Break spends the first few days after the attack and subsequent rescue-by-Gilbert unconscious in the infirmary, watched over by Canterbury and his Liam. During that time, he's just as sick as he is injured, the fever caused by the poison taking up most of his energy; when he does wake up enough to communicate, nothing he says really makes sense. Once the fever finally breaks, it's the painkillers that keep him knocked out, and by the time he's coherent enough to (grudgingly) admit to Liam what happened, Shelly is back to normal.

And Break isn't going to be. Most of the wounds are trivial; they likely won't even scar, and if they do, well. It's not like he doesn't have a whole wealth of scars already. But his knee -- it isn't going to heal properly. He may not be able to bend his damn toes ever again, let alone walk on that leg. Given how much time the man spends moving, and how much he values his own physical strength, it's not unfair to say that a large part of his life is now over.

Pride keeps him from letting them carry him back to the bedroom; he'll stay in that damn infirmary until he can make it back on his own somehow, even if he has to drag himself down the hallway. Arrogance makes him sit up and do his best to be a brat when people visit, so no one has to deal with seeing him as hurt as he feels. But sometimes Liam has to bring him his cats to snuggle for a while, and sometimes he just can't manage to come up with any light conversation and retreats into silence, and underneath all the anger he's trying to summon so that he can push himself through this, he's sad. He's just incredibly sad, and he's grieving, for himself and for what he had with Shelly.

He loves Shelly. That hasn't changed, and it probably won't. And Break blames himself for letting things go so far.

[Thread is not finished at time of posting; latecomers welcome, and all of the backtagging. Break's Liam will be around on some level for all of these threads.]