Chapter Text
In his idleness, Sky daydreams. In these daydreams, in this warm obscurity of empty night, he dies. He hits his head on the dock and sinks, staining the lake with swirls of red; he slips into the dark, still water, he inhales deeply. He lets it burn his lungs and drag him down; he dies. Painfully. Slowly. He dies bleeding peace and with pain sparking up his nerves.
Sky leans forward. He slides past the edge of the wood, into the rippling night sky echoing below him. Ironic, in a way his brain is too unfocused and too heavy to decide. He doesn't feel it, though. He doesn't feel the caress of it around his ankle, his knee, his middle, his collarbones. He doesn't feel his neck tip back or the sharp kiss of the planks on his crown like his mother kissing him goodnight. It might be an imagined memory. He's sure at one point he was young and guiltless, he's just not sure if it was recent enough to remember. His arms burn with the strain of lowering himself so excruciatingly slowly; he feels light and weightless.
His head goes under.
His hands grip the planks and so he's still, suspended and stagnant. His shoulders are probably wrenched uncomfortably above him. It doesn't matter; nothing except the cruel, gentle cold of the water matters. The pressure of it on him. This siren song of quiet, of a clean, guilt-free nothing.
His hands must let go, the muscles in his fingers must untense—he sinks. He steels himself, he breathes in deep. He lets go.
"Sky?"
Sky jolts. He hadn't even noticed he was tipping forward.
"Sky, is that you?"
He nods, eyes fixed on a specific star lost in the lake.
"You should—" Warriors swallows, pained "—Sky, you should probably sit farther from the water."
What're you doing here?
Why did you curse me?
Why do you want to die?
Sky shrugs. He stays. He's on the very edge of the dock, it's digging into the back of his upper thigh. Warriors shifts towards him, footfalls soft and unobtrusive. Like Sky might bolt at the slightest noise, like he'll fight Warriors to fulfill this awful wish. Sky takes a moment to imagine it too; a world where his fight wasn't bled out of him and replaced by guilt.
"What are you doing out here?" Warriors whispers, soft. In the flickering light of their lanterns, Sky can see that Warriors' hair is mussed and that his spine is no longer ramrod straight. His limbs are loose, his posture small and weary.
Sky shrugs. What is he doing out here? Why would he do this? He doesn't know how to explain it, so he doesn't.
Warriors hums, dissatisfied. They slip into a quiet watching, of each other, the lake, of the shifting of the leaves and the brush of the wind. Warriors is trying to hide the bulk of a strip of bandages behind his leg and his fingers are twitching, only every so often and always towards it. There's a waterskipper about a foot away from the dock.
Sky clears his throat. His eyes linger on the lake as he gathers up the energy to speak, as he presses past the discomfort of disturbing their silence.
"Do you need help with...?" He waves vaguely at the bandages. Warriors furrows his brow, then startles.
"Oh. Uh, no. No, I'm...no." There's a frantic edge to his voice. "Thank you, though. For offering."
"Mhm."
They lapse back into silence, Sky already tired. Warriors is sitting completely straight now. Sky sighs. If Warriors is hiding an injury, he wants to help. It's just...tiring. He's just tired.
"I won't," He waves his hand again, he doesn't know what Warriors is afraid of. "Just let me help. If you're hurt."
Warriors hesitates.
"What are you out here for, Sky?"
Sky stares at his own hands, dropped back into his lap. He could lie. Can't sleep. Wanted the view. Something stops him. What has Warriors caught him in? What has he caught Warriors in? What strange, awful thing are they both living?
Sky shrugs, looking back out over the lake.
"What are you doing out here, alone, at night, tipping forward towards the lake?"
"I don't know, Warriors. I," he laughs, pulls up his knees and rests his head on them. He's tired. But he also feels lighter, somehow. There's a tension, an edge of discovery, that quickens his heartbeat. It tastes a little like anger. "I really don't know."
"I think you do." There he is, the tactician. The fighter, the leader. Sky smiles sharp, though he knows his eyes still hang sad. He's exposed, but not defenseless.
"What about you, Captain? What does a soldier need with bandages at this hour?"
Too much, too close. Warriors winces and the sharpness rushes out of Sky. The game's over, he's tired once more. He scoots back from the edge as apology. 'Sorry' would force Warriors' hand, would show him his own scrape. Sky bumps their knees where they hang off the dock before pulling his up and resting his head on them.
"Hey. You know mine." His what, Sky doesn't know. Vice? Habit? Problem? He doesn't dare give it a title.
Whatever he interprets it as, it leaves Warriors looking off the edge of their dock for a long moment. He sighs again and his hand twitches.
Then he takes his pants off.
What.
Well, moreso he stands and wiggles down his trousers on his left side. Is that where he's hiding an injury? Sky can't immediately see for the angle, but maybe. Warriors pulls this side of his waistband down as far as he can manage without fully pulling the right down as well. His hands are shaking a bit. He stares at his hip, his leg, his newly exposed skin and pulls in a deep breath. Then he turns.
Oh. He's. Oh. Oh, Warriors.
Well. Sky wasn't wrong, he is hiding an injury. A few of them, in fact.
Sky hums. He unfurls from his knees-up, seated position, shuffling towards Warriors. He reaches up, but stops an inch or two before actually touching Warriors' leg and glances up.
Warriors is watching him. His ears are pulled back, his eyes are wide; his chest is rising and falling like the quick beats of a hummingbird's wing. He's terrified, but he nods, jerky, when Sky tilts his head for permission. He shuts his eyes tight afterwards, in the between of Sky's gaze lingering on his face and dropping back to his thigh.
Warriors' muscles jump when Sky gently rests a fingertip on his skin.
"Shh, shshsh. It's okay. I promise, it's okay." Their game from earlier is dead, belly-up in the water below them. Sky may have been about to join it before Warriors found him (Not really. Well. Maybe. Either way, not important right now), but he's still a big brother and Warriors looks the closest to crying that Sky's ever seen him. Newly-bonded loftwing treatment it is—gentle shushing and choreographed movements.
Sky softly traces over the scarred tissue on Warriors' leg and hip. A few are raised dramatically, others barely puffing up or sinking in. There are crisscrossing silvery ones, barely darker than Warriors's normal skin tone, overlaid by deep purple and pink ones. Sky is calm, goes slowly and with the barest press of pressure; his heart is aching and sunken behind the touch. He's hurting. Sky avoids the fresher ones; there are many that are warm with healing even from where his finger skips around them. He dodges long carvings barely covered by bridges of scabbing, irritated by the rub of fabric and uncovered.
"I only use the bandages when they're bad enough, and only the night I...only on the night they're made," Warriors defends. "I wouldn't waste medical equipment that often."
There's a cave-in in Sky's chest, his heart is crushed by the falling debris.
"Which?" Some of the fresh ones are bad, deep and long and wide. How many of those got dressing? Some of the scars are worse, some Sky is pretending are sword slashes.
"Um. This one," Warriors points to one scar swinging from almost his stomach to curl around his hip, then snake all the way down to his thigh. It's still new, tender, and couldn't have been one quick one; he might have had to go back several times to continue it. "And..." He gestures loosely to some of the wider scars and cuts. "Some others."
Sky hums again. He pats his palm against a rare part of Warriors's leg webbed by only scars and not cuts and swipes his thumb over it a few times, then withdraws his hand and looks back out over the lake. Warriors shuffles his pants back up and sits down again, crisscross this time.
They're quiet, slumped. Puppets with strings cut, lost leaves drifting in the breeze. Something feels different somehow, shifted. For worse or for better, Sky doesn't know. Maybe just sideways.
"What now?" Warriors asks.
"Hm?"
"What do we do now? We can't tell the others—I mean, we can but it'd be fucked up at least a little and the other person could just tell them too." He huffs a breath. "It's mutually assured destruction. I don't want you to kill yourself, Sky. And you probably don't want me to...you know."
"I don't," Sky confirms.
"So then, what now?"
The star he was looking at earlier has shifted a few degrees in the lake. Have they really been out here that long?
Sky sighs, then in a slow, clear motion pulls Warriors to him, curling an arm around his shoulders. Warriors hesitates at first, but ultimately falls easily to his side.
"I think," Sky smooths down Warriors' hair with the arm around him, "that this is a tomorrow conversation. I'm too tired, I think we've done enough for one night."
Sky can feel that Warriors' ribs are still against his own. He's holding his breath. Sky gives him a squeeze.
"Don't you think so?"
"I-yeah. Yeah."
Time passes by slowly, swimming past them in a languid stretch. The dock feels too-full somehow—it cannot handle both the weight of them and their fledgling understanding.
"Sky?"
"Hm?"
"I'm being fucking eaten alive by mosquitoes."
Sky laughs, startled. "I think that might be our cue to go to bed."
Sky hauls himself up, then extends his hand to Warriors. He accepts; something soft and smiling and devastatingly sad echoes around them as they walk back to the cabin and say goodnight.