FirstAidKit

The town medic is ready for visitors! She opens up for shop, ready for the reports of frostbite and pneumonia. She has a knack for making soup and healing others, known for her kindness and trustworthiness, but what is she hiding behind that facade?

---

You can't save everyone.

Oh, sure, tweezers and iodine and suture and gauze can save lives. Save a lot of lives, in fact. A blanket and some soup and a listening ear can do a lot for the miserable, bone-deep cold in someone's heart and soul. Plague magic can help one see where an infection threatens to take hold, to clean and debride it before it gets into the bone. And letting someone know you care, even a little, is usually enough to pull them back from the ledge. If you're smart, like Kit is, sometimes you can learn to be a turning point.

But sometimes you can't.

Sometimes you could have, and didn't.

Was it weakness? Selfishness? The pure ruthless calculus of triage? Kit doesn't know, and isn't really interested in finding out. Maybe she's not ready to face whatever led her to turn away and leave someone she loved out in the cold. Maybe she'll never be.

A warm mug of soup, a blanket, some heat around the core to slowly warm the limbs, and a gentle tut-tutting about cold safety. Toes can't survive being frozen forever, you know.

You can't save everyone.

Kit has found that that fact becomes a lot easier to cope with if she never truly gets attached in the first place. Kind and trustworthy, always trying her hardest, never has a bad word to say about anyone. And if her compassion reads a bit hollow to her more sensitive charges, well, she's just having an off day. Her other charges will vouch for her.

She wishes, just once, that someone would fill her soup cup, wrap her in a blanket, and tell her that it's going to be okay. That she couldn't have done better, even if she knows it's a lie. But that's not what the town needs. They need her compassion, her expertise, her magic and her dexterous claws and her smile. Life is hard enough out here, where the weather saps the strength from a dragon's very living bones.

You can't save everyone.

Reports of casualties from below roll in, and Kit turns away, washing her claws in her basin. The others assume it's to hide tears. She knows the hollow nothing inside should scare her, but the names just clink and echo as they fall down the walls of the yawning canyon in her soul. Even the void doesn't hurt any more.

I can cancel that sweetroot order now, Kit thinks glibly, drying her claws after an appropriate amount of time has passed. Time to go back to work.

Thank you Axqu for the lore!!

Thank you Birdiee for the poem!!

---

Thank you valegale !!!