Welcome to Gaia! ::

Detraeus grunted, nodding absently as he forced himself up and back over to his hastar despite his body’s sharp protests. After grabbing what he needed, he returned to her with gauze, water, and disinfectant salve, helping her to clean and dress the wound. Not nearly so bad as he feared, he realized as he worked with it — major relief there, though, as the thought sank in and blood seeped through his own wound dressing, it occurred to him to wonder why and when Araceli’s well being had come to mean so much to him.

He shoved the concern away. She was a friend of his now, wasn’t she? That mattered more than the fact that he’d…

He let his hands drop, and worked himself up to a stand with the help of balancing against the hastar. “There. We should—”

The ground shook, trembling beneath them, and Detraeus’ posture tensed, bow back in hand in a moment’s notice. Seconds later, the largest creature he had ever found himself face to face with burst out of the ground — directly from the broken in area in the newly discovered ‘abandoned’ urshund tunnel.

Detraeus fired.

Detraeus blinked. That had been easier than intended. Perhaps, with the aid of Ara’s magic, he’d managed to skewer the thing directly through the brain.

Regardless, he didn’t have much time to think on it, since moments later, the ground was shaking again. Apparently, the extra action up above had been seen as a signal to a massive collective of interconnecting urshund tunnels beneath their feet. He lost track of how long they fought. It seemed endless, Ara with her magic, and him with his arrows, despite his injured leg and her arm. Beast after beast like critters popping up out of the ground except they were ten times their length and fifty times again their weight.

They brought them down, though. Eight total, in the end, by his count. Eight carcasses. He groaned, limping as he gathered up the useable arrows that he could in the aftermath and grimacing as he wiped them clean before tucking them away again. When he made it back to the hastar, sweating and exhausted, the bandages on his leg red with blood, he eyed Araceli.

“Home?”

Detraeus blinked, then huffed as he mounted. “And what would you have me call it?”

Detraeus frowned. He had, but never moved forward on the idea. What he had sufficed and saved him coin, even though he wasn’t pressed for it any longer. Aloud, he shrugged and said, “It’s temporary. Why?” Most of his focus, for the moment, was still on her hands on his hips. He clicked the reins, starting them back towards ‘home’.

Detraeus tensed, pulse picking up as her weight laid against his back more than necessary. “You—what?” His mind buzzed with the possibilities. He wasn’t blindly naïve and knew what happened — all too well — between two persons who shared a space. It brought to mind their kiss — kisses — and made him wonder afresh what she wanted, hoped, out of him. Did she expect him to be pursuing her? Courting her? Romancing her?

He knew nothing of such things or, more accurately, knew of them, but had no intention or capability to follow through. He sputtered through his response. “I don’t—that—no. I’ll…I can take care of myself. I need no…I don’t need it. I’ll pay for what I need and live in it. And I need space…of my own. You wouldn’t want me there.”

Detraeus frowned, feeling her withdraw as he listened to her words. He did like, in theory, the idea of a nicer place to live. Somewhere where he wasn’t constantly concerned about his locks, his belongings, and the persons around him. What he did not want, however, was to misguide her, lead her into some vein of thinking where she concluded he could and would ‘eventually’ be more than what he was now.

He kept the hastar moving and debated long before speaking. “You’d touch nothing of mine. Treat the space I paid for as my own until I discontinue paying for it. Ask no questions of me uninvited…” He frowned, tail coiling back around her ankle unawares to him as he lost himself in thought. “I would harm nothing in your home and you would expect nothing of me other than that and my coin. Yes?”

The thought of better lodgings appealed to him. He hated his narrow, thin, hard bed that barely fit him before and now was a gross joke between himself and his wings and tail added. His desk no longer fit his growing supply of texts and papers, forcing him to pack them as neatly as he could beneath it and around it, but he wanted for more space, and her words seemed half a message from Soudana and half a message of worse things to come.

He waited for Araceli to tip the balance in favor of one or the other.

Detraeus grunted. After an extended pause, he asked, “How much?” and they argued rates, her starting ridiculously low and him insisting on paying more — paying what such a place was worth. Eventually, they came to a relative truce. It was convenient, he argued to himself as his mind plagued him with reasons why he ought never have agreed. She lived close, her rates were fair, and it would be to his advantage to live somewhere with enough space for his belongings and a bed large enough to fit him. No uninvited guests in the form of small animals trying to take up quarters in his room or the bugs migrating over from the spaces of filthy neighbors.

Peace. And quiet.

That alone, he insisted to himself, was worth paying the extra for, and if she kept to her word, he would have his space to himself as he did now, and more of it. If she didn’t, he could leave any time he so chose.

So, it was decided upon. When they reached the gates of Taliuma, Araceli insisted on him letting Lithian tend to his wounds as he did hers, and the day after, he began the process of moving his limited belongs into the space she cleared for him. How long the arrangement would last, only the gods could guess.