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Time, he finds, heals all things. With a patient, inexorable slowness, the way flesh knits back to flesh, clotted blood giving way to the beginnings of new skin; the body returning to its memory of itself through the months it takes to graft endurance back together, bone to bone. It is certainty. It is consolation.
For the moment, it is all the answer there is.
Tanda straightens and sets aside the roll of cloth, stiff with blood, that he has been unwinding from around Balsa's torso. Taking up clean bandages he glances at her, a quick look that stops short of being a pause or an unanswerable question. Her face is taut with pain, but her eyes are bright.
Although her eyes no longer glitter with the impatience they both knew all too keenly, a long time ago. Because it's simple, isn't it? Looking forward.
There's a faint smile on his lips as he sets to wrapping the cloth over and around the ragged gouges in her stomach. Long, deep slashes, still seeping blood in between the stitches, but the angry red inflammation has eased, and he can already see the signs of healing.
Just like absence. Just like the hollows of moments drawn out into months and silent years of waiting, coming together in meeting after meeting, the gaps between the seasons stitching shut every time the old familiar habits rise to cover and gentle the signs of distance: cheeks rubbed raw by wind and sun, a body worn by travel, lines sunk into skin, strange scars.
He knows those calluses as intimately as his palms' own lines, when her fingers press his hand to her breastbone.
Time is a wound. As with all things, it closes for those who wait.