Malyn

They'd given Malyn oxygen. X-rayed his chest. Shoved a tube down his throat to peek at his airways—that one had been a real delight. Drawn blood. X-rayed his chest a second time. And between each of these little adventures, he'd had to sit and wait. And wait. And wait some more. 

At least Finch had been there the whole time, lying through his teeth to whatever doctor or nurse tried to send him out. Though, in fairness, maybe most of it hadn't really been lying. Yeah, technically Finch wasn't his brother by blood, but they'd grown up together and were closer than most biological brothers, so what difference did it make? He’d also told the doctors that Malyn had a medical phobia and if he was left on his own, he’d probably freak out and leave. Malyn had scoffed at that in his head, but it wasn’t actually untrue. Finch had just made it sound extra dramatic. Malyn was more incredibly bored and annoyed than he was afraid.

Finally, a doctor came for them, a thick manilla folder tucked under one arm, and led them into an office. 

"Well, to start off with, your lungs look fine," she said, opening the folder. 

“Great,” Malyn said. “Can I go?”

“You’re in a hospital, not a prison. You can leave whenever you want.” She slid a chest x-ray from the folder and set it on the table between them. “Here’s the confusion we’re having, though. This one’s from your records as a child. Your lungs weren’t fine then. You had permanent scarring on them.” 

“Yup.”

She laid a second x-ray alongside the first. “And now you don’t.”

“Oh.” Malyn leant forward to peer at the films side by side, though he didn’t have the first clue what he was looking at. The two looked pretty much identical to him—grey blurs, ribs, more grey blurs. “Well. That’s interesting. Maybe a bit of smoke inhalation was just what my lungs needed.” 

“I don’t think—”

"He was bitten by a breach creature a couple of days ago," Finch cut in. "Bite healed completely, practically overnight. Guessing the two are related."

“That seems extremely likely,” the doctor said. “Do you know why the bite healed so quickly?”

“No,” Malyn said. “Do you?”

“No.”

Malyn leant back in his chair. “See, I knew going to a doctor wouldn’t be helpful.”

"We were wondering if the bite itself might have caused this," Finch went on, ignoring him. "We've also got someone staying with us who moved in around the time this all started, but honestly, I don't think he has any way of doing something like that. And a few days ago we handled the seeds of a plant that came through the breach, so maybe that's something."

The doctor nodded, scribbling notes.

“We send everything through the lab here in town,” Finch added. “I’ll give you our reference number if you want to chase any of it up.” 

“That’s not exactly part of my job, but I will do that,” the doctor said. “If something came through that could completely heal injuries, both old and new, that would be incredible. Do you have a contact number I can take down?”

“Nah, I already tossed my phone into the fire after the fire fighters got there,” Finch said. “A crazy vampire’s trying to kill us, so I think we’re going to have to go into hiding.”

The doctor’s eyebrows lifted. “A vampire? Luther is trying to kill you?”

“No, there’s another one now. Much worse. Luther’s okay, I guess. You can probably email Adin and he’ll get to it once he’s got a secure device to work on.”

"I…" The doctor's pen paused over her clipboard, then started, then paused again. "Okay." 

Malyn held his child x-ray up to the light. There were some blurry spots. Was that lung damage? Or was that just how lungs looked? “So can we leave now, or is this one of those things that kid’s TV shows always warned me about where if you have a special power, the government will lock you in a lab and do experiments on you?”

“No, you can still go. Ideally I’d like to be able to contact you, but I understand the whole vampire situation might get in the way of that.”

Malyn nodded gravely. "It's probably going to get in the way of a lot of things, doc. Possibly including me continuing to be alive. But hey, I probably would've died like two days ago if my friend hadn't blasted a dog in half for me, so that's kinda just a part of life, right?" 

“Uh…”

Finch pushed up from his chair. "Thanks for looking into those things for us. We should get going." 

Finch tried to insist on driving, but Malyn kept repeating what the doctor had said about his pristine fucking lungs until he finally gave up and let Malyn drive the bike. They’d spent hours sitting around only to find out that Malyn was fine and probably would have been fine even if they’d done nothing at all. The oxygen they’d given him at the start had been great. Everything after that, he could've done without. 

And Adin and Tyla had been waiting for them that whole time. He was sure they were fine. Katrina probably didn’t want another piece of Adin. Just… after what had happened, it didn’t feel right for them to be apart. It felt especially wrong to be away from Tyla at a time like this. Or at all, really. They were always together these days.

Malyn felt a flood of nostalgia when they made it to the road that led up to Adin’s little cabin in the mountains. He remembered Finch taking him up here for the first time when they were still mostly communicating through gestures and single words and being offered lemonade by a calm man with huge fucking antlers.

It had been a lot, that first afternoon. Malyn’s parents would have called Adin a monster, but Finch had just sat there sipping lemonade, talking to Adin like he was anyone else. Like he was a friend. Adin hadn’t truly become a part of Malyn’s life until years later, but he had played a part in forming who Malyn was. There had been something monumental about realising he could sit down with someone so bizarre and not have to have an opinion on them. That it wasn't his job to grant someone permission to be.

None of them had driven back then, so Malyn hadn’t been able to make the trek up to see Adin very often. Finch might have been able to power through it easily, but it was close to an hour’s walk uphill and that wasn’t a great time when you had shitty lungs.

The dirt road wound up through pine and scrub before finally spitting them out at the end, where Adin's ramshackle one-bedroom cottage sat exactly as Malyn remembered. Parked in front of it, throwing a long shadow across the lemon tree, was Luther's huge bus. 

Huh. He'd thought Luther and Shadow would've been long gone by now. Maybe it had been too late to head out when they'd gotten up here. The sun was well on its way to being up, so it was definitely too late now.

Finch had barely got his second knock in before the door swung open. Adin must have heard them coming up the path. 

"Tyla's sick," he said, standing aside to let them in. "I can't tell if he breathed something in, or if it's shock, or something particular to his physiology that I have no hope of comprehending. He's pale and clammy, he's been throwing up, and it only seems to be getting worse. We may have to take him back to Nuuvatu. I don't think a human doctor can help him." 

Malyn had stopped listening the second he’d heard the word sick. He was already past Adin and into the cabin, where Tyla lay bundled on the couch in his nightgown and a cardigan that swallowed him three sizes over, a bucket parked on the floorboards within easy reach. 

Malyn crossed the room and reached out to feel for a fever, but Tyla's hand shot up and closed around his wrist before he got there, dragging him down with a strength that had no business coming out of someone who looked half-dead. He clung like a drowning man. Malyn gave up on the temperature check, got an arm under him, and hauled him up and half into his lap until the grip on him eased into something less desperate. 

Finch's eyebrows lifted, but he kept whatever he was thinking to himself and settled onto the arm of the couch. "So how're we getting him to Nuuvatu? Because he's not clinging to the back of a motorcycle in this state." 

Adin lowered himself into his armchair. "We'd have to take the bus. We could wait for Luther to wake up so he can drive, but if Tyla worsens before then, you or Malyn may have to do your best." 

"I bet I could drive a bus." Malyn ran a thumb along Tyla's forearm, slow, coaxing, the fingers locked around his wrist still not all the way willing to let go. "Most buses don't even have seatbelts, so they can't be that bad to crash. Can't be worse than a motorcycle, anyway." 

"I don't want to go back to Nuuvatu," Tyla murmured into his shoulder. "They won't let you in. I want to stay here." 

“I want you to stay with us too, Ty, but we’ve done pretty well with no one dying tonight, and I don’t want to ruin that now,” Finch said.

“I assume the doctors cleared you, Malyn?” Adin asked.

"Oh, yeah." Malyn couldn't help the grin. "Get this. Smoke inhalation healed my lung scarring. I've actually got better lungs now than I started with." 

“Did they say smoke inhalation healed them, or—”

"We're assuming whatever fixed the bite did the same for his lungs," Finch said. "The doctor didn't have any more of a clue about it than we did." 

“Which is what I told you would happen,” Malyn said.

“She’s going to look into everything we’ve sent to the lab recently and see if there’s anything that might have caused this, which is nice of her,” Finch said. “Or, y’know, she’s hoping to get whatever magic heal-all thing Malyn’s been exposed to named after her, but whatever.”

"Good," Adin said. "Normally I'd want to be involved, but I'm honestly not sure what our next step is." 

"Me either." Finch dragged a hand down his face, eyes screwing shut against a yawn. "I've been thinking for the last few hours, and… I don't know. I don't know where we go from here. We might have to move. Fully start over. We could take the risk that Katrina's bluffing and assume she'll lose interest in us as soon as Luther and Shadow are gone, but I don't like the odds on that one." 

“We can’t risk Malyn,” Tyla insisted.

"No. No, I agree," Adin said. "There's a great deal to work out logistically, but nothing matters more than keeping us all safe." 

"So what do we actually do?" Malyn asked. 

“For now, monitor Tyla,” Adin said. “That will have to decide our next step. If he gets worse, someone will have to figure out how to drive that bus. If he stays the same, we talk Luther into taking us to Nuuvatu after sunset and go from there. If he gets better, well. We can move directly to more long term plans.”

Malyn leant his head against Tyla’s shoulder. “Okay.”

“Get some rest, all of you,” Adin said. “I’ll be here, watching over you. I’ll make sure that everything is okay.”