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“Need a heal, big guy?”
Raising his head, Gorgug smiles a little as Kristen waltzes over, twirling her staff in her hand. He shakes his head. “I’m good, thanks.”
“You suuure?” Raising an eyebrow, Kristen puts a hand on her hip, stooping lower to look him over in exaggerated focus. “You took an awful lot of hits back there, Gorgug.”
“Well…” He shrugs. “That’s my role, I guess — but I’m fine.”
Maybe he’s lying a bit. Gorgug could use a heal right now, in the aftermath of a battle that had taken him and his friends the entire day to beat. A particularly nasty menace of a sorcerer had been running amok and causing lots of trouble, so the Bad Kids had ventured out to defeat him. Unfortunately, though, said sorcerer had kept teleporting away over and over, forcing them to rely on Adaine’s divination to track him down and kill him once more.
It’s night time now. The battle ended a while ago, the sorcerer pulverised to a bloody pulp. Fabian’s resting in the Hangvan, having taken the most hits between him and Gorgug due to repeatedly goading the enemy. Fig, meanwhile, sits at the open back of the vehicle, kicking her legs lazily as she strums a melody on her bass guitar. Up on the roof of the van sit Adaine and Riz, the two of them whispering to each other about… well, Gorgug doesn’t know, nor does feel like prying.
Gorgug, meanwhile, sits against the trunk of a nearby tree, knees drawn up and hands resting in his hoodie pocket. He had moved away from his friends to calm down after going into a rage during the final stretch of the battle. For once, it hadn’t been one of his controlled rages; no, Gorgug had been so pissed off by the sorcerer’s constant teleportation that, upon catching up to him for a fifth time, he had snapped and lunged straight at the man with his axe raised over his head.
How the sorcerer had survived that… Gorgug still doesn’t know.
“Well, just in case…” Plopping down next to him, Kristen presses a hand against his shoulder, murmuring under her breath. Gorgug closes his eyes at the wave of cool, twilight magic that wraps around him, ghosting against his skin before vanishing away. “There,” Kristen says, pulling back with a grin. “Now you’re good.”
Already, he can feel some of his energy restored to him; the lethargy and aching pain that had throbbed through his body have dimmed. It’s not a full heal, but it doesn’t have to be one; Gorgug can easily sleep off the rest of his lingering exhaustion. “Thanks,” he tells her, with a smile.
“Yeah, no problem. It’s my role, after all.” And Gorgug swears he can hear the shit-eating grin in Kristen’s voice with her echoed words.
For a while, they sit in silence. Gorgug leans his head back, glancing up at the night sky. It’s nice being out here in the wild sometimes, if only so he can look up and see all the constellations glittering in the dark, unclouded by light pollution. He still remembers being a kid and listening to his parents tell him the stories of the stars as they pointed up at each and every one. They taught him a lot of things about the wilderness, things that finally came in handy many years later when Gorgug became an adventurer.
He hears a hum, before he feels Kristen lean against him, resting her head against his arm. He doesn’t mind it, the warm weight against him. If anything, it makes him feel glad whenever one of his friends does that. There’s something about being reminded about how much his friends like him, taking comfort in his presence, that makes him happy, even after all these years. Maybe some part of Gorgug will always feel like that awkward, loser kid without friends, but moments like this prove to that small part of his mind that he’s not that boy anymore.
He has friends now. Friends who care about him, who like to fight side by side with him.
Out of nowhere, he hears Kristen speak. “Do you remember when we died on the first day of school?” There’s an odd fondness in her voice — not odd in the sense that it’s weird to Gorgug, but odd in the sense of what, exactly, Kristen is talking about. People don’t usually bring up their first deaths with a warmth like this.
Still, Gorgug nods. “Yeah.”
A gentle exhale. “Do you ever just— think about that, and then think about us now? Because look at us now, Gorgug.”
He gets what she means. He really does. They’ve both come a long way since then. Gorgug’s grown into his own skin, gaining a certainty about himself — of who he is and what he wants to be — that he hadn’t had as a kid. Kristen’s grown even more, straight up leaving everything about her past behind. She left her family, left the church, brought back a goddess and raised a new religion all on her own.
They’re so different now. And yet, underneath it all, they’re still the same two kids who died on that first day.
He feels a warm hand come to rest atop his.
It stays there for the rest of the night.