The States

would have stayed up with you all night

July 3, 1863

The only reason Austin finds Mindy in the aftermath of the battle is that Caden asked him to see if he could find Ginny.

For a couple of seconds, he wonders if he should just turn around and pretend he didn't see anything.

Empathy wins out. Austin knows the horror of waking up surrounded by your own dead men.

Mindy's young. It's probably her first death. She's going to wake up, all alone, in the mud, surrounded by her fallen soldiers.

That thought is enough that Austin grimaces and starts gingerly stepping through the fallen ranks of the First Minnesota Regiment.

It was the least Austin could do to dump her into a Union hospital.

They were family once, even if they weren't anymore, and Austin can't imagine the disappointment on Alfred's face if he left her in the decimated remains of her regiment.

Austin scoops her up and freezes.

She's still alive.

Austin tilts his head and actually observes her condition, pressing his fingers against her throat to feel the thrum of her heart. She's barely conscious, eyes not even open. Her heart's beating erratically, and she's losing blood rapidly from dozens of cuts and bruises that littered her body. She had a gash on her temple from where it looked like the butt of a rifle had been slammed into her head sluggishly oozing blood.

There's shrapnel embedding into her left calf, and Austin swears.

If he dumps her into a Union hospital, they'd cut it off. Ginny had once told him if you had to regrow a limb, you wanted to be dead.

Austin glances back at her bloody and pale face.

He sighs heavily. "Oh, I am definitely going to regret this."

July 5

Mindy is in and out of consciousness and completely delirious the entire way to the Kentucky-Tennessee border. It isn't a good sign, but Austin is a little grateful anyway. He'd stopped in West Virginia overnight to try and patch her up, but there was only so much he could do without a decent medical kit. He'd poured whiskey over the shrapnel wounds to try and keep the infection at bay long enough to get to safety. Mindy had whimpered, but hadn't reacted much besides murmuring some more delirious French.

There are only a few places that are safe for a Union state in the south, and the old state house on the border is one of them.

If Kendall and Tim can meet up every couple of months for three years and not get caught, then it's definitely not on Jackson's radar. Plus, because Tim's such an injury magnet, it's probably going to have a decent stock of bandages and hopefully antiseptic that isn't whiskey.

~~~~~

He makes a mess of the cabinets searching for what he needs, but Austin figures he can clean it up later. Mindy's dying.

It's times like these that Austin really hates his ability. It's also times like these that he's also grateful for it.

He doesn't heal people often. It takes a lot out of him, leaves him with pounding headaches and nausea and episodes of passing out. He especially doesn't heal personifications. They heal fine enough on their own.

(He'd healed Evangeline a handful of times, despite his own rules about it. She'd never asked him to do it. The self-loathing part of Austin's mind always insists that he did it out of the selfish need to ease his own guilt that she was hurt in the first place.)