Work Text:
Scott pulled his knees closer to his chest, glancing out the green stained bottle at his captors. They weren’t paying attention to him, but he didn’t find it that much of a surprise anymore. They hadn’t paid attention to him since catching him.
He was pretty sure they were waiting for him to starve.
His eyes were drawn to the wall where they had their “trophies” displayed. It was a horrific sight, covered in dry blood and gruesome things taken from villages they pillaged. That wasn’t what he was looking at, though. Instead, he was focused on the butterflies, dragonflies and… and moths pinned between every trophy, covering the wall.
He wondered if they had starved too.
His stomach growled, and he couldn’t hold himself tighter. He wasn’t going to last much longer, he could tell. The warning twitches of loss of health had already started, and soon the pillagers would have a new decoration for their trophy wall.
To think, a few days before he had just been standing in front of a sunflower in the planes trying to figure out how to get it home. He had plenty of tools to cut down massive trees, and quickly burrow through the ground, but he had nothing delicate enough to properly transplant a sunflower. It was the same issue he had run into with rose bushes, and in the end he had to give up and ask someone bigger for help getting the rosebush home. He remembered Lizzie grinning, calling it the great rose heist as she and Jimmy carefully worked with him to dig it up at its roots.
But no one had been around the sunflower planes. The angel would be the only one able to get there fast enough before nightfall, but Scott didn’t have one of the church’s messenger pigeons with him, and he definitely wouldn’t have time to fly to the church and come back before night.
He had been too focused on the sunflower to notice he wasn’t alone in the planes. He hadn’t noticed until a large jar slammed over him and he was being pushed along so they could get a cover over the opening for transport. He had stumbled and fallen, his head spinning as the jar was turned rightside up and the world reoriented. His head hurt so badly he didn’t try to fight back until it was too late when one of them jammed in two stubby, gray fingers and grabbed the strap of his bag, quickly pulling it off him and out of the jar before corking it.
When they got back to The outpost they had poured green wax over the cork to seal it properly, and the only way the mothling could get oxygen was through a small hole they had poked with a needle in the top. The air came slowly and left him having to take shallow breaths to not waste it all. They had allowed him that small amount of air, and it was the only way he knew they wanted his death to be slow and due to a weening strength.
Not for the first time, he cursed his friends’ and brother’s thoughtfulness in being sure his clothing was made from materials he wouldn’t or couldn't eat through. He had been adventuring and decided to finally wear the new outfit his brother had worked on with Gem and the villagers for him. As usual most of it was made from moth silk, dyed green and tan and even darker purples for a sash, with his own molted fuzz from the winter before used for a fuzzy lining to his hood and collar. The boots had been made from tree bark that had been carefully stripped into thin pieces to make it malleable, layered over and over until they were sturdy, and lined on the inside with more silk and fuzz to make them comfortable. It was all made from materials he wouldn’t eat through in moments of anxiety, and it was so kind but so useless in that moment.
Again his stomach growled and he let out a whimper, all four hands gripping harshly as his sides to hopefully distract the pain. It had worked the earlier days, but the more hunger whittled him away, the harder it was to think of anything else.
One of the most frustrating things about the bottle was the fact that it prevented him from hearing anything outside. It was made of a thick glass, sealed so carefully. All Scott could hear was his own shallow breaths and growling stomach. It had gotten to the point where he almost didn’t recognize the sounds as his own. He had thought one of the pillagers was crying for a time before it had finally registered that the tears were on his face, and that the soft sobs were escaping his mouth.
It was so quiet and so loud at the same time, and his head still hurt from the impact when they turned the bottle, and he couldn’t focus on anything long enough for it to matter.
That was, until he heard a soft thud that startled him out of his haze. Something had hit the bottle, and it took too much energy to turn his head to see what it was, but he did.
Identical eyes to his own stared back at him, wide with panic. He registered pink hair, thought it was distorted by the tint of green in the glass, and hands pressed to the glass surface. Their mouth was moving. He was trying to say something to Scott but he couldn’t hear.
Scott was moving before he realized it, his hand pressing over his brother’s with only the glass separating them. He was crying again, he realized, and his head hurt from the confined sounds of his own shouts and cries as he hit his hands against the glass, begging his brother to let him out.
Over his brother’s shoulder he could see the fight. It took too much energy for his weak mind to actually keep up with it, but he could at least pick out the flurry of feathers and the occasional bursts of magic.
He stumbled, pressing his back to the glass as the bottle was lifted, a green shirt and overalls passing in front of his face. He heard the creak above him as the waxy seal was broken and the cork twisted before it finally came loose and the sounds of the outpost reached him.
His hands flew over his ears, attempting to block out the overwhelming sound of shouts, clashing metal, and magic bursts.
The bottle was slowly turned, giving him time to scramble and adjust his position before it was turned completely upside down and he fell. He slipped right past the bottle’s neck and opening and onto the waiting hand, and gave up the safety of his ears to cling to the hand that held him so tenderly.
“It’s okay now, we found you,” Gem’s gentle voice reached him and he relaxed into her palm, barely restraining himself from a cry.
There was a small flutter of wings, and he looked up to find his brother fluttering close, hands aimless in the air as their eyes darted over Scott. Finally his hands settled on Scott’s cheeks, holding his face as they looked in his eyes with an intensity similar to the fiery light they chased.
“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” Xornoth said, voice stern but strained.
“I won’t,” Scott promised, his own voice hoarse. He glanced back at the fight that had come to a close, fWhip holding out a hand to Sausage, who was kneeling and catching his breath. Sausage nodded and smiled at his brother once on his feet again, and the two looked over to them with visible concern.
“How did you find me?” Scott asked, turning back to his brother.
“fWhip heard some gossip from a patrol that passed by his area,” Gem explained. “He wasn’t sure, but he decided to check it out. He tried to save you last night, didn’t you hear him?”
Scott shook his head, “I couldn’t hear anything in the bottle.”
“That explains a lot,” fWhip said. “Luckily I made it out and returned with back up.”
“Thank you,” Scott said.
His stomach turned again before anything else could be said, and his arms wrapped around his middle again.
He was shocked back into reality as he was dropped into a new hand, bigger and more familiar for him to sit in. He peeled his eyes open again and found Sausage giving him a soft smile before Gem caught his attention again, holding out a few leather scraps she had dug out of her bag.
“I came prepared,” she smiled.
“Thank you,” Scott said again, quickly taking the scraps from her. They were gone in seconds, even though it made his stomach hurt in a different way to go so fast.
“Slow down,” the angel holding him cautioned. “It’s dead, it’s not going to try and run away from you.”
Scott huffed a heatless glare at the angel’s teasing, but did as he said and went slower with the next scrap handed to him.
“How about we get you back home,” fWhip suggested. “You look tired.”
Scott nodded, but didn’t get up to fly. He didn’t have to say anything for them to understand, and he ended up dropped in the hood of Sausage’s robes, curled in the deep white fabric.
“I’ll get him and Xornoth back,” he said.
He didn’t catch the rest of the conversation. It had gotten hard to keep his eyes open, and the last thing he saw was his brother smiling down at him from Sausage’s shoulder. He smiled back and closed his eyes, letting the comfort embrace him as he fell asleep.