Evien's summer-brown heels keep bobbing out of view, or maybe its the blood in his eyes. The soreness was creeping in like the low tide but it was nothing he hadn't felt before. Dimly, he notices Evien tearing out a rosehip flower and chewing it up. He has begun to associate this scent with him, this flower specifically.
It was a testament to how often he got himself into fights.
Taylor sits down before he starts swaying on his feet. Some piece of shit. Harrassing Ico. Trepassing. He closes his eyes, anticipating the sting of the poultice. Things moved fast. Could've left earlier.
It isn't clear whether he's talking to himself, to the stranger, or to Evien. He looks up, brows knit, hands rolling out like praying in reverse. My left ear— it isn't working. His breaths are shallow, eyes glazed over with some vague, flimsy distress.

A close up shot of Evien fills the whole screen. He can't bring himself to meet his eyes, and instead focuses on the deadness of his ear. At least, he reasons, the ear itself is still there.
The air is cold where the doctor had swabbed his skin clean. He knows he's being foolish and selfish and childish, but its so easy to slip into a world where you were against everyone and everyone was against you. That was all he'd known.
He's tired. Tired of squeezing in sleep that wasn't even sleep, tired of waking up after a fight and being too sore to move, tired of looking into a foggy bathroom mirror and wondering to himself where that bruise had come from. How that scar had been made. You already know all the answers, Taylor.
I don't know how Ursus'd be like without you, his smile is drenched in cynicism. Probably we'd all be dying from stepping on a dirty thorn. He folds and tucks the distress into some imaginary alligator skin suitcase, shoves it deep into a black corner of a closet.

A sharp scoff, a look back. Fuck no, he retorts, buoyed by his smile. He feels a little less like he's just been dragged through the digestive system of a lawn mower and more like himself pre-fight (which hadn't been so hot in the first place either).
The poultice is still warm from Evien's mouth, and some of it drips down his jaw and neck. He shudders at the strange sensation, and vaguely thinks that he'd rather go without all the fuss. Then he remembers sepsis. Then he remembers gangrene and terrible keloid scars, and he makes up his mind to go through with it.
This is rosehip, right? And then with a smile, See, I'm learning.
It doesn't sting as much as he expects it to, but he still fights the instinctual urge to pull away. There was a gaping difference between pain from a fist fight and pain from a treatment that made the latter much more irritating. Probably because one had to sit perfectly still and calm through it, he reflects. Like torture, but in the opposite direction.

Pleased with himself, the ends of those blue eyes crinkle into a true smile. It would be charming if there was no blood in his teeth, dried into a dark brown crust between his incisors. He looks handsome, in the you look like you've been through shit, tell me more, way.
He smooths his hair back, careful to avoid the poultice. What's your favorite season, then? The uncooperative ear is the furthest thing on his mind now. The last dredges of adrenaline had all but broken down in his system. It is on a post-fight buzz when Taylor can begin to relax. How characteristic.
Mhm. Evien must be tired, he thinks. Cleaner of other people's messes. Healer to a pack led by a warmonger. It sounds like a bad joke.
Eyes hooded, he studies the brown fuzz on Evien's cheek. Thanks, by the way. Really. Something twists where his stomach is, but not painfully. A pressure over his chest, untouchable.

Evien dances on the in-between of summer and spring and Taylor is content to watch. He thinks, briefly, of a springtime rain. The ones you could see coming from a mile away, heavy and dark and inexorable. If you were standing in its way, close enough to see how thick the mist was, you only had two choices: to find shelter or to stand there and get drenched.
He had always let the storm soak him.
I love rain. Maybe the spring or the fall. He can easily see Evien thriving in that in-between and tucking in a flower behind that velveteen ear with the pollen sticky on his hands and his ankles thick with it. The thought at first drives euphoria into him, but it quickly decays into shame. Then the doctor moves in to touch his cheek.
Taylor's mind is just his thumb on his face. The dried blood pills up and falls off as dust. The fine muscles around his eyelids twitch and flutter. A soft and muted breath. Evien, I...
...hope you'll let me return the favor. You've helped me. A lot. Thanks. It sounds as if he meant to say something else but had changed his mind in the last possible moment. He feels full of pins and needles.

Where Evien's had placed his thumb is cold in his absence. He brings his hand up to his face and touches the place it had been. You belong in the spring.
Only a blink in response, a wordless I'll try my best and something chasing that sentence looking like this: for you. It occurred to him again that he did everything in halves. Mmm. He looks to the side as if Evien can't already see him sliding back into the whirring and whining disk of constant thought and he takes a breath in and he takes a breath out until his throat feels clean enough to say it—
Kepler.
His throat constricts around the k and his lips grip the p but the rest comes in a formless syllable filled to bursting with a soft vowel buoyed by softer consonants. The vocal fry takes it away. The interference coming from an old radio, made sepia with time.
Like he felt with Merrick, that tight sense of being awake, some part of him exposed under a surgical bulb but this time warmer and electric, if electricity had any emotions to do with it at all. The weight of it off his chest. He can breathe again.

If he were human then Taylor would've known that he was named after a retired space telescope and thought it was funny that he shared his name with a now-useless mass of metal and technology was drifting through space with a wild and blind eye. How fitting, he would think. How cruel.
Down on earth, he hears a thank you from miles and miles away. He presses the secret to Evien. Taylor is no doctor, but even he knows that the first rule of being one is: do no harm. How different they were. How unknowable to each other they should seem.
A long pause. Yeah. 
The single Kepler split into two. One Kepler only existed in the moments before this conversation. He was afraid and running from a brother than wanted to pick him apart anaestheticless. The other Kepler had stopped running. He had settled in a home just waking up from the winter with someone who cared about him and who he cared about too.
Let's try this.
That voice, that face, those hands, finally being buried. Auf Wiedersehen.

Kepler was an atrophied name— kept hunched and crouched in the backrooms of his skull. The first time he had heard it was when he was born. The second time, when his brother ground burning wood to his side and he had fought back (the scar was still there, a hairless jagged circle, puckered). The third time, in Evien's mouth.
A long silence passes. His fists are clenched. For a moment, it would be easy to mistake the expression on his face and think that he was going to cry, but instead, he presses his face to the doctor's shoulder, eyes closed.
Into his summer-brown skin, he mouths something incomprehensible, something in-between Evien and idiot and thank you.
His breaths drag and shudder, brows drawn together tight in a sobbing without tears. A lot of the times, you didn't need to say I love you. Perhaps Taylor knew that better than anyone else.

They sit there for a while, cheek-to-cheek. Holding Evien like this is a constant reminder that they are both alive and breathing and moving. Blood swells in his ears with the crescendo of unheard music.
In his dreams, he put Evien's hand to his mouth. He had memorised how in the sunlight, his eyes were flushed with more yellow than anything else. How his brown hair was struck into strands of spun gold, wild and tousled. In his dreams, he twisted them gently around his finger.
The warmth is almost overwhelming. He holds the heat in his cupped hands like he's been doing with every emotion recently. He had not known that he could change. He had thought that he would live out the rest of his days hollow and in fear. His dreams were only dreams, until he saw his brother.
It feels wrong to think about his past now. He remembers he had said it doesn't matter. Just you.
The kiss fills his head with something unnameable. Something to get drunk on. He hugs him, all palm against palm, chin against shoulder, fingers worked together— and then Taylor, Kepler, was facing him.

In his dreams, he was something to drown in.