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When Deet comes to, he feels little more than the buzz of healing magic and a bone-deep ache.
His nose picks up the gamey scent of cooked rabbit and the sweetness of carrot, then parsing out bay and thyme and maybe sage beneath the prickle of salt and ground peppercorn. He tenses when he catches the wizard’s scent, so well-masked by the food by virtue of the fact that he had likely spent hours standing over it at the fire. And not because Deet had missed him entirely.
A growl rises in his throat, now that he knows he is not alone, and somewhere past his feet there’s a rustle of fine fabric and the scrape of leather soles against hard-packed dirt and pebbles.
Good, they should all be on their toes.
He sits up, more painfully than he’d like to admit, and meets the wizard’s gaze. Gale is half-kneeling near the end of his bedroll, caught between sitting and standing.
“Welcome back to the material plane,” Gale begins with the ghost of a chuckle. Deet only stares blankly. “I thought I would give our cleric a chance to rest,” he continues, his face falling slightly, and gestures at a bowl between them. “I saved this over for you—it’s still warm.”
Deet nods weakly, still skeptical of the wizard’s cooking and disappointed that he was in no state to hunt for himself. He hoped that Gale wouldn’t watch him eat; he’d eaten more in the past week than in the last year—he needed little sustenance, but he didn’t want to draw too much attention to his... peculiarities.
“The boy is safe. You didn’t get the chance to see,” Gale says, quietly. “I’m glad we were able to save him from his predicament.”
There’s a complicated expression on the wizard’s face. Deet’s not sure if it’s because of him. He doesn’t think too hard about that, just as he doesn’t think too hard about what might have happened if the harpies hadn’t attacked him, along with everyone else. Children usually didn’t make it far into the forest—he usually didn’t allow it. Not that he would ever spill their blood; children were only ever lost, or curious, or foolhardy.
No amount of juvenile foolishness warranted a death sentence, Deet thinks. But neither had he ever been so inclined to get in the way of a creature’s meal. He is… grateful to have skirted that dilemma. A part of him fears his true answer. Seeking distraction, he picks up the bowl of stewed rabbit.
“Thank you,” he mutters. Gale perks up a little.
“You’re welcome.” His smile is small but genuine and his words are quiet. “I’m glad to have witnessed some mercy in all this mess. You have been… something of a surprise, I must admit.”
Deet looks up from his meal with an indignant scowl, but Gale is already looking away and onto other subjects. Although he’s cut the wizard short more than once in the past few days, he is too bone-tired to interrupt him tonight.
Deet half listens to the wizard speak, head slightly cocked and food quite forgotten, eyes tracking the man’s pacing form and his awkward gesticulations. He notes that he is in a heightened state of emotion, though he’s trying not to be. Deet sees the muscles twitch in his arms as Gale reigns in broader, wilder movement, and how he tries to conceal the slight tremors in his fingertips by clenching them into fists when they rest at his side.
The wizard is afraid. Of him? He should—no, he shouldn’t be, he thinks bitterly, unable to hold back a sigh. Deet could hardly defend himself from a few harpies. Even this soft man that reeks of ink, parchment, and this evening’s pottage could probably best him like this.
Gale stops, then, and Deet tenses, his attention snapping back to the here and now. The wizard looks expectant. Right. He wants—what was it? Magic items. Fine. He might as well. Deet averts his eyes.
“I will help,” he says, simply, and the wizard’s dark eyes light up, though they remain guarded. He is still keeping something back, after all. Deet wonders if it has anything to do with that odd smell that he can’t quite place. The Weave hangs thick on him, saccharine and almost hungry, where his own magic—Mother’s magic—is far livelier and sharp. It bites into the mind and soul, flooding the veins like a venom. Bracing. Giving. Invigorating.
The wizard thanks him again (he cannot help but wonder why) and he watches him walk off to fetch Shadowheart.
Deet decides to slip away before the cleric gets her hands on him—not that he has any objections to her presence, exactly—but he needs quiet. Space.