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"Jaiden," Roier recognizes in an instant. The woods are quieter than they've ever been. She supposes it's less loud when there aren't any tiny feet rustling about, attracting wildlife and killing everything in their wake.
Jaiden takes a few steps forward before she can actually see Roier. His back is turned to her for a second and she can see the tenseness in his posture, the drowsiness of his normally exuberant presence.
Both their eyes meet. Jaiden's mouth is set near permanently in an uneasy frown while Roier's tongue is on his teeth, perpetually in contemplation. Their shared gaze is intense, communicating words neither of them know how to translate into thoughts or are ready to even imagine saying. Anguished violet holds hostage hickory gently.
It's two kinds of hurt intertwining.
She sighs, ducks underneath a branch's awning to move closer to him, and breaks eye contact to do that. After a few seconds, Roier meets her halfway, walking in what's far from a rush but not painfully slow either.
Everything has been painfully slow for the past forty-eight hours.
Jaiden found out that her son died within that time frame. Jaiden watched Roier curl into a ball of denial within that time frame. Everything was uncertain and unbalanced in that time frame. Her entire world fell apart after hearing a single sentence.
Cucurucho appeared with letters and near promises to bring Bobby back today. Now, nearly everyone they, she and Roier, love is snoring on camping cots on the grounds of Bobby's castle, awaiting the breaking of a new day in order to rescue Bobby.
Or so it seems.
Jaiden looks up from her shoes to look at Roier again, not to meet his eyes necessarily, but just to look at him. On the surface, he seems fine. His face is not wracked with rivulets of tears, he isn't sweating intensely, and he isn't shaking. But if you look long or hard enough, you would be able to see the stiffness of his shoulders and how his fists're clenched.
She sees him swallow tersely. It isn't unkindly. There's a slight delay in all his actions, something sluggish overtaking him that doesn't bite him but gnaws at him slowly. It chews on every bit of him meticulously and quietly — and it eats away at him so much that his grasp on the world, his reflexes and his life force on worse days, slips.
It's a danger. There are no real medical professionals on the island, as far as Jaiden is aware, exempting the possibility of the Federation's people. The Federation has never helped them before, and they won't help them now, so he's stuck lagging behind in his own body — entirely out of it at some of his worst moments despite being one of the island's best combatants and most present existences.
So he treads dangerously. He always has.
Neither of them ever thought it would kill Bobby. Neither of them thought the world was cruel enough to strike at a moment like it did. All this time, it has been a dull aching occupying him- and "it" has been something Jaiden could even relate to at times, for there has to be some conspiracy made about the way how the farther apart Quesadilla Island members are, the worse the pains get for some people, and how the pains are there in the first place. The great lag of existence.
Roier coughs, finally alerting Jaiden and interrupting both her inspection and introspection. He says, "You know," and his eyebrows furrow here, "maybe we'll be able to bring him back. I think we can."
He doesn't think that. Jaiden knows he doesn't.
"I'd do anything," she tells him. He knows that. "I would do anything to get our Bobby back."
She's deathly serious too. And visions of the most horrid things jump to front immediately as she remembers herself being unable to fully empathize with Slime's grieving wrath because all she was back then was scared.
Jaiden is willing to scare anyone if it means-
Roier laughs in something close to hysteria but far from insanity — because insanity is a type of closure too kind for the world to grant to either of them, and they can only drift so closely to any semblance of sense or settlement in both their lives now. "We will get Bobby back. Tomorrow!"
"We will get Bobby back, Jaiden!" was the sentiment his words said, but his undertone echoed in a coarse manner that only served to impale and embrace Jaiden all the same. It was a bitter taste of fantasizing in spite of their reality.
Getting him back: it's what everyone was saying, drifting off to sleep. Almost every single person was tired and tuckered out, not expecting to have to prepare for a trek to save their friends' probably dead kid, but a few people like Bad, Forever, and Cellbit took longer to fall asleep.
Bad and Jaiden spoke for a while. Jaiden really appreciated how much he valued Bobby- and all the kids at that. He really was a kind man. He sympathized with her, but while she was grateful to have someone like him around, she was only occupied by guilt deep down. She exchanged what felt like pleasantries but must have been more like monotonous insincerity with everyone else, smiling and moving along to the beat of a future that would never exist.
Jaiden already wanted to cry. Jaiden already wanted to grieve. No one was ready to, but she needed to. When everyone spoke of the pretenses of a world with him back in it like it was how ought to be, how it was going to happen as if it was a given, Jaiden's voice needed to escape and it scratched and clawed away from the recedes of her throat in great desperation.
But somehow, she played it cool. She was simply an antsy mother worrying for her kid's life, not one already grieving the almost certain death of her child. Her Bobby.
Roier played it very cool. But Jaiden knew. She knows. That optimism he carries with him is a burning flame that is already on its path to becoming purely ashes. It isn't real anyway.
They both know he's already gone. Jaiden doesn't think either of them have even said it aloud since two days ago — but the truth has always been in both of their gazes and the flora on the fields and the cumbersome lack of noise and chaos and the sunsets and moonrises. The truth has existed and persisted. He is gone.
But if they have to walk eight thousand blocks for a chance, for a pathetic and desperate shot at a "maybe", then they will. Jaiden will move mountains and oceans if it means getting to say one last thing to her son and seeing Roier snicker with him.
"Yeah. We will."