Accepting Consequences

[Sören]

Much had changed since he'd last been in the city. Sören's gaze roamed the view below, following the lines of the impossible arch with intensity. The world changed while he was chasing phantoms in India, and the news called him back to Moscow as surely as the yank of a leash despite his injury. The eye ached beneath the patch, and even the smallest fluctuations in light sharpened that to pain. But he stared anyway.

Morven made an inelegant entrance behind him, armed for a war he had no interest in fighting. She had come, as he had bid; his eye closed for a breath, a little relief unfurling in his chest. Then he turned to her wearily, filtering out the moaning already skipping from her tongue. She had grown little beyond the wilful child he had plucked from the wilderness, but her talents were too rare and useful to discard just because she was, at times, abrasive. He understood her brashness to be mostly for show. If she cared so little for him, she would not have come.

The words buzzed past his ears, aside from one. It caught like a hook, slashing at the emotions he stored very carefully within.

Ruined.

The eye was a toll he paid willingly, a trifle annoyance. But Declan's life; that was a price it had taken time and distance to settle on his shoulders, and he did not like the bitterness it left in him. He swallowed the regret in his cavernous chest, and would speak of it to no-one. The man had been foolish - so damn foolish - and the tragedy had happened so fast. Still, when he closed his eyes at night his mind dissected every moment over and over, testing for the weaknesses, examining the variables. The replays tormented him.

If death it must be, could it not have been a hero's death?

Sören lowered himself into a chair, muscles stiff - but expression stiffer. His teeth ground in his jaw, steeling himself to quiet and patience as he flipped the patch from his face. Despite himself, he watched the shift of Morven's features. Not disgust; just the light of morbid curiosity. She might have kept that to herself; for a doctor she had a terrible bedside manner.

When she came closer her grip pinched his chin, and Sören answered her questions mildly, eager for her to simply get on with why she had come; that would tell her more of the injury than he could. But it was easier not to argue. Without fuel for her temper, her attentions turned to the injury, despite the small huffs at his silence. Her fingers touched his temple, and almost immediately ice needled his blood. Sören flinched beneath the touch of her ability, then held himself still until she dropped her hands and leaned back, frowning at him.

"Well?"