or she'd throw up a fuss. Well ... and she was a determined pessimist. That seemed to be her defining feature.

"Ariel, I've spent every waking moment of the last two days tending to people who might die no matter what I did for them. One more won't kill me." He offered her a kind, encouraging smile, before ducking into the tent, lighting it himself with a small mage-light. Illusions weren't his specialty, but he worked better if he could actually see the injuries he tended - and the lights often let him read in bed without fussing over a lamp or candle. A smallish smile ghosted across his lips at the memory of better times - and vanished when he actually laid eyes on his patient.

The dark-haired girl was ashen, her face twisted in pain, her eyes squeezed shut. She held herself stiffly, but otherwise didn't seem inclined toward much movement. Where before he'd seen an almost rosy glow to her cheeks, she was now almost bloodless.

It wasn't hard to see why. Her chest had been bandaged up, but it was obvious she'd taken some kind of grievous wound. The bandages were soaked through with blood, and someone had removed what tattered clothes she'd been wearing and set them aside. By the state of them, they'd have done less than the bandages themselves to preserve her modesty. Where the bandages didn't cover was almost as alarming as those places that they did. Other than the chest wound, various cuts and gashes marked her entire body. Where she wasn't cut, she was bruised. Where she wasn't cut or bruised, she had scars from times where she'd once been cut open. Defensive scars seemed to mark every inch of pale skin. This stranger was not at all unused to combat - even abuse, maybe. And her face ...

Her face was lined with pain, yes, but she was gaunt as well. Her eyes were sunken into their sockets, and lightly bruised. He saw a thin scar that traced down over one eye, barely visible in this light. She seemed malnourished, her bones showing under the soft glow of his mage-light, a state that would not help the healing, since she'd obviously have no reserves of her own power for him to draw from.

Not for the first time, he thought that something was just wrong with the Bosmer. Kneeling next to her, he tilted her head to the side, telling himself that he was just checking for injuries.

What he found didn't surprise him. It actually answered more questions than it raised. He just didn't have a lot of time to process it, before she bit him, sinking tiny, almost delicate fangs into his hand. Martin bit back a yell, determined not to call the guard unless it was necessary, staring at her as she suckled on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Before his eyes, her body seemed to relax. She wasn't breathing, but then, he couldn't remember if vampires actually needed to.

So that was it. The vampire was as strong as - possibly stronger than - two men, and she didn't die from an assortment of injuries that would have killed a normal person. He also suspected she was some kind of assassin, given the bits and pieces he could remember of their talk in his rooms. He could not, however, remember if she'd given him her name, nor how exactly she'd snuck into or out of his rooms unnoticed.

The stuff of legends, their Heroine.

None of that changed his debt to her, nor did it change the fact that she was injured and he was a healer. It only made it somewhat more difficult; he'd never treated a vampire before.

Gently, he skimmed the line of her neck with his free hand, examining the scars there. Two puncture wounds, injuries that had torn her flesh open and apparently become infected. Where she'd been bitten, then. He reached up to her mouth, prying her away from his other hand - he couldn't afford to be distracted by blood loss, not when her injury was so severe.

The girl whimpered, trying to curl in on herself, but the pain of it forced her rigid again, a strangled noise escaping her. Even unconscious, she tried to keep quiet, it seemed.

He'd have to see the wound, so he produced a small knife of his own - he counted a full fifteen of hers lying next to the bedroll they'd set out for her, along with two more strapped to a heavy-looking backpack. His, however, was spelled against causing injury, like he suspected hers weren't. It was also clean, and there were enchantments for sterility hammered into the very metal of the blade. Using it, he gently sliced away the bandages, wincing at what he saw.

If he was any judge, the Bosmer's heart had been nicked by whatever had pierced her - probably a sword of some kind, though serrated and decidedly unclean. Infection fought with the girl's body, angry red lines spreading sullenly from the wound. Did her heart even beat? Should it beat? He found himself at a loss. The injury was deep, too - no, it had come from the other side.

He'd never seen someone so injured still living, but then, he'd never dealt with vampires before. The only way he knew anything about the creatures was a mostly academic study of the occult, and even that touched more on the ways vampires were not Daedra than on how to deal with them.

He was almost afraid to try anything, for fear that it wouldn't work - or worse, that it would hurt her.

First, he tried to burn out the infection with pure magic, but it was almost impossible to tell what parts were her own flesh and what was just common disease. Did vampires even get sick? Somehow he got the sense that her vampirism, the dark curse that marked her entire body, rather than just parts of it, was doing her more good than harm right now - and a thorough magical cleansing would probably burn that out, too, whereupon Martin was certain that she would die, just like anyone else who took that bad a chest wound would. Assuming, of course, he had enough power to burn it away - the curse seemed as much a part of her as her lungs, or her spine, to his sight.

He frowned, searching his memories for every scrap of information he'd ever picked up on vampires. The subject wasn't exactly one that was well-recorded, especially in Cyrodiil. In the Heartland, vampires apparently made themselves scarce, such that most people could go their entire lives without seeing one ... or knowing that they saw one, anyway.

Everything he'd ever read indicated a vampire needed blood to survive, and deprived of it they would die a long, horrible, torturous death. At least one 'scholar' had actually bled a vampire completely dry in the name of research ... though most copies of the book he'd published on the topic had been burned, and the man had turned up mysteriously dead not long after. The madman had written that ultimately, it wasn't even beheading that killed the vampire - it was the bleeding out that followed. Martin doubted that.

Focused as he was on the injury, he saw that yes, her heart did beat, slowly, stuttering at times. What would happen when it stopped?

He decided on a more practical question. How would he give her the blood she needed? He could hardly call a refugee in to be slaughtered, trading one life for another. He didn't think he could trust an unconscious person to stop drinking just because another person would die of blood loss just as surely as she would - and would she drown in the attempt? Looking to her knives, he gnawed on his own lip, absently. Did he think he could manage it without killing himself? He was tired, too.

Martin took one of the blades from the girl's selection, inspecting it carefully. Like all of the others, it was very sharp. Unlike all of the others, it didn't seem to be magical in any way - many of her weapons seemed to be spelled to cause extra grief to any they were turned against. This one also didn't seem to have been used much, and when he sketched a rune for cleanliness over it, the rune showed pure and white.

It would have to do. Martin pressed the blade to his forearm, holding it steady above the girl's slow-beating heart.

He said a prayer to the Nine, then sliced open his own flesh.