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“You’re bitten.”
Mikleo hears Sorey force out the words, heavy with exhaustion and something that he, with a flutter of anxiety, doesn’t recognise. Sorey sometimes has a knack for pointing out something very obvious. Normally, Mikleo doesn’t mind, but this time it causes a flicker of annoyance in him. He doesn’t say anything, though, and instead focuses on the one thing much more important: keeping his wound—his bite—from bleeding any further than it already does. It’s throbbing painfully. It’s been hours since he was bitten, and only now do they have the leeway to inspect it, huddled together in Sorey's small house.
“You’re going to be fine,” Sorey says, and he sits close to Mikleo, hands hovering Mikleo’s injured arm, like he’s not sure what to do.
Or maybe he doesn’t want to touch Mikleo, despite his strong instinct to help, for fear that something might happen, that Mikleo might turn on the spot, and bite him, too.
Mikleo forces the thought out.
He finds, when he focuses back on reality, that Sorey is fussing over him, trying to find something to clean the wound and saying, “We’re…We’re immune. That’s what Gramps said.” Mikleo stays very still at that, his breath hitching. His eyes follow Sorey’s right hand. It suddenly pauses midway in feeling the ground for something—cloth, perhaps—and fishes something out from his pocket instead. It’s a handkerchief—his favourite one, even. It looks immaculate, free from any kind of dirt, and Mikleo could see Sorey’s name sewn in cursive onto one end of it. Mikleo sewed that.
It’s a shame it’ll be stained in deep red.
“Here, I’ll—” Sorey pauses, looks at him. Mikleo nods, and he takes off the red cloth pressed grimly against his wound. It is what it is: a bite, the teeth marks gruesomely shaped on Mikleo’s flesh, a chunk of said flesh visibly gone. It’s not a big bite that renders his arm useless, but it still is big enough to require medical attention neither of them could provide; Mason really got a good bite out of him.
“At least it’s not my left arm,” Mikleo says, when Sorey has gotten very still at the sight of his wound, “I don’t think I’ll be very useful if my left arm got the biting.”
He hears Sorey breathe a soft laugh at that, and he finds himself tugging a smile, too, but it immediately disappears. His wound stings. “You’ll be fine,” Sorey says again, “we’re going down to Ladylake. We’ll find help there, for you and your arm. It’ll be fine.
“You’re immune, so we don’t have to worry about…turning,” Sorey says, and Mikleo fights the urge to look away. “We’ll have to get out of Elysia first, though, if we expect to get to Ladylake. Fight our way to to Gramps’s house, since all the supplies are kept there. We’ll get your wound properly dressed there, then we can stock up before heading out.” Sorey ties his handkerchief, examining his handiwork. “Is there a difference to their activities between day and night?”
“I…,” Mikleo trails off, hesitating. In the candlelight, he could see Sorey furrow his eyebrows and level his gaze with Mikleo’s. He takes a deep breath. “No, Sorey, there’s no difference to their activities. I don’t know where you got that idea from.”
“Is it? I thought…”
“No,” Mikleo says, “but we do have to go to Gramps’s house. There’s no use hiding here; no one will help us. The village is overrun. We’ll need medical supplies, food, and weapons. We’ll have to fight our way out and to Ladylake. Being immune is useless if they kill us before the virus itself does.”
Silence overtakes them, Mikleo trying his best to even his breathing, and Sorey looking at Mikleo’s wound. Unsaid words hang heavily above them, ones that Mikleo wouldn’t even dare to think, much less to say.
“It’s not,” Mikleo manages, “your fault. No one could’ve known. She can’t be the one to bring that Carrier here. It’s not your fault, or hers.”
Sorey is quiet for a moment, then, “you got hurt protecting me.”
“You would’ve done the same.”
Sorey smiles grimly at that. “I know.”
He stands up, extending a hand to Mikleo. He takes it, and Sorey pulls him up to his feet. “Feel like taking Gramps’s house tonight?”
Mikleo can hear a ringing in his ears, and he’s far too aware of the throbbing in his wound. He’s feverish—he knows it; Sorey knows it, too, and suddenly, he’s aware of that thing in Sorey’s tone that he couldn’t place earlier. “Yeah, okay.”
Sorey smiles. “We’ll be fine, I swear!”
He is such an awful liar, Mikleo thinks as he picks up the nearest weapon he could find in Sorey’s house: an old, decrepit staff that he found in the old ruins deep in the forest outside the village.
Gramps had always said only one of them is immune.