So Camillo kneels by the chair and applies the bolt cutters to the iron ring, trying not to jar it too badly.

Valentine shuts his eyes and breathes through it as it shifts.

It's solid, but not solid enough to hold up to the shears. It resists, a few seconds, and then gives all at once.

"There we go," Camillo says, as if Valentine is very small and Camillo has just pulled a splinter from his foot. "Do you want to take it from here?"

It's surely going to hurt, taking it the rest of the way out.

"...cut it again. So there's a larger gap. Then I'll pull it out."

Cato is preparing bandages, and not looking.

"Yeah. Okay."

Don't start telling him how to handle it. It's too normal, too comforting -- he'll relax. He can't.

The second cut takes a couple of tries; the ring keeps slipping under the shears. He gets it eventually.

He lets out the breath he was holding, when he hears the piece of iron clink off the seat of the chair onto the floor.

"...all right. Look away."

Camillo wants to protest that he doesn't need Valentine to protect him, but he remembers how relieved he was, just a moment before, to see Cato looking away.

He turns his back.

He pulls the sharp cut edge of the ring through the hole and out.

It's not nearly the worst thing he's had to do to himself in the last three months.

He lifts it in his palm, then, and just looks at it, the ring freed from his body, his body freed from the ring.

"...this should have some power to it," he muses, miles away.

"Oh my god," Camillo complains, affectionately exasperated, and then it's time to wash Valentine's ankle in a mixing bowl with lots and lots of fresh clean water.

There's not much blood at all. It must have had some time to heal. It's just a hole, lanced all the way through.

"...it really is you," he says, watching the water trickle through him.

"It's us, Dad."

He sacrifices one of the older dish towels to dry Valentine's foot, holds it steady in his lap for Cato to bandage.

Cato's wrapped a lot of bandages. He makes quick work of it.

Valentine watches his hands.

He reaches down to take one of them, when it's done, feel it light and warm in his,

and then nearly knocks them all to the floor grabbing them and pulling them into his arms.

"You're alive. You're alive. You're alive."

He chants it like it's its own blessing.

"We're alive. We've been okay."

The latter is a bit of a stretch, but at this moment, with his face in Valentine's shoulder and his arms around Cato and Valentine both, it feels true.

He smells like blood and sickness and the texture of his back is wrong on Camillo's hand but he's here, and holding him, and not letting go.

Cato has one hand tight in Camillo's shirt and one on Valentine's wrist, like if he doesn't hold onto him he'll disappear as quickly as he arrived.

"--you need more water. And food, and electrolytes, and a bath -- and antibiotics, probably, if you have anything fresh, and painkillers..."

He can't stand to just be here and feel. It's too much.

"No painkillers," he says, before he can even finish processing the sentence.

"Advil, Valentine, jesus."

And they're back on familiar ground.

"...all right," he says, reluctantly, "Advil. If it's already here — "

Cato is already passing it over.

And Camillo is already filling a glass with water.