POV: Liora
The gash looked worse in daylight, jagged and packed with sand and salt, the edges swelling red. I had told myself it was not deep, but the bleeding had not slowed and the skin around it was hot to the touch.
I wrung rainwater from a strip of sail onto the wound and he flinched, unconscious and burning, but his body still knew pain. A tentacle twitched once and went still.
"Hold still," I told him, pressing the cloth down harder. "This is going to be unpleasant for both of us."
I washed as much as I could, wrung it out, pressed again. But the bleeding would not slow and the swelling was spreading fast.
"You are going to get infected," I said, pressing harder. "And then you are going to die, and I will be stuck on this island alone with your creature, so stop bleeding."
Then I remembered the leaves he had pushed through the wall in the cave, dark and wet. He had told me they stopped bleeding and kept out rot.
"You better be right about those leaves," I said, pulling myself up. "Because if I go out in this storm and they do not work, I will be furious with your unconscious body."
The rain hit me the second I left the shelter. I searched the low scrub beyond the tree line, the bushes clinging to the rocks, looking for what I remembered by feel — dark and slick with a bitter smell underneath.
I slipped on wet ground and opened cuts on both knees. "This is insane," I told the storm. "I am crawling through a hurricane to save the thing that tried to kill me."
I found them growing thick on a low bush near the cliff base, same texture, same smell. I gathered what I could.
In the shelter I ground the leaves between flat stones until they became paste and spread it into the gash on his shoulder, then the smaller cuts on his arms.
"If this is the wrong plant and I have just poisoned you," I said, smoothing the mixture into the wound, "I want you to know it was an honest mistake and not revenge."
I worked carefully, keeping my hands from the tentacles where I could, but when I could not avoid them I touched them briefly — a brush of my wrist, a graze of my knuckles — and each time my breath caught and my pulse kicked harder than it should have.
"If you could stop having so many limbs," I muttered, reaching across him to a cut on his far shoulder, "that would make this considerably easier."
They were warm and did not react, and for the first time I saw them not as weapons but as flesh, part of him, injured too, with raw scrapes where they met his back. I hesitated, then spread the medicine across the wounds on the tentacles themselves.
"Do not read into it," I muttered, my fingers careful against the thickest one, smoothing paste over a raw scrape. "You try to kill me again and I will use this paste to write insults on your forehead while you sleep."
The creature had crept to the edge of the shelter while I worked, its round body low to the ground, watching my hands move over the tentacles with its head tilted so far sideways it looked broken. It chittered once, soft and uncertain, as though it could not decide if I was helping or doing harm.
"This does not mean anything," I told it, meeting its flat unblinking eyes. "I am practical, that is all."
I turned him on his side and adjusted the compress. I had found dry sticks wedged under the hull and struck them against flat rock until my palms blistered. The small fire would not last, but the warmth reached us both.
The creature had inched closer, pressed against his hip. I was exhausted, every muscle shaking, my own wounds throbbing untreated.
The fire burned to ash and the cold crept back. The darkness closed around us with the rain.
I lay down on cold sand and the wind cut through gaps in the shelter until my teeth ached. He was burning beside me, fever pouring off him in waves I could feel across the gap between us.
I edged closer, telling myself it was survival and nothing else. My back pressed against his chest and the heat seeped in so fast it hurt, and I could feel the broad hard plane of him against my spine, his breath shallow and hot against my hair.
"This is survival," I whispered. "I am cold and you are a furnace and if you ever mention this I will deny it completely."
A tentacle, limp and unconscious, shifted with his breathing and draped across my hip. Every nerve in my body fired at once, the weight of it heavy and warm, settling against the curve of my waist with a gentleness his waking self had never shown me.
It did not tighten, just lay there, the weight of an arm that fell in sleep, and the heat of it sank through the thin cloth and into my skin until the shivering finally stopped. I was too tired to move it and too warm to want to and too honest to pretend otherwise. I slept, and for the first time on this island I did not dream of drowning.
I woke to sun in my eyes and a large leaf draped over me, broad enough to cover me from shoulder to knee, placed with a care that had nothing careless about it. The tentacle was gone and the space beside me was empty.
A fire crackled nearby, not dying embers but new, freshly fed, and fruit washed and placed on a flat stone. He had woken, seen me curled against him, and instead of pulling away he had covered me and built a fire and left fruit where I would find it.
I stretched and waited for the pain, but it came muted. My cuts had been cleaned and dressed, the welts across my ribs and thighs covered in the same dark paste I had used on him. He had treated my wounds while I slept, careful enough that I had not stirred.
"So you can carry fruit but you cannot stay long enough to face me," I said to the empty shelter. "Noted."
I ate the fruit with shaking hands and followed the beach toward the sound of water, sand cold under my bare feet.
I found him in the shallows, spear in hand, tentacles sweeping through water and herding fish toward the shore.
He moved stiffly, his wounded shoulder held high and tight, the tentacles doing the work his arm could not. As though last night I had not held his fever and he had not tucked a leaf around me.
"Good morning," I said, loud enough to carry. He kept his back to me, spear steady, as though I had not spoken at all.
A tentacle flicked a fish into a bucket and pushed it across the sand toward me. Breakfast without a word or a glance.
"You leave me fruit and a fire and a leaf while I sleep, and then you will not even look at me," I said.
He jabbed the spear into the shallows without answering, and a fish darted sideways and a tentacle caught it.
"You heal my wounds through a wall," I said, stepping into the water. "Then you choke me on a cliff, then jump off it to save me, then tuck me in and disappear. Pick a version of yourself and commit to it."
His jaw tightened beneath scarred skin.
"You do not get to be kind in the dark and cruel in the light," I said. "Answer me. You owe me that much."
He stabbed the spear harder, shoulders rigid around the wound I had treated, and still he said nothing.
"Look at me," I said. "You can ignore me or you can explain yourself, but you do not get to stand there fishing while I am talking to you."
I walked toward the bucket, and before he could stop me, before either of us could think, I pulled my foot back to kick it over into the sand.