"Muluku. Muluku Isles, you mean," he corrected. Because as always, things like proper pronunciation held priority over things like mysterious steel boxes. Daintily as if handling a tiny animal, he cradled it against his chest and held the light over it.

"See? All bristling with locks and things. I fathom it would be something important. We'll just have to..." and this was the part where he felt the need to tell her that he probably couldn't get it open, at least not fast. A bit of negotiation with delicate push and pull spells could probably spring the locks, but it would take time. Time he didn't want to spend in here. "Filled to the brim with kippers, perhaps. Don't know how toothsome they'd be after being locked up like this, though..."

That eye flickered around the dark back room, up to the thundrous rain slamming on the ceiling. A slow sigh hissed through his teeth. "I would like to be content with this but after all the heart racing and trouble..." And he looked to the crates again, lip twisting faintly with annoyance. "I suppose we'll dismantle every one of these, if we need to. I don't want to leave unless we have..."

His sentences didn't seem to want to finish. Hava gently set the lockbox on the floorboards and crossed the tiny backroom to the crates again. The first stack of crates they'd uncovered, the one with the shipdate so tantalizingly close to one on the crate he remembered from the month past, was dwindling low. He knelt again and forced the edge of the machete under the lip of yet another crate, and wrenched it up. It was like trying to find a shell sliver on a beach.

"Find something to wrench lids with or roll yourself a smoke, miss. We may be here for awhile yet."

All was indeed clear out front, from what Murmur could make of the stormy dark. No manner of man nor beast was out in the pelting rain, it seemed--pirates were tucked away in their cozy flophouses, alley cats curled up in their hidey-holes, and seagulls vanished into that mysterious place they went when not stealing fish.

This next crate was most exciting. It held bags of dirt.

Oddly, one of the dirt bags had corners poking through the canvas, corners of a size and shape much like the lockbox Havek held now.

“Right, Malarkey Islands thas what I said,” Murmur rolled her eyes slightly, but poked her tongue between the gap in her teeth with a smile to show that she had gotten the proper pronunciation.

“ Glamorous, aint it? This life of crime,” said Murmur, leaning across Havek and planting a fist into the bag of earth. “When I said turds in boxes before I didn’t think we’d find a bag o manure proper. Or do ye think it’s the ash of some poor thief that crossed Shook before?”

Sliding the flat of her knife into the crate like Havek had done with his machete, she pushed down on the handle to slide it open. “Just like guttin fish ent it? I tell ye, even if I ‘ad all the money in th’ world an’ didn’t need te work a day in me life, I’d still spend all me time workin’ in me fish shop.”
But it didn’t budge, and Murmur let out a small harrumph.

She looked at the box skeptically, pushing down on her knife again, all her weight resting on the knife, skin perilously close to cutting on the blade.

“Cant ye just, ye know?” she waved her fingers wildly making wooshing and clicking noises, “Magic tha open?” Magic could pry Turien Fendin’s mind wide open like a sardine tin, brine spilling all over the streets as his poor brain was turned into mush, so surely a lock could be easy. “Or thow it at the bloody wall or sommat? Though I suppose,” at this point her voice which had been up til then mostly unsubtle, rising slowly back to normal pitch was reduced once again to a soft whisper, “that might make a load of noise.”

“But yep,” she slid her knife and pushed down hard again, nicking her palm on the sharp edge “Oh fff-clockin shit crap,” she hissed, sticking her hand in her mouth as blood began to pour down it and quite without wanting them to, a few tears seeped from her eyes, snaking their way treacherously down her face. “I ent doin it right.” She said petulently, well she said “Oiyentdoinitroihht” as her mouth was still around her fist, but she pulled it away to say, “fuckin thing wont open fer me. Show me how te do it.”

Ignoring the blood on her hand, she got into position again. “What are ye doin that I ent?”

Hava tried by and large to ignore the wiggly scrap of girl that just folded itself over the crate. He reached around her, gripping at the edges of another strange thing. He tore open the edge of the sack with the machete blade, easing off the canvas to reveal another steel box. He lugged it out the earth and onto his lap as the other had. His eye darted about the rest of the crate's contents. Then, Havek went about gutting open the other sacks like fish bellies, quick and ragged. Not quite paying attention to Murmur until that tiny squeak of pain. He was up like a shot at that.

"Hulali bless," he hissed, "are you alright?"

He raised the light spell to illuminate her face, her little bloody hand. Blood and tears made Hava chew his lip, eye darting about all nervous. "Miss, may I...ah?" He reached out and took her wrist, delicately as he could. Fingertips illuminating her hand, he bent his head over it, thick cords of hair tenting around it.

"Just a scratch, just a scratch,.." he muttered. "Oh, gods...how clean was that knife? Is --? ...that's a stupid question if I ever heard one, ah?" A sigh hissed through his teeth, a nervous laugh. "You could have just asked, you know. I was getting to it..." Being a healer gave a person plenty of useful skills, but it also had a way of making them absolutely neurotic. A cut from a dirty knife could get infected, swell with pus, be devoured by gangrene. "I can...disinfect that, for you. In fact, I ought to." No, no, there wasn't a faster way he could be distracted from crookery and opiates than little girl tears. In one moment, his whole focus shifted from the curious steel lockboxes to the rumpling about in his satchel for filched little decanters of gin and whiskey. As he searched, he muttered a barely cohesive response to her question.

"It's not how you were doing it, it's...the knife itself, really. Much too little, and the metal probably isn't..." He paused from rummaging in the bag to hold up the machete for her to examine, the length and breadth of it. "It's longer, for one. The blade is wider, the metal is thicker. The pommel is bigger, too. Much better for wrenching things about than a little fish knife, I must admit..." Once a thick mason jar of gin was acquired, he cracked off the top without waiting for confirmation from her about this whole disinfectant business.

"It shall only hurt a little, I promise. And it shall kill all the muck and things, no worry about it crusting over and what not."

Murmur, wiped the tears with the back of her hand, smearing dirt and red absolutely everywhere now looking like some sort of feral girl.” You wot?” she blinked at Havek, not really sure what he was doing, why he looked so clock stopping worried…well, he always seemed to look worried but even more so now then he had been at the threat of that strange light.

Murmur fiddled into her pocket for what she was looking for, her brother’s flat cap scrunched into a little ball and using her incisors ripped the threadbare loose material of the hat’s lining from the hat until a strip hung from her mouth. Using her teeth and un-bleeding hand she tied the scrap of material around her hand. “This ent,” she chewed through a mouthful of material, “The first time I’ve cut meself, I work with knives all the time. An’ sometimes when yer a kid ye get over zealous with filleting.”

Murmur’s ma didn’t bother enough to notice little cuts and bruises, and Levi or Muriel might dab at a grazed knee when she was extra little, but on the job it always had to be about the job- cut fingers or not. Her brothers and sisters loved Murmur, fiercely, protectively but they above all people understood the need to get a few cuts here a few bruises there. After the initial surprise at the pain, and the frustration of being so utterly useless all the time Murmur’s tears were all but forgotten.

Blinking at the gin, she grinned and lifted it loosely from his hands, “Cheers trouble,” and with that Murmur took a sip of gin. “Fiddle about with my ‘and all ye like when we’re out of ‘ere. But no,” she raised a threatening finger, “no magic at all. I just wanna get this finished.”

The remaining sacks of manure contained only one thing, and it was not recreational. Wads of fresh, odoriferous dirt spilled out, filling the backroom with an air the galdori would politely call rustic, and that humans would simply call shi--

"It were back 'ere," said the same voice they'd heard earlier, wheedly and still mildly inebriated. While the two thieves had been occupied with their search (and with each other), the lantern and its drunkard had slowly loped back into the alleyway.

"Hain't this Shook's place?" Another voice, deeper and slower. "Hain't they with the Brudders or wotnot. Ollie, I wanna go back to th' Dove, I don' wanna get--"

"Don' worry, No-Beard, we're shippin' out tomorrow, nobody'll know it were us," Ollie said. "He'll just think it were the same ones what broke in first. See, there's the 'ole they made in the winder." The light tentatively approached the door, not getting quite close enough for the pirates to see in.

"Y'think they're still in there?" No-Beard asked.

"Nah," Ollie tisked at his dim friend. "They's already on the other side o' the Harbor by now. Quitcher bellyachin'."

There were a hundred curses and prayers Hava wanted to hiss, but they were all swallowed down into his belly. With a whisper of monite the soft orb of light in his palm extinguished, leaving them in darkness beyond the weak beam of the lantern. He lifted the machete from the reeking crate, rolled the pommel in his fingers.

Hava slid the two lockboxes against Murmur's knees, pressing them there hard for silent emphasis. He leaned in close to her, for once not wincing over the brush of her hair on his cheek or the warmth of her breath, and hissed two words into her ear:

"Run, miss."

Eyes wide, Murmur stared straight ahead. As Havek whispered in her ear he only reflected what her consciousness was screaming at her. She nodded, not looking at him, gathering the boxes up in the material of her coat in trembling fingers.

Don’t be too far behind, she wanted to whisper, but couldn’t. Holding the lock box she couldn’t even fumble for her pathetic little de boning knifes, but if it came to it Murmur wasn’t about to hesitate to drop them. Staying alive, that was all that mattered in the end. They all said that, you sometimes needed to steal to make sure you stayed alive that bit longer but the moment, Murmur now, that was the most pressing thing. And there was no misguided sense of honour, no way, not like Hava might have. If it came down to it, she’d have to leave him behind.

And taking a deep breath, Murmur ran. Out of the store room, hopped over the counter and tried the front of the store, looking out for a bolt she could slide to open it from the inside.

At least she was moving and out -- the sound of her quick feet scuttling away was relaxing, if just a tiny bit.

He eased back onto his palms, machete gripped awkwardly, and and scuttled across the honey sticky floorboards all crab-like to stay out of the lantern beam filtering through the broken window. Once out of the bit of light, though, Hava staggered up to his feet and darted across the apothecary foyer. Though he couldn't see in darkness, he could hear Murmur clattering with the locks on the front door. His stomach flipped at the recollection of all the bolts and chains Shook locked up with.

"We'll be alright, miss," he breathed, though he didn't sound entirely confident. The words were more to signal that it was him, not some guttered pirate creeping up behind her. Hava turned his back to hers, facing out to the storeroom entry way. He silently prayed she'd be nimble with those locks -- but if not...

Hava hissed the monite for Cloak; they'd surely been heard, but that didn't mean they had to be seen.

A tangle of chains protected the bolts, like a nest of snakes protecting a Naulanese temple. Just like a half-tally adventure story--only, our heroes were petty criminals, the temple was a shop, and the natives weren’t going to eat them. Probably.

Once Murmur had charmed the chains off, the bolts were easy enough. Like the hinges, Shook’s locks were also well maintained.

“I fink they are still in dere, Ollie,” No-Beard corrected.

“Erses! I bet they still got the ging!” Drink had turned Ollie ‘All Thumbs’ Prichard from a cowardly rigger to a lion--a lion that was tired of being out in the rain. His ma’s birthday present didn’t hurt neither. “C’mon, we’ll get ‘em!”

After shoving the lantern onto his buddy, Ollie reached into his pants and pulled out his gun, Bessy. Not a polished mess of curlicues, Bessy was like a simple tumble, capable of doing the job, but not at all pretty. Still, his ma gave it to him, and, like a good sailor, he did love his ma. His birthday had only been a week ago, too; he hankered to try Bessy on something bigger than a seagull.

“Arr!” Ollie growled, trying to sound as dangerous as he felt. He started to cock the gun when he ran into the spice sacks and kicked up a mean cloud. “Hurk-ffft--” he spluttered. “Can you see ‘em, No-Beard? Where the hell are they?”

“I.. don’t.. know...”

Havek’s spell had worked, a little too well. With a sizzle and a pop, the two had disappeared completely--even from each other. Murmur could see herself, but she could not see Havek, and the same was true for him. He could still hear her breathing, but the girl was no to be seen. However, as long as they stayed still, they’d stay invisible.

Of course, Murmur didn’t quite understand the finer points of a cloaking spell, didn’t even quite grasp the she had been cast on. One minute Havek was beside her muttering about things being alright and the next he was gone. What was Murmur to do but let out a shriek and grab at the fistfuls of air where Havek had been…well, fistfuls of invisible coat and torso as there was definitely something beneath her fingers.

“What did you dooo?” she hissed turning to see the lamplight and the faint outline of two large men, heard the sounds of gruff talking and the cocking of a weapon. Before there was time to do anything, Murmur jerked open the door.

He...should have realized that would happen. No magic, she’d said – perhaps, then, that should have been a red flag she had no idea what was going on. That shrill yelp, all that twisting and pawing – yes, they’d be spotted. Of course they would. Hava wouldn’t want to admit that a flinch of fear and annoyance flashed through him.

He wouldn’t want to admit that he seized Murmur by the shoulder and shoved her out the door, either.

Oh gods above and below, he hated guns. The way Murmur thought magic was unfair, Havek felt the same about pistols. He darted out after her and immediately threw himself away from the doorway, from the line of fire, and flat against the front wall. The rain made the darkness that much thicker, and he was blinder for it.

His hand snatched at the space beside him, hoping to grab a fistful of hair, dress, anything, but he only grasped at air and rain. Everything in him said bolt, leave her, she’s probably half way to the docks now anyway. But all the more said he had to be certain.

“Murmur! Miss!” he tried to shout above the pounding storm.

BLAM!

The bullet was aimed at the shriek. It hit Murmur clean through the shoulder, clipping bone and leaving a cauterized tunnel in the muscle. Blood gushed forth, spilling on her, on the ground, on Havek. Everywhere.

"Did I get 'em?"

"I can't tell."

"Then go 'round front!"

While No-Beard obeyed his friend and jogged down the alley, Ollie rubbed at his eyes sourly. The rigger tip-toed cautiously, but quickly, beyond the sacks, only to get stuck in the honey on the floor of the main room. "What the...?" Then he saw the classy vandalism on the counter. And giggled.

As Havek and Murmur had moved, the cloak slowly lifted. They were becoming visible, even as No-Beard's heavy steps were fast approaching.

There was pain, the familiar kind- burning a fist on a stove, scraping a knee on roughly paved ground, slicing a part of your hand on a fish knife, there was the not so familiar pain, like the wrenching of your gut when the trawlermen found your Ma- not quite as alive as everyone had hoped and prayed for and you realized that the shop you lived in wasn’t yours to keep. And then there was this.

Somehow, in the moment bullet made contact with skin and rippled through her body carving a white hot tunnel in between her flesh like a knife driven hard through the shell and meat of a crab it felt like she were the centre of something, some explosion like the stolen wick fireworks her brothers would throw into flower pots and make lights in the sky on special occasions. The flower pots always cracked under the engery of the explosion. The blinding white hot rush of pain came next as metal and blood and bone merged, as the world filled up with blood- her blood.

Red like spilt ochre dripping softly onto the pavement before it got all washed up into the gutters, streams and torrents. Relentless, without mercy the bullet had ripped through her brother’s coat, warm protective hug it had once been and she felt exposed- it was nothing like the real thing, to be so far away from home from her brothers and sisters, rain water soaking her hair and blood all over. Ragged breaths tore out of her lungs as her fingers shook, a strange clammy sheen washing over her face that wasn’t just the rain.

She could walk, little steps, to Havek. Those damn lock boxes clattered on to the ground as she clutched on his sleeve like some small child at Mama’s skirts- her eyes somewhere else, glazed but not in the least bit frightened. Somewhere else. Not quite Murmur now. “I…shot…’e shot me, Trouble,” she whispered gripping hard on his arm, those few teeth clenching together as she felt drawn out and shriveled, like there couldn’t possibly be any more blood inside her, like some dried out dead fish or a rat ripped apart in the jaws of some dog for a baying crowd, and she couldn’t see past this thick wall of rain, battering at her skin like hammers and mallets.

“Help,” she squeaked, crumpled against the mug man like some damp piece of paper folding under all this rain.

Somethings are just reflexive. Hava's coat flashed open and swallowed her up against him without a thought, like a bat engulfing a moth. His arms wreathed around her, clutched her close as if Murmur was fit to melt through his fingers and drain away down the gutters. His guess from earlier tonight had been right -- when they stood close, the fluff of her hair brushed the jag of his collarbone. He squeezed tight and bowed his face into her curls, muscle memories from a time before pain was only for filthy sailors. When it happened to little girls, too. Clutched her close like Akee, like Ama, like other little girls across the sea sobbing into brother's arms with bloody knees or broken noses.

Poa'xa, it hurts! Fix it, poa'xa! Pe'a, pe'a, pe'a, pe'a...

Just when panic should have peaked, burst into hysteria, everything became cool and clear. He'd been in darker places than these, with deader people than this. The healer things in him boiled the situation down to bare bones, dividing into black and white. Though it was hard, keeping your head level when your thoughts kept getting all mucked up with more delicate things, because of soft keening and clutching hands.

"No matter what happens," he whispered into her hair, "don't make a sound."

He couldn't hold her close enough, it seemed. Huddled against slick stone walls in the storm, in the blackness, she was hot and close and the copper tang of blood cloaked the air. His hand slipped a between them and skipped across her chest, not flinching at the closeness, searching for the source of blood. Fingertips stumbled over the split flesh of her shoulder, and so much fear was abated fast. The terrors shattered breastbones and gutshots out of mind, his thoughts could turn elsewhere.

It took more force of will than he thought to wrench one of his arms free of her. A hand arced up and slashed through the air, decisive, towards the back of the shop, the monite for Ghost Sounds hot on his lips. Havek kept the sound of her shrill shriek strong in his mind's eye -- how ever could he forget it? -- and it willed it spring up from all those fickle mona bits in the back of the apothecary, make them cry out. Call call their attention away. Havek lifted his mouth from her hair and spoke the spell strong as he could -- they'd need it.

No-Beard galumphed into the street, breathing heavily. He peered down one way, peered down the other. Seeing nothing, he stroked his beard, which was as large as it was ironical. Somewhere, a dog barked in the distance. The signs flapped in the wind. The rain fell.

And then, the scream--the death cry of a mouse--the sound of a dying Murmur.

The mona had obliged, but not without warning. On the tip of his tongue, Havek could just sense the taste of ash and blood--her blood. But an instant, and it was gone. The message was clear: more spells too soon could risk their ire.

The large man jolted and ran back down the alley just as Ollie yelled something incomprehensible. Another shot was fired, this time at the back door, judging by the sound of breaking glass.

As his fingers skated over the ragged exit wound, the ripped material in her dress sticking to the torn flesh Murmur hissed, feeling a fresh wave of intense pain in between all this constant pain and pressed her face into Havek’s chest, muffling whimpers against coarse fabrics, gripping at his side to try and ride it out. But it was an incredibly long ride and her legs didn’t feel much like they would stand it much more.

Murmur had never been shot before and, well, she couldn’t say she was enjoying the experience but wrapped up in Havek’s coat it was hard not to feel, if comforted was not the right word, then not scared utterly shitless might be more appropriate. It was hard to hear over the sound of the rain hammering on the paving and on roofs and the blood in her ears but she could make out the scream and the shout and another gun shot.

Again she clutched at Havek in a tight squeeze, longing to be out of the rain and the cold, away from danger where she could gather her thoughts and this confusion. In her head he was Levi, he was Mal and the twins, her brothers, her sisters- she just wanted to go home. No one shot at fishmongers and thieves in Vienda and Murmur pretend she could do this,take a bullet for something important, for freedom maybe, not for two dropped boxes in a soggy puddle. Shock coursed through her system , cold beads of sweat like pearls formed on her head. Helpless.

She tried to wish it all away, wish away the longest night, the grim old rose streets with their weak lamplights and the gun shots and the yelling where bullet leapt from nowhere. She could smell the blood, feel it between her fingers and seeping through her dress but she tried not to. Tried to smell fresh fish and chipped ice, the ding of the bell on the door as the first customer of the day came through or the sound of Mal’s gum boots against the floor as he slapped a swordfish on the counter but there was nothing but the bite of acid rain, copper blood and that old musty coat she was wrapped in.

"Aye...can you walk very far?"

It wasn't a question he was going to wait around for her to answer. It more like a politer way of saying, 'If you can't walk, you best remember how, and fast'. Nerves jangled like alarm bells in him, but he muffled them with reason. They couldn't move fast like this, but at least they could move. His arm slid down and twined around her hip, shifting her to his side and offering support. He wasn't quite certain where they were going -- the only destination he had in mind was 'anywhere but here'. Yet when he lurched them forward for that first step, his boots clanked against one of those horrid boxes. Thoughtless, he let he eased down quick as he could with her cemented to his side and gathered the thing up under his other arm.

They shambled along like some quadruped monster, some ungainly thing -- he wanted to find a place, any place, to hide for the night. His eye strained in sheets of dark, but couldn't make out a single building not marked by a lamp. Storms on the waterfront were that much worse, pounding rain and wind blowing in sprays from the sea. Across the thoroughfare, a heavy phosphor lamp dimly illuminated a ramshackle shed erected on one of a dozen docks. Wooden boats stacked in drunken stacks like huge wooden shoes sagged against one side, crates -- Hava could go the rest of his life without seeing another crate -- on the other.

"Come on, miss. I'm going to set this to rights."

Hava clutched her closer than before as he slogged them through the mire of the road, mud bubbling up from the cracks of the ill-cobbled pavement making the street a marsh fen. A waterlogged fishery supply shed wasn't pretty or comfortable, but it was close and it had a roof. Those were the only criteria he cared for, at the moment.

Once there, he booted the cockeyed door open and it blessedly had plenty of clearance. He eased the girl inside the musty dark, leaving the door open so the phosphor lamp swinging from the eaves outside could dimly light the cramped space. It was surprisngly dry inside -- still damp, but not flooded -- small clipper boats and wainscotting and pounds of folded fraying nets hemmed the walls, towered up to the low ceiling.

He slipped his arms away from her and dropped everything -- satchel, machete, lockbox all went clattering to the ground. He slipped off his coat and lay it out on the dirt floor. It was wet in water and blood besides, but the inside was mostly dry. He tried to ignore the large blood stain blossoming on the side of shirt.

When he spoke his voice came out hoarse and rattled, alien to his own ears.

"Ah...lay down if you please, miss. I...I ought to get a look at your shoulder." Hava couldn't quite bear to look Murmur in the face. Instead, he eyed the soaked fall of her hair, her bloody little wrist he'd weakly taken in his hand. "I..I can fix it. I will fix it."

Murmur didn’t need telling to lie down. She sat heavily on Havek’s coat, fumbling hands shucking her own from her body before coming to rest at the top of her dress. A contained area of the thin cotton material was utterly saturated with thick blood, seeping into the rest of the material as she tried to jerk it down over her shoulder, unsticking rapidly congealing blood from the wound and wincing as she did so.

“I... sorry I 'ave te...,” she looked down at her dress in a weak little whisper and felt behind her back for the buttons, fumbling with just the one hand as her other arm refused to be moved without a huge amount of pain. Easing four of the home stitched buttons undone she pushed the dress down over her shoulder and it fell away over her torso. Shivering in her sleeveless and very obviously homemade thin and also very bloodied slip, it did not occur to her to be embarrassed, too distracted was she by the pain and the cold. Her brown shoulders did not look so brown, a strange waxy pale falling over Murmur’s face.

A wave of nausea hit her as she looked down at that messy exit wound, at the congealing blood intermingling with fresh blood seeping out , “Shiit, shit,” she whimpered and to look on the wound made the pain in her body sting anew, the kind of pain that was beyond tears. To stop herself fainting or vomiting she told herself firmly that this wasn’t her shoulder, no this was…a tuna fish, the meat all red like that, she was simply gutting out a tuna, same thing she’d done day in day out when she was a girl, it had never bothered her then. The smell of burning flesh around the blackened ring of the bullet's entrance was nothing neither, not when you cuddled up to Jude the tanner boy who had spent most of his life thigh deep in pigeon shit and horse urine when you were sixteen, not when you handled rotten fish on a regular basis.

No Muck worth anything had a weak stomach. Blood loss or not, she was going to stay conscious and keep a hold of the contents of her stomach.

Easing herself back on the coat, she looked up at Hava with a shaky half smile. “I could bloody do with them kippers an’ whiskey right now.”

Thank the gods above and below she was calm, at least. There weren't any sedatives on him to go shooting in her. Hava knelt beside her and squinted in the half-dark, paying no heed to shucked off dresses and slips. He dragged the back of his hand across her brow, tamping down a shiver at the feel of her cold sweat. Calm, yes, or slipping into shock.

"Can you feel your hands, miss? Toes? Not...not cold or anything?" Not yet, anyhow. Hava dragged his satchel close and opened it, rifling through the all too familiar contents. They hadn't had much purpose, not for awhile. All his little flasks and phials suddenly seemed alive and important. The way the mona's hissed over his tongue like ashes made his skin crawl -- the simple solution, a flash of magic to knit her back together again, was suddenly unthinkable.

He fished out another mason jar of liquor -- it was his next to last. He'd have to start getting his hands on more alcohol. He fished about until his fingers found a long, winding scrap of fabric. It wasn't his dusty stripes of gauze -- he'd save those for later -- but it would for now. Hava cracked open the new jar. The sharp amber smell, hot and hard; whiskey, then.

"If...ah...I could trouble you to sit up again, miss?" One boat oar hand slipped under back and eased her up off the coat, shuffling on his knees to get a better view of her back. His hands loosely gripped the tops of her arms, squinting at her shoulder in the dark.

"Ah...please excuse me..." he breathed, huddling down close, absurdly close, to her bared back trying to locate an exit wound in the gloom and faint lantern light. He swirled his spindly fingers in the whiskey before drawing them up to -- "Sorry, sorry miss," he said again -- palpitate the soft flesh around the wound. Small and dark and leaking blood. A sigh hissed through his teeth, unbidden.

"You're...you're lucky, you know. It looks like a clean shot. Blessed be Hulali you don't have to worry about getting a bullet wrenched out of you." He reached around her and slinked the whiskey soaked length of cloth from the jar of whiskey, not before wringing out the excess. "This will...oh...you know..." he muttered before pressing the wet rag against the torn skin of the wound, dabbing it delicately to rinse away disease and cauterized peels of flesh besides. Hesitant, he hooked his thumb under her slip strap all glued to her body by blood and slid it off her shoulder. "I...sorry, epa'ma, it was...Apologies, miss."

Hava wrung out the whiskey and blood from the cloth before dipping it again and bringing it around to her front. He gave the entry wound the same treatment as the back, scouring it hard as he dared -- which, admittedly, wasn't much. He didn't know if he could stomach her crying out again.

"See?" he ventured when he eased the cloth away, voice a touch quivery "All that blood made it look worse than it was. Just...just a little hole." It was an empty comfort, he knew. Bullet holes didn't have to bleed immensely; most didn't. His mind raced over the terrors of hidden bone splinters and internal bleeding, from that bullet knocking around inside of her. She didn't have to know that, though. He wrapped the cloth around his hand and -- with another muttered apology -- pressed his palm hard on her shoulder, her chest, the heel of his hand exerting pressure onto all her leaking little vessels.

"No...no magic, you said," Hava muttered with a weak, watery laugh. "Sorry it's all a bit...a bit...invasive and barbaric, miss." He pressed his back against the damp shed wall, never letting up on the wound, and curled a leg from under himself, stretching it out alongside her. They could be here awhile. The wet mess of her hair was close, her bare shoulders were close, but his every thought was zeroed in on the small puncture in her shoulder. The rest of her might as well have been invisible.

"I'll buy you a mess of kippers after this. Hold me to that. More kippers than you could possibly stomach, miss."

Prodded and poked, there was nothing for Murmur to do but grit her teeth, hiss and whimper as tears ran down her eyes. What he was saying was reduced to the faintest attempts at reassuring her, barely more than a whisper on the wind. All that pressing about made her shake, she wasn’t any kind of doctor but all the same she wanted him to leave it alone, kicking her leg against the floor she twisted her body this way and that letting out a serious of little, “no…please, no stop.”

Those big gentle hands could have been twin pincers mopping up all that dried blood, pressing against sensitive muscle and flesh. The whiskey burned like fire, sitting up made her head spin and she clutched at his hand going over the wound, digging her nails in, not sure if she was trying to get him off her, make sure he stayed close or simply to alleviate some of the burn.

All she knew what that this night had lasted forever, that she was crumpled, woozy and weak, and yeah pretty damn cold too. Breath still short she shivered violently, wet hair on her back, bare shoulders in the storm subconsciously arching towards the closest point of warmth. One bloodied hand still on his, the rag still putting pressure on her wound she shuffled back, closing the reach of his arm and the cold expanse of space between them trying to somehow suck out all the warmth from his body.

“Cold,” she said quietly through chattering teeth her eyes closing, heavy as the world revolved faster than it ought to be. Scrabbling in the dark she found Hava’s other arm and pulled it around her middle tightly letting her weight rest slightly against his torso on the side of her body not utterly drenched in blood and pressed her cheek into his chest.

She was warmer, that’s all that mattered. No idea where she was, having been preoccupied on the journey there she let the hard floor and the smell of decay slip away. “Breakfast o’ kings tis,” she slurred lazily.

"No, no, no. None of that..." he slipped his hand away from her waist to cup under her chin. "You have to stay awake." His voice was curiously sharp, more for himself than her. He didn't let bleeding, dizzy-headed sailor boys wrap around him and sleep, he wouldn't be doing that here either. Cold, cold -- they were both drenched. He was cold too, but he wasn't slurring and sleepy too.

He' leaned forward and pawed at the floor of the shack, hand scrambling for her shucked off coat. The thing was slick with rain too, and he shook it off half-heartedly before drawing the mostly-dry lining up over her. Been here before, even, not to long back -- though he was the one the floor getting seized up with shock instead of the one bumbling over it like a fool.

"It's going to be fine," he insisted again. "Just...just..."

Stop whimpering like that, were the words that went unsaid. He drew the rag away from the wound, bare fingertips lightly skating around the puncture waiting for more blood to dribble out, to feel the skin around the shot for swelling.

Hava's eye flickered to the dark ceiling, to the hammering of rain on tin, to the sheets of rain illuminated sick blue by the lamp just beyond the cockeyed door. It looked to the humid dark around them, too, to the places where the light couldn't reach. The mona particles where everywhere, in everything, but tonight they felt heavy and tangible. Stirring like dust motes in places the light didn't touch.

A truce was what he wanted, or an agreement of some sort. He was the wick-thing striking all the wrong notes and calling monic ire tonight, not her. If they wanted to spit and burn someone, well...

That eye flickered closed against them, and he pictured the knitting of skin, the regrowth of flesh, the healing of burst vessels. Hava slid a hand down and grasped her wrist. You'll have to trust me, he wanted to say. But if he couldn't do that himself, he had to right asking her to.

"I'm sorry," he muttered.

His fingers flanked the wound and he spoke the monite for Big Fix, swearing he could smell ashes before he could even taste them.

Searing pain bit into Murmur once again. As muscles reached to fill the gap, the nerves spread their tendrils faster, feeling the diminishing hole in exquisite detail.

The small shack went colder still as Havek worked. Heat was drained from the air to fuel the fire in Murmur’s shoulder, and the carbon of their intermingled breath turned to a soft cloud of ash. Almost too hot to touch, the wound closed slowly, reluctantly. The mona’s patience was finite, and when the last of the essential work was done, they stopped, just short of healing the skin completely. The fish monger would have a lasting scar.

As the slow work of stretching her tissue was underway, Murmur would have given anything for the short, sharp explosion of the bullet passing through her shoulder again. In Murmur’s life wounds were left to it, she’d had no experience of healing, not on little cuts, not on grazes and slightly deeper wounds so to have that portion of her body, right through, inside to out was a shock she was neither prepared for nor used to, no prior warning to inform her what was to come. The excruciating twisting and knitting together of skin set the area on fire and she let out a guttural howl like a small animal being twisted and tortured near death. But still through the crying and the swearing she could hear it.

The sound of wet flesh sifting together and sickly syrupy blood changing, the nauseating ripple of bone and blood as the unnatural shifts in her body started. It wasn’t normal, it wasn’t what happened, every inch and surface of matter in her shoulder violated and manipulated, muscles stretching horrifically tight against her body’s own painstakingly slow defenses, its own functions to heal at its own rate.

She could try to be brave, pretend that it didn’t hurt when oh gods it did, and she would have liked to have been. To have taken it on the chin, laughed through it the way her brother’s did when they got beaten up real bad in the basin, some tough as nails moll chewing on a cigarette and letting out the smallest of hisses after taking a whole round of bullets. And vita knew that this was going to embarrass her in the morning. But for now, in the midst of all this white hot pain she was just some scared little thing, just some fish monger’s kid, somebody’s little sister, somebody’s baby. She wanted her Ma.

“No. No, stop it,” Murmur wailed,vocal chords pulling tight just like the thin strings of flesh in her arms. “Make it stop, I don’t wan’…” thrashing her head, Murmur choked on cries of pain, unable to force every inch of the hurt out but trying her hardest, pulling frightened moans and heart thundering sobs from deep deep down in her diaphragm. Her body was reluctant to bow to the mona’s will and so was her spirit, somewhere still horribly aware of Turien Fendin writhing from that pain spell, blood dripping down his nose. “Stop,” she wept again pointlessly, but of course the mona would never listen to her- never heard the cries of humans, it merrily went about its work.

Excruciating pain saw time slow and shift into a messy bloody pulp of pulled skin and Havek and the bastard mona could have been doing their business for eons, a century of burning flesh and savage cries, black heat rising behind her eyes and serpents coiling in her stomach. “I can’t,” she cried because honestly she really couldn’t, “I can’t.”

It stopped, leaving the lingering irritation of pain, the deep imprinted memory of what it felt like to peel away your skin, away your muscle and sinew and nerves and veins, stripping right down to the bone but not stopping there, never stopping until that thing, those things in everything got into the marrow, grinding it down into dust.

Breath shallow, she tore away from the healer- bringer of all that pain, on her knees as though in prayer and burrowed her head into her stomach, the curving of the bones in her spine poking through the thin slip, clutching her poor sore arm around her stomach and the other coming to linger by her wound, fingers soft and as comforting as they could be, stroking her own scar, trying to soothe over the hot skin, to apologize. Muriel, Malachi, Levi, Ellen, Micah, Ira, Alva, Max and Morris she whispered, over and over again, rocking against her knees like saying her own strange spell in monite, the kind where she could call to mind her siblings and just go home.

She had her mind at least, not like Fendin’s when the mona had ripped through it like a piercing head shot. All this magic had sucked the life and the warmth from the shack leaving the cold hollow bare bones and she cried again, into her knee as the wave of nausea hit- her body and her mind almost trying to reject the busy hands of the mona. She choked out a small amount of vomit just in front of one of her knees, hunching over again, a thread of salvia on her lips. A final shiver and Murmur went limp, collapsed over her knees, hair over her head and in that little puddle of sick, unable to do anything but keep her glazed eyes fixed on the dark of her skirts.

Havek's hands clutched at her absence in the air, shivering. How he managed to keep a grip on her for so long completely eluded him. Just as gentle gestures like a clutching a hurt thing to his chest were ingrained into muscle memory, so were blacking out a hurt thing’s cries. Some sailor boys were small and reedy when they were green – just as he’d been, once. Some would squeal and thrash and call out for their mamas on further shores. Tune those out, tone them down to nothing, reduce the writhing thing to a piece of meat.

It was a stupid way to make a living.

A thin cloud of ashes cloaked the air, clinging on his tongue, coating the dampness. When she wrenched away from him, it was like a little lamp spell illuminating the dark. Cleared the smoke pall he’d drawn around his thoughts, drew up the whole scenario clean and in excruciating detail. He couldn’t move towards her, not at first. He recoiled into himself, swallowing thick ash, huddling further against the wooden wall as if he could sublimate himself into the planks. Slick fingers clenched into the rag as he realized he too was trembling like a leaf in a storm. Curled into herself like an oyster around a pearl, muttering unknown names. He’d give her a moment of privacy – how could he not? He might well have just shoved his spindly hand into her chest and mucked around with whatever he found inside. Your body wasn’t yours during a healing. He’d been on the other end of enough to know.

“Murmur?” he croaked after a massive draw of silence, the hammering rain filling in the gaps for him. When no reply came, he crawled the small distance to her side and slid a hand between her shoulder blades. The stillness made his chest churn. Hesitant, he pressed on her shoulder, flopping the limp girl onto her side. Still not quite out of the healer lens yet. Her chest rose and fell with breath, he noted, and the hole in her shoulder had closed clean. Most of the way. Chaos avoided, then, though he didn’t know at what price.

Some Mugrobi proverb said history flowed in concentric circles. Hava just hadn’t been expecting history to cycle through again so fast. A shuddery sigh escaped him, a long draw of breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding. He wiped the slick of sick from her lips with his shirtsleeve. Hava gathered her up in his arms for the third time tonight and dragged her away from the storm churning outside, from the wide open door.

Moving into the lantern light again, he nearly retched too.

Ekua’s headscarf trailed from his hand, bloody and wet as a coil of intestines. Bright ocean blue and intricate stitching sodden in whiskey and the blood of some guttersnipe girl. Havek tossed it away from himself as if he’d been clutching a viper, a hint of bile climbing his throat. It slapped sickly somewhere in the darker parts of the shed.

He slammed the door closed, not desiring even the faintest light anymore. The sea gales battered its weak hinges and threatened to send it clattering open in a wash of rain. The frame of a small rowboat was balanced against the opposite wall. Staggering to his feet – he wavered like a drunk and nearly toppled over himself; this level of nerves and fatigue had been foreign to him, until tonight – he stumbled over to the wall, hand sliding down it in then new darkness until they found the frame. He dragged it the best he could to cover the door, to keep it closed on the storm tonight and curious fishermen in the morning.

Hava could hear Murmur’s shallow breathing at the back of the shed. The cold here was thick and physical, no help to a girl who’d just spilt a sea of blood. He collapsed against the far wall beside her. The spill of adrenaline in his blood was trickling away fast, leaving every overwrought muscle the consistency of water. Trembling hands re-arranged the coats over her. It was the best he could do for now. His fingertips slid the little tendrils of sick-soaked hair away from her mouth, smoothing back her sodden hair.

Havek folded in on himself, drawing his knees in close. He listened to the churning of the sea, to see if Hulali himself held any opinions on this business. The Great God, as ever, withheld comment from Hava. Foreigners called that a Mug compliment. If you cannot say anything pleasant, say nothing at all. The silence was broken not by a howling wind, but a mutter.

“You break easier than you say, poa'na."

(( EoT ))