Among her many other very excellent qualities, Winifred Whiteley was clever. This was all well and good normally, but less so when one was a secret werewolf who had secretly bit Topaz Urquart - so, Kieran's situation. (It was probably also detrimental in other instances, but these were the only secrets he really cared about, other than the Jude thing.) On the morning after the last night of the full moon, the werewolf thing was the only thing on Kieran's mind, especially as he was trying to conjure a pitch out of the WCU information he had gotten from Mrs. Skeeter.

He was in his usual spot in the back of the Augurey with just a beer in front of him, ostensibly deep in thought but mostly just exhausted. He felt and looked like shit and would probably have given up by now if this pitch wasn't due to Pengloss basically all the time. 

So far all he had written down was "WCU bad at jobs" which everyone already knew anyways, so clearly this was not going very well. It also did not help that there was a large cut on the palm of his writing hand, hopefully from his surroundings last night and not from the wolf's teeth or claws. His palm itched and ached and he was really only mildly surprised when the wound reopened and started bleeding.

"Fuck," Kieran said loudly. He looked up and; yes, only Winifred. "Do you have any dittany?"

She was a midwife and a low-key abortionist, so it was not the most ridiculous question he could ask.

Winifred was popular with prostitutes. She didn't shame them for their profession, asked minimal questions, treated them well, and was generally a kinder person than they were used to dealing with. The women at the brothel she tended to most frequently enjoyed having her around even when her services as a midwife weren't needed and Winifred counted a great deal of them among her friends. People thought poorly of her for it - she knew that very well - but they weren't in positions for her to care about their opinions. Those women (as well as the patrons of the Augurey) were the closest thing she had to family. Trading that for the approval of strangers seemed like a terrible deal.

However, as much as Winifred hated to acknowledge it, there were times that approval was helpful. This last birth she'd attended to had been a difficult one and it would've been easier if she hadn't been called for at the very last minute. The mother had outright refused her services months ago and had spent the interim desperately searching for another, more respectable midwife she could afford. She hadn't found one. In the end, her husband had showed up on Winifred's doorstep during the early hours of the morning in a panic. 

Winifred worked through the day and the night and just as a new dawn was breaking, the baby was delivered. After making sure mother and baby were in good health, Winifred washed up, changed into the spare dress she always kept in her bag of supplies, and headed for the Augurey for a celebratory drink. A tumbler of whiskey always did her good after a rough job. 

She was nursing on said whiskey when Kieran asked after some dittany. "Sure, but it's reserved for mothers who need, like, episiotomies and all that." Winifred tilted her head to look at him properly. "Christ you look awful." Considering she hadn't slept in over twenty four hours, Winifred knew she couldn't look much better, but Kieran also had an overt aura of misery about him that made her sympathetic. "I'll make an exception for you." 

The tumbler clinked against the bar top as she set it down to root through her bag for the vial. There'd been no time to reorganize it after the last job so it was a mess, but eventually she found what she was looking for. "Why d'you need it anyway?" Probably should've asked that before. Oh well. 

Kieran didn't know what an episiotomy was, but given the violence of childbirth in general, thought that he ought not to ask. "It's been a long week," he said with a vague head-tilt. "You look a bit shit, too." His tone wasn't disparaging but factual - Winn looked tired, and he probably ought to buy her another whiskey just for disturbing her. 

He held up his hand, palm open, revealing the bleeding wound. Little droplets were getting on his parchment which meant that he probably ought to rewrite this lede for Pengloss. 

"I cut myself shaving," Kieran said, because normal people didn't have open wounds on their hands and it was the first excuse to pop into his head. He ran his other hand over his chin to feel the scratchy patchwork scruff; it had been a few days. He should have gone for some other excuse - a stabbing, or something.

"Cut reopened."

Winifred took no offense to Kieran's remark, snorting out of amusement rather than scrambling to defend herself. She always looked rough after a long labor, even more so when the delivery had been as troublesome as the last. "Complementary as always, Mr. Abernathy," she said, putting on a posh accent and using formalities usually reserved for her patients' husbands (if they had one).

She held the vial loosely between her fingers, rolling it back and forth idly, but made no move towards him yet. "That's a nasty one." Of course, she'd seen much worse in her line of work and the sight of a bloody hand was more familiar than off putting. "A few days old?" Winifred figured it must be considering the state of his facial hair. Either that or he was lying about how he'd gotten cut. "You should be careful. Infections are easy to get and quick to do you in." She stared at his hand for a bit longer that was strictly necessary before sliding off her stool and heading towards him.

Up close, Winifred's doubts magnified. She'd never had to shave, but by observation, she'd put together that men who did either got nicked on their faces or their fingers. A slash across the palm seemed highly unusual to her given the alleged context. "You sure you got that from a razor?" She arched a brow at him as she pulled the cork out of the vial of dittany essence. While she now fully doubted that Kieran was telling her the truth, she wasn't going to let him bleed all over the table in an attempt to wheedle answers out of him.

She was looking at him from her barstool and she knew.

"I know," he said, "I'll try to avoid it, can't always have Finn giving me medical care." He probably shouldn't ask Finn for anything anytime soon, after their little spat, but normally that was where he went. Official healers were expensive, and more likely to ask questions.

She probably didn't know everything but she clearly knew that something was up, and Kieran sat at his table with the blood dripping down his palm and the sense that this moment was part of his increasingly complicated life. He was telling so many lies that he had to get caught in one of them sooner or later - Finn had already caught him, more or less - and it was only a matter of time before more people did. Something was going to fall, sooner or later.

Was this when it would?

And now she was sliding off of her stool so maybe not, maybe he was fine. Kieran held his injured hand out to her, palm upwards. He had to try some other excuse, clearly, more lies to surround himself with.

"I might have gotten drunk and broken a glass," he said ruefully.

"I'd rather him be giving you medical care than planning your funeral." The dittany essence should take care of the cut in a few hours or less but, if it didn't, Kieran would have bigger problems than coming up with a story to explain how he'd gotten it to begin with.

"That's a better lie," she said as she took his hand in one of hers, holding it gently. Kieran could very well be telling the truth now, but there was no way to verify his answer. While this admission was certainly more embarrassing than the last, she didn't quite buy it. Had Kieran been a man in a position to be negatively impacted by the revelation of such things, Winifred would've been more inclined to believe him. As things were, she could see no real reason for the falsehood. She of all people was in no position to judge him or go telling his business to anyone else. And, even if she was, who would care?

Winifred had never been one for deception and found it difficult to understand the motives for engaging in it most of the time.

"This might sting a bit," she warned him. "However, I don't imagine it'll be much worse than what you've already been feeling." With her other hand holding the vial steady, Winifred began to let some of the essence drip out and into the wound. "You don't have to tell me what actually happened. The lying is a bit tedious though, so if we could dispense with that I would very much appreciate it."

Kieran was well acquainted with dittany by now, and faked a flinch as it dripped onto the wound. His skin began to knit itself back together and Kieran looked away from the wound, making eye contact with Winn instead. He immediately regretted it; it was harder to lie when he was looking right at her. It was also hard to lie to someone who was good at telling when he was lying.

"I just didn't particularly want Jude to know," he said. Of all the non-truths he could tell, at least this one was based in well-documented fact - Kieran was shifty about things that had to do with Jude. He was also obviously, painfully, infatuated with him. (At least to everyone who was not Jude, apparently. He hoped.)

 "Not that you'd tell him - but, you know. It's the sort of thing he'd get all frowny and stern about," Kieran added with a snort. That part he could imagine - Jude really didn't like his over-drinking habit.

"Uh huh," Winifred said, tilting her head as she tried to decide if she believed him this time. "Well, I'll refrain from telling him about it even though I think someone ought to lecture you on the dangers of hand wounds." She sighed and gave him a faint smile. "It's nothing to worry about anyway, now that its not open and bleeding everywhere. Wherever it came from, you should be careful and ... You can tell me if you need help, you know." Winifred wasn't much for prying, but she was concerned and that made her more insistent than she normally was.