Jini had not meant to come back.
When she'd stormed out of Harold's cave the day before, pride blazing hotter than the pain in her bones, she swore she would never crawl back to that human again.
Humans were treacherous, selfish things.
She knew their ways—kind smiles hiding sharpened teeth.
She had learned it with her own blood time and again throughout her short life.
And yet… here she was.
Her sharp eyes had caught the lizardman half-buried beneath a tangle of thorn-bushes at dawn.
His scaled body was broken nearly beyond recognition, his blood matting the dirt, his jaw slack as though death had already claimed him.
Any sensible soul would have looted the body for its worth before turning away.
A lizardman was despised by almost every race.
Even among her own kind, whispers followed them—violent, brutish, untrustworthy.
If she dragged him into a village, the guards would finish him off before letting him through the gate.
But something in her chest twisted at the sight.
Maybe pity.
Maybe guilt.
Maybe the faintest echo of the same desperation she'd felt when Harold had dragged her broken body into his cave.
So she hauled the lizardman across rough ground.
It was brutal work; her arms burned, her legs ached, but she forced herself on until Harold's cave mouth loomed before her.
She laid him there, just shy of the threshold, then slipped away into the trees.
She would watch from afar.
Watch and see if Harold's words were truth… or a mask.
From her perch among the rocks, Jini's golden eyes never left the cave.
She saw Harold stumble outside, bleary and slow.
She saw the moment he froze at the sight of the body, then lunge forward with a speed she hadn't thought the man capable of.
She expected hesitation.
Disgust.
Even fear.
Perhaps anger and violence.
But no—his hands went to work immediately, dragging the lizardman inside with a muttered plea.
Jini crouched low, tail flicking as the shadows cloaked her.
"Show me," she whispered under her breath. "Show me what you really are."
The next hour unraveled in horror.
From her distance, she could not hear every word, but she didn't need to.
She saw the motions.
Harold bent over the body, blade flashing in lamplight.
Not slashing, not stabbing—but cutting with precision.
His hands plunged into wounds she herself would never dare open unless she meant to kill.
He stitched, he pulled, he pressed cloths that appeared from thin air, then discarded them when they blackened with blood.
She hadnt been awake for the process when he'd worked on her, had it been like this?
She couldnt help but pull up her shirt a little to look at the stiches still holding her flesh together even though new skin had already started to form a scar.
Jini swallowed against the bile in her throat.
He was like a butcher, but rather than carving meat off the body he was stiching it all back together again.
A madman, anyone unknowing would probably call him a mad scientist or a necromancer trying to bring the dead back to life.
And Harold himself worked like a creature possessed.
His hands shook, yes, but they never faltered.
When sweat blinded him, he shook his head and pushed on.
When blood soaked his shirt, he simply shifted and kept going.
She saw him open the lizardman's chest, saw his arm vanish past the wrist as he fished for something inside.
Her claws dug into the stone at her side.
Madness.
Sheer madness.
No human would do this.
No one would.
And yet, as the minutes dragged on, the lizardman's chest kept rising.
Barely.
Uneven.
But rising.
Jini's thoughts tangled like thorn-vines.
Why?
Why go so far?
Why spill his own strength for someone he had never seen before, someone who could slit his throat the moment those yellow reptilian eyes opened?
For her, she had told herself he had a reason.
Perhaps she was leverage.
Perhaps he thought her useful.
Perhaps he wanted payment later, by way of the use of her body.
She had comforted herself with those suspicions, because the alternative—that he helped her with no strings—was unthinkable.
But this?
A lizardman male.
A cast-off, despised, likely abandoned by his own kin.
Even she would not have helped.
Not truly.
She would have looked away, whispered a prayer, and moved on.
Yet Harold did not stop.
Not when the stitches covered the man's limbs like black webbing.
Not when the casts hardened like pale shells around his torso.
Not even when his own body sagged and his hands slipped with exhaustion.
She saw him slump, back to the wall, chest heaving like he'd run a marathon.
Saw as he seemed to slip into maddes with a smile cross his face, and chuckle of laughter escaping his lips.
Then, finally, she saw him collapse sideways, cheek pressing to the stone.
Unconscious.
Spent.
And the lizardman—alive.
Jini did not move for a long time.
Her claws still pressed grooves into the rock.
Her tentacle hair lashed with a rhythm she barely noticed.
Inside that cave lay a human who had nearly killed himself saving a stranger.
A human who had proved her wrong twice now.
And it unsettled her more than any enemy blade.
She wanted to march down, shake him awake, demand to know what game he was playing.
But what words could she even use?
She had seen his exhaustion, the stubbornness carved into his face even as he collapsed.
No ulterior motive shone in that madness.
Only purpose.
Only the refusal to let death take another soul.
Her throat tightened, strange and raw.
She hated it.
She hated him.
But still… she could not look away.
She left her hiding place, entering the cave dwelling once more.
Watching Harold sleep at the foot of a bed he had given away again.
Watching the lizardman breathe, fragile but steady, in a body sewn together by sheer will.
And for the first time in years, she wondered if perhaps—just perhaps—not every human was what the world had made them to be.
But she would not decide yet.
No.
She would keep watching.
It's probably just him whose weird but for now she couldnt risk the only sane human being lost so, without asking she stole his patient away.
Carring the unconcious man out of the cave, before placing him down on a blanket of sorts and dragging him the rest of the way, as she limped her way foot still encased in her own cast.
"If you're lying, Harold… you're the best liar I've ever seen."