Chapter Text
Everything hurt.
Pain eclipsed every sensation, blurring her thoughts. She was laying on a forest floor and she couldn’t remember much of anything. How she got there, what was going on, what she should be doing - all felt meaningless in the face of the deep tiredness that hung over her. Her head throbbed.
The dirt and grass was cool against her cheek, sticky with dried blood that ran the course of her forehead all the way to her chin. Her eyelids were so heavy, threatening to shut once again.
Footsteps in the dirt jerked her back to awareness. But she could barely move her head to see who approached. Everything still hurt, slow to respond and agonizing to actually move.
The steps stopped. She reached out sloppily toward whoever’s mind it was but found nothing. It was no Wraith. It must be a human.
A human. Her skin prickled. She has never met one before, at least not that she could recall. Just trying unearth those memories made her head ache worse.
The male - a young human for he had few wrinkles on his face - stared down at her. She faded in and out of consciousness. He turned her over, pain flashing through her at the motion. She bit back a groan as a dull ringing in her ears overwhelmed her senses.
She thought he had left, she didn’t hear any more movement. But then the ground rustled again as he crept closer. Haltingly, the human reached out. He brushed a light hand across her cheek, just a flutter of a touch. His hands were smooth, lacking any claws. Her eyes fell shut.
Everything went black once again.
She woke up still in the woods. But she felt better, her body slowly repairing her wounds. She had been moved. The trees were gone. Dark stone walls surrounded her but there was still light enough to see. She was in the mouth of a cavern, cocooned in a blanket. It was soft against her cheeks, filling her with a pleasant warmth. The blood had been wiped from her face.
She looked around for the human. Across from her, there he sat, watching. He hadn’t harmed her, even when it would have been so easy to. She wanted to ask why he hadn’t, what possessed him to help her inside, but she held back.
He shifted, apparently noticing she was awake.
“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice gentle.
She swallowed, her throat dry as she tried to form words. It felt weird to speak aloud. “Better.”
She wasn't sure if her voice was hoarse from what had happened or because she had used it so rarely. Ellia tried clearing her throat.
“Good, that’s good,” he looked down, fiddling with his hands.
She wanted to sit up but thought better of it. Her body still felt sore. She had told the human the truth, she did feel better than before, but the pain lingered. She could feel her body still knitting itself back together – almost as bad as the burst of pain she faintly recalled, from before she woke up in the forest.
“What’s your name?” he asked her after a long pause.
She stared at him. “Name?”
He seemed lost by her confusion. Moments passed before he spoke again. “Something people call you that lets you know it’s you they are talking to. My name is Zaddik.”
“I don’t think I have one,” she said, feeling an odd loss at that. Because that was something she was sure she hadn’t forgotten from the crash, for all that most of her life prior to the crash felt fuzzy and unfocused. It was a lack that had always been there. Just not a lack she had ever given thought. How could she be upset over something she never had?
It seemed simpler to touch minds, there could be no confusion who was before you that way. But wait, humans couldn’t do that, could they? No, she was certain of that. His mind felt distant and watery, out of her reach. She wondered what his name meant, if it somehow held great meaning within its two vowels or was just meant to sound nice. How much could it really mean? After all, how could you condense the whole essence of a being into one small name?
“Do you want a name?”
Her eyes flickered back up to his face. That was a different question than she expected. But she couldn’t help but be intrigued by the idea. What would be a good name for her? How did humans come up with them?
“Like what?”
Zaddik fell silent, his face wrinkling in thought. He didn’t say anything for a long moment until she looked away from him, running her eyes along the rough curves of the rock around her and out past the mouth of the cave, along the trees close enough to see. There was no way to tell just how far he had moved her.
“How about Ellia?”
She paused, her eyes darting back to him, and thought about it. It had a nice sound to it.
“It’s what I would have named our baby had it been a girl,” he said quietly.
A shadow came over his face and she knew better than to ask for details. Yet the name suddenly had a meaning to it - even if she couldn’t quite name it herself. Ellia meant something to him if he thought to give the name to his child. And now he was willing, offering even, to allow her to have it. It felt like a gift.
“That’s a nice name,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
His lips turned upwards but it was tight. A smile, her mind provided, something she had never seen on a human's face before. Even if she had met many humans beforehand, she doubted she would have seen the expression. Smiles were tied to positive emotions.
No humans were happy to see Wraith. She didn’t need memories to instinctively know that.
“I can take care of you,” he said, his voice wavering. “Would you like that, Ellia?”
Overcome with a rising feeling of something climbing up her throat and seizing her heart, she nodded. For the first time since she woke up on the forest floor, she felt a sense of relief, of security. It didn’t matter what had happened in her life before, not compared to the relief of having somewhere to go. Of someone to go with.
His smile grew stronger. “Come with me.”
And she took his hand.
They settled deeper into the cave, in an old abandoned mine according to Zaddik. It was bare and drafty but standing in it with Zaddik filled her with warmth. It wasn’t a very welcoming place but she was safe. That was more than could be said for the other Wraith aboard the doomed vessel. She didn’t need to ask. Ellia knew they were all dead. She didn’t want to ask what happened to them - the odds of them all dying in the crash seemed low when she somehow survived - but she could guess.
Still Zaddik meant her no harm. That was enough. He would keep her safe.
Piece by piece, item by item, it became a home. It crept up on Ellia until she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else with anyone else. Zaddik was a home just as much as the cave.
He brought her ribbons, in a rainbow of bright colors that she loved. He tied them up in her hair, sometimes just simply tying it around a clump of hair and other times trying different styles. Ellia wasn't an expert herself but she knew he wasn't very good at it. But he tried and that meant more than anything else.
He taught her how to make tea and biscuits. She enjoyed those times, just the two of them baking together. One of the first times she mixed up ingredient amounts and they both laughed over how awful they looked. But she quickly caught on, getting more adventurous and tweeking her father's careful instructions to something uniquely her own, making additional changes based on her father's feedback. Soon she would bake on her own to surprise him, a small way to repay his kindness.
One day he told her she could call him father, if she wanted. There was an odd shine to his eyes, like unshed tears as he spoke. Ellia wasn’t entirely sure what it meant at first. But it made him happy when she did as he asked, Ellia could tell from the warm smile that always followed. It was a small way to repay him for his kindness. She knew he hadn’t always lived in the forest. That was a sacrifice he took on for her. If she wasn’t a Wraith, they could live in the village among his people.
But she was a Wraith and so the forest was the only place they could live together. She didn’t resent that fact yet.
Time would change that.