Chapter Text
—
Another day, down in the dungeon, to check on the current status of all the traps on this level. A solo mission that only takes 4 hours then back up to the surface you go. Your pack slowly drags you down to the ground, making you even more lethargic than before.
Why did you even take this job? You hate working alone and loathe disarming traps.
Yes, it’s been a while since your first party disbanded but you do kind of miss them. The jokes and moments shared within the tavern and the camaraderie between the group was quite enjoyable. If only the party leader bothered to spare funds to renew your contract with them.
It was quite hard to leave them but it had to be done. A contract is a contract, money is money. If they weren’t going to cough up the funds to keep you in the party, they don’t deserve your skills in their adventures. Although being in a party was the best experience you ever had, there was a downside to it.
The way your previous party leader handled things was quite proactive, as she constantly thought of what might happen if they were to lose a member of the party on their adventures, and clearly she was a penny-pincher who wouldn’t spare a cent to save a soul. So instead of saving money to revive party members, she decided to hire two members who shared the same level of skill.
Chilchuck Tims.
Your replacement.
In the past, you wouldn’t pay much attention to him, which indefinitely bothered him. Being a replacement to you must have gotten to him as well, as the two of you would constantly be squabbling over the smallest mistakes.
Your catfights would result in the leader docking your pay sometimes or resulting in situations where Chilchuck would be in charge of you instead but in the end, he always knew that you were better than him.
Every night, you would consider how selfish your previous party leader really was, intentionally dividing the sum of a tall-man rouge’s salary between you and Chilchuck, as “the both of you combined is essentially a tall man”.
It’s a wonder how both of you fell underneath the spell of an underpaying job.
The leader treated the both of you as slaves, making you do her dirty work. She always said that we could leave whenever you wanted, but yet you didn’t.
Truth be told, you cherished working with Chilchuck, yet you could never tell if he felt the same. Within every moment of vulnerability shared between you two, whenever it got to talking about his past or his feelings, he would always change the topic.
It felt like talking to a brick wall.
Which was so infuriating.
Chilchuck Tims is really the only reason you still think about that party till this day. You’ve been in different parties since then, but it never felt the same. Well, those other parties actually paid you well and didn’t force you to do their laundry but you didn’t mean it that way. You missed having Chilchuck next to you, helping you out, giving snarky compliments, keeping you safe.
It pains you to say this but, without hesitation, you would give anything to work with Chilchuck once again.
If only he didn’t decide to be a total dick the day you found out your contract wasn’t getting renewed.The moment Chilchuck found out, he immediately stopped talking to you. He refused to even say a single word to you and every time he looked at you, it was just a cold scowl towards you. Like as if he has despised you since he met you. It broke your heart. Shattered it, even.
The reason why your contract wasn’t getting renewed was because the leader finally figured out that having to pay the salary of half a tall-man only is cheaper than paying a tall-man’s salary for two half-foots.
Your previous leader wasn’t the brightest person.
She didn’t believe in experience and believed in “mortality rate” so she chose the person who would die faster to stay in the party to save funds.
The party disbanded the day after the leader’s death and used the funds that she saved for her resurrection and split it amongst themselves. (It was quite a high sum as she thought she would be worth a lot.)
It might have been illegal but you heard that it was Chilchuck’s idea to split the savings since he wanted it as revenge for you.
But how would you know? It was just a rumour.
—
After daydreaming for a bit, you find yourself at the entrance to a trap room, with belongings scattered around the entrance’s walls.
Although you only notice the belongings (as your job also includes you arranging the belongings to be taken by the corpse retrievers) your attention is drawn away to the *living* owners of the bags, a mixed trio.
A dwarf, with a conflicting smell, is emptying the contents of a pack while a tall-man excitedly watches on, almost drooling. The last of the trio is a female half-elf, looking at you directly with an annoyed visage, probably from the other two.
You didn’t get mad at her as their incessant chanting would have annoyed you terribly too. You clutch on to the straps of the pack on your shoulders. You can’t tell if you should proceed with caution about asking what happened to the owner of the 4th bag or to just leave as they seem to be occupied themselves.
The half-elf stares at you pleadingly, almost silently begging you to take her out of her current predicament.
The only way you could drag her out from this is to initiate conversation.
“Do you guys need any help or?…”
“Yes please!”
The emotions on her face immediately change as she sounds even more cheery than her previous disposition.
“We have a friend in that room that’s honestly been there for a while and I can’t stand to be here anymore.”
“Oh, really?” You’re surprised the half-elf would wait that long. “What can I do?”
“First of all, my name is Marcille, the dwarf is Senshi and Laios is the tall-man.”
“So who’s in there?”
Marcille almost examines me a bit, seeing what I was carrying and what I would do just based on her glance.
“A half-foot, just like you! You seem to be carrying the same equipment as him and he did say something about a silence barrier or something so he told us to stay out here, but I’m sure you can go inside as well!”
“So you want me to go inside and ask him what’s going on?”
“Yep, then come back out and tell us!”
If that was it, why did he take that long? Traps that involve magic would need a magic user to solve it, why did he ask the only magic user to stay outside? This half-foot that they hired seems to be inexperienced to you.
“I’ll leave my pack here then I’ll be back.”
“See you!”
You leave your pack with the quirky trio and slowly step inside the trap room, you instantly feel a pull.
All of your senses are being stripped away from you, leaving only the echo of your footsteps to resonate within the barrier’s walls. You quickly turn behind you to sound out to Marcille to pull you out but you find yourself unable to catch her attention.
“Marcille!! It’s a silence bubble!”
“Can you hear me?”
You can only see her looking inside the room, with a figure that makes her look like a reflection of herself in a lake.
Guess you can’t do anything from inside here to get her attention.
The only thing you can do is to find the half-foot that’s supposedly trapped in here. The room isn’t badly lit, but it’s still not bright enough to see its entire interior. You take a torch from the side of the room and start pacing yourself to the other side, to hopefully find the half-foot.
As you approach the end of the room, mumblings get louder, as you start to see a shadow emerge from a taller-than-average half-foot standing in a secluded corner of the room, almost ignoring your presence. You can’t make out his face but it does seem like he managed to find the one spot in this trap room that isn’t covered by the silence barrier.
You rush to the corner with your medicine pouch since to your point of view, it looks like he was kneeling over himself in pain.
—
You clearly underestimated the distance between your previous position in the barrier and the half-foot, as within seconds, you somehow managed to find yourself tumbling into the lap of the supposed injured half-foot you saw, slightly scalding yourself with your torch. You thought that he was at least a 100 metres away from you but realistically, a dungeon trap room isn’t that big and you just fell under the illusion of the barrier spell.
The torch gets knocked to the wall adjacent to where this half-foot was laying. Perfectly illuminating the grimace this half-foot had on when he noticed a familiar-looking half-foot was laying on his lap. You didn’t even notice that you were laying on top of a stranger. Instead you’d rather focus on the blistering wound on your forearm that’s gradually getting even more “stingy” as you let it rest.
You crawl up into a ball, roll over and scrunch up your eyes, about to let out the most ear-bleeding scowl to the world ever. Clearly the other half-foot knows what was about to happen and covers your mouth before you could even yell out your agony.
“Gods, R/N the louder you are the more my ears are gonna regret working y’know.”
He knew your name. Now, who is the only half-foot who knows your real name? (other than your parents)
“Chilchuck?!” you say under his palm, which comes out as, “Chichk?!”.
“I know you brought your medicine pouch. Is it still on your waist?”
You nod. You also notice that he doesn’t remove his hand from your mouth. He clearly doesn’t want to hear any noise from you, like before.
Rather than getting mad at him, like you always wanted, something in you just prevents you from doing it. It’s like you wanted to just hug him instead of bashing his head against the wall for hurting you so badly when you were released from the party.
He takes the medication and starts dabbing it over the burn wound, surprisingly well with just one hand. He’s really determined to make sure you make no noise.
“Could you stop looking at me like that? You look like you’ve just seen a kitten get taken away from its mom.”
His calm tone really reminds him of the past, when you’d get impaled by an arrow, getting your hair cut off, losing a hand. He was there to help you as much as you were there to help him, no matter how passive-aggressive he was when helping to fix you up. Sometimes he would poke a finger in the bruise, just to annoy you. Just like how you would put actual salt in his wounds after he gets stabbed by a mimic. Those were good times.
“It fucking hurts!”, from muffled pains, gets translated into “Ipuckehurs!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know it hurts just calm down.” He swiftly bandages up your right arm and starts to loosen his grip over your mouth, slowly. “Now, I’m going to lift my hand from your mouth. So promise, you won’t make any loud noises.”
You knew better than to not listen to Chilchuck.
The moment he lifts his hand from your mouth, everything comes flowing back. The heartache, the lonely nights, the regret, the what-ifs, the why-didn’ts. Every single thing you felt about him came rushing back.
You couldn’t tell if you wanted to punch him, kick him, slap him, pinch him.
Whatever it was, nothing could really describe all your feelings towards him but this was the only thing you could think of.
—
You hug him.
It was a feeling that made you feel too much all at once. You could feel the emptiness within you be filled just by being able to touch him again. Nothing could ever fill the void more than he did. You could feel tears welling up within your eyes as you gripped him even tighter, making your bandaged arm hurt like hell. But who cares. This made you feel more complete than how you felt for the last 7 years.
7 years.
It’s really been that long since you’ve seen Chilchuck.
While you were hugging him, he didn’t do anything. He just froze up. Almost like he didn’t know what to do. It’s not like you two had ever hugged each other before.
With his reaction like that, you remember how he acted towards you on the day. You wanted to punch him so bad but you got burned on your dominant hand. So all you could do was turn frustration into even more sadness. Rather than the tears just getting your eyes damp, it started to slowly fall down onto his leather vest.
The moment the tear drop fell, you can tell that some sort of instinct kicked in him. Yet you’re not too sure what to describe it.
“L-Listen Y/N, I’ve missed you too.”
Without trying to let go of him you start expressing all your anger towards him.
“Why the hell did you let me leave? All I wanted to do was stay working with you.”
“Are you sure you only want to work with me?”
“Oh, shut it.”
“Well I’m not letting you leave now but I have to say, my legs are getting numb”
“Fuck off, you deserve it.”
“Whatever you say.”
You can feel a glowing smirk behind your head, as he snuggles a little bit more into the crook of your neck, finally embracing your grief stricken hug.
Your anger dissipated into just pure nothingness. You can’t tell if it's you being sad or just being too happy to see him but you start giggling.
—
“Chilchuck, can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
This is where you start to let go of him.
“Why did you act so coldly towards me whenever you were about to open up to me?”
Finally you stare him in the eyes, your tear-stained eyes. It’s swollen from all the crying but you didn’t care if he saw you like this, at your most vulnerable. He’s seen you at your most injured, that’s for sure.
“U-uh..”, he starts to scratch the side of his chin. This was always the way Chilchuck would change the topic.
“Oh. If you’re going to be like that.”
You pause. Staring him dead in the eye.
“I’m gonna do something I should’ve done the day I left.”
You take the sides of his face and slowly pull him towards you, your eyes focused on nothing but his lips. You inch closer and closer, slowly entangling your hands into his hair.
“You were goi-”
Your lips finally pressed against him, stopping him mid-sentence. It felt long-deserved to you.
It was your very first kiss after years apart, as you both hesitatingly explored each other’s lips. As memories flooded back, the kiss deepened with longing, hands finding each other's warmth. Your breaths intertwined, you could feel your hearts racing, and time seemed to halt, reigniting a love that had never truly faded between you two.
Could you really call it love?
You two were only partners before, why did this feel so welcoming?
The kiss intensified, then Chilchuck pulled away, eyes wide with realisation. Guilt and fear start to develop in your heart. You can't tell if what you did was wrong or terrible or just not meant to happen but everything you’re overthinking ends the moment he says this.
“I’ve always liked you R/N, I don’t know how you couldn’t tell.”
—