Profound relief flooded her when Jax spoke in his usually flippant tone. The sullen words didn’t matter, only that he spoke. Speaking was good, speaking meant he was alive, it meant his lungs weren’t filling with blood. Her relief was so surprisingly intense that she all but staggered when it hit her. The openness that her Captain had dragged her into meant that for a brief moment her relief showed on her marred face. 

She was moving towards him as soon as the smoke cleared enough for her to make him out and with each step the ice came back, frosting over her lovely features until it was only her eyes, her traitorous eyes that spoke of her worry. She skirted the Captain and his armful not really trusting herself to speak to him since her own emotions were so raw from everything. But she did press a hand lightly to his shoulder, a quick grip with her fingers still scented with the smell of gunfire. That was all she could manage to acknowledge his words since her world narrowed down to one.

One infuriating, frustrating, hurtful man. A man who was not dead. It would have been her fault if he had been killed, she hadn’t moved faster, she had hesitated. She had nearly failed. She was very good as self-recrimination, a master at mentally flaying herself. 

She stopped before Jax where he sat with his flippant tone and that unsettling grin and looked down at him her eyes skipped his face and searched his body for wounds. She was a doctor. She was there as a doctor and the relief she felt was that of a surgeon for her patient she told herself. She was a first mate. She was there as an officer making certain a valuable crewman was still fit to do his job. That was it. She believed it.

As she looked him over she recalled how he had hid the wound in his hand and knew she would have to be insistent. She recalled too the sting of his words as he mocked her, the words that had made her flee the pond filled with [i]Nymphaea Antares. [/i]

“I need to examine you.” She said succinctly, her honeyed voice stiff, professional though her eyes pointed out the lie in her voice. 

Then her eyes lit upon the scorched hole in the front of his coat and they narrowed even as she felt a squeeze on her heart. 

No

She dropped, crouching before him she touched the hole gently as if probing for a wound.

“[i]Mon Dieu[/i], Are you shot?” she asked, her surgeon’s fingers tracing the edges of the hole shakily.