Tears welled in Fanner’s eyes, but he didn’t let himself sniffle. He wasn’t a good person at all. He could fix Yore, he knew he could. He could fix Yore and make him not hurt anymore and maybe everything would even be okay. 

But what if it wasn’t? There would be no going back. Mr Burrows had wanted him to be a healer. He had been bred with it in mind. Yet, when he realised he’d been successful, all he did was isolate Fanner and have someone hurt him.

Fanner didn’t believe that was what Yore would do. Things were very different here, but they were different in ways Fanner wasn’t even close to understanding. He didn’t know what Yore might do. He didn’t know if Yore would be as loyal to him as he was to everyone else or if his loyalties to others would compromise his kindness to Fanner in the same way they compromised his concern for his own wellbeing.

And maybe that would just mean overworking him and pushing him in ways that might trigger the more dangerous side of his magic, but what if they started to have the same sorts of thoughts as Mr Burrows had? What if they, too, realised that he was a renewable source of organs for transplants? It was hard to imagine Yore condoning that, but what if someone he cared about more than Fanner was dying? What if it were somebody who was crucial to what they were doing? Would he really take the moral high ground? Would everyone else go along with it if he did?

The worst part was that if they asked that of Fanner, he doubted he would have the courage to say no. He could be selfish in secret, but Companions weren’t exactly trained to stand up for their needs and assert their boundaries. They were trained to serve in whatever way was asked of them. He knew he could be easily swayed into doing just about anything, no matter how much he didn’t want to.

But just because he intended to keep his healing powers a secret didn’t mean he could do nothing for Yore. Yore was asleep now, his breathing slow and even. Fanner pressed down a little too hard on one of the painful knots of muscle in Yore’s back and Yore’s breathing hitched, but he didn’t stir and a moment later he was back to breathing normally. A small amount of pain wouldn’t wake him.

It had taken Fanner a long time to figure out how to heal scar tissue. Most healing was intuitive, the body’s own natural healing processes guiding his magic, but healing scar tissue was different. Scar tissue was the end result of the body’s own healing. At that point, it was done.

Eventually he had realised he had to actually dissipate the scar tissue before he could do anything else. It was a bit more involved than dissipating dirt from an item of clothing, but it was conceptually similar and not too tricky once he understood what he was doing.

The one problem was that it did hurt a bit. It involved reopening a wound, so of course it did. Fanner was fairly confident that if he went slowly, it wouldn’t wake Yore, though. The scars that permeated his body were numerous, but each of them was very small. Yore lived with so much pain in his day to day life that he probably wouldn’t be disrupted by a little sting.

Fanner’s goal was to target key areas in Yore’s back and leave him with just a bit less pain than he’d started with. He would wake up the next morning and feel good and he would attribute that to the massage, which would mostly be true. The pain would gradually return and if it wasn’t quite as bad as it used to be, he might not even notice. 

Yore would probably hate him if he ever found out what Fanner could do and how little he actually had done, but at least it was something.