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There's a strong scent of cake that Kabru hasn't smelled in a long time, rich and warm when the fork was placed against his mouth, always careful not to poke his teeth.
Immediately the familiarity gives him a sense of panic. He struggles against the covers, and then is bewildered to find himself stuck in a large plush bed in a room barely big enough to hold it. He's suited in a thin pair of bedclothes with its holes patched up lovingly--he'd asked for a needle and thread instead of a new pair. There's the smell of smoke somewhere far away, more familiar than the cake, that makes him thrash about even more, but he only sinks further into the luxury: stuffed toy dolls and patterned pillows unfurl from where he wrestles against the bed until he can barely feel the sheets. No more hunger or cold.
He doesn't scream or call for help, but he's frustrated enough that he feels like crying. This surprises him greatly. He remembers dimly, like a vision of someone else, times where he'd shed a tear to help play the part or convince others of his good will. That had been it for a long time.
There's a sensation that cuts through. Kabru is only aware of it moments after: a hand combs through his hair once and stays there, much colder than the one he remembers--and then he feels his body tug, not like being pulled by a hand but by his whole skin. The feeling only lasts a moment before Kabru finds himself once more blinking helplessly at the dark ceiling of the bedroom.
"I suppose it wouldn't be that simple," comes a voice at his side.
Kabru jolts in surprise, but only manages to wrestle himself slightly upwards on the bed. He's met with a fragile face--an elf, sitting absurdly still next to him amongst the pillows, legs crossed, silver hair shiny in the low firelight. He's pristine and still like a statue, and, Kabru notes to himself, there’s a startlingly empty look in his pale eyes, like glass, as if he isn’t really seeing anything. More urgent, though, is his uniform.
Kabru steels himself, then puts on an exceedingly assured and charming smile. He envisions them meeting in a tavern, somewhere he isn't caught like a bird in a cage.
“Did my mother send you? Give her my thanks, but I don’t need any help.” He doesn’t attempt to struggle against the bed again and disprove his point.
The elf looks uninterested. Actually, for a slight moment he seems agitated somewhere within his blank face. Kabru is unsure how he knows this. He’s never met him before, has yet to acquaint himself with any habits, but somehow he can tell.
“I forget you can be like this. You can drop the act.”
Kabru frowns. “I’m sorry, have we met before? I find it hard to believe I’d forget a face like yours.”
The elf looks even more unimpressed, but he seems to realise something and reaches for one of his ears, feeling carefully at the tips.
“I see.” He appears disinterested again.
"Is something wrong?" Kabru asks.
He needs to hurry this along. There's something much more important he needs to get to: a fire in the distance that rages beyond the dark safety of his little bedroom. Before he had only smelled the smoke curling slowly in; now he sees the red flames dancing wildly, like a monster with a huge mouth. He knows that's where he needs to be.
Instead of answering his question, the elf grips his arm with surprising strength. Kabru wants to yank his arm away but doesn't.
"Enough of this. We need to go."
"Go where? Are you also trying to get to the village?"
The elf turns behind him to see where Kabru has been staring, but returns his gaze with silence and such a lack of concern that Kabru feels a flash of hot anger.
His smile thins out, doing little to hide his growing disdain--he knows his mask is cracking. A Canary would do as he liked no matter the ways Kabru tried to appeal to him, so he might as well not even bother. Surrender curdles like a sour fruit in his mouth.
“Fine. Could you help me up?"
As if to prove him right, the elf doesn't bother to take his outstretched hand, only readjusts his grip on Kabru's arm to something lighter and less firm. Then Kabru feels that strange tugging sensation again. When it dissipates, he jerks his arm away in fright.
"What are you doing?” he demands. “Is that magic?"
"I'm trying to teleport us out of here," the elf replies, unbothered by Kabru's resistance. "But something is preventing me from doing so. We need to hurry and figure out what that is before that fire reaches us, or worse, the monsters."
Kabru shivers at that. He remembers monsters most of all.
"Maybe there's a spell over the place that's keeping me, and you--because you are trying to help me--here. I don't think my mother would resort to something like that, but I suppose she could be a bit extreme at times.”
"Your mother. You're referring to Milsiril?"
"Yes. She never wanted me to leave her, but I really had no choice."
The elf doesn't respond to that. He only looks at Kabru silently, as if thinking.
"What's your name, by the way? You seem to know me, but I've never met you."
The elf seems reluctant. "Mithrun."
"Mithrun.” Kabru takes a mental note. “Can't you cast a counterspell? That's hardly more complex than teleportation."
"That's not going to work."
"Why not?"
"It's not a spell that's holding us here. We're in a dream. Your dream. Or your nightmare, really."
Kabru thinks on this carefully. “Why didn't you say that before?"
"I've been instructed before by a certain someone to be less blunt. I'll be pleased to tell him it was of little use."
Kabru doesn't feel that Mithrun could be pleased by anything at all. His tone remains dry, almost like he'd rather not speak at all, and there's a genuinely worrying air about him, as if he'd let himself be carried away by a breeze if it were strong enough. But he might have seemed the slightest bit fond recalling his friend, just now. Or it could have just been the flickering low light.
"And you wouldn't believe we're in a dream. You probably still don't."
Kabru doesn't flinch at being caught, but he's unnerved that Mithrun can tell. And how could he believe it? The fire is much too real. It's always there. When he closes his eyes at night or is left with a quiet moment to himself, when whoever he's with is preoccupied by something else. Ash always swims across his vision, and shadows always dash across the walls.
"Stop it," Mithrun says. He reaches for Kabru then, like he's moving to grip his face, but then seems to think better of it and puts his hands down. "Focus. You said your mother might be keeping you here. What does that mean?"
"Aren't you a Canary? Have you never met her?"
“I have.” He doesn't explain any further.
Kabru sighs. “Well, she's very overbearing. She'll likely see me as a little child forever.” He shrugs. “Nothing I can do about that. She let me leave when I told her I had to, though.”
“You said she was keeping you here.”
“This is my old bedroom. There’s even that awful smell of nut cake everywhere. I can't think of another reason I'd be here. Really, this feels more like my life than a dream.”
Mithrun looks around. “Doesn't seem that bad.”
Kabru glares at him. “I'm sure it doesn't,” he says coldly. “A lot of people would've loved a warm bed and all the cake they could ever eat, like I got. So just tell me how I get out of here before there's nothing left.”
Mithrun studies Kabru’s face carefully. “In Utaya?”
Now, Kabru flinches. “If you know, then I really think we should stop wasting time.”
After he says that, Kabru notices something in Mithrun change--he suddenly seems very unsettled, even though his expression looks much the same.
“Here, then, see if you can get up,” he says. This time he reaches out a hand.
Kabru grips it, tries not to shrink away from how cold it is, and pulls. He hardly moves.
“I expected that to work less than the teleportation.” It’s the kind of thing he’d say to be joking, some other time, some other place. Right now he can barely hide sounding irritated.
Mithrun doesn't bat an eye. He's still looking at him with that slight discomfort.
“You can't help them anymore.”
“What?”
“Utaya. There's nothing you can do, now.”
Kabru yanks his arm away from where Misurn’s hand is still lightly resting on it. That faraway fire feels like it’s rushed into Kabru’s body, agitated and eternal, and he looks with fury at the elf.
“You don’t know anything about me,” he snaps. “I’m the only one who can help them. You--the Canaries. I never asked for your help. I never wanted it back then.”
“You have to tell me what you want, then, or we'll both die in here.”
“I want you to go away.”
Mithrun frowns. “Kabru,” he says. The first time he says it. Kabru freezes as soon as he hears it. He already understands that he’s talking to someone who knows him, somehow, but hearing his own name still surprises him.
And it unsettles him. He suddenly wants to retreat into the blankets, like he’s embarrassed from hearing it, from it being called--his being recognised. His whole face burns with shame. He wants to lie underneath a large piece of rubble and stop moving.
His desires finally line up with the room's. Rather than continue to hold him in place, Kabru starts to sink inward as the pillows pull on him, into the covers, and in some impossible way he can feel himself being swallowed by the bed. He yells out in surprise, and Mithrun immediately springs up and grabs his hand. Kabru can feel the urgent magic of Mithrun's teleportation spell now, repeatedly firing against where their palms connect.
He hates it. That in the dark and through all the smoke, that a hand reaches out to grab only his.
This time he lets go.
Mithrun curses, reaches for him, wraps his arms around and pulls him in.
Kabru feels like he's hanging in the air, seconds before a free fall, but he doesn't feel scared of it. Or any more scared than usual. His eyes are a little wet with warm tears. Mithrun--he's still here--moves a hand towards Kabru's face, thinks better of it, and puts his hand back down.
“You can just say you miss your mother,” Mithrun says. He doesn't sound the least bit interested, but Kabru gets the sense this time that he's listening carefully. And waiting. In the struggle with the bed his ears have been lopped off at the ends and his eyes have gone out like a light, but they look more alive than ever.
Kabru laughs, but it comes out mostly strangled. He covers his face with an arm.
“It was just me and her. One of the only things I remember now is lying on a mat on the ground, where we had to sleep one night. And she rubbed circles against my back. All night, because I couldn't sleep. I guess neither could she.”
A canvas bedroll blooms underneath Kabru's back like a flower, barely separating it from the cold stone floor. Somewhere far away, instead of a large crackling fire, he hears Mithrun yawn.
Kabru continues. “That's one of the happiest memories I have. Everything else pales in comparison.”
He wants to shift around a bit, get closer to the warmth of a small fire nearby, but he can't move just yet.
“I didn't want to go back. It was right there, but I couldn't make myself get up. I'm a coward.”
Mithrun looks up, away from Kabru and into the small fire that Kabru can’t see. “I don't think you should worry about that,” is all he says.
Kabru laughs drily. “Okay.”
“I'm sorry.”
“It's fine, just--When do I wake up?”
Kabru thinks he sees Mithrun smile. “A good slap should do it.”
Kabru makes a face of disbelief, but fine, he wants this to end. He's shared about Utaya and his dead mother more times than he can count. Before a request, in a practised way that belies any emotion and effaces the self, that shows he hurts from it but isn't so wounded he can't keep going. He hasn't let anything touch that wound in a long time. He thinks this is the last time he'll have to.
“You can close your eyes. It'll hurt less that way.”
Kabru closes his eyes. He feels a little nervous, waiting for the sting.
Instead he feels something else, not against his cheek--somewhere else, and not sharp. Something that lingers. Something that leads him gently to lie down by the warm fire.
When he wakes up Mithrun's scruffy head is laid against his chest, rising and falling slowly. Kabru is so bewildered he does little more than watch him for a while, but eventually decides that he must have been cold.
Then he immediately figures that no, Mithrun wouldn't have cared about being cold or hot or sick or dying. His body isn't even underneath the covers. But the captain gets so little sleep as it is, Kabru just lies there as still as he can on top of that bedroll he can feel all the stones under.
Some moments later Mithrun stirs, and turns to meet his eyes. He doesn't move, likely not as bothered by his position above Kabru's heart as he should be.
“Are you cold, captain? Maybe you should get under the blanket, if that's the case.”
Mithrun grunts. To Kabru's surprise he simply does as he's told with no complaints.
Then he says, “I won't let Utaya happen again.” Simply as if it were a response to Kabru's question.
The silence stretches along the cool stone of the small room. Kabru shuffles to the side so that Mithrun can crawl in.
“Where'd that come from? The Canaries are part of the problem you know.”
“Now you're being more honest. It's better that way.”
“Better than?”
Mithrun ignores him. “Have you ever considered being more straightforward, like me?”
“No, thank you. And you're not straightforward, you're blunt. Things don't go anywhere like that, if you recall how we ended up down here.”
“It worked out, somehow.”
Kabru huffs. He wants to argue but saves it, curling back down into his bedroll, more ready to go back to sleep than anything else. It felt good, possibly the best sleep he's had that he can remember, and he feels like he was dreaming about something nice.
When he turns to look at Mithrun to make sure he's doing the same, he goes silent with surprise. Not because Mithrun has also curled up, like he's thankful for being warm and not alone. But because there's a small, rare smile on his face, like he's remembered something amusing.