Page 39 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded

Zeke

Iwoke the following morning with a throbbing pain in my leg. It wasn’t the first time the injury had played up, and it wouldn’t be the last. I rolled over, cursing under my breath and dreading the dragging stumble to the bathroom that I was going to have to do to get some painkillers. The pain flared up as I turned, causing me to yelp.

A moment later, Dax was in my doorway, bleary-eyed and sleep-rumpled, but as eager as ever to assist. “Are you all right, sir?”

And that’s when I realised; Holy shit, I didn’t actually have to get up. And even better, Dax would be thoroughly happy to be given something to do. “Can you get me some painkillers?” I asked, feeling profoundly grateful, perhaps for the first time since he’d arrived, that Dax was there. “My leg’s killing me.”

“Yes, sir.” He darted off, returning a minute later with two pills and a glass of water. “Is this because of the physiotherapy session yesterday?” he asked, concerned, as I swallowed the pills.

I shook my head. “Nope. Not directly, at least. It just flares up now and then for no apparent reason.” Be that as it may, I was still disappointed. The physiotherapy was supposed to make this better, not worse.

Dax lingered by my bedside, then tentatively offered, “May I suggest a treatment that might soothe the pain?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, go for it.”

But instead of telling me what he was planning, Dax rushed off. I heard him rummaging about in the kitchen, then he came back several minutes later with four heat packs and a bathroom towel. He summarily stripped the sheets off my lower half, tucking them sideways so they were out of the way, and covered my leg with the towel, then set the heat pads over the top. “Holy fuck,” I muttered, as I felt the heat seep through the towel. “That’s hot.”

“If it starts burning, I can remove them,” Dax said. “But if this is going to work, they need to be very hot.”

“Doctor Green said I should put cold packs on it if it flares up, not heat,” I said – not by way of complaint, but curious about what he thought this would achieve.

Dax nodded. “I might be wrong. And I apologise if I am. But your injury was caused by a type of venom, correct?” I nodded. “There are bugs on Eumad that cause painful stings. The standard treatment was always to apply heat, as hot as the patient could stand. The heat helped to break down the poison. I thought it might be worth seeing if it helps you in the same way.”

I shrugged. Neither the painkillers nor the cold packs had ever seemed to help much, so I wasn’t going to object to trying something new. The real problem was that no one really knew what the venom was. Aside from me, and one other soldier a few months earlier, no one had ever encountered it before.

“Are you hungry?” Dax asked next. “It’s early, but I could make some breakfast if you like.”

I craned my neck to check the clock. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet. “Nah, I’m good. Let’s see if this gets me on my feet again, then we can sort out food after that.”

Dax went back to his bedroom to put on a pair of sweatpants – he’d only been wearing boxer shorts when he’d come in – and then came back to perch on the edge of the bed.

“Thank you for yesterday,” I said, after a while. “For getting us home safely. I know I wasn’t much help.” I’d zoned out twice, staring blankly into the distance, and I’d had to find a quiet corner to sit down for a while when we’d had to change trains. Dax had bought me a bottle of orange juice out of a vending machine, citing concerns about low blood sugar, and made sure that no one bothered me until I’d been steady enough to keep going.

He smiled in the dim light. “It’s always a pleasure to be of service, sir.”

I shifted my hand over a few inches so that it was resting over his hand. Aiden had said that any physical contact was good, and since the opportunity was here, it seemed negligent not to take advantage of it.

The minutes ticked by as I waited, trying to think about something other than the throbbing in my leg. There was nothing particularly appealing at the moment – I still had to find a hobby; I had a psychologist appointment this afternoon that I was most definitely not looking forward to; I was going to have to get a handle on my mental state before I tried to go anywhere on the train again. A few minutes later, I hazily realised I was drifting off to sleep again… and the odd realisation brought me suddenly awake. If I was sleeping then… I tentatively flexed my ankle, then my knee. “Wow,” I said, peering down at my leg. “That feels a whole lot better.” The pain had faded to a dull ache – not a complete cure, but vastly better than it had been ten minutes ago.

Still waiting patiently on the edge of the bed, Dax smiled. “I could massage it, if you think that would help?”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” I said, happy for him to try anything he thought might be useful. He peeled the heat packs and towel off my leg and settled in, cross legged, to begin massaging just above my knee. The sting had originally gone in at mid-thigh, and while I occasionally felt twinges of pain down in my calf muscle, the majority of the pain was from mid-thigh to my knee.

He moved gradually upwards, his fingers firm but gentle, as he coaxed the tension out of each muscle in turn. I lay back and simply enjoyed it, then I had to groan as his fingers dug into a particularly stubborn knot on the back of my leg that had been tense for what felt like the entire last year. “Fuck, you’re good at that,” I muttered, my eyes closed, my body feeling warm, despite the lack of covering.

“Thank you, sir,” Dax said simply. “I enjoyed learning this. I believed at the time that it was a skill that could be very useful.” He continued his work, while I savoured the warm, tingling sensation his hands were creating. I hadn’t felt this relaxed in a long time, and the feeling of another person’s hands on my body was creating an odd, flipping sensation in my stomach.

Long minutes later, Dax paused and made a questioning noise, quickly aborted. His hands started moving again… but then stilled, one hand just below my hip, the other one resting on my inner thigh, just shy of my…

Oh. My eyes flew open and I looked down, and suddenly, that warm, tingling sensation made sense. I was hard.

Well, not fully hard. Not hard enough to really do anything fun with it. But harder than I’d been at any point in the last year.

Dax was staring at my groin. He glanced up and saw me watching him, and then darted backwards, snatching his hands off my leg. All of his earlier confidence vanished in an instant,and he was left looking guilty and nervous, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

It was then that I realised we’d never resolved the issue from yesterday about his wet dream. With my panic attack, I’d forgotten all about it after we’d got home. I’d gone straight to bed for a nap, wanting to just hide from the rest of the world for a while, and then I’d spent the rest of the afternoon with my head down, working on the puzzle on the dining table.

Given the deer-in-headlights look on his face now, I knew I was going to have to address the issue. Dax, being the diligent dimari that he was, was never going to just brush his own perceived disobedience under the rug.