On the road
8 Gingemes, 333
Slavina
Late-evening sunlight filters through the canopy. Sunset will start soon, but this late in the spring sunset takes long enough to complete that there's no rush to beat the darkness. Slavina (just a few paces to the east of Kelly) picks her way over a log and around a clump of ferns, one hand holding in the folds of her cloak and the other steadying the basket atop her head. She is quiet, as she has been for most of the gathering trip thus far: not a hostile silence, but words have been largely unnecessary.
She dips down into a crouch by a rotten stump with brilliant-colored fungus sprouting from its fissures. These she plucks off, wrapping each piece in a separate clean rag before stowing them in the basket (of course, prior to collecting their bounty she searches the maplike patterns for meanings and offers a song to the god of the forest).
Fate
Kelly picks his way through the forest with ease, his steps largely inaudible, and scans the area with a careful eye. His gaze falls on something and stays there for a moment. But with wordless confidence he moves over to a tree, leaps up to the lowest branch, and pulls himself up into the foliage. After a moment of quiet rustling he returns to the branch and eases himself down from it one-handed, eventually dropping to the ground with a soft grunt. From there he makes for Slavina, stepping at the edge of conversation space and waiting for a window of unobtrusiveness.
There's a spiral snail shell in his other hand. It's half the size of his face—not remarkable—and bears pretty standard coloration and patterning for a typical snail.
Slavina
When his presence presses into her sphere of awareness, Slavina looks up. She wipes her fingers off and replaces the rag before turning her full attention to him. Then she gives a long look first to the snail shell, then to Kelly, presenting him with the open basket and raised eyebrows.
Fate
He sings an inquisitive measure as a preface then asks, "Does this look interesting to you?" It's almost a matter-of-fact sort of question, similar to asking what day it was. He offers the snail shell.
Slavina
"Yes. But so does almost everything," she says, deadpan but with a hint of a smile. Slavina takes the shell and turns it over in her hands a few times, noting the irregularities in the brown pattern of the shell (drips of gall-ink when the scribe tilts her work too soon) and curve of the spiral (an eye, again. they have been often passing eyes).
"Yes." She offers it back to him. "What does it look like to you?"
Fate
Kelly describes it, using the language Slavina had partially helped him work out. It evokes a sense of smallness in bigness, serene, and of bigness in smallness, comfortable. The "colors" move like shifting tides, or like a changing landscape as one travels through it.
When he finishes describing it, there's a bare moment of taut, silent consideration... and then he places it in the basket with a, 'Thanks,' in Esta's language.
Slavina
Slavina listens to his description with closed eyes, visualizing it as best she's able. She tucks a bit of cloth around the shell to cushion it. 'No need, it's my pleasure,' she replies in the same language.
Fate
Just as he's turning to leave he freezes, the gears ticking away behind his eyes for a couple seconds. Then, once translated, he nods in understanding and starts off in another direction.
Slavina
Slavina rises and follows him at a comfortable distance, drifting off on a slightly different path to bring her closer to a small stream pool. She examines the water and its reflections and its distortions, letting herself get near-lost in them (but not lost, not when she's out in the wild that would be dereliction). After a long time staring... "Kelly?"
Fate
There's no response, not even a hummed acknowledgement.
Slavina
Slavina freezes, even her breath. She breaks her attention from the water and slowly, silently, scans the woods for Kelly (or..... others), walking back through memory for the last place she was aware of his presence.
Fate
Soon, she's greeted by the distant sound to the northwest—a sound of a wheezing gasp for air, followed quickly by an exhale with a pinched, audible strain to it.
Slavina
Slavina breaks into a northwesterly run (leaving the basket to fend for itself), making as quick a pace as possible through the dense underbrush. She pauses partway there, silent, holding her breath as she looks and listens for signs of danger. Sensing none, she picks up into a sprint the rest of the way to Kelly.
Fate
After crossing past a few trees, Kelly is visible, leaning heavily against a tree trunk and using one hand to support him, curled a little on himself and breathing in great gulps of air as if he were drowning. His eyes are a strange mix of a thousand-yard disconnection and silent, stifled fear, and his other hand clutches clawlike at the middle of his chest. He turns his back to the tree, pressing himself tight against it, fingers groping nerveless and desperate around his thigh and waist.
Slavina
She slows as she approaches him, breathing in ragged gasps. "Kelly..." Slavina reaches her hand out for that groping, aimless one, to give it something solid to grasp. She infuses her voice with steel cables and quilted down when she wraps it around him. "Kelly, look at me. Nod if you can see me."
Fate
As she approaches, he hardly seems to register her—but once she takes his hand, his sweaty grip cinches tight and his gaze slides to her, still distant and still frightened. He's wound so tight that he's shaking from head to toe, making his slight nod almost indistinguishable.
Slavina
"We're going to sit down now." She uses the twin lifelines of voice and hand to guide him to the ground, with Slavina kneeling just in front of him on a clump of ferns. "Sing with me, Kelly." She starts to sing the 'Kelly is calm' song that Aaren taught them, stopping every few bars to refill burning lungs.
Fate
It takes a while for him to be able to catch his breath to even bother singing, and even then it's stuttered and fragmented. But eventually he's able to take it up with some degree of reliability. His muscles begin to unlock, little by little, and his grip eases around Slavina's hand. A sheen of sweat coats him and his pulse and breathing are both heavy but steady and slow.
Slavina
Slavina keeps singing with him well past the point where his breath and heartbeat are steady. During the process she shifts position to sit next to him on the opposite side from the tree, and she puts her free hand around his shoulders in a side-hug (still holding his hand like a tether with the other). Eventually, she eases off the song to see if he can be calm without it.
Fate
Sure enough his breath and heartbeat remain steady. The brief silence is broken by the sliding of his feet as he draws his knees up, and he shifts forward to rest an arm on his knees and put his free hand over his eyes.
Slavina
She lets him be quiet for a long time. Eventually, Slavina asks, "How are you hurt?" When Slavina says it, there is no implication that the hurt need be physical.
Fate
"I—" He hesitates, searching. "I don't know." His voice is flattened by fatigue. Then he says, "I was just suddenly afraid. Everyone felt too far away." He swallows, weakly. "I thought I was going to die."
Slavina
She hums an acknowledgement and squeezes him a little tighter with her arm. "Does that happen often?"
Fate
Kelly shakes his head. "N-never." This time his voice falters a little, briefly making it sound small and boyish again.
Slavina
"First time for everything, I guess," she tries in a very gentle attempt at humor. Almost without thinking, Slavina starts very slightly swaying from side to side with Kelly, rocking him in time to his heartbeat. She rolls a shoulder to dislodge a twig that got stuck on her sprint.
She thinks for a while about how to proceed. "Can I help you find words?"
Fate
Thusly prompted, he takes a deep breath and lets it out, staring at the ground while he collects himself. "Dying was... it didn't scare me before." He leans his head back against the trunk of the tree, brow slightly furrowed. "I'm a hunter." This is spoken like an explanation. At this, his gaze drops, making his eyes almost seem closed. "Aaren says I'm grievously injured." This is offered similar to a clarification, but with more question in it than answer. His tone, too, indicates that he wasn't referencing the realm of the physical.
Slavina
Slavina tucks her feet up under her and pulls her cloak over them. "Sometimes in portents, one thing stands in for another." She continues slowly, evenly, quietly, as if this were not a side track at all. "Often, it is something familiar and concrete which shares qualities with the unknown and amorphous reality."
She releases Kelly's hand to pull a gourd of water from her belt. This she uncorks, and offers to Kelly first. "Death is symbolic of many things. Drastic change, severed connections, loss of autonomy, painful things that can't be escaped..." she trails off, because the meanings of death are of course too numerous to list. "Could it be standing in for something else?"
Fate
Kelly considers for a long moment. "Aaren says my song's changed a lot and forever because I was... tortured." It's an ill-fitting word in his mouth, not one spoken with trepidation but rather with the discomfort of something that feels completely foreign. "I guess that's kinda like dying." He's quiet a moment. "It was scary."
Slavina
"What was scary about it?" Slavina takes a gulp of water for herself, then presses the gourd into Kelly's free hand.
Fate
He takes it with a small 'Oh' sort of hum and takes a gulp and a mouthful to swish out his mouth before he hands it back to Slavina, gathering his thoughts further.
After a drawn-out silence, he says, "I didn't know what they wanted." He swallows again. "I didn't even know what they were going to do to me. And I couldn't stop it. I couldn't even... hold myself up. Or move." A thought strikes him, rendering him silent for a long stretch of time again—but it's a hard silence, with the tension of prey feeling the presence of a predator. Then, he says, "And... and I was afraid no one would know I was there. That I might pretty much be lost forever, as far as you and Daina and Aaren... and Auntie Harley and Mom and Dad and..." It's too much. He closes his eyes and begins singing his pounding heart to calmness again.
Slavina
Slavina sings with him, resuming their rocking motion like one might do to calm a child. "I would be scared too. But we'll always find you, no matter where you are."
Fate
At that, the tears begin to spill. He wipes his tears with a trembling hand and regards it, singing a strangled strain of mild surprise. But then his mouth twists and he buries his face in said hand, shaking hard with weeping.
Slavina
Slavina sets the water-gourd aside and wraps her other arm around him to make a better hug. Since the calm-song no longer seems quite appropriate, she sings a non-Aaren song for him (a plaintive, quavering liudzi night-song) to fill in the background with something comforting.