The Ones Who Stay

"Some questions you can only answer by living them."

The treatment room smelled like antiseptic and eucalyptus, the same combination that had been present this morning when I'd stood on the other side of the table. Different context now. Different patient.

I sat on the edge of the examination table, my injured arm extended under the bright overhead light, and tried not to think about the last time I'd been in this room. The effort was futile. The space held the memory whether I wanted it to or not — the quiet hum of equipment, the particular quality of the light, the way sound seemed to flatten and compress within these walls.

Dr. Groves pulled on a fresh pair of gloves, the latex snapping softly against his wrists. He didn't say anything as he began unwrapping the makeshift bandage Dennis had applied in the field. His face held the same focused neutrality I'd seen on it earlier today, the professional mask that allowed him to do difficult things without letting the difficulty show.

Dennis stood near the door, his arms folded across his chest, radiating a restless energy that seemed at odds with his usual stillness. He'd barely spoken on the drive back, his attention fixed on the road, his jaw set in a way that suggested he was replaying the rescue in his mind and finding fault with every decision.

"Let's see what we're dealing with," Stephen said, more to himself than to either of us.

The gauze came away slowly, revealing the wound beneath. I made myself look at it — the angry red line tracing diagonally across my forearm, the dried blood crusted along its edges, the swelling that had developed during the drive. It looked worse than it had felt in the moment. Adrenaline had a way of doing that, masking damage until the crisis passed and the body finally had time to register what had happened to it.

Stephen's fingers were gentle as he examined the laceration, probing carefully along its length. I watched his face for any sign of concern, any indication that the damage was worse than it appeared. His expression remained neutral, revealing nothing.

"Does this hurt?" He pressed lightly near the wound's edge.

"Yes."

"What about here?" Higher up, away from the visible damage.

"Less."

He nodded, reaching for a penlight and shining it along the wound. "Make a fist for me."

I complied, feeling the pull of damaged skin, the ache of abused muscle. But everything moved the way it was supposed to. Fingers curled, tendons engaged, the mechanics of my hand still functioning despite the eagle's best efforts.

"Now extend your fingers. Spread them wide."

Again, everything worked. The pain was there, sharp and insistent, but the underlying architecture remained intact.

"Good news," Stephen said, setting down the penlight. "It's not as bad as it looks. The talon scored across the surface rather than digging deep. No tendon involvement, no structural damage that I can see. You'll have an impressive scar, but that's probably the worst of it."

Dennis let out a heavy breath. "So no stitches?"

"Butterfly strips should be sufficient. The wound's clean-edged — talons are sharp, whatever else they are — and it's not deep enough to require suturing." Stephen was already reaching for the supplies he needed, laying them out on the tray beside him. "I'll clean it properly, close it up, bandage it. Main concern now is infection. Eagle talons carry all sorts of bacteria — they're not exactly hygienic implements."

He worked as he talked, the words serving as a kind of backdrop to the careful movements of his hands. Saline solution first, flushing the wound with gentle pressure, washing away the dried blood and any debris that might have found its way in.

I watched the process with a detachment that surprised me. This was my arm, my blood, my body that had been damaged. But it felt distant somehow, as though I were observing it happening to someone else. The dissociation was probably shock, or exhaustion, or some combination of both. It had been a long day. A very long day.

Dennis shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I should go check on the eagle. Make sure they've got everything sorted with the carrier."

"The eagle's fine for now," Stephen said, not looking up from his work. "Kira's handling the intake. She knows what she's doing."

"Still. I should—" Dennis stopped, his hands dropping to his sides in a gesture of frustrated helplessness. "I shouldn't have let you get that close before we had it properly secured."

"Dennis." I waited until he looked at me. "It wasn't your fault. The bird panicked. They do that."

"I've done dozens of these rescues. I know how they can go sideways. I should have—"

"You should have what? Predicted exactly when a stressed, injured eagle was going to strike? Developed the ability to slow down time?" Stephen's voice was mild, but there was something firm underneath it. "Raptors are dangerous. That's not news. You both knew the risks when you went out there. The fact that you came back with only a superficial laceration is a good outcome, all things considered."

Dennis didn't look convinced, but he stopped arguing. His eyes moved to my arm, tracking Stephen's movements as the wound was cleaned and prepared for closure.

"The bird," he said, after a moment. "What do you think? Honestly."

Stephen's hands paused briefly — just a fraction of a second, barely perceptible — before resuming their work. "I think it's too early to say. Wing's in bad shape, but I've seen worse recover. I've also seen better injuries end in euthanasia. The next few days will tell us more."

The word hung in the air between us. Euthanasia. It landed differently than it might have this morning, before I'd learned exactly what that word meant in practice. Before I'd felt a heartbeat stop under my hands.

Stephen didn't look at me. Didn't acknowledge the weight of what he'd just said, or the context that made it heavier. But something in the quality of his attention shifted — a subtle adjustment, an awareness of shared experience that didn't need to be named.

"I'll go check anyway," Dennis said, pushing off from the wall. "Can't stand around doing nothing while other people work."

He paused at the door, his hand on the frame, and looked back at me.

"You did good out there," he said. "Whatever I said before about fault — that doesn't change the fact that you kept your head when things went wrong. That matters."

"Thanks."

He nodded once and was gone, his footsteps receding down the corridor.

The room felt different without him in it. Quieter, but also somehow more charged, as though the air itself had thickened slightly. Stephen continued working on my arm, applying antiseptic with careful strokes, and I let the silence stretch between us. Some silences demanded to be filled. This one didn't.

The antiseptic burned, a sharp sting that brought me back fully into my body. I focused on the sensation, using it to anchor myself in the present moment. The treatment room. The examination table beneath me. The wound on my arm, being tended to by hands that had done much harder things today.

"First butterfly strip," Stephen said, his voice breaking the quiet. "Hold still — this works better if the skin's properly aligned."

I watched him position the small adhesive strip across the wound, pulling the edges of torn skin together with precise pressure. The closure was neat, controlled, the kind of thing that looked simple but required experience to do well. He'd probably done this hundreds of times, on dozens of species. The principles were the same whether the patient had fur, feathers, or skin.

"You're good at this," I said.

"Practice." He applied the second strip, then the third, working his way along the length of the laceration. "Most of my patients don't hold still as well as you do. And they usually try to bite me."

The joke was small, almost perfunctory, but I appreciated the attempt.

"How many of these have you done?" I asked. "Raptor injuries, I mean. On humans."

"A few. Enough to know that you got lucky. Wedge-tails can do serious damage when they're motivated. Seen a handler lose most of the function in his hand from a single strike." Stephen finished with the strips and reached for the bandaging roll. "The bird that got you was exhausted. Six hours of fighting wire had taken most of the fight out of it. If you'd encountered it fresh..."

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

The bandaging process was methodical — layer upon layer of gauze wrapped carefully around my forearm, tight enough to protect the wound but not so tight as to restrict circulation. Stephen worked with the same focused attention he'd shown throughout, his movements economical and sure.

"There." Stephen secured the bandage with medical tape, smoothing down the edges with his thumb. "Keep it dry for at least twenty-four hours. Change the dressing tomorrow morning, and again each day until the wound closes. If you see any redness spreading beyond the immediate area, or if it starts feeling hot to the touch, or if there's any discharge that looks off — come back immediately. Don't try to tough it out."

"I won't."

"I mean it, Jerome. Eagle talons are nasty. Infection is a real risk."

"I understand."

He held my gaze for a moment, as if assessing whether I actually did understand or was just saying what he wanted to hear. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him, because he nodded and began cleaning up the supplies.

I flexed my fingers experimentally, testing the range of motion against the new bandage. Everything still worked. The pain was there, duller now beneath the pressure of the wrapping, but manageable. I'd had worse. Not from eagles, but from other things — the accumulated minor injuries of a life spent working with animals who didn't always appreciate being worked with.

The door opened.

Margaret Ashcroft stood in the doorway, her hair catching the overhead light, her expression carrying the particular intensity that always made you feel like she was seeing more than you intended to show. Her eyes went to my arm first, then to my face, then to Stephen, gathering information in the quick, efficient way that characterised everything she did.

"Jerome." She stepped into the room, pulling the door closed behind her. "Stephen. I heard we had some excitement this afternoon."

"Word travels fast," Stephen said.

"Dennis stopped by my office on his way to check on the eagle. He seemed..." She paused, selecting her word carefully. "Concerned."

"The rescue was more complicated than expected," I said. "The bird got me before we had it properly contained. It looks worse than it is."

Margaret moved closer, her gaze dropping to the fresh bandage on my arm. She didn't ask to see the wound — she trusted Stephen's assessment, trusted that if there had been anything seriously wrong, she would have been told immediately. But she looked at the bandage for a long moment, her expression unreadable.

"A wedge-tail," she said. "Those talons can do real damage."

"It scored across the surface," Stephen supplied. "No deep tissue involvement. He'll be sore for a while, but it should heal cleanly."

Margaret nodded slowly, still looking at my arm. Then her eyes rose to meet mine, and something in her expression shifted — a softening, perhaps, or a recognition of something that went beyond the immediate situation.

"It's been a long day for you," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

She pulled up the stool that sat in the corner of the treatment room, the one that staff used during extended procedures when standing became impractical. She positioned it across from me and sat down, her posture straight but not stiff, her hands folded in her lap.

Stephen had finished putting away the first aid supplies. He glanced toward Margaret, then toward the door, clearly uncertain whether this was his cue to leave.

"Stay," Margaret said, without looking at him. "This won't take long, and you should probably keep an eye on that bandage anyway. Make sure there's no immediate bleeding through."

Stephen nodded and leaned against the counter, his arms folded loosely across his chest. His presence felt less like an intrusion and more like a grounding force — a third point in the room that somehow made the space feel more stable.

"Dennis told me about the rescue," Margaret said. "The entanglement, the complications, the way things went sideways at the end." She paused. "He also told me you held on when most people would have let go. That even after the eagle got you, you kept the blanket in place long enough for him to finish cutting it free."

"Instinct," I said. "I wasn't really thinking."

"That's exactly my point." Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact. "When things go wrong — really wrong, not the small manageable kind of wrong but the kind where someone could get seriously hurt — most people freeze. Their brains lock up, their bodies stop responding, and whatever training they've had goes right out the window. The people who can keep functioning in those moments, who can act on instinct when their conscious mind has checked out..." She shook her head slowly. "That's not something you can teach. You either have it or you don't."

I didn't know what to say to that. The compliment felt uncomfortable, too large for the space it was trying to occupy.

"I'm not telling you this to flatter you," Margaret continued, as though she'd heard my discomfort. "I'm telling you because it's relevant to something I've been thinking about for a while now. Something I've been meaning to discuss with you."

She paused, and in the silence, I became aware of the sounds of the Haven continuing around us — the distant hum of equipment, the soft calls of animals in their enclosures, the particular quality of a building that was never quite still because it was always in the process of keeping things alive.

"You've been volunteering here for a few years," Margaret said. "In that time, I've watched you develop from a student who was enthusiastic but green into someone I'd trust with almost any animal in this facility. Your instincts are good. Your knowledge is solid and getting better. You have the patience that this work requires — the ability to sit with an animal for hours without getting bored or frustrated, to let things happen at their own pace instead of trying to force outcomes."

She leaned forward slightly, her eyes holding mine with an intensity that made it impossible to look away.

"But more than that — and this is the part that matters — you care. Not in the shallow way that a lot of people care, the way that makes them feel good about themselves without actually costing them anything. You care in the way that hurts. The way that stays with you. The way that makes days like today feel like they're taking pieces out of you that you might not get back."

The words landed somewhere deep, in a place I didn't usually let people see. I felt my throat tighten, my eyes prickling with something that might have been tears if I'd let it develop that far.

"That kind of caring," Margaret continued, her voice softer now, "is both the greatest gift you can bring to this work and the greatest danger. It will allow you to connect with animals in ways that other people can't. It will give you insights that no amount of training can provide. But it will also break your heart, Jerome. Over and over again. It will take everything you're willing to give it, and then it will ask for more."

She sat back, her hands still folded in her lap, her expression holding something that looked almost like sorrow.

"I've been doing this for almost forty years. I've seen hundreds of people come through the Haven — volunteers, students, staff — and I've watched most of them leave. Some of them burned out. Some of them decided they wanted something easier, something that didn't ask so much of them. Some of them stayed for a while and then drifted away, their passion fading into something more manageable, more sustainable, more... ordinary."

She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter.

"The ones who stay — the ones who make this their life's work — they're a particular kind of person. Not better than the others, necessarily. Just... different. Wired in a way that makes it impossible for them to walk away, even when walking away would be the sensible thing to do."

I thought about the day. About Pip, peaceful at the end. About Ghost on his perch, watching with eyes that would never learn to fear. About the eagle in the treatment centre, its future uncertain, its wing torn and bleeding from wire it had never seen coming.

"How do you know?" I asked. "Whether you're one of those people or not?"

Margaret smiled — a small, rueful expression that held decades of experience in its curve.

"You don't," she said simply. "Not for certain. Not until you've been tested enough times to know what you're made of. And even then..." She shook her head. "Even then, you're never really sure. You just keep showing up, day after day, and eventually you look back and realise that you've been doing this for years, that it's become part of who you are, that you can't imagine your life without it."

"And if it breaks you? If the caring becomes too much?"

"Then you learn to carry it differently. Or you step back. Or you find ways to protect yourself that don't require you to stop caring entirely." Margaret's eyes were steady on mine. "There's no shame in any of those options, Jerome. This work isn't for everyone. It's not supposed to be. The shame would be in pretending you're someone you're not — in staying when you should go, or going when you should stay."

She rose from the stool, her movements carrying the slight stiffness of someone who'd been on her feet for too many hours.

"I'm not asking you to decide anything right now," she said. "You're barely twenty years old. You've got time to figure out what you want your life to look like. But I wanted you to know that I see something in you. Something that suggests you might be one of the ones who stays." She paused at the door, her hand on the frame. "Think about it. Take your time. And whatever you decide, know that you've already made a difference here. The animals you've helped, the work you've done — that matters, regardless of what comes next."

She looked at Stephen, some wordless communication passing between them.

"Make sure he goes home soon," she said. "He's had enough for one day."

"Will do."

Margaret nodded once — to Stephen, to me — and then she was gone, the door closing softly behind her.

The room felt smaller in her absence, the air somehow thinner. I sat on the examination table, my bandaged arm resting in my lap, and let her words settle into the spaces they were meant to fill.

Stephen was quiet, giving me room to process. He moved around the treatment room, checking equipment, making small adjustments to things that probably didn't need adjusting. The activity felt like a kindness — something to fill the silence without demanding anything from it.

"She doesn't talk like that to everyone," he said finally, his back to me as he straightened a row of bottles on the shelf. "What she said about seeing something in you — she meant it."

"I know."

"Do you?" He turned to face me, his expression curious but not challenging. "Because when Margaret Ashcroft tells you that you might be one of the ones who stays, that's not small praise. That's her saying she thinks you have what it takes to do this work for real. Not as a volunteer, not as a student. As a career. As a life."

The words felt heavy, weighted with implications I wasn't sure I was ready to examine.

"I don't know what I want," I admitted. "I used to think I did. Zoology degree, conservation work, something that would let me be around animals without having to be around too many people. But after today..."

I trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence.

"After today, you're not sure you can handle it," Stephen supplied. "The loss. The uncertainty. The way the work takes pieces out of you and doesn't always give them back."

"Yes."

He nodded slowly, as if this was the answer he'd expected.

"I've been doing this for fifteen years," he said. "And I still have days where I wonder if I made the right choice. Days where the losses pile up and the wins feel too small to matter. Days where I go home and sit in my car for twenty minutes because I don't have the energy to walk inside."

He moved to the stool Margaret had vacated, settling onto it with the ease of long familiarity.

"But then there are other days. Days where an animal you've been working on for weeks finally turns the corner. Days where you release something back into the wild and watch it disappear into the place it belongs. Days where a kid comes through on a school tour and looks at a blue-tongue lizard like they're seeing magic for the first time."

His eyes met mine, and there was something in them that looked almost like recognition.

"Those days don't erase the hard ones," he said. "That's not how it works. But they remind you why you started. Why you stay. Why the cost, as real as it is, feels worth paying."

I thought about the boy at the school group this morning. The quiet one, who'd sat apart from his classmates and watched Bruce with an intensity I'd recognised because I'd felt it myself at that age. The way his face had changed when he'd touched the lizard's scales for the first time.

First time's special, I'd told him.

It was. It still was.

"You should go home," Stephen said, rising from the stool. "Get some rest. Take some painkillers before bed — over-the-counter stuff is fine, but don't skip it. The arm's going to hurt more tomorrow once the adrenaline fully wears off."

He reached into a cabinet and pulled out a small bottle, pressing it into my uninjured hand.

"Ibuprofen. Take two tonight, two in the morning. And drink water — more than you think you need. Your body's been through a lot today."

I slid off the examination table, my legs stiff from sitting in one position for so long. The movement sent a fresh pulse of pain through my arm, sharp enough to make me wince.

"Easy," Stephen said. "Don't push it. The wound needs time to settle."

"I know."

I stood there for a moment, the bottle of ibuprofen clutched in my hand, not quite ready to leave but not sure what else there was to say. The treatment room held us both — the space where difficult things happened, where endings and beginnings overlapped in ways that couldn't always be distinguished from each other.

"Thank you," I said finally. "For... everything."

Stephen nodded, and in his expression I saw an understanding that went beyond the words.

"Go home, Jerome. Tomorrow's another day."

The corridor outside the treatment room was quiet, the late afternoon light slanting through windows that needed cleaning. I walked slowly toward the exit, my injured arm held carefully against my chest, my body registering the full weight of exhaustion now that there was nothing left to do.

At the door, I paused.

The Haven was settling into its evening rhythms — the soft sounds of animals in their enclosures, the distant hum of equipment, the particular quality of stillness that came when the day's crises had passed and the next day's hadn't yet arrived. Through the window, I could see the paddocks stretching toward the treeline, the kangaroos moving through golden grass, their silhouettes dark against the fading light.

I thought about what Margaret had said. About caring in the way that hurts. About the kind of person who stays.

I thought about Pip, and Ghost, and the eagle with its damaged wing.

I thought about Luke, and Nate, and all the people carrying things they couldn't share.

And underneath all of it, in a place that was quieter than thought, I felt something shifting. Not an answer, exactly. Not yet. But the beginning of a question I was finally ready to ask.

The door was heavy when I pushed it open, the late afternoon air cool against my face.

I walked to my car, climbed in, and sat there for a long moment with my hands on the wheel.

Then I started the engine and drove home.