((Warning, thread contains mention of adult themes?))


Angus had never been so afraid before, or so embarassed. It was like a nest of ostas had made their home in his stomach, running about and making him want to vomit. He hurt, and he had never hurt before. Not like this. Simon had said that he'd known what he was doing, though Angus had learned to doubt him far too late. There had been no skill in his nervous hands.

Angus felt used and foolish. He didn't want anyone to know but it pained him so badly. Angus had limped the entire way to the infirmary, with his collar up, taking all the back paths even though it took longer. Throughout his life, if he was hurt in the garden, his mother would help him, on the sporting field there was always a healer watching. He had no way of knowing whether this would heal on it's own.

He was terrified and young. No one had ever explained how it was supposed to go, he'd just been told he had to wait. How could he wait? Angus had been born impatient. He was matching his brother's stride by the time he was five, running circles around the younger boys. He'd wanted Simon to like him...

He knocked on the door to the Healer's office, cold from the evening chill and pale from his unease. He hoped that someone was there that could help him, someone that could keep quiet. He never wanted anyone to know about this, never.

A young healer opened the door, apparently no more than five years older than Angus. She was holding a stack of papers in her arms, and seemed surprised to see a student so late in the day.

"Erm, hello?" Her wide, brown eyes peered at him curiously, almost timidly. After a slight pause, due to a distracting number of medical possibilities pouring into her head, she recalled the prescribed course of conversation. "I'm Healer Ixbridge. H-how may I help you?"

Twenty days into her internship, Abby was still acclimatizing to the infirmary environment-- so very different from the classroom. Already, she missed attending lectures, taking notes, and hiding in the anonymity granted by a large class. In less than a month, she'd spoken to more people than she had in her entire life, it seemed, but, at last, she was being useful. No more leeching knowledge off the system. She now had the skill and position to reimburse the school for the knowledge she would be gaining, and there was still so very much to learn...

"Do come in." Bowing her head, the young woman backed into her tiny, nearly empty office, and gently placed the papers on her desk. Case files. She had been familiarizing herself with the format mainly, having yet to decipher the idiosyncratic handwritings of her fellow healers.

She motioned to a chair tentatively, half presuming and half hoping the boy wasn't bleeding internally or something equally severe.

Abeline might have been only five years older than Angus but still he saw her as a sensible, possibly judgemental adult. Her voice was kind though and that was enough to ease Angus through the door. He shut it behind him, as softly as he could manage.

He made it close to the chair, opening his mouth to try to explain. It was too embarassing. Immediately he was thwarted by his shame. His lips downturned, distorting his handsome face. His arms wrapped around himself, defensive and fearful.

He burst into tears, sobbing first quietly and then more loudly. Despite being a normal height for his age, a normal weight, he seemed small and skinny. Pathetic like a water-drenched rabbit out in the rain.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this!" He cried out, still sobbing, soft and wracking cries that shook his shoulders and made his eyes look big and red.

"Wh-what?" She spoke softly, instantly at a loss. Fairly sure there was a culturally-approved response to distraught teenaged boys in an etiquette book somewhere, she frowned ruefully, for she hadn't read it. This was nothing like the classroom. Nothing at all.

"Please," Abby began, reaching a hand out to comfort him, but stopping half-way. What was the right course of action? Many galdori didn't care to be touched, herself chief among them. Even the slightest of contact might put him in a worse state.

"Please, tell me what happened. I can't help you if I don't know." She tried a sympathetic smile. It trembled.

He'd really wanted a hug and his tears had gotten slightly louder as Abeline's hand had skirted away. He was damp but he still hadn't bothered to remove his coat. He shook his head, for no reason at all. Perhaps for his decisions and the way they had gone bad.

"Simon told m-me that nothing would happen." Angus was scarlet now. "I wanted him to like me, I wanted to see what it was..."

Another jar of tears made its way into the carpet of the infirmary. Angus sniffled so loudly that he sounded like an engine. His shudders again subsided into a mild staccato rhythm. He ran a snotty hand through his hair, causing it to fall about in wet locks.

"Please don't tell anyone. Please, please don't tell anyone. It went wrong, it won't stop hurting and b..." He couldn't manage the word. "I don't know what to do, if anyone found out, my parents..."

He looked very young, beseeching her like she was there to save him. His precociousness had overstepped the bounds that society had dictated to him. He would continue to rail against them, like he had before but that did not change one simple truth; he feared those bonds. He didn't want the shame of others bearing down upon him.

Wrong move, apparently.

A small part of her sardonically ripped into her social failings, but the vast majority of her attention was on Angus. She watched his shuddering body language, saw the despondent shake of his head. Perhaps he did need contact, as uncomfortable as that would be for her.

"Anything you disclose to me is confidential." She looked into his pleading, golden eyes with a steady, sincere gaze. "I will not tell a soul." Her whispered promise was tinged with empathy. She'd need more facts, but she suspected his worries were not entirely beyond her personal experience.

"You're safe with me," the healer added warmly, taking up a towel and draping it over his head in one continuous movement. "Here, let's get you dry, dear boy."

The sobbing subsided, leaving in its place a quiet misery that was apparent in every small expression, from the slant of his shoulders to the way he scuffed his boots on the ground. Her kind words could not entirely heal his wounded air but they still meant a great deal to him. He rubbed the towel into his hair. It was comforting. Finally, he took off his jacket and hung it on the nearest hook. Abeline would have seen that he was limping, without the voluminous coat to hide him.

"Thanks." He said, clearly grateful for more than just to towel that she had given him.

"I was kind of courting someone." He said, ringing the cloth of the towel in his hands. "I really wanted to make him happy and I was curious, so..."

His voice became softer and his eyes darted about as though afraid someone would come in and hear in. He took a few wobbly steps closer to Abeline.

"I don't think we did it right. It really hurt and I thought it'd stop but it didn't. I know some other people that, well, it wasn't like that for them. I've been finding, ugh, bl-stuff and I'm scared. My parents never told me anything about it, I really need your help." His shoulders were hunched even more now and his head was peeking out from beneath the towel.

"Oh."

It was rapidly becoming apparent that this was beyond her personal experience. The boy needed more than a shoulder to cry on and a word of advice. Of course. Her first month on the job couldn't be easy -- not that she could handle the simple act of comforting an adolescent in the first place.

With only a fraction of a second of delay, her sarcastic mind caught up with the real implications of Angus' words. Her inner jester froze like a hingle in the torchlight, and Abeline herself rocked back on her heels. What little confidence she had mustered routed faster than quicksilver, and her face went white as a pair of abducted and prominently-displayed bloomers.

"W-wait, you mean--?"

Angus looked like a clockwork tin man with a cherry-red finish. His arms were spasming all over the place as he tried to think of a gesture that might illustrate just what was going on without him having to say another damned word. He couldn't think of anything that wasn't horridly crude.

"Aiiyeeee, oh gods... Haad, um, relations of an, uh, intimate nature." Angus choked out, using the least offensive terms he could think of.

He looked at the ground. He looked at his feet. He looked at Abeline's feet. He liked his own shoes better.

"The way he said it, it seemed like a really logical thing to do, I mean... I might not get married until I'm 25, I didn't want to go another decade without knowing what sex." His voice momentarily dipped near-below audible range. "Was like. He was really attractive! Like, stupidly gorgeous, how was I supposed to say no to that?"

He had his hands raised in a gesture of desperate supplication. He looked like an everine, kneeling before a statue of a god. The subject was different but the feeling was the same.

"My mum always said I was supposed to be accomodating!" Angus cried, once again surrendering to tears of embarassment, fingers clutching at his hair.

Please, please, please, don't start crying again, she begged of him (or, rather, wished she could). Her mouth was obstinately clamped shut, as though it knew more about social graces than she. A chrysanthemum of heat blossomed under her collar when she belatedly realized there was no preventing the next wave of bawling.

"Ah-uh," she stammered, and swallowed. Her hand vacillated in the air like a hypnotized cobra, then struck for his shoulder, landing gently. Her grip gradually became firm, in such a way that she hoped was supportive rather than invasive.

"What you did," the healer said, breathing deliberately, trying to keep her thoughts on exasperatingly pointless morals and not on the clash of their tense fields. She earnestly whispered, "T-there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Nothing at all."

This was, in her estimation, true. A little pre-marital experimentation between two consenting partners was not, by itself, entirely dangerous or harmful. Well. There were exceptions, like the teary-eyed young man before her, but that was probably caused by his own ignorance. Which meant it was a fault of the education system. Even Brunnhold's advanced biology classes, best in all Anaxis, certainly hadn't prepared her-- but that was another story.

"Is there anything herently wrong with it, then?" He asked, not knowing what the word meant.

The inconsolable crying seemed to have abated once more, at the very least. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, with a supreme lack of delicacy. His pride was too broken to give a damn about decorum or appearance. In all honesty, what he really wanted was to be warm and dry and eating bread rolls, with no pain emotional or otherwise.

"He said it was my fault." Angus said, finally sounding like he was a bit angry about his circumstances. He seemed to be running through the gamut of his emotions with a speed only a child his age could manage. "For not, I don't know."

He sighed, and the action moved his entire body, shifting his lanky shoulders up and down, stretching and constricting like a spring.

"I have a football match tomorrow, will I be able to play?" It seemed he'd moved past using Abeline as his confessor now. "Also, I know we're all galdori and we're supposed to be upstanding and stiff-upper-lipped but... I'd really like a hug, if I may."

The rabbitiness of his appearance returned, with his eyes looking big and soulful under his eyebrows, his body made puffy by his slumping posture. He clearly still wasn't ashamed to ask for what he wanted.

Abeline was sure she'd seen a painting that looked exactly like Angus did in that moment. It was hanging in the Vienda Museum of Arts, and though she had forgotten the title and artist, she could picture it very distinctly. The huddled shoulders, the saucer-like eyes, the wobbling lip... At the time, she thought it was one of the tackiest paintings she'd ever seen. No one could look that pathetic.

Ashamed of being proven wrong, and plainly drawn in by the boy's expert supplication, the healer said, "Of course.."

The logistics of this hug puzzled her for a moment, as, even with his shoulders hunched, he was still taller than her. So she decided to hook her right arm around his elbow and her left.. she wasn't sure what to do with her left. Clearly, the healer was not an experienced hugger, but, so as not to disappoint him with a lame half-hug, she sneaked her hand between his arm and his waist.

"You'll be fine," she said with more confidence than she'd had all evening. The decade of studying medicine had not gone to waste, and she did have self-assurance in that respect. But she knew her limits. She tried patting his back lightly.

Angus sniffed again, burrowing into her embrace and taking more physical space than she had initially offered. She could feel that he was boney, slim and not quite grown into his body yet. His shivering stopped as she continued to offer him what he needed most, silent comfort.

((eot))