Chapter Text
They’d pulled him, kicking and screaming, from the wreck. Coughing and sparking, blinking as the dust settled around them and trying to turn his palms on them to shock their pans into a frenzy so he could scramble away on shaking doe-legs, but a hot square little palm had slapped down on his cheek and his whole world just froze.
The dust settled, covering them all in a fine creamy ash, and two shapes hung over him silhouetted against the moonlight and the pink sky.
“Are you OK?” A young rough-hewn voice came, hoarse from shouting. He recognised it, he had been the one yelling himself hoarse as the cart of psions rattled past, heavy ladened with bodies. He still sounded raspy from his screeching, and Mituna took a stuttering breath as he took his red-hot little hand from his cheek, leaving him spinning as the world rocked around him, like the cart was still tumbling.
“Anything purroken?” Says another voice, and a girl leaned in with hair all wide around her shoulders, puffy and dusted with ash, eyes big and green and keen as she sniffed at him, reaching in to take his hand and angle it about, checking him over for scratches.
Mituna yanked his hand back and hissed, holding it tight against his chest, bony fingers knotted up against each other as the noise of two hoofbeasts shrieking off towards the front of what had used to be the slavers cart, and was now a pile of splintered firewood. The beasts kicked up dirt as they surged away from the wreck, leather bonds cut and bridles wrenched off. He wondered how they’d got free, glad but still wanting to know how they’d thrown off the huge heavy leather bindings that leashed them to the caravan.
The answer stepped through the dust, skirts swishing around her ankles, bloody from the wrist up all deep noble blue on jade cloth, lips dark and dripping and her skin alight. Mituna must have screamed, though his pan was dizzy enough with all the psionic discharge that he didn’t know it, because her brows sloped down all empathetic as she swooped closer, legs obscured with floaty skirts, and when he tried to scramble away his back came up against a jutt of broken off burned up wood, scraping black lines against his bare back.
The two young trolls looked at him, his pan-pounding terror and the way his claws dug at the dirt, and the one with wild hair frowned deep as a gully. The other caught on faster, eyes going all empathetic in a mirror of the big rainbow drinker, reaching out to him like he was trying to calm a feral snarlbeast.
“No, no, it’s OK! She’s with us, she’s with me, she’s my mother.”
Mituna snarled at the outstretched hand, a thin growl rattling in his throat as he gathered his legs up closer. “Your /what/?”
The girl rolled her eyes so hard they looked like they were going to roll out her head.
“Just pawl her your LUSUS. We do this EFURRY time.”
“She isn’t a lusus! She’s my mother and that’s what we’re going to call her!” The hoarse one said, scowling with something like a little pout at the girl who kept on rolling her eyes. The mother swept forwards like a cool breeze, kneeling down to their level, and set a hand on each of their shoulders.
“Leave him be. He’s just had quite a shock, doesn’t need us all crowding him. Come now, we need to be moving, it won’t take them long to notice a missing cargo this valuable.” She said, straightening and pulling them with her. The boy looked like he sorely wanted to stay, while the girl stood more readily, raising a hand and waving goodbye.
“Bye then, whoefur you are! You’re welcome.” She grinned, nodding at him decisively, showing off gappy yellowed teeth far sharper than his. He glanced between them, still silent, and the jade turned to leave, but the little hoarse one stayed put for a moment as they turned to the treeline and set off.
“...I’m Kankri. You should probably get moving, they’ll find you soon, most of the others are… well, all of them went that way.” He pointed off towards the horizon, where a blue and red haze silhouetted a couple dozen bodies moving down the path, some carrying others, some levitating just slightly. “...I hope you do OK.” He said, and he reached out to pat Mituna’s shin, awkward and hopeful. His hand was so beautifully warm and heavy and it felt a little bit like flowers blooming up his leg until he shook it off and wrapped his skinny arms around his knees, waiting for him, for KANKRI to get the message and back off.
Mituna hadn’t realised he was wearing a cape. What a loser.
They moved into the trees, the jade and olive blended in almost instantly and the little coal-hot boy went after them, his cape snagging on brambles. Mituna looked down the road that the other yellows took, saw them kicking up dust in the distance in a happy hazy red blue cloud. Idiots. Following the road. Where did they think they were going?
He looked to the forest, the slight indent in the grasses where the three slightly-dirty trolls had disappeared still fresh. Fresh enough to follow.
He picked himself up, dusted himself off, and started following Kankri the same way he would for the rest of his life.
---
They fed him. Clothed him in something that wasn’t cheesecloth. Tended to his wounds, knitted him back together, and the distance between them shrank a little every time Kankri or Meulin - her name was Meulin, he learned that over hopbeast stew that the jade lovingly prepared and fed him bowls of - smiled at him bright enough to blow away a little of the dark. Or they shared a joke they had to keep hidden from Porrim, or scrambled to hide in the same bush as a cart rumbled past.
Porrim had to leave them sometimes, go and pick up odd jobs in taverns and left them to play in clearings or caves or brooks. More than once some opportunistic scavengers tried to take a crack at them, especially with an “untapped battery” rattling around, but they learned to take care of themselves. Meulin was a surprise, turned out she could hold her own better than anyone Mituna had ever seen fight without weapons before. She turned their faces into ribbons and went too far more often than she didn’t, and sometimes Porrim came back to find a dead body all sticky and congealed on the floor of wherever they’d been left with her charges huddled up in the tree, Meulin bristled up and Mituna sparking as he kept them all afloat.
They spent so much time together. Kankri talked a lot, and his words wove in ways Mituna had never seen before. Back at the battery pack there’d never been any cause for storytelling or flowery words, things were short and blunt and words were just there to get you from one place to the other, but when he told stories…
When he told stories the air came alive with them. Mituna could see it, how his eyes got bright, how his breath caught up in his throat and he choked up on emotion when he talked about trolls he’d seen dressed in pure woven gold, and trolls who didn’t have anything. He’d seen acts of such divine kindness, he told them about when Porrim had snuck him around swaddled up in a pile of scarves, and about the sights and sounds of lands he’d only ever heard of from shopkeeps or sailors.
He told Mituna about cruelty in the world. How trolls with money that jangled in their pockets and didn’t deserve to keep it looked down on the castes that they outranked. He’d never seen a seadweller in the flesh before, never seen a purpleblood, but Kankri told him about all the cults they cooked up in their heads to justify their nobility. How they poured their lives into religions that the rest of them couldn’t see, Gods that wouldn’t touch anything lower than a sour purple, painted up their faces when they went into battle and killed in the name of their Gods, with such fury and conviction.
They saw a battlefield once, about two sweeps after he started walking with them. They hopped from place to place so frequently he had trouble piecing it all together in his head, and couldn’t tell if they were right on the whitecliffs or landlocked, because everywhere they travelled was somewhere new. Here the grasses were all yellow, and the moons were just rising and turning the sky gold, and he watched as the grass turned yellow to brown. And brown to red. And Porrim put out an arm to stop him, freezing as she looked around at the trampled grass of the planes and took a frozen breath, trying to cast her sleeve in front of his face and turn them around before-
Kankri wailed, eyes welling up as he stared at the bodies. He sobbed hard, and Mituna’s eyes went wide, stepping back a little as his eyes flickered over the ruin, Porrim dropped to her knees in front of Kankri and wiped at his cheeks with her thumbs, hushing him, brushing his hair back from his face, shushing and soothing him as Meulin darted past her. She moved like an arrow loosed from a bow, shooting over the trampled ground, legs eating it up as she flung herself to the side of the first fallen soldier she came across. There were no noises beyond Kankri’s burbling sobs, and he didn’t know where to look, there was so much to take in, all the bodies, all the noise from Kankri crying like this for the first time, Meulin running from body to body, eyes welling up, body getting wrought with tension until she looks down and starts trembling, raises her boot, and stamps it down straight through a skull.
Mituna flinched violently, and Porrim turned around with Kankri pressed to her chest.
“MEULIN! We do not deface-”
“THEY DIDN’T EVEN HAVE WEAPONS!”
She looked up, knees splattered blue, the highest blue he’d ever seen.
“THEY WEREN’T SOLDIERS. THEY WERE… PEOPLE. JUST PEOPLE.” She threw her arm out, and everyone's eyes went down to the nearest body. Some sort of peasant. Brown. Its head had caved in, its eyes had popped like… like what? What did eyes pop like? What dribbled down your cheeks and congealed on your nose when a club burst it out your eye sockets?
“They slaughtered them they just.... They just culled them. For fun.”
Her voice lost the fight in it, and her shoulders drooped in increments. She was a little girl in the middle of a battle field. No. Not… not a battlefield. A slaughterhouse.
And she looked so lost.
Mituna moved closer, moving as light as he could, trying not to heave when his boots squished up in a puddle of brown, setting his jaw and moving until he could set a tentative hand on her shoulder. Squeezing gently. She looked up, shivering slightly, jaw trembling like she was fit to fall apart, and Mituna remembered what Porrim had done and just… reached out. Touched her cheek and shushed her, the sounds coming out slightly lispy through too many tongues and teeth, breath shivering slightly. He reached up into her hair (she was so cool to the touch, it was only one caste but it felt like a dozen degrees) and brushed it out of her face, where the tears stuck it to her cheeks.
“It’s OK.” He murmured, and she sniffed. The field was silent.
Kankri set a hand on both of their shoulders, sniffing, eyes glossy and cheeks red, and all at once they collapsed into a hug, arms wound round each other, shaking just slightly. Kankri sniffled some more, Mituna reached over to muss his hair, and his fingers stroked over Meulin’s, already wound up in there. It was… ok. Good. Feeling her fingers scritching across his scalp under his own, and letting their fingers knit together, just for a minute.
When they pulled apart he felt so warm. Warmer than he could justify, standing in the middle of the barren field, with an olive pressed up against his side. Things moved slower, things stayed in the right order, nothing jumped or skipped, and when Porrim stepped in to shepherd them away, he went easy.