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Aya goes to the kitchen, and gets hot water, and clean rags, and a roll of gauze. She also breaks a leaf off the aloe plant in the window and gets a little bowl and a knife to shred it. She hauls everything back up the stairs, managing not to spill in spite of hurrying to prevent the water from cooling to tepidity before she gets there.

She plunks the bucket and then everything else down beside the couch. "If you want me to help I'm going to need to see," she says softly.
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Yes. That is logical.

With some difficulty, he wriggles out of his shirt.

His back is pretty well fucked up, to an extent most people would consider excessive even applied to a slave. It would be easier to count the parts that aren't bleeding than the reverse.
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Aya makes a hssst sort of noise. She expected it to be bad based on the spread of blood on his shirt, but this is - well, she might need to make another trip.

She dips a little of the water into the bowl for mixing with the aloe after she shreds it, and with the rest, starts doing her best to clean him up. She doesn't bother telling him it's not going to tickle.
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He hisses occasionally, but mostly doesn't react, at least not in a way that's discernible past the crying. The crying is very much still a thing.

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Once she's gotten the worst of the blood away and can tell where the injuries are under it, she shreds the aloe in the smaller bowl of water, crushes the shreds until it amounts to a paste, and starts applying it. "Going to need you to sit so I can wrap you up," she murmurs.

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He nods again.

It takes him some time - half a minute, maybe - but he manages to sit up. And continue crying. Definitely that.
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Aya wraps him up in enough layers of gauze that she doesn't expect him to ruin the next shirt he changes into, tucks the end in, and sits back on her heels. With the last of the clean water she rinses her hands off.

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"Thanks," he mumbles, more or less. It's hard for him to enunciate. Or see. The crying gets in the way.

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"You're welcome. Are you hurt anywhere else? Do you need anything else?"

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He shakes his head again. Although it has been established that this signal may not be perfectly trustworthy.

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"Are you sure?"

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...That is a question he does not feel qualified to answer right now. No response.

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Aya sits right where she is, and waits.

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And he curls up slightly more comfortably on the couch and cries some more.

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"Do you want me to leave you alone?"

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He shrugs. Which, in his current condition, is quite a ways to go to express indifference.

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Aya crosses her legs, collects the various supplies remaining in the bucket to consolidate them, and doesn't go anywhere.

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If she sticks around, she is going to see him spend a while crying. He doesn't seem to be remotely self-conscious about it; he makes no effort to cry more quietly, or hide his tears, or stop.

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After a few minutes, Aya finds herself reaching to put a hand on his knee. Her hand makes it all the way there before she looks at it without quite knowing what she's doing; she considers retracting it and fleeing.

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It's hard to tell, in context, whether he's shifting slightly closer to her as a reaction to the comforting touch or curling up tighter as a continuation of the general trend of unreserved weeping.

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Aya... elects not to move her hand.

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So. The crying. That will continue.



It does wind down eventually, though. And then he just... sort of lies there, curled into a ball, half-dressed in his ruined formal outfit, sniffling occasionally.
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Aya considers trying to formulate another question.

She doesn't come up with one. She sits. She leaves her hand on his knee.
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He stays where he is for - much less time than he spent crying. A few minutes, maybe.

Then he uncurls and sits up, rubbing at his tear-streaked face.

"Thanks," he says again, much more clearly. "You didn't need to do all that, but it helped."
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"You're welcome," says Aya, attempting an encouraging smile.

(She never told him what she'd do after the part where she saved up enough to go to school and got herself a formal education, namely: help people. He's the only one in reach; what else was she going to do?)

She lets her hand fall back into her lap.
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