It wasn\'t as though he was purposely trying to be insensitive to her injuries and her needs -- there was simply no time to waste sitting down and licking wounds while Laurent was still free in the city. Licking wounds and examining herself was something that Storm could do in the car on their way out of this tainted city.
Like any soldier had to do from time to time, Damien grit his teeth in frustration at losing the battle. Now it was time for all of his forces to retreat. Laurent, no matter how damaged he might have been after the fight with Pierre, still had the upper hand in the situation, an advantage that Damien never wanted him to have. Not only could, assumably by the way Storm had described it to him, the Zalmric heal nearly as quickly as any immortal, he could walk (or stumble even) through the daylight hours, searching for them both. Now, with his strongest soldier out of commission for the time being (the burning in his abdomen was fading with haste, though a sore region made its way to the surface on the flesh) and with their hiding place at high risk of being discovered by the tendrils of needling blackness Laurent still possessed, Damien was stuck with a shitty hand. The only thing left for he and Storm was to leave quickly without a word to anyone.
With the apples, the change of clothes, and the pistol in the shopping bag in his hand, Damien looked at her. The brave face that he saw was paling but calloused. For a brief, impulsive moment it made him want to smirk. And if it were any other situation he may have. She was battered and bruised, as if she had just been beaten. Yet the look in her eyes and on her face was that of a soldier heading into an unwinnable battle. It was only then that it dawned on Damien how young and extremely mortal she was.
She was only twenty-one, a babe in comparison to his age. And yet he always had the feeling that she was either far younger or far older than her years made her look. At any given moment, he reflected, she could appear seventeen or almost thirty. She was just a child thrown about in a bitter tumult of life, but she took it all and swallowed it as if it were her duty in life. He had glimpsed the things she dreamt about, grasped the points that neither one of them could bring themselves to talk about but more often eluded to. Storm, he had determined long ago though never actually realized until this painful moment, was as much a soldier as he was, only some-odd nine hundred years younger. As much as he had ignored it heretofore, he and Storm were far more similar than either one of them were willing to admit just yet.
When he had first met Storm and decided her fate for her that night on the cliffs, Damien had refused to accept her as anything other than a copy of an idea, a key to a door he knew little to nothing about. Yet as he continued to look at her, he couldn\'t stop a natural twinge of guilt from lingering in his breast. He had ignored her, belittled her mortality and skill in his mind, even looked at her as if she were a sort of nuisance. But as she looked at him now with the face of a calloused soldier, that unmistakeble weakness of defeat filtering into her features, he began to feel inescapably and genuinely cold. The brave front that was failing her was tugging at him.
"Wait a second," he said slowly, taking the time to drop the bag on the bed. He constantly forgot that mortals never worked at his pace, could deal with less than he had been forced to put up with for all of his years. He forgot that sometimes he needed to slow down and move at a mortal\'s pace to keep things in order. Damien removed his sweatshirt, emptied the pockets into the shopping bag -- his crushed pack of cigarettes that he hadn\'t touched in a while, notes of different messages, keys to Pierre\'s car -- and handed it over to Storm with a more human expression sunk into his face. "Put this on. It\'s cold outside and you can\'t get very far looking like that, with all those bruises." He watched her give him a funny look and put it on gingerly, though he hardly recognized her flushing cheeks. To his enjoyment he noted how it covered her body not only from the bite of winter but also from any wandering eyes that may have been curious about the colors of her face and neck.
"Good. Let\'s get moving. We have a four-and-a-half hour drive ahead of us."
