[Ridge]
"Well it's not poison." Raforn concludes, holding the bottle up close to his eyes. He's holding it out cautiously with two fingers, as if it may try to bite him at any moment.
"I could've told you that. What sort of idiot directly hands someone a vial of poison?" I groan, knocking my head back against the wall at the Doc's lack of helpful diagnosis. Shit, I forgot I'm injured there too.
"You never know." He sighs. I expected him to argue with me. Maybe he's being considerate since he knows how much pain I'm in, which includes a grueling headache. That being said, he's been acting strange since before the looter attacked me, all the way back to the GW incident. So maybe it has to do with something else?
He opens the cork lid, bringing it up to his nose to take a whiff of the bitter aroma. The brown and gray bits look like crushed leaves, filling less than half of the little clear bottle.
"There's no need to waste anymore time on this. I'm perfectly fine with just using whatever you give me." I snatch it from his hands, tired of dealing with this.
He reaches for it, "Wait-"
I turn the open bottle over, dumping its contents into the space between two floorboards. Raforn stares at the now empty vial in astonishment. He looks at a loss for what to do now. His twitching fingers seem to want to gather the bits of herbs from the crack, but he chooses to sit back on his heels and let out a helpless huff.
"What if it was important? You need all the help you can get right now." He scolds.
I roll my cramped neck, careful to avoid hitting it on the wall again, "No use dwelling on it. I'll heal just fine on my own, and with your help. You're my doctor, Forn, not that fucking looter."
He's taken aback at first. Perhaps because I don't usually talk about people like that out loud. I just can't bother to put up a polite front right now, everything hurts too much. I don't like nor do I trust Tristan, end of story. I'm not in a good enough condition to hide that.
Besides, it's not like she tried to be civil with me. No, instead she couldn't even leave well enough alone and came to see me hours just after I woke up. Not to mention I'm stressed as shit over Kadeeth.
Raforn filled me in on that situation some more when he examined the vial. Kadeeth's tied up in what the Mercenaries call the brig on the other boat. Since river boats are so small though, it's basically a little nook under the deck with a trap door made of wooden bars over it.
It took five people to subdue him last night. Five people and they still couldn't even manage to leave a scratch on him, much less knock him out, which is apparently what they were going for. At first he was "feral" as Raforn put it, but he eventually calmed down some when they brought Raforn on deck to take care of me.
When he finally realized that the only people left around him were trying to help me he actually pulled himself together. The Doc said he stopped trying to attack everyone, and even temporarily forgot about the intruder. Once I was all bandaged up, and before he could slip back into that berserker state of mind, he was locked in the tiny confinement pit.
I know Tellur said to leave it alone for now, but as soon as we dock and head for the March territory, I'll go find him. At least Raforn has visited him a few times.
I wouldn't want him to be as lonely, or as in pain, as I feel right now.