He shrugged weakly. "Don't know anymore," he replied, letting his eyes drift closed, if only momentarily. It was a long story and one he wasn't feeling up to telling just yet. Besides, what was the point of explaining" It was doubtful she'd understand, and even if she did, she'd likely think it foolish. He was starting to doubt the wisdom of it himself, especially after almost being killed by them. "Am I ..." he trailed off, licking dry lips, the question his brother had asked just a few minutes before left unspoken.

"If you do, it'll be because you were too lazy to fight it," she informed him before he could finish the question on his lips. Softening, she sighed quietly. "Your brothers need you. Don't give up on them, okay?" Reaching for a different cloth, she wet it and held it to his lips, dribbling water into his mouth to help him wet his throat.

He made no reply to her statement, doubtful of that, too. Maybe Nate needed him; he wasn't so sure about Eli anymore. There had been a time when they'd been close, but all that had changed after their mother had died and their father had gone off the rails. He sucked up the water, his throat feeling as parched as the desert, and mumbled a quiet, "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Setting the cloth aside for a moment, she looked him over with tired but critical eyes, considering his overall appearance. "Have you eaten anything in the last few days?" she asked quietly, marking the sunken look to his flesh that she had missed the night before.

"No, haven't felt much like eating," he replied. He felt like he had a huge hole in his stomach, but he wasn't sure if he was up to eating anything much yet.

It was at that moment that Nate chose to return with fresh water, both for drinking and bathing. He looked between the two, having overheard the conversation as he was coming down the hall. "I can make something to eat," he volunteered. "Eli went out for supplies. Got some eggs and bacon and bread and milk." That likely meant that Eli had "borrowed" said supplies from a house or farm closer to the village. With any luck, he'd asked nicely, but it was unlikely.

She rolled her eyes, more amused by Cody's response than concerned by it, and looked up as Nate re-entered the room. "No, you need to sleep," she informed him sternly. "And no arguing. How much good are you going to be if you're falling asleep on your feet' I'll stay with Cody. It's fine."

"Pardon me for saying so, ma'am, but how much good are you going to be if you're weak from hunger" Cody here's more important than sleep. I'll make us something to eat and then I'll sleep," he told her, not taking no for an answer. He turned on a heel before she could argue, footsteps heard on the stairs as he departed.

"Stubborn, isn't he?" Cody asked, rhetorically. "Runs in the family."

Brona's eyes narrowed as Nate stumped off to make something to eat. "Hmm ..." She glanced down at Cody as he commented on his brother's stubbornness. "There's more than one way to skin a cat, my mother used to say," she said with certain amount of gleeful confidence. "He'll sleep. As for you ..." She picked up the cup of water, very carefully letting a single drop fall into it from the vial she'd taken from her basket earlier. "You're not eating until you've stopped sweating, at the very least. C'mon, let's get you up a bit so you can sip this."

"What is it?" he asked, more curious than suspicious. He had no reason not to trust her; after all, without her help, he'd likely be on Death's door by now. He winced as he tried to push himself up, the stitches on his ribs making it hard to move without being in pain.

"It's made from cali leaves, mutant venom, and fennel," she told him, twisting about to ease her arm beneath his shoulders and help him to sit up without putting too much stress on those stitches, proving herself to be much stronger than she looked. "Tastes like crap, but if medicine tasted good, people wouldn't get better."

He couldn't speak for a moment, biting back a groan as she helped him to sit up for the first time in days - the first time since she'd drained the wounds and stitched them back up. He looked a little pale and sickly from the effort, and it took him a moment to catch his breath. He was feeling a little light-headed, but the feeling quickly passed. "Mutant venom?" he echoed dubiously. Wasn't that what had caused his infection in the first place"

"I know it sounds crazy," she assured him. "Trust me, I was skeptical myself. But when people are infected with mutant venom, their wounds close within hours, and diluted enough, it retains that property without killing the patient. So yes, there's venom in this, but not enough to kill you."

If she wanted to kill him, she'd had plenty of opportunity already, and for some reason, she just didn't seem like the type. He decided to trust her, not that he had much choice, letting her help him with the glass, not trusting his own shaking hand not to spill the mixture before he could drink it. "I do - I trust you," he told her, hoping that by giving her his trust, he might gain hers in return.

Trust from her side might be a while in coming, but she wasn't about to abandon him when he needed her nearby. Very gently, she guided the cup to his lips, tilting it just enough to let him drink in slow sips, holding most of his body weight braced with her own. "If I wanted you, or your brothers, dead, I'd have done it by now," she told him quietly. "I'm not as helpless as I look, you know."

He couldn't very well reply to that, until he was done sipping the mixture. It was taking all his self-control to get it down without spitting it back up. The stuff tasted horrible, but like she'd said, most medicine did. Once it was down, he relaxed a little, obviously favoring the wounded side, reluctant to lie back down now that he was sitting. "Never said you were," he told her, almost shyly studying her a moment before forcing his gaze away. Whatever he thought of her, it wasn't helpless. He had a feeling there was a lot more to her and to the story of her being here than she was saying, but it let it go for now. Maybe she'd trust him enough to tell him in time - if she stayed long enough. He could only imagine what she thought of them and wasn't sure he wanted to know. "Used to live on a farm once," he told her. It seemed like a long time ago.

"My family has a farm," she answered. It was a reasonably safe topic, after all, and provided a little common ground. "That's where I call home, anyway." She bit her tongue before she could comment on people missing her; he didn't need the stress of worrying about that while he was recovering. "What did you raise ....animals or crops?"

"A little of both, but mostly crops. Had a few chickens and a cow. Some horses. What we didn't have, we traded for. It was a hard life, but an honest one," he said, with a little wounded pride. He wasn't much a fan of the way Eli was going about things, and it had caused some friction between the two brothers in the past. He wasn't sure if he should tell her much more than that, and he was rescued from making that decision by the smell of food that was wafting up the stairs. "Smells good, whatever it is," he remarked with a weary smile.

"Maybe you and your brothers should come to Pax and settle down," Brona suggested mildly, but she didn't press it. Catching the scent of food from below, she smiled along with him. "It does," she admitted ruefully. "Do you think you could eat?"

He arched a brow at her suggestion. Having been chased off from one too many villages in the past, he doubted they'd be welcome, but it was nice of her to offer. He didn't get the chance to say that though, as she was asking him another question. "Not sure," he said, that frown still in place. "I can try."

"They haven't done much in the way of welcoming us, I'm afraid." He supposed that was what happened when you went around stealing their food and supplies. At least they didn't steal money. They'd found jobs on occasion, but Eli never seemed to want to stay in one place for long, and the other two knew better than to argue. Cody knew at some point he was going to have to speak up and tell his older brother how he felt, but he wasn't quite ready to stir the pot yet. "After Mom died, Dad went a little off the rails. He insisted on hunting down every mutant in existence, so we took to the road, drifting from town to town, never staying too long. He got himself killed a few years ago, but by then ..." He shrugged. "Eli said Dad would want us to keep going, but ....I have my doubts. It's not their fault they've become mutants. You don't shoot a bear just because it's a bear, do you?"

"They're mindless animals," Brona agreed softly, though she was horrified that his father had chosen to turn his sons into mutant hunters, rather than allow them to experience their grief and grow from it. No wonder they all exhibited signs of emotional trauma - Eli, with his gruffness; Nate, with his sensitivity; even Cody, with his apparent inability to think about himself first. "You know ....there really is nothing to stop you from settling in any of the villages," she offered. "All it takes is the will to prove you're not there to cause harm, and you said yourself that you're all stubborn."

He voiced all this despite the fact that he'd nearly been killed by a mutant. "Maybe," he replied. "But they weren't always that way. It's the war that made them like that. What gives us the right to kill them just for trying to exist?" he countered, though he saw her point. He sighed, further picking at his breakfast, despite his hunger. "You don't know Eli." Though Cody had often suggested they join one of the many militias if Eli was so set on killing mutants, Eli had always come back with some argument about not trusting the villagers, and Cody wasn't quite sure why.

"Well, you got lucky living on the edges and not being picked up by the women from the valley," she pointed out. "They'd have had you guys with a snap, if they'd ever found you."

"They wouldn't have gotten close," Cody insisted, though smarter, tougher men had fallen into their traps. "We mostly hunt at night. Lay low during the day. We almost ran into a group of them once, but we got lucky. They didn't see us and kept going. They had some men with them, too. Nate and I wanted to do something, but Eli said it was none of our business. Our job was to kill mutants, not get involved with the villagers' problems. I'm still not sure what we could have done. I don't like killing, but I guess I'm good at it." He took up a bit of scrambled egg onto a fork, not looking very pleased with himself.

Brona paused, watching him quietly. "There's nothing wrong with being reluctant to take a life," she said quietly. "Any life. Even if that person, that being, is trying to kill you, you're not a failure just for not wanting to kill them, even if you have to." She sighed softly; releasing someone from a long painful illness was one of the few things she truly hated doing, and yet sometimes it had to be done. "But Eli was probably right that time. They didn't give any quarter when they picked people up - you'd have been captured or killed."

"No, we wouldn't," Cody argued, as if for some reason, he knew better. "My Dad taught me to shoot. He said it might come in handy someday, if I had to defend myself against mutants or outlaws or wild animals. I can shoot a leaf off a tree from a hundred paces. It's a gift, "he said, "but I wonder sometimes if it's not a curse."

"My brother was taken, and he escaped, and he almost died doing it," she shot back heatedly, disliking his insistence that he and his brothers were somehow better than every other man who had ever lived under the shadow of the valley's threat. "Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't, and pretending you're not as prone to bad luck as the rest of us will only get you killed one day."

"I didn't say that. I just said it's not likely they'll get close, unless they take us by surprise. How do you think I got hurt?" he shot back, his face flushing with emotion. "I know we aren't invincible. I know we've been lucky. I'm just saying I don't like killing. I'm very capable of doing it if I have to." He sighed. It was a lot of words to get out all at once, and it was taking a lot out of him. Or maybe it was just the heat of the moment. "Sorry about your brother," he added quietly, hoping he didn't sound insincere. Everyone had been through something out here, and he wasn't the type to judge.

She subsided, looking down at her plate, her appetite gone as her thoughts turned to Mahon. Had he reached the valley' How had the fight gone" Was he alive and well and preparing to come home with his Nemone, or would she never see her big brother again? But none of these were questions any of the brothers here could answer. She shook her head. "It's okay," she said quietly. "I'm a little ratty myself. I'm sorry I snapped at you."

He would have offered to listen to her story, if he'd known she was worried about her brother, but from what she'd told him, he'd been one of the lucky ones and had escaped. He sighed again, before setting his fork down on the plate. "It's okay. You didn't ask for this, and you don't owe me an explanation. I'm the one who should be sorry. Do you-do you think I could rest a while now" I'm feeling a little sleepy."

She nodded, setting her plate aside and reaching for his. "Of course, the best thing you can do is rest," she told him, moving to close the shutters now he was no longer radiating heat. "Here, let me help." Kneeling on the bed beside him, she brought his arms around her shoulders with an instruction to hold on tightly, and proceeded to cheat in a manner that would have made her mother proud. She simply untucked the sheet from the top of the bed, and slid him down on it fairly easily, settling one of the pillows to cushion his head. "How's that?"

He found his heart racing a little as she came uncomfortably close, though the only reason for it was to help him get comfortable on the cot. He hadn't done more than pick at his food, eating a few bites here and there. It wasn't hardly enough to live on, but what he really needed right now was rest. "That's good, thanks," he replied, his face going red again, hoping she'd blame it on the fever. It hurt like hell to move, but not as badly as it had before. "You should get some rest, too," he told her, knowing sunfall would be here before too long and that was the time when the mutants came out. They were safe here for now, but that might not last.

Gently touching his head to check his fever, she smiled at him. "I'm sure I will get some more sleep," she promised him. "Sure you're comfortable" I'll be right here, unless someone evicts me." And by someone, she meant Eli. She doubted Nate would say boo to her unless she really crossed a line.

He wasn't bold enough to ask her to stay, but was glad she would be there when he awoke. He nodded his head against the pillow. "I'll be fine," he insisted, though he was far from out of the woods just yet. "I'm sorry, Brona. I didn't mean to make you angry."

"You didn't make me angry," she assured him. "I just ....I have a lot to worry about at the moment, and I shouldn't have taken that out on you. Your only job right now is to get better, okay' Don't worry about me. I'll be fine." She wasn't entirely sure if that was completely true, but it was good enough for now.

He'd be fine; she'd be fine. He didn't miss the fact that they seemed alike in that way, insisting they'd be fine, as if they were afraid of worrying those around them, thinking more of other people than themselves. "You should go home, Brona," he told her as his eyes drifted closed, unable to hold them open any longer now that he was lying down, the dose she'd given him helping put him to sleep. "Your brother needs you." It was the last thing he said before he lost himself to the darkness of a dreamless sleep.

She watched him settle down and give into sleep, sighing softly in answer to his words. Did Mahon need her" If everything came out as they were hoping, her brother would have his Nemone and their son to occupy his mind and his heart. Uther and Han would move to the valley to be with Gia. Ethan and Ember would be reunited. And where would Brona be? An outsider in her own home, most likely; an after-thought, only necessary because she was a healer. But those were thoughts for the future. Right now, she was exactly where she was needed to be.

Setting the tray down on the table once again, she seated herself in the chair by the cot to keep vigil, forcing her mind away from the family that may or may not be worried for her. No, this was where she was, and this was where she had to stay, for now at least. She would just have to deal with whatever happened when they decided she wasn't needed any longer.