Chapter Text
“...So, uh, thanks for looking after him, again. Seriously.”
Dani shakes her head. “He wasn’t any trouble last time. All due respect, I can deal with more than a rabbit.”
“Yeah, of course, totally, I just mean — well, I just mean thank you, I guess.” Aubrey shifts her stance and offers a small smile to Dani, but regrets it almost immediately when Dani smiles back widely, making warmth bloom in Aubrey’s chest.
“Really, it’s not any trouble,” Dani repeats. Her brown eyes carry a spark of… something, and Aubrey just swallows, nods, and smiles as she turns away, leaving Dr. Bonkers in Dani’s arms.
She’s doomed. Staying here, at this lodge, with Dani — tall, radiant, talented, kind Dani — she’s going to end up burning it down. It’s not like she can go anywhere else, though, even if she wanted to leave. Dani certainly isn’t going anywhere either, she reminds herself as she pushes out of the door to the lodge, remembering vividly brown eyes turned cat-like and orange, and fangs stark white against a red mouth.
...Anyways. That’s all assuming she survives tonight.
Aubrey shakes the idea out of her head as soon as it surfaces. They will do this. No sweat. They’ve got a plan, it’ll be fine.
“Aubrey! You comin’?” Mama’s voice reaches her ears not too far away, and Aubrey picks up her pace through the forest and calls “Yeah, I’ll be right there!”
It’ll be fine.
—
Aubrey shrugs off Barclay’s movement to help her with a mumbled, “It’s okay,” and a strained smile. It’s about as genuine as it can be with her head feeling like it’s full of cotton and her chest twinging a little if she breathes too deeply. She pulls her jacket on, shifting the lapel to better conceal the Pine Guard logo, and walks out the door.
“Aubrey —”
“Dude, they cleared me. It’s fine.”
“Yeah, I know, but don’t — don’t run off, or anything.” Barclay follows her out, and she can feel him side-eyeing her like she’ll collapse any second. She snorts.
“Where would I run to?” she asks. Barclay shrugs.
“I don’t know. Just strikes me as something a punky twenty-something dealing with newly-discovered fire powers and just having been knocked the hell out by a literal abomination of nature would do.”
“Aw, thank you. Everybody says I’m more goth.”
“You’re kinda… both.”
“Damn it.”
Barclay laughs, and they walk in relative silence through the hospital, down to the parking lot, where he pulls out a phone and calls someone. Aubrey faintly hears Ned’s voice say, “Hello?” before Barclay asks him where he is. She stops paying attention and stares up at the darkening sky.
Barclay said she’d been out for the night and a little bit of the morning. She’d stayed at the hospital for a final check-over, and now they were leaving. She bit her lip and tried to decide whether the cool evening air soothed or stung her still-recovering lungs.
“Ned’ll be here within ten minutes,” Barclay says.
It startles Aubrey out of her thoughts, but she nods and says, “Cool.”
Barclay doesn’t press it, just taps his foot on the stone and rolls his shoulders.
—
Ned gives her a tentative pat on the shoulder and says, “See you around,” before driving away from Amnesty Lodge. Aubrey waves after him, then turns and walks through the door that Barclay holds open. The air around her immediately warms, and she pulls her hands out of her pockets and flexes her fingers. Nice as her gloves may be in aesthetics, they’re not particularly functional in the winter safety department. She rubs her eyes and glances around, looking for —
Dani is curled up in one of the chairs, blonde hair bypassing her headband and falling over her freckles. Dr. Bonkers seems to have burrowed himself into her flannel overshirt, almost blending in against the white shirt she wears underneath. Aubrey snorts and makes a quiet approach, reaching out gently to touch Dani’s shoulder when she reaches them.
Dani shifts, then blinks open her eyes. Aubrey is surprised by bright orange irises staring up at her, but Dani seems unaware as she sits up, temporarily displacing Dr. Bonkers until she gently sets him back down on the cushion, then stands and says, “Oh my God, Aubrey, are you okay?”
“What — I don’t look that bad, do I?”
“Your head’s all scraped up and you’ve been gone all day. What happened?”
Aubrey hesitates and glances to Barclay. He shrugs. “I mean, it’s over now.”
“What’s over?” Dani asks. Aubrey can see some of the other people in the room starting to take notice out of the corner of her eye, and she bends to pick up Dr. Bonkers from the chair.
Quietly, she says, “Come on. I’ll tell you about it somewhere else.”
Dani frowns, but she follows Aubrey as she heads to the only place she’s sure of in this lodge. Aubrey sets Dr. Bonkers down on his bed and pats him lightly before sitting down heavily on her own. “Can you close the door? Maybe not all the way,” she says, and Dani pulls the door mostly shut before turning to face Aubrey.
“What happened?” she asks again, and Aubrey gestures for her to come sit down. After a moment, she does, and Aubrey flops back on the bed with a long sigh.
“So… I dunno how much you already know.” She yawns and sits back up, continuing, “I mean, you know Silvane, of course —”
“I'm unfamiliar, actually,” Dani interrupts dryly, but there’s a teasing smile on her face and Aubrey snorts. She starts to speak again, but Dani suddenly swears and starts to get up. “Sorry, I — I completely forgot I didn’t have my bracelet on, I’ll just go get it —”
“You don’t have to —” But Dani is already out the door, returning a few moments later with brown eyes and the bracelet around her wrist.
“Jake thought it would be funny to snatch it off my wrist for a second earlier, but Dr. Bonkers didn’t seem to mind it, so I just forgot to put it back on,” she explains as she sits back down. Aubrey shrugs.
“I don’t mind it either,” she says, and Dani mirrors her shrug, twisting the bracelet around her wrist without seeming to realize it.
Aubrey picks back up where she left off, choosing her words carefully. “So do you know about… the, uh, abominations?”
“The what?”
“Okay. So, uh, there’s like, these weird goopy spirit things? Or maybe they’re decomposed bugs or something, but they come from Silvane and kind of possess animals and then they all get joined together. It’s, uh, super fucked up.”
“Oh, wait — was it that thing Mama had me draw? Because, yeah, that’s really...” She shudders.
“Yeah. It was a really good drawing, by the way.”
Dani smiles. “Thank you.”
“It chased after some people in the forest and then Duck, you remember that guy Duck? And then me and Duck and that guy Ned ran into it and fought it, and then Mama said we had to get rid of it, so we lured it to a cave, me and Mama and Duck and Ned and Barclay, and, uh, burned it and fought it more and stuff. It was really crazy.”
Dani seems to think about that for a minute. Eventually she says, “You killed it?”
“I think it was, like…” Aubrey pauses. “The animals it got were like, already dead? And then there was the goop inside it, which I guess we got rid of one way or another.”
“You guess?”
Aubrey points at the scrapes on her temple. “I hit my head on the wall and inhaled a lot of smoke and then passed out, so everything’s kinda fuzzy.”
“That's why you were in the hospital?”
“Yeah. I’m totally gonna be okay, though. When and if I die, it will not be to a glorified gummy bear.”
Dani laughs at that, bumps her shoulder against Aubrey’s, and says, “I hope not. I’d think you’d go out in a real blaze of glory.”
“Oh, my God,” Aubrey whispers, Dani still grinning and closer than she’d been before. Aubrey tries not to stare at her face, but she notices a little scar just on her chin, pale against her dark skin, and wonders where she got it. She can also see that Dani’s ears are pierced, with no earrings in. She wonders absentmindedly if Dani went out and did that — if she did it while she was on this plane, or on Silvane, or if she could just will the piercings into existence, and why she didn’t wear anything in them.
“Aubrey?”
And Aubrey realizes that she has been staring, probably really weirdly. She jerks away and says, “Sorry, I —”
“Aubrey, I think your jacket’s burning.”
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!” Aubrey scrambles away from Dani and yelps as she narrowly misses tumbling off the bed. She pulls off her jacket and tosses it to the floor, stamping on it a few times from where she still sits and exhaling loudly in relief when no further flames seem to spring up. She bends to pick the jacket back up again and sees, out of the corner of her eye, Dani staring at her. Aubrey flushes and sits back up, clutching her jacket. “Sorry.”
“Your tattoos are neat,” Dani says softly, prompting Aubrey to rub her shoulder sheepishly.
“Thanks,” she mumbles, and starts when Dani reaches out.
“Can I look?” she asks, fingers a centimeter away from brushing her skin, and Aubrey swallows and nods, shifting closer so Dani can inspect the sleeve she has on her right arm.
She expects Dani’s fingers to be a cool contrast against her skin, which she’s sure is burning for several reasons, but they feel… normal. Dani doesn’t seem to notice anything as she peers at the ink, running one finger lightly over a grinning skull on the inside of Aubrey’s wrist. She doesn’t say anything, but she raises her gaze back up to Aubrey’s eyes and holds it there.
“When'd you get this one?” she asks softly. Aubrey runs a hand through her hair, dropping the eye contact with Dani to stare at the floor.
“It was one of the first ones I got,” she says after a second, “I was probably eighteen or nineteen, actually, so like… four or five years ago? I didn’t really have any other ideas, so. I kinda did it just to prove that I would. My folks weren’t too happy, but I moved out pretty quick afterwards, so they didn’t have to deal with it very long.” There’s a bitter tinge to her voice that she didn’t mean to put there, and Dani pulls her hand away.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” she says. Aubrey looks back at her — she looks genuinely sad, and there’s a flash of empathy in her expression, too. Aubrey shakes her head.
“You didn’t. It’s not really a big deal.”
Dani looks unsure, but then there’s snuffling behind them, and Aubrey turns to see Dr. Bonkers making his way across the bed, apparently having managed to get off the endtable where his bed sits.
“How'd he —”
“I have no idea,” Aubrey admits, watching as he hops his way between them and settles into what Aubrey likes to call his loaf form.
Dani pats him fondly on the head and murmurs, “Hey, Dr. Bonkers.” The smile has returned to her face, brown eyes warm as she looks back up at Aubrey. “Thank you for tellin' me 'bout what happened,” she says, “I assume it’s kind of hush-hush.”
“You can ask Mama. I don’t really know,” Aubrey replies. Dani rises from the bed and brushes white rabbit fur off her ripped jeans, tucks some hair behind her headband.
“I hope you feel better,” she says, “Night, Aubrey.”
“Night, Dani,” Aubrey replies, as Dani slips out the door into the hallway. She can hear voices for a minute, then Mama pokes her head in.
“Hi,” Aubrey says.
“Hey,” Mama replies, “How are ya feelin’?”
“Decent.”
“That’s good. Please don’t almost burn the lodge down next time you talk to Dani, yeah?”
Aubrey feels her cheeks flush as she says, “Yep.”
“Alright. You have a good night and rest.”
“Will do.”
Mama disappears from the doorway, closing it behind her, and Aubrey pulls the letter out of her jacket. She skims through it again, then sets it on the endtable with a sigh.
“I think it’s gonna be okay here, Doc,” she whispers. Dr. Bonkers nuzzles her hand and she pats him gently. “It’s gonna be okay.”