The red woman, his healer, introduced herself as Faun, then had proceeded to wrench what energy he had left from his body. She talked the entire time she worked with him, pushing and prodding and cleaning the crusted wounds. According to her, they hadn’t been deep, but the gouges had been left in places that meant to hurt, to bleed him dry.
Aquillius had barely been able to parse that from her speech. She spoke fast.
She’d helped him to the mouth of the den today to allow him to get some sun on his fur for a little while, let him watch the comings and goings, especially when he managed to quietly admit to the woman that in the shadows he just thought the demon lurked beyond the view of his sight.
She was nearby, he knew, but his attention was fixed on a distant, high wheeling bird, swooping on a drafty air current. He tipped his head to continue watching it at a comfortable angle for his gouged shoulder and ribs.
Better.
She’s passing by when she sees a dark figure, cut against the even deeper shadow that forms at the mouth of the healer’s den. Her first inclination, as always, is to turn back, make herself scarce, to leave the wounded boy to his healing business.
But it’s a pining curiosity, and suddenly she has to know the color of his gaze. For all the days he’s been among them, and every peek she’s stolen through the gathering night of his cave, she has never seen him with opened eyes.
So she slinks forward a bit oddly, innocuously lowered body, measured steps, silver stare awaiting hints of discomfort- any sort of thing that would caution her approach.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” she blinks before one side of her mouth lifts in soft playfulness.
The figure that approaches him is treated to an odd sort of side eye, being the only sort of side eye he could really give, before Aquillius would turn his head to look at the woman head on.
She seemed familiar, and the feverish flashes of his memory identified her as one of the two figures that had been there when he’d been so out of it he couldn’t think straight. He slapped the ground once with a curl of his tail, face loose.
Well, for him. He still didn’t wear much of an expression. Expressing himself wasn’t part of the healing process beyond telling the woman who’d been healing him “ow” when he was inevitably vomiting blood.
It is good to be alive.
I will live, he’d told the spider. And here he was, out of the web.
Sound of mind, she thinks after hearing him speak, though his body embedded with old and new wounds reveals the great depth of agony he must still be in.
“Terrible,” she breathes, and then quickly, “Not that you look terrible, just what you’ve been through,” She shrugs a bony shoulder and seats herself some distance from the ailing boy. He doesn't exactly look great, either. But he doesn’t need her to state the obvious. “I’m Tauris, by the way.” She introduces, whiskers along her mouth giving a twitch.
“Can I bring you anything? Fetch your…nurse?”
This song and dance is still very much new. Alone, she would have done her best to skirt every stranger she came across. Now she seeks for wolf-scent, and learns how to temper her careless tongue. To represent Kvarsheim, in the face of their neighbors. She's still deciding if this is all for her.
She’s funny, he decides as a laugh bubbles against his rib cage. It comes out in a bone dry wheeze at first, then fades to a rusty chuckle.
Its alright, I know I look rather frightful.
He dipped his head, only to halt the motion when his head started to swim, instead opting to tilt his head forward slightly.
Aquillius.
The rest left off. He was far too tired for the mouthful of his full name at the moment.
And thank you, but I believe I am alright. I wanted to see the sun for a bit, my healer said I could. I think she’s fussing somewhere over there.
A quick gesture into the distance.
She must have said something right because the boy called Aquillius wheezes into bone dry laughter- which she first mistakes as a cough before she recognizes the smile playing on his lips.
Frightful was… right. He was war-torn, had that aggressive look- the sort of creature Tauris would have known not to cross in the freelands. But there was youth underneath all that crosshatched marring, and when he tilts his face into the day she sees finally the color of his eye. Sunlight.
“How old are you?” She asks, seeing as he hadn’t so far been dissuaded by her curiosity.
He frowned at the question, lips pressed together in thought as he tried to parse out his own age.
How old was he?
I believe I was born around this time…
He murmured, before humming softly.
If I am correct, I have recently turned a year.
He had missed his birthday, he idly thought to himself with a little frown. Not that he actually knew the date.
A year old.
Only a boy, but with the weight of so much suffering. She slides her teeth together and with an averting gaze finds her paws. She supposes living means brushing with hell now and then. At least this boy was on the right side of it, gritting through with humor.
Returning her stare she shifts to the side, to let the sunlight warm the crest of her spine and length of her legs. “Are you from the Riverclan, too?”
The woman asked him of a River Clan, and the boy gave her a curious look.
The River Clan?
He asked aloud, before shaking his head.
No, my father and I are from a pack in the mountains. It is..gone now, and I don’t know where he’s been since.
He shuffled in place.
My mother left many months ago, with two of my siblings, to find relief for an old injury. I..well. I did something rather idiotic in the space between here and now that earned me this.
A shamed, quick flick upwards toward the blinded eye.
How cruel she thinks, of a father to abandon his son before his first birthday. Even her Aunt in all her contempt for Tauris and her siblings had not been so uncaring. But she will not share such sentiment, for fear of adding to Aquillius' pain.
But he baits her along anyway with an indication toward a pale eye laden with scarring and she can’t help but hold her eager ears closer.
“You try to kiss a grizzly or something?”
A bobcat, actually.
He couldn’t help the strained sort of smile that pulled at his face. Perhaps a muscle twitch. The memory of that cat was just as fractured as the rest of his mind. No matter how haphazardly he slapped cement on it, it would not heal.
Not without time, he supposed.
My father. He married a new woman. I felt it too soon, and instead of speaking it, I..well. I decided I could fight a bobcat about it, I suppose.
He looked down at his legs, noting the thinness of his fur there idly.
In hindsight, it wasn’t the best way to handle that.
“Sometimes it feels easier to fight our demons than name them. I can understand that,” She draws a limb across the other shyly. It’s not really her place to speak on such things, and what does she truly know about life, anyway? It’s not as if she’s ever faced problems head-on. She has always run. A mere rat seeking shelter.
“A bit prone to scrapping, hm?” She questions, a little tease strung along her voice. Some bare attempt to keep things lighthearted.
Aquillius’s first answer was a humored snort. His next was a quiet, whistly breath.
I was.
And look where it got him, hm? Laying here, after two near death experiences in only a year of life. He looked at his paws.
I don’t think I will be anymore.
The time for that passed when he’d wound up here. Not that he knew much about who he was without conflict.
She’s quiet a moment as her thoughts linger on the reformed soldier.
“I think- that’s a wise choice. Might save you another eye,” She offers him a sheepish grin. “Such noble pacifism calls for a treat. I’m sort of known as the hunter of Kvarsheim.” she gloats. It was a joke of course, she was probably the least capable of the pack. But she really did feel bad for the boy and figured she could find something to take his mind off his wounds, no matter how small.
She lifts up to her paws, tail wagging playfully now.
“Pick your poison- Fish? Elk? Goat?”
He was quiet for a moment.
Fish.
The shore, the island, Heda who he had yet to revisit to thank. He noted that down beneath the category of “what to do with my pathetic life”.
I really like fish.
Ugh, the bitter part of him hissed, you sound like a child. He ruthlessly picked up a mental rock to toss aside when the bitter asshole went back into its hidey hole in his psyche.
“Fish is good,” she echoes, sensing a bit of Aquillius’ hesitation. She’d never had occasion to fish in the north, but she’s tasted salmon before- the smarmy, briny pink flesh was so unique to anything they’d hunt for on land. She didn’t know if it was salmon season in these highlands, but perhaps she’d be able to find something. Trout? Minnows?
Her lips raise into smile, tail ticking with enthusiasm. “Fish it is, I think I can manage that.”