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Kabbu wakes, panting, looking around wildly. Master, Bit… he heard them… the beast…
The room is dark. Quiet. Bedding is twisted around his hands and legs, and he can hear the bed underneath him creak in time with his shaking. It’s warm here, and dry. He’s not in the swamplands.
He lets go of the bedding, leaning back on his hands, and sighs. His chest feels tight, as it always does fresh out of the nightmare. His slumbering consciousness has tormented him with many iterations of the same dream, but he doesn’t always get one where he can clearly hear Master and Bit’s voices. Their screams still ring in his mind, immortalizing their fear, cementing their final sacrifice for him. Every night in his dreams, he is reminded of how much of a coward he is.
Something stirs next to him, and he tenses, readying himself. He nearly leaps off the bed as the thing roughly slaps its paw on his leg, but he forces himself to relax as he recognizes the cool of Leif’s hand. His hand pats around the bed a few more times until it lands on his, and Leif blearily grabs it. “Kabbu?” he slurs, voice muddled by sleep.
He’s not in the swamplands. He’s in Bugaria, in the house he bought with his teammates, in bed next to them. He hears Vi’s soft breaths as she sleeps, a whisper of sound punctuating the silence of the room. He sees her sprawled halfway across Leif’s lap with one leg poking out from under the covers and her stinger sticking straight up in the air. He sees Leif shift in the dim light, blankets sliding off of him as he carefully frees himself from Vi’s grasp. She mutters unhappily as he moves away from her, and she crawls in her sleep over to his leg, attaching herself to it; Leif sighs, patting her head. Kabbu lets a small laugh leave his throat in spite of himself. Vi is Vi, even when sleeping.
“Bad dream again?” comes Leif’s question, his voice clearer but still low. Kabbu looks away, avoiding his gaze. The bed is soft, warm. Cool radiates off of Leif, though the blankets provide a bit of a barrier. Moonlight filters in weakly from the window across from their bed, illuminating the twitching of Vi’s leg.
Leif sighs again. “We’re going to take that as a yes.” He reaches for his hand, consciously this time, and gently squeezes it. Kabbu focuses on the cold of his grip, on Vi’s even breaths, on the soreness of his wings. Anything but the worry in Leif’s voice. “Do you want to talk about it?”
The answer is always no. Even after the rematch with the beast, even after walking away from it alive, with his teammates—his family relatively unharmed… It came too close to happening again. He almost lost them too. Because he was rash. Because he was selfish. Because he was naïve, reckless, too focused on revenge—
“Kabbu.” Leif’s hand is on his shoulder now, the cold burning into his carapace. He can feel himself shake. “We understand not wanting to talk about what’s bothering you, but this has happened far too many times for us to be comfortable with your silence.” He pauses, and Kabbu tries his best not to shrink into himself. He fails, and flinches as Leif moves closer, putting his arm around him. “Please let us help you.”
“What if I don’t deserve it,” he catches himself mumbling, then mentally kicks himself as he hears Leif’s breath hitch. He shouldn’t have said that out loud.
“Would you ever think Vi isn’t deserving of help?” Leif quietly challenges, pulling him a little closer. As if sensing the mention of her, Vi’s leg kicks. Both of them freeze, staring down at her, but she merely grunts and burrows harder into Leif’s lap. Leif snorts softly, patting her head again. “Vi, hardheaded and quick to anger, often refusing to admit she’s wrong. Would you call her undeserving?”
“… no.” No, never. Kabbu looks down at her sleeping form, a pang shooting through his chest. What a life she must have had, to drive her away from her home and into a profession as dangerous as adventuring at such a young age.
“Then by that logic, you aren’t undeserving either.” Kabbu dares to look up at him, meeting his perpetually tired gaze. Worry lines his face, his expression a mask of weariness and concern; he looks away again. “Let us help. Please.”
Thoughts well up in his throat, but Kabbu clamps his mouth shut, staring down at the floor. He can still hear Bit screaming, bloody and mangled in the jaws of the beast as he ran, he ran away from it all. He still remembers Master shouting at him to go, to finish what they started. What he started. Leif doesn’t need to hear all this. Leif already knows he ran, but if he knew the extent of his cowardice, he’d probably resent him too.
Leif says nothing about his silence, only shifting a little closer to him. Excluding the chill from his arm, it’s strikingly similar to how Master used to comfort him. Guilt swirls up in his chest, constricting around his throat. If he had stayed, if he had fought with them, would they be here now?
Then again, if he had, he likely would never have met Leif or Vi.
“… do you ever feel guilty?” he tries, cringing at his own words. “Like—like everything you do is tainted with… tainted by you. And everything you have now, you weren’t supposed to have.” He should have fought with them, then. Even his life is a trade off for Master’s and Bit’s.
Leif doesn’t respond, but his arm tightens around him. Kabbu resumes looking at the floor, trying to ignore the growing ball of burning guilt rising in his chest. The floor is just dirt and grass, with tracks all over from his pacing and their daily activities in the house. Some of the grass is getting long; maybe he should trim it.
“Yes,” Leif finally says after a minute’s silence. “Always.” He sighs, pulling his arm back briefly to rub at his face before placing it back around his shoulders. “Being transported decades ahead in time while in a coma, then waking up to discover that almost everyone we knew and cared for is dead when we should have died doesn’t exactly leave us guilt free.”
Kabbu winces. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought this up at all. If he’d known this was a sore point for Leif too, he wouldn’t have.
“What we're saying is, we get it.” Leif squeezes his shoulder gently. “We can’t… get Muse back. We can’t get our previous team back. We can’t get our old life back.” Kabbu can feel Leif’s gaze on him, and he hesitantly looks up to meet it. Unlike the rest of him, his gaze is warm. “But we have you now. We have Vi. We have us, as a team. Maybe we weren’t supposed to meet the two of you, but we did. And we find it’s often less stressful to accept that we have what we have now, instead of debating over whether or not we were supposed to have it.”
“That much is true…” Kabbu sighs, fiddling with the blanket around him. “But the guilt… that doesn’t change what happened… happened.” Master and Bit are still gone, forever, and he’ll never know if he could have changed that. If he had chosen to stay instead… at least he could have died with them, if it ever came to that. Then he wouldn’t have to be separated from them. But even now, he is selfish.
Leif pauses before responding, glancing briefly down at Vi as she twitches in his lap again. “No, it doesn’t,” he agrees, stroking her head. “What happens now will never change the past. But it doesn’t have to.” He puts his hand on his shoulder, and Kabbu meets his gaze. There’s a hesitant confidence in his eyes that Kabbu isn’t sure he actually feels, but the conviction in his voice is strong. “You did what you could then, Kabbu. You’ve always given your best at everything you do. We have no doubt you were the same before we met.” He squeezes his shoulder gently. “We’re sure Master and Bit would have wanted you to forgive yourself, too.”
They would have. “They would have,” he echoes his thoughts. “But I don’t… I didn’t do my best then.”
“We doubt that.” Leif resumes his hug, and this time, Kabbu allows himself to lean into it. “You don’t have to believe it yet.”
Leif draws in a breath to say something else, but stops as Vi wiggles around, turning her head to grumpily look up at them both. “Shuddafakup,” she grumbles. “Y’re loud.”
“Language,” Leif says mildly, but she buries her face in his lap again, ignoring his reprimand. Within seconds her breaths are even again. Kabbu looks down at her, marveling at how quickly she fell back asleep. She makes it look like an easy task. It’s hard not to be a little envious.
Leif chuckles lightly. “You heard her. We should follow her lead.” He rubs his face, then stretches. “Sleeping in sounds good for the day ahead.” His demeanor gets more serious as he looks at Kabbu. “You can always talk to us about this. Vi, too, though we’re not sure what insight she could offer you.”
Vi growls, thumping her fist against Leif’s thigh, and he laughs. Kabbu allows himself a small smile. “Okay, we’re sleeping.” He pulls the blankets around him again, then beckons for Kabbu. He hesitates, but obliges, letting Leif tug him closer. Leif rests his head against his, a happy chirp rumbling in his throat. “Good night, Kabbu.”
“Good night, Leif,” he responds softly. The chill from Leif’s arm is cushioned by the blankets piled around them both, leaving only the comfortable weight around his shoulders. With it, easing back into sleep is easier, and he drifts off leaning against Leif, free of nightmares for the night.