“What do I do? How do I fix this?” Michael’s rambling, hands and face flying panicked circles through Raphael’s field of vision. He’s the only thing she can see. She almost laughs from the irony, but it would hurt too much. Michael wouldn’t understand, anyway. He’s not made for that sort of thing. “Raphael? Raphael, what do I do?”
She blinks hard, trying to clear the spots from her vision. She’s been hit, but it’s not bad. Thin blade, so it’s bleeding like shit, but really, the only thing keeping her down is the shock of it. Plus the dehydration and the low blood sugar, which is what’s probably making everything come in and out of focus like a shitty school projector from the nineties. Michael’s face is really close to her, so she starts her self-triage by pushing him away.
“Michael, you need to calm down, first of all. Second, bring me some Gatorade and the first aid kit, please.” Once he scrambles to his feet, she leans forward and begins to assess the situation.
She lifts her shirt up, hissing as she peels it away from the drying wound. The cut’s long and thin, just like she thought, and it’ll probably need somewhere in the ballpark of fifteen stitches. She’d really rather not do those herself, and there’s no time like the present to walk Michael through some basic stitching procedures, so she mentally readies herself to be a pincushion for the next forty-five minutes. She’s in no danger of bleeding out, so she takes the hem of her shirt and starts wiping blood from around the site.
“Michael, bring some antiseptic when you come over here, alright?” She hears a clatter and a curse from the bathroom and then his sweaty, panicked face peers around the corner, followed quickly by the rest of him and the supplies she’d requested.
“Are you going to be alright? Should I take you to the E.R.?” He sets the stuff down next to her and then stands awkwardly to the side as she dumps rubbing alcohol onto a paper towel and starts cleaning out the cut.
“Michael, I’m fine. It’s just a cut. I can do it myself.” She uncaps the Gatorade and downs half of it in one go before continuing. “What’s got you all worked up, anyway? It’s not like this is the worst injury I’ve ever gotten.”
She knows why he’s being weird, just like she knows why her heart is hammering in her chest right now. It’s just the two of them out here tonight, for real this time. There’s no one to call, no one to turn to, no one to text if things go south. Sure, they’ve been alone before. Hell, Raphael’s even done solo segments for easy hunts. But this? This is different. Less than a year ago, there were five Shurleys. Now, it’s just her and Michael. That’s it. Her and Michael and a thousand years of baggage under a bleeding moon.
“I don’t know. I’m fine. I’m not getting worked up.”
Michael is literally pacing. “You’re pacing.”
“I’m not pacing, I’m walking,” Michael huffs. He sits down next to her and watches intently as she pulls a sliver of glass from near her belly button.
She works in silence for a few minutes, letting him watch and fidget and worry and stop himself from trying to help until finally, it gets to be too much. “Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you. Do you want me to show you how to stitch people up?”
“I know how to do stitches, Raphael, I know first aid.”
“You can do stitches, technically. But just technically. Here, show me your arm.” She takes his right hand and pushes his sleeve up, revealing a long, ragged scar and another, smaller one cutting through it on the underside of his forearm. “You see the big one, how it’s got those bubbles and pulls and uneven spots? That’s the one you did yourself that time with Amara, right?” Michael nods. “Now look at this one.” She points at the smaller scar. “See how it’s one clean line with the little pockmarks on the side of it? That’s because I did it and I know what I’m doing. Now, I don’t know about you, but I value my ability to wear a bikini without looking like Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Alright, so show me how,” Michael insists, pushing the suture kit towards her.
So Raphael spends an hour teaching her older brother how to stitch a long wound, and neither of them talk about the implications. Neither of them mention how everyone else has left so far, and Raphael wouldn’t bother to teach him unless she saw herself leaving in the near future. Neither of them talk about how it was becoming increasingly evident that Michael would end up all alone, or about how Gabriel and Lucifer are probably dead by now. They don’t talk about the fact that Raphael wouldn’t have gotten hurt if Michael wasn’t too slow, or the fact that Michael was too slow because he’s been damn near catatonic for nearly three weeks now. They don’t talk about the colleges Raphael’s applied to or the fact that Michael is still denying their father’s disappearance, and they don’t talk about the way they’re just drifting now, roles in whatever sick game the cosmos has played for them at last fulfilled.
They don’t talk about that, so Raphael tries to ignore the sick curdling in her stomach that says she’s starting to hate Michael for everything he couldn’t do. Instead, she teaches him how to stitch. There. There’s one more thing he can do on his own, so maybe Raphael will see less burning bodies in her dreams when at last she leaves.