Work Text:
Ashton was on the doorstep, not moving, still. He would have looked like he was sleeping if the amethyst crystals and green skin of his head and shoulders didn’t look so terrifyingly like a shattered vase with thin, wet cotton draped over it.
Milo stared at the body, at Ashton, because Ashton couldn’t be dead, Ashton was too tough to be [i]dead[/i]. Surely that was Ashton, sleeping off their injuries - The world shook, and Milo fell beside their friend, wrapping arms around them best they could. “ANNI! I need some help! I need to carry Ashton!”
It was a struggle. They put him on Milo’s work table, fussing to clear it off, but now they had Ashton where there was light from Milo’s lamps. Milo didn’t dare touch his head yet, but Ashton was breathing raggedly, so not dead yet. Besides, they could focus on Ahston’s arm for now. That had to be the right course of action. The bones were fucked here too, and setting them was tricky, but necessary before they figured out how to deal with the cracks that radiated out from what must have been the point of impact.
Milo kept feeling sick and nauseous. Ashton had watched out for them so often, and now he was on the table, bleeding from rifts in his skin. Worse, when Milo tried to stitch them up, they couldn’t get a needle through that skin to stitch it. Milo was damn near in tears, all they could do was bandage it all tight and move to the sight that scared him most.
Ashton’s head was… Terrifying. The purple crystals were shattered short on one side, sharp shards hiding within what was left, and his skull wasn’t smooth, but looked shockingly soft. Milo whimpered. “Come on, Ashton, I’ve got to put you together again,” Their voice cracked high, and they smothered some noise that might have turned into a laugh or a sob.
They used tinkerer tools to get the crystal shards off Ashton’s head without putting pressure on it, and slowly, with these tools, they started looking at his body in a new light. Inspiration struck. They had things - supplies - one of the oil lamps without soot had a cheap glass shad made of slag and there was a glue Milo had that they could stick the skin back together.
They still felt ill, as they went about the next part, cutting a flap in Ashton’s scalp to check on the skull below. Something was horribly off about it. Milo didn’t think what they were about to do was the right way to deal with it, but all they could think of was removing the fractured pieces and fitting the curved shade to the hole and then, very carefully drying it as best they could and pressing the cracks of skin closed with layers of gold and glue.
It was hours of painstaking work - the night past, and the morning, and Milo worked on, until their hands shook with an exhaustion so deep that it would take an army to feel it all. they weren't sure anything they’d done was enough, but they needed rest.