Welcome to Gaia! ::

“Don’t talk,” There was an almost hollow if not distant sound to her voice when Laven walked into the room with a fresh bowl of cold water and a damp cloth in hand. She set them on the nightstand beside the bed then slid one cool hand behind his head to help support his neck.

“Need you to sit up for a moment.” She instructed while avoiding eye contact, but she did at least wait for him to nod before forcing him to rise.

The scrapes on her face from their encounter with the owl were scabbed over, the skin around them still an angry red but it at least suggested that they were still healing. Her limp, however, was not something she could conceal very well but the bandages on her hip were at least hidden behind her knitted sweater.

Her lips pursed into a thin line but it was hard to parse if it was because of the horrible barking cough or pained look on his face or if it was because he didn’t listen to her warning about not talking. Either way, she didn’t really know how to answer his question without it bringing up questions they couldn’t really talk about so… she didn’t.

“Drink this slowly,” Laven picked up the glass of water and handed it to him when she felt confident enough that he wouldn’t spill it on the bed.

“I picked up some cold and flu medicine from the convenience store a few miles down the road.” It was a harrowing experience with the owl still watching the house. Wolframite had been safe enough inside but she almost wasn’t as lucky. Thankfully it grew tired of the game of chase and eventually gave up before she had to return to the cabin. But that didn’t mean that the danger was over yet.

“There is warm broth in the kitchen but I’m worried you’ll burn yourself.” Even if it was lukewarm, sore throats were a b***h to contend with and would make everything he’d swallow hurt. Then again, he was never really one to shy away from pain and at least it would be a reminder to himself that he’s alive.

“No,” She shook her head and pulled her hand away. In his current state, it didn’t take much effort at all.

“Until you’re well enough to at least teleport yourself to the infirmary then you’re going to have to listen to me.” Right now she didn’t give a s**t about rank. “We’re half youma, not humans, I have no idea if medicine even works on you the same way.” For as frustrated as she had every right to be she seemed rather… calm.

The last twenty-four hours had been spent in silent contemplation on what to do or what she would say when he finally came to and now that he had, Laven just felt drained both mentally and physically.

Feeling that panic rise again, she picked the cup up off the bed then got up herself. “I’ll be back.” She turned before he could try and stop her again, skirting out the door as quickly as she dared to move with her hip still injured. For several minutes she stood at the kitchen sink, letting the faucet run just so she could let the white noise of running water silence the thoughts in her head.

“Idiot…” He wouldn’t be in this state had he just stayed here and let her go. He wouldn’t be this sick if he had just left her at the bottom of the lake. Although she never directly spelled it out for him, he knew the story of how she awakened which kind of implied she could breathe underwater. There was no reason for him to panic the way he did. Unless he knew she was injured and would bleed out if she stayed under for too long, but… that was giving him too much credit. Yes, he had a good sense of smell and decent sight in low light but even that was expecting too much of him.

Pinching the bridge of her nose to stymie the oncoming headache, Lavendulan sighed then filled the glass and returned to the master bedroom where she expected him to still be sitting in bed where she left him.

"Wolf-" Hastily setting the glass of water on the dresser, Laven moved quicker than she should have to catch him before he hit the floor. A misstep on her part sent a sharp pain down her leg and with his added weight they met the ground with both knees regardless.

"Why can't you just listen to me?" She bit out her frustration through pursed lips and clenched teeth. "Twice I've told you to stay and twice you've ignored me." Laven braced herself then, careful of the cuts on his chest, she helped him back up and onto the bed.

"I told you I'd be back, so why? Why are you being so damn stubborn..." Her pupils pulled into thin slits and while she was on the verge of forcing him to lay back down she was also half anticipating him telling her that he was about to throw up or needed to use the restroom.

“Just… stop.” She wanted to believe him, that he was truly remorseful. But the fact of the matter was that this was him, who he was. “I’m not going to be guilted into forgiving you just because you’re sick.”

Laven looked away, trying to hide the tears that nearly fell. She was angry, she was frustrated and come morning he likely wouldn’t remember any of this. All it would be was a fevered dream and he’d be back to his normal self.

“Damn it,” she swore, wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “Damn you,” Her heart wrenched in her chest because she knew, despite her anger, despite everything, she’d forgive him. He had warned her months ago that this is who he was, these were the similar things he had done in his past and though he wanted to do better or be better, he was still a long way away from changing that.

Somehow she had allowed herself to believe that she was an exception to his past, that he wouldn’t manipulate her the way he had others. That his feelings for her were real but now… now she honestly didn’t know. As far as she knew they were just simple words meant to keep her here so he wouldn’t be alone and that thought just killed her inside to even consider.

“I hate you.” But that was a lie. Yes she was wounded and was angry but she didn’t hate him; at least not the way it sounded. “I wanted to leave you there.” She admitted her sin to almost abandoning him there to die in the cold snow or to be eaten by the hungry beast. “That way, that way I could just disappear and nobody would bother to come looking…” She was already invisible to all but him. Even her family must have stopped looking for answers or truths by now.

Perhaps Lopezite or Tina might start asking questions in a few weeks or months perhaps, but by then it would be too late. She’d be long gone. Probably living in some underwater cave away from land and people in a darkness she chose for herself.

“But I couldn’t, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t leave you. But that doesn’t mean I forgive you either.” This wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. Her heart was supposed to remain steeled, her face expressionless and yet here she sat, broken down in a mess of tears in front of someone too sick to even really process what she was saying.

“Why tell me now? Why wait so long? It’s like you wanted to give me a reason to leave you because you were too cowardly to say you were tired of me.” Each statement felt like a lash upon her heart each one making her feel that much more numb and yet she found it hard to stop herself. “I don’t know what to think anymore, oh you… of this.” Laven gestured to the room they were in.

“No more lies. No more secrets.” She reached up and removed her earring and held her hand out to him. “No more hiding.”

“Tell me… tell me the truth...”

Laven hesitated at his defeated resignation.

This was wrong. What she was asking him to do was wrong. He was sick and injured and while she more than half expected him to have argued that it wasn’t necessary or that she should just trust him he instead surprised her yet again.

But if she waited until he was better then Wolframite would have the mental fortitude to play more mind games with her, to put up walls on things he didn’t want her to know or evade questions and block her out completely. If she truly wanted answers, this was the only time she would get them and so she reached up with shaky hands and affixed the cuff on his ear.

A rush of guilt poured through the link from both sides. Oil and water crashing into one another yet not mixing. For the moment Laven did nothing to hide her raw emotions, she wanted him to not just know, or acknowledge, how badly he had hurt her but she wanted him to feel it as she did.

The betrayal was real. The confusion and frustration were real and it was all his doing.

“Tell me everything about purification. How you found out about it. Who performed it. Everything…” She didn’t want to give him the time to sympathize with her or pity himself and so she slammed a wall of rime up between them, a jagged wall of ice around her heart as she waited for him to tell, or show her, what happened.

“That outfit…” The colors were different before but the pattern unmistakeable. “That was you in the Dreamscape...” That everchanging place where she both did and did not have control over the world and how it appeared. All that macabre and horror with the blood and snakes, it was his doing.

A peek into the darker recesses of his mind, a place that terrified her more than the prospect of being trapped in the haunted house for eternity.

“Regardless, you knew the repercussions of purification and still decided that the risk was worth taking. You could have warned me about all of that early on but you kept it from me. Why? We were barely even friends at the time when I told you that I hated being a half youma and I hated being here.”

“I missed my home, my family.” Images of her mother, her father, and their smiling faces flitted in between the shared link. Their lips moved as if they were speaking but no sound was heard because in the year she’d been away Laven had forgotten what their voices sounded like.

She could vaguely remember her father’s deep laughter and the way his eyes would crinkle when he smiled as well as the sneezing sounds her mother would make when her allergies were acting up. If she thought hard enough she could remember their ‘I love you’ before sending her to bed as a kid but all that was a result of being forced to stay away from them.

For the quickest of seconds, there was a memory of a cemetery but it was quickly dismissed before either could read the name on the headstone.

“Just as the Sovereigns didn’t trust you with reasons as to why they were moving forward with the truce between the Negaverse and the Dark Mirror Senshi, you didn’t trust me with the truth that there was a way to get my life back.” He had been physically tortured; beaten and burned then expected to accept things as if they had never happened while living with the scars as daily reminders. Whereas she was left to seclusion, kept away from all that was familiar to her; joy and happiness stripped, even the comfort of her own bed taken away.

“Little by little I have had to get rid of my remaining belongings.” She used to have a larger storage area where she fit nearly all of her belongings, but over the last year, she had to sell or get rid of larger things so she could move into a smaller space. Half of her scuba gear had been sold a month ago just so she could pitch in for this vacation. On one hand, she didn’t really need it anymore, the tanks and masks or the fins; the bodysuit she kept but the rest was now more or less a mutation she lived with since she could see and breathe underwater just fine. But the nostalgia attached to the items could never be bought back.

“Even if I did decide that the risk was worth taking, that fifty percent was on an all or nothing was enough for me. It’s not like it would have changed anything for you. I meant nothing to you back then...I was just a neighbor across the hall you didn’t even know about for almost five months. Clearly a friendship, or even relationship for that matter, neither made a difference because, at the end of the day, you said it yourself, you’d kill me if I left.”

“The happiness and future you desired and grasped at is the same happiness you’d deny me...”