He found her in a ditch.

He plucked her from the mire and muck, freed her from the foul castaways of many a discarded fast food meals and brought her

home.

She was feverish, pale, deathly pale, and writhed in the agony of a pain that he could only darkly imagine.

He did his best to stabilize her. Did his best to treat the six inch woman who took bed within an old bandage tin.

But what else he wondered could he, should he have done?

What hospital would really have seen her and treated her?

What physician could he have trusted with her care?

Trusted to keep her from the needles and the curious prodding of the scientific mind?

No. He knew those sort of minds. Knew what made them tick. Understood all to well how the gears of steel and their levers of solid brass worked. Within that antiseptic world there was no room for the better nature of man. No room for the sympathies of the heart, and no quarter made for that infallible code wrought by the Hippocratic oath...

No. He vowed to care for her. He vowed to shield her. He promised to house her until the day she no longer had need or want of him.

So day by day he watched with astonished joy at how quickly she grew in health and in strength.

Her levity, her radiantly joyous presence lifted the dark pall from his house and from the lonely and desolate path that had been his solitary life.

For her he surrendered all comforts that he had once so thoroughly kept in himself.

His bed, an expensive and useful luxury was now just hers.

His room, which was his respite from his work and from the world was hers as well.

And even the matcha, which lifted from his weary shoulders all the pressures of an unrelentingly brutal day at the clinic...

...he gave with a willing and joyful heart unto her.

What he drank to sooth his soul she bathed in to strengthen her hearth and renew her very life.

She was an elemental forced out of her element. A guardian of the waters and rivers...

...whose domain was given over to filth and degradation.

His heart ached for her. Bled for her.

She had been cast out of her home. Cut off from her very life blood and purpose in this sad and weary world.

What was it to him then to loose a little comfort here, and a little ease there?\

For her and in the service of one so noble, and one so ignobly wronged...

...it was all well worth the while.