I saw the blood trickle into her frown. Sadly, it turned me into a monster, it a more contagious disease riding along all my cells, transforming me more fully than a simple drop of adrenaline.

I took her hair in my hand and bent her down, pummeled her face with my dark fists. I felt arms and hands scratch me and tug at me, and then, that proving faulty of breaking us up, I breathed heavily in consequence of my blows. Immediately I began to hear "Fi-ight! Fi-ight!" and saw raised tankards in my peripheral.

She desperately fumbled out a knife, and slashed my side. I opened my eyes, and lit the hitting hand of mine to deal in the pain she deserved, while my other hand was still attached to her brown head. I then launched that firey hand toward her face, but she had dodged the blow; and I gripped her shoulder hard after the incident of her escaping my grasp and having plucked me in the stomach, the push, the churn, of the dagger now in me sending pain up my abdomen in excruciating waves.

I fell onto her; and having collapsed her ability to hold me to the point where she was now bending down with me on her, and on one knee, she whispered, "Not again."

"You got me this time," I slurred myself awake -

"They call me down for saloon business - it's quite disheartening," a talented voice (mastering slurring and accentuating its words to the point of irresistible attractiveness) absently spoke to me.

Spasms answered in response to hearing, tasting, and finally feeling things, making me retch upwards and hold my stomach, and slowly return to the inn bed I was on, exhaling pain. It was like a slaughterfish poked a hole in my midsection and swam through, electrocuting my gut...it couldn't be lady cramps...and that stab...felt like it did a lot more than just stab. I breathed, incessant breaths, closed my eyes at the tears that cut through the pain, and was begging for it to stop.

I clammed Farengar Secret-Fire's hand in mine under some of the warm Inn torchlights, cutting my nails into it, its warm, smooth, and wide breadth-(and probably now slightly cut and bloody from my nails)description meeting my senses more clearly as it came obvious that it was really his hand every second that passed, with me holding it. This was the same hand I'd shaken the day of the Barrow mission to prove my worth to the Jarl as Thane. "Ahh, make it stop..." I begged him of the pain.

It took so much for that sentence to come out that I took his wrist and sunk my teeth in it - yeah, call me mad - and he only grunted his displeasure as if I were some weakling canine and placed a hand on my forehead, smoothing it down as if to calm me and take my temperature at the same time, and then placed that free hand that I had finally stopped biting on onto my shoulder, to push me down on the mattress. I obeyed after a fit of not doing so, because I was in shock.

This surfaced in me again once I lied down - I immersed a hand in flames again and he gripped my wrists so tight, staring in my face so sternly I instantly stopped and wanted to get out of his grasp, and that look, because it was ticking me off. I wasn't a little child, he didn't have to scold me like one - ah - I arched my neck up a second time in pain, but not my whole self like at first.

"Little one, Desraim. Stop," he said as my shoulders followed my squirming action, and then he was letting go stabilizing one my wrists and was successionally shoving a bottle up to my bottom lip as an antidote. "You wanna get paralyzed by this? I'm threatening you - it'll shut down all your organs. Now if you don't stop fidgeting..."

I looked him in the eyes but didn't lie back down. "The more you move, the more your body has to pump blood. You're doing the same thing to yourself. You're body has no blood, Desraim. You'll be paralyzed if you continue, and dehydrated," he made me bite down on a cup nearly because he forced it through my teeth - I trusted this to not be the poison, though, and drank the sweet liquid. Water...tasty...uhhhhh.

I grabbed his collar and drank more deeply, the seconds rendering my body hydrated enough for me to stop my asthmatic tantrum. "Not too much, now," he stole the water away from me, leaving me groaning in malsatisfaction. "Nutrients," he forced something else into my mouth. Gruel from a cup. Yuck.

He rubbed the drizzle off my cheek, and this moment with him was less than romantic as I didn't want anyone to take care me like I was a baby...oh, well.

That didn't shush the ache in my groin and abdomen and back and pretty much everywhere in my body (I was suffering from all the battles I've had so far, I believe, especially the most recent one, Fort Greymoor). However, this food made my body feel less weak, and like nourishment was literally running through it and revitalizing every cell (well, it was, duh me). It helped take my mind off the pain.

"Farengar, how am I going to move?"

Farengar placed a hand on my stomach, its warmth deterring me from the oncoming pain of it. "You can't. Not for at least a week. Make sure you don't do anything strenuous like laughing or speaking too much."

I poked out my lips, offended but with enough smirk in it he knew I wasn't heartbroken at his words. "Your way of trying to tell me not to talk?"

Farengar sighed. "I have enough of your lectures at the Court, of how to sell and what dragon you've recently slain. It'd be nice if you just heal, please."

I bent my head down, looking at him under thick, determined eyelashes, the kind of look a lady-manager gives you when you doubt her power in the workforce...because he was doubting my power to continue doing what I want: talk. "So for the news...I really want to know what's going to happen to me," I said: yet I knew I would get what I wanted. This information he couldn't exactly keep me from asking about, and so this conversation continued.

"You're going to have a hard time until you die, unless we find a way to, um, fix your intestinal death," he relayed.

I raised an eyebrow, kinda happy Farengar knew I wasn't offended with realness. "My intestine's death? She gutted me? Wow, that's a little harsh, even for her -"

"That's what the Companions thought. Oh, well. Who knew there'd be another occurrence. We have yet to figure out what makes her such a killer when the time calls -"

"That's just it," I broke his sentence, reaching out for his hand, slightly, again. "The time called." I massaged his long palm, grinning at the warmth, the contact. It made me feel a lot better to be in someone else's presence at a time like this, as if that someone else could share half the pain, and leave me with just a bit of it.

* * *

Time made it so I couldn't do a darn thing - he put a sock in my mouth for yawning - and so neither could I sing the swan song I had prepared for my death, the thing I'd rather do to pass the time than rather sit and stare at the ceiling.

Farengar didn't let me even whisper - kept dodging my advances for human communication with medical lingo, and I'd been here, as of now, for three days. If I pestered him even more, a frank "no," 'I-don't-want-to-talk-to-you' statement ensued.

I drowsed off lovely until he thumped me. "Desraim, you've got a visitor." I smiled.

And said, "Really?" Then dropped my smile for a stale-face as I raised up a little off the bed. "You just happened to finally allow some visitors, because I know people that would have visited me by now."

He smiled at my realization.

Then his robes magestically rustled behind him, brushing Lydia upon her entrance to my room of doom, one that as an Inn room looked a lot less like a hospital room, but was nonetheless still was where I was to die. "Ooh, you came to see me," a useless thought bum-rushed outta my head. 'Cause it was so obvious.

It was also a miny whisper, because I'd been used to such.

"Hi. How are you?" She then paused, stitching it up to fit a sick person, "You don't have to say anything."

I thrusted my thumb up and smiled, crooked. But Lydia kept staring at me like a nervous cow about to have birth, if you ever see one, and I only hoped she didn't scream at me like one. "Why did you attack Uthgerd?" She drawled out this last two words in unbelief.

"I'd wanted to see her, you know full well. But she had no place to apologize for what she did. It made me so angry...its either her fault or not and we've already come to know its mine. She wanted to pretend she was wrong, well, she got it. And I got mine," I gasped for a little air, the sudden intake making me cough. I gaped in pain, reaching for my abdomen and bending forward.

"Yeah, I see. But you'd attack her for that?"

I held up a hand and cut the conversation of with an eventual wave of that hand. Then I summoned Lydia over and took a roll of parchment off the desk near us, parchment Farengar said I'd need if I needed to talk, and started to write: "That's what we Nords do if we got an issue, don't we?"

Lydia's arms folded and her face retracted in a - whadduya know, so surprising! - stink face. "I'll have you know I'm a housecarl. And if I have a problem, I simply report to the Jarl -"

Tap! Tap! Tap! I got Lydia's attention via her shoulder. "Stop meddling in people's buis," my paper said, "Lyd. If you don't...I'm not going to write this threat on paper. Yo."

Lydia stood, dragging out her sentence in an angering fashion - " Desraim, you know how stupid that is. You could get in trouble!"

"Blah, blah, leave. You're bad company," I wrote meanwhile , frowning.

I shoved it in front of her snout, and Lydia snatched it away and balled it up. "You wonder why people leave you, Thane. It's because you never listen." She threw it to the ground, giving me the goodbye of my life, the door closing peacefully. I fluttered back to sleep, enjoying slopes of Skyrim and mudcrab-filled rivers where I made lunch out of their legs shortly after finding them. I ate those bottom feeders like my life depended on it, and filled my belly.

I woke up noticing, though, that I was a dependent mess.

Hehe, let me get this straight.

If people kept running away from me, how'd I take care of myself?

By being more independent, I guessed. I sat up by pulling on the bedpost, and leaned forward, back then, my muscles screaming in protest while. Three crunches. Yeah.

Four...five.

I rested against the post, aware of the clump of blood beneath my bandage that just got bigger. Danggit.

I raised my leg, put it down.

Again.

The other.

Again.

My arms protested in acidic sensations, straining to keep me up, and I almost stopped.

I peeled off the covers, though, at that point, traced the scar on my bicep, the swell on my forehead, then winced at cuts and bruises that eventually the cold of Skyrim made worse.

"Holy creamy sweet buns...what am I going to do..." I thought about it, but didn't have to linger too long before my hands did it for me. Yellow smoke emerged into the room, and I breathed it I'm, wanting every inch of me healed.

Those aggravating parts of me did...but the pain still remained in my gut.

"How come you won't save me God?" I say as a last resort, trying to cheat him out of a gracious act. And. Guess. What...It. Didn't. Work.

You know something good, though?

Farengar was nicer, eventually. He seemed rather heartbroken when his big bulging blue eyes met mine.

"Could you take off that hood? You're not the Dark Brotherhood, or a Greybeard. Unless you're growing bald and -"

He touched the rim of his hood, "Why does it bother you so very much, Desraim?"

I stared at him expressionless. It slipped off his head as a result. "Dying wish granted," said him with it.

"Uh..." He did have a nice shiny bald one, but as expected he was just as alluring without it. I denied my mind thinking of the stretch of an allure like that without his clothes. "Thanks. You seem less like a god of death."

"Hehehuhuh," he laughed a bone-chilling chime that made me shiver as from cold. "I'm not one yet? Maybe I should try harder. But I am just a...court Battlemage, indeed, heh."

I swallowed my brows up in the most investigative stare I could muster. "This isn't going to be one of those..ablutions that happen before someone dies, right, where the person not dying spills their truths out to the sickly one, is it?"

"Hehehe," he laughed again, and I sat up, straining my abdomen like one would a rubber-band.

His eyes stuck into me as arrows in a tree. "You wanna move, hm?"

I let out a sigh, my stomach trying to induce me to throw up now and so not letting me talk stuff about him like I was able, earlier.

"That means I can cut on you. Quickly." Let me rephrase: this statement finally is, his eyes now pinned me to an invisible tree, with arrows his eyes.

When did you become a pharmacologist, my very first question about him since him being my 'doc' became, When did you become a surgeon?