Chapter 183: Chapter 183: Medical

“Medical,” Arion said again.

This time there was no space in the word for argument.

The professors seemed to hear it too. Files were closed. Notes saved. The center panel was disengaged with the efficient calm of faculty who knew when a lesson had ended and become someone else’s problem.

The silver-haired professor stood. “The physician is already on the way. The containment report will list this as auxiliary combat escalation under faculty supervision.”

Sylvia blinked. “That sounds much more respectable than what I watched.”

The professor glanced at her. “You’re welcome.”

Dean, who had apparently decided that if he was going to be forced into treatment, he might as well remain verbally difficult to the end, said, “Faculty supervision is carrying a lot of moral weight there.”

“It usually does when princes are involved,” the lean professor replied.

Nero gave a short laugh, then hissed when the motion pulled at the wound in his shoulder.

Arion caught it immediately. “Sit down.”

Nero looked offended. “I’m not collapsing.”

“Sit,” Arion repeated.

And because some reflexes had been built too early and too well to ignore even now, Nero actually did – dropping to sit on the low boundary ledge with a controlled lack of grace, one forearm braced on his knee.

Dean saw that and, traitorously, looked vindicated. “See? He’s fine.”

Arion turned to him. “You have blood in your mouth.”

Dean licked at his split lip on instinct.

Arion’s eyes dropped there for one single, disastrous second.

Then returned to Dean’s face.

The second had not gone unnoticed.

Dean’s pupils changed by a fraction.

That was all.

But Arion saw it, and because the day had already been ruined by lateness, violence, and the discovery that Dean and Nero used to beat each other into walls as a hobby, he had no patience left for pretending he was unaffected.

His voice dropped lower.

“You are not helping yourself.”

Dean’s own answer came quieter too, though whether from exhaustion or awareness Arion could not yet tell. “You are being strange.”

“No,” Arion said. “I am being exactly as normal as the situation deserves.”

Dean opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Then, because surrender in him rarely looked like softness and usually looked like redirected insolence, he said, “Fine. But for the record, if I wanted to make a truly bad decision, I would have picked someone less resistant to blunt trauma.”

Nero lifted a hand without looking up. “Appreciated.”

Sylvia stared at both of them. “You’re all clinically unwell.”

“Probably,” Dean said.

“Certainly,” said one of the professors.

The ring doors opened then, and two medical staff entered with the steady lack of panic of people who worked university combat sectors and, therefore, considered blood an inconvenience rather than an event.

One of them took one look at the floor, the walls, Nero’s shoulder, Dean’s face, and the scorch marks, then asked, “Which one ignored the stop order first?”

“None,” said the silver-haired professor.

The medic raised a brow.

“The Crown Prince said enough,” she added. “They stopped.”

The medic looked almost disappointed to be deprived of a more interesting report.

He approached Dean first.

Arion did not move away.

The medic noticed that and chose wisdom. He only held out gauze and said, “Tilt your head slightly.”

Dean took the gauze but did not apply it fast enough for Arion’s standards, so Arion did it himself – two fingers under Dean’s jaw, the other hand pressing the folded white square under the nose with efficient, controlled pressure.

Dean went very still.

The room, which had already seen enough to ruin several people’s concentration for the week, got somehow quieter.

Sylvia turned her head away with the expression of a woman trying heroically not to react and failing spiritually.

Nero, meanwhile, let the second medic inspect the puncture high near his shoulder with the long-suffering patience of someone who considered stitches bureaucratic harassment.

“This will need closure,” the medic said.

“No,” Nero replied immediately.

“Yes,” the medic said.

Nero looked at Arion. “Can you tell your staff that I heal in a maximum of seventy-two hours and there is no need” – he made a vague gesture with his good hand – “for panic?”

The medic did not even look up. “I’m not panicking. I’m preventing you from bleeding on a university floor I had cleaned this morning.”

Sylvia made a strangled sound that might have been laughter.

Arion, still firmly holding the gauze to Dean’s nose, said, “Sew him shut.”

Nero stared at him in betrayal. “That is not support.”

The medic finally did look up then, dead-eyed and entirely unimpressed by princely suffering. “Your Highness, with respect, I have stitched cadets who screamed louder and complained less.”

Nero’s mouth flattened. “I wasn’t screaming.”

“Yet.”

Dean, who was still forced to hold his head at the exact angle Arion preferred, made another muffled noise of laughter against the gauze.

Arion glanced down at him. “You are in no position to enjoy this.”

Dean looked up with blood still drying at one corner of his mouth and said through the cloth, “I’m enjoying it enormously.”

Nero pointed at him with his uninjured hand. “See? He understands me.”

“No,” Arion said. “He understands consequences poorly. There is a difference.”

“Again,” Nero replied, looking at the medic reaching for the suture kit as if witnessing state abuse in real time, “I heal in seventy-two hours.”

The medic snapped on gloves. “Then you can heal with stitches.”

“That is authoritarian.”

“That,” Sylvia said from the stands, leaning forward with bright beta delight now that the danger had passed and the humiliation remained, “is the first correct thing anyone has said in the last ten minutes.”

Nero looked at her. “You are enjoying this far too much.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said. “Because for once none of the blood is mine.”

The medic took Nero’s shoulder firmly, assessing the depth again despite the prince’s visible moral objections. “Hold still.”

Nero looked down at the hand on him as if considering whether social order required him to tolerate this.

Arion’s voice cut in before he could test the theory. “If you make him work harder, I’ll have the wound packed first and stitched second.”

Nero turned his head slowly. “You are a terrible cousin.”

“I’m an excellent one. I’m making sure infection doesn’t turn your shoulder into a cautionary lecture.”

Dean, traitor that he was, nodded once from under the gauze. “He has a point.”

Nero stared at him. “You threw metal through me.”

“Yes,” Dean said. “But with affection.”

That silenced the room for one extraordinarily blessed second.

Then Sylvia folded in on herself, laughing.

One of the professors coughed into a fist with suspicious timing.

The medic on Nero’s side, who had clearly accepted that this was the kind of afternoon the university paid him extra for, only said, “Good. Since everyone is done being emotionally useless, I’m injecting local anesthetic.”

Nero looked offended. “I don’t need—”

The needle went in.

He cut off mid-sentence and hissed through his teeth instead.

Dean’s eyes lit with immediate spiteful delight.

Arion saw it and pressed the gauze a fraction more firmly than necessary when Dean started to grin.

Dean jerked slightly. “That was malicious.”

“That was a correction.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Yes,” Arion said. “And yet you keep proving that in interesting ways.”

Across from them, Nero rolled his shoulder once before the numbness spread enough to stop him and muttered, “I still think this is unnecessary.”

The medic threaded the suture with calm efficiency. “And I still think holes in princes should be closed.”

“That is a terrible sentence.”

“It becomes worse if you move.”

Nero looked personally persecuted by medicine.

Sylvia, now fully invested in his downfall, called down, “Please tell me he has to get a tetanus shot too.”

The medic paused. “That depends. Did any of the metal come from the floor?”

Dean and Nero both looked at the wrecked ring.

Then at each other.

Then back at the medic.

The medic’s face became very still. “I’ll note that as a yes.”

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