Work Text:
It’s not often that Ivan gets hurt. He’d get a few scrapes here and there, but considering that the Garden was designed to have little to no safety hazards (as much as possible), there wasn’t really anything he could get hurt by.
It’s not often that Ivan gets hurt, but he is used to it. He is used to fleshly throbbing, a wild stinging that will burst out of your skin and ooze in waves of crimson—he will look at it in fascination, and will wonder the implications of the thing called pain; what it means for him, a subject of his own disdain. Then the blood will subside and the thoughts are wiped from his head just as quickly.
But he is here now. The grass is plastic at best, the trees clay at worst, and everything is so wonderfully artificial that he has not had the chance to have those thoughts in a while now.
He has not had the chance to bleed. Not until now.
“What the fuck?” says Till.
He has not had the chance to see Till in this kind of state either.
Ivan looks him dead in the eye. “What the fuck?” he echoes back, just for the fun of it. Just to piss him off, even if a little bit.
Till frowns and he stomping over to him now, a fire burning in the depths of his irises, and they have never blazed this brightly before. Never for him, never for him, never for him until now. The present is damning; the present has dug his grave for him.
“You,” Till breathes out, suddenly unsure of himself. He has stopped walking, and he has halted right in front of him, like he can’t decide whether or not to get closer. Ivan can see the look on his face—flustered and eyes blinking fast, and gone is the previous ferocious incentive. “You’re bleeding,” he settles in the end, his voice quiet and curt.
Ivan holds his arm up, shoves his bleeding elbow in Till’s face and the latter backs away, surprised. Ivan laughs then, reveling in the bewilderment of his expression.
“Good observation,” he comments, nodding. “I am bleeding.”
“No shit,” Till scoffs in reply. Then, softer, “You gonna do anything about it?”
The infirmary is a fifteen-minute walk from where they are now, and it smells so strongly of antiseptic that Ivan’s throat goes dry every time he catches a whiff. No, he’d rather not do anything about it, actually.
“It’s just a scrape. I’ll fix it up later,” he lies. His plans for later consist of lazing around for the rest of the afternoon.
Apparently, though, fixing it up later isn’t an option—not for Till, it isn’t.
“It looks a little deep. You’re gonna get it infected if you don’t treat it now,” he says, avoiding Ivan’s eyes, and Ivan wants so desperately for him to do so. He wants so desperately to see for himself the concern in Till’s gaze, even if he will fabricate it just to keep himself content.
“You’re right,” Ivan acquiesces. “I should listen to you since you have so much experience, don’t you?” Then he reaches out, with his good arm, to thumb softly at the cut on Till’s lip—the one he’d seen him receive the other day. He’d been so fixated on it, the blood-red on Till’s mouth, the color against his pale skin.
Till’s reaction is immediate; he shoves Ivan’s hand away with a sharp groan, and Ivan accepts the rejection like it’s second nature.
“You’re so shit,” he says, and then he levels Ivan with one of his unreadable stares. “You should go to the infirmary.”
Ivan can smell the antiseptic from here. “No way.”
Till frowns at this. “Didn’t you listen to anything I say? You’ll have a hard time if you don’t treat it, you know that right?”
“Who says I’m not going to treat it?” Ivan says, grinning.
Skeptically, almost infuriatingly so, Till raises a brow and looks him up and down. “Do you even know how to?”
“Oh,” Ivan says. “ I’m not going to do it. You are.”
Then: “You’re insane.”
So Ivan comes closer, shows his scraped elbow in all its glory, with the blood still dripping down his arm and Till tries to take a step back. It was time to turn on the guilt-tripping.
“Till, it hurts,” he says, but he is still smiling, his eyes are still crinkled in the amusement that is usually brought up when he sees that particular hesitation in Till’s countenance; it’s so addicting, it’s so maddening. “Won’t you do anything about it?”
So Till sighs. Long and deep and so full of exasperation, that Ivan almost deludes himself into thinking there’s endearment somewhere in the mixture.
“Fine,” he drawls, “come with me.”
And they are walking the direction of the dormitories, they pass through the paths that no one really frequents, and Ivan realizes that Till is doing so on purpose, to keep prying eyes from the sight of his injury. His heart squeezes a bit in his chest; Till doesn’t know what he is doing to him.
“You’re lucky I found you,” says Till, as soon as they arrive, and he is leading them to a room Ivan’s never known about before. “If that got any worse, I’m not sure what would have happened.”
“Well, I would have gone on about my day normally,” Ivan says. He watches as Till punches a code into the keypad of a storage room. How he’d gotten to know the code, he doesn’t think he’ll ever find out.
Till pauses in his actions just to stare at him judgmentally. “You are so infuriating. So infuriating.” His eyebrows are knotted in frustration, and Ivan finds it so amusing, the expressions Till can make; the emotions he can so freely display in the twist of his lips, in the scrunch of his nose.
Ivan just grins back, and the rest of their time in the room is spent in silence.
It’s one of the old storage rooms—which is probably why Till had found the passcode out so easily, and why there’s barely any cameras around. It looks like it’s been previously raided, too. Some of the boxes he peers into are half-empty, and it’s really a wonder how no one has checked to confirm the state of the place.
Over in a corner, Till is rifling through some first-aid kits. A few of them have been ripped open already, and really—Ivan would prefer it if Till just used one of the unsealed ones. Looking so thoroughly for a good one makes him think about why Till would do that, and the answer he conjures up in his head is incredibly dangerous.
“You can just use one of the old ones,” he calls out.
Till laughs sharply. “I knew you were crazy, but you’re also stupid, aren’t you?”
“You’re the stupid one,” rustles Ivan. “You don’t need to care so much.”
Then Till stops, suddenly. He doesn’t turn around to face Ivan when he speaks, just stays frozen into his position. “But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” he says, then stops short.
Ivan lets his smile waver. “What’s the thing?”
Say it. Say it.
“What’s the thing?” he demands, and if he closes his eyes and lets Till’s voice flow through the crevices of his mind, he can imagine him saying it. I care, he will say, I care so much. I care so much.
The silence remains pointed. Ivan almost doesn’t notice when Till stands up.
“Found one!” he shouts, snapping Ivan out of his stupor.
Ivan hovers closer, and he finds that Till has found one. It’s a little plastic box, and though the latch is broken, he can see that the outside has remained unscratched and he grins a little when he realizes this. He cares so much.
“Now come and sit,” Till says to him, taking his wrist and pulling him down to sit with him on the floor. There is a thin layer of dust, but it’s better than doing this out in the open. He wants Till’s attention: undivided and in its entirety.
“Are you sure you know how to do this?” Ivan asks again, half because he wants to rile him up, and half because he’s reluctant now. Hesitant to let Till take care of him.
Till yanks at his hair playfully. “Of course I do,” he confirms, and reaches out for Ivan’s arm.
Through his lashes, he looks up at Ivan, asking for permission. Ivan just nods. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to verbalize his answer, not now, not when Till is looking at him so intently he thinks his palm will burst open at how hard he’s clenching his fist. His nails dig into skin; the pain is welcomed.
“You should be more careful next time,” Till mutters, beginning to get into the flow of things. He does look experienced, if his concentration is anything to go by. His intense focus on the treatment of Ivan’s wound allows him to stare at Till’s face without shame.
“Don’t need to,” Ivan replies. “I have someone to treat me if this happens again, don’t I?”
Till laughs while he cleans the scrape. Ivan barely registers the feeling. “You think I’ll help you next time?” he teases.
Ivan focuses on the way his hair will fall into his face if he dips his head too low, on the way he will blink only every so often; maybe he is scared of missing anything about his face. Maybe he is scared of seeing concern.
“Won’t you?” he asks, and his voice is small.
Till pauses. There’s cotton in his hand, drenched with antibiotic he has yet to dab into Ivan’s skin. He pauses, drowned in his own thoughts, and then he smiles. His brows are pinched together like he can’t fathom the things Ivan is implying.
“You idiot,” he comments, and then he breathes in. There is a look on his face. He stares up at Ivan with caution in his gaze.
“What?” Ivan asks.
“This might hurt a little,” Till warns, like he is actually worried. “You’ll be okay though, right?”
Ivan won’t be okay, not for the reasons Till thinks. He wants to say no. He really wants to say no.
“Yeah,” he replies instead.
So Till proceeds. He presses the antibiotic to Ivan’s skin, and strangely—he’s not sure if it’s the high from being so close, or simply the numbness he has already gotten used to—he does not feel anything. He does not feel anything at all, and isn’t that so strange?
“It doesn’t even hurt,” he says. “You scared me for no reason.”
Till looks shocked. He applies a bit more pressure in the way he rubs at the wound, trying to elicit a reaction out of Ivan, but he stays deathly still.
“The fuck?” he says. “This always used to hurt for me, at least the first times.”
“Maybe you’re just weak,” Ivan says offhandedly. This earns him a pinch in the skin of his wrist, but he just laughs it off.
“You’re just weird,” counters Till. His lips are pursed, but there’s the faintest bit of red that spreads on the apples of his cheeks. He tries desperately to change the subject, “Where the hell’d you get this, anyway?” he asks quickly.
Ivan hums. “Fell down a hill.”
Till calls him out on it right away. “Bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
And then Till is sighing. “If you don’t want to tell me, you can just say so. Who the fuck would believe that you fell down a hill, anyway?”
Ivan insists. “But I did. ”
Till’s scoff is automatic. “You’re an asshole,” he mutters, turning around to look for something to cover the wound with. He contemplates for a bit, then reaches for the gauze.
Ivan takes this time to take a peek at the work Till had done. The wound is obviously still fresh, still an obnoxious shade of red that he wants to smother, but Till did a good job, he thinks. For one, it’s stopped bleeding, and the area around it is cleaned up now.
“Give it here,” Till commands, then pulls Ivan’s arm towards himself, anyway. “Just need to wrap it up, then we’ll be done.”
“Won’t you give it a kiss first?” teases Ivan.
Till sneers at him, but there is a lilt in his voice, the beginnings of amusement. “In your dreams.”
And there’s a semblance of truth—in his dreams, yes, in his dreams. If he ever will dream, it will be of him. Ivan thinks himself mad; he thinks himself enamoured.