Rhiane had already been anxious about what she would see underneath his expensive designer shirt, but she had notably paled when she saw the dark splattering of bruises that had blossomed along his rib cage. For a second she looked and felt as if she might cry a second time. She might have made a fine nurse. The princess elect had a robust sense of empathy, knew how to talk to people from all walks of life, established a rapport easily with everyone except the most hostile of individuals, was intelligent, and not at all squeamish. With Luke as her patient, however, she couldn't keep up a veil of professional distance and courtesy. She knew the vehicular accident was her fault, that it had caused these injuries, and that she was the proximate cause of harm to someone she secretly held dear.

Carefully she reached out and pressed her cool, damp palm against the mottled skin. Her touch was gentle but she could tell it drew a great deal of pain. Rhiane could not feed any protrusions under the flesh but there was certainly something amiss. Were she to press down with her fingers she could do a more thorough evaluation, but she didn't have the fortitude to torture her fiance like that. She quickly withdrew and let the fabric fall back over his side to conceal the evidence of her poor judgment from view.

"I'm sorry," she whispered again before reaching for the medical kit. Rhiane rooted around for a minute or so before pulling out the two bottles he had discovered earlier. Unfortunately, they presented her with a problem. The caps had safety mechanisms that required that they be both squeezed and turned clockwise to open. Ordinarily this would not be a challenge. Because Rhiane only had one arm, and therefore hand, she was willing to use, however, this gave her a long pause.

Ultimately she was unwilling to ask Luke for help or admit her deficiency. On a normal day her pride was robust enough that she wouldn't want to volunteer information that a container was outside her capabilities to open. Today her shame at indirectly hurting Luke and her refusal to admit to the extent of her arm's impairment held her tongue. What sort of person would she be if the complained to someone struggling to ask for a drug to reduce his suffering that she couldn't open a bottle? Rhiane fumbled with both bottles, trying to open one and then the other, with no success.

With a cry stifled in her throat she rolled her left shoulder forward, displacing her arm into her lap, and wrapped her fingers on that accompanying hand around the bottle. Rhiane bit down on her tongue to force herself not to alert him to the agony this caused. Now that the bottle was stabilized she was able to use her right hand to squeeze and twist the cap as required, popping it off, and jerking her left arm slightly. She curled her toes, suppressing a yelp, before reaching into the opaque plastic phial and recovering a single pill.

"Here," she said as she offered the pill. It was the sedative because, as Luke undoubtedly predicted, she had not forgotten that he hadn't slept. Rhiane had chastised him earlier and tried to convince him to take a nap at the very least given how little he rested during the nights. The sedative provided an opportunity for her to compel him to oblige her. Although he might take issue with her judgment, or how insistent she was, she had the best of intentions. Once he was carted off to the world of dreams she would almost certainly commence with her earlier plan to find the road. She had not given up on either her plan to both punish herself and perform an act of contrition, even as it thundered ominously overhead and the rain outside became a deluge that obscured their ability to see more than a meter beyond the windows.