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“What are you doing?”
The Surgeon lifts his head at the interruption, but does not break pace with his excavation. It's not Mellow, interestingly enough; the faint voice is too high-pitched, the words lisped. Yet something about it strikes him as similar. The curiosity, he supposes.
“Gathering resources,” he answers, and turns.
A pale yellow wisp wavers at the edge of the gravestone behind him, features faded and smeared. Ah. The daughter from the house by the waterfall.
“What's a resource?” The blur asks, tilting, as if to peer down into the grave with interest. A futile action. The Surgeon has not dug more than a foot down through the soil yet.
The Surgeon could turn away and dismiss her easily. She is a remnant, tethered to the plane by memory and rite, barely perceptible. A single flash from one of his mirrors would dispel such a thing.
He does not do so.
“A resource is a supply that may be drawn upon to satisfy needs or wants,” the Surgeon replies instead, lifting his shovel again. “Organic material is a resource I use in my work.”
“Oh,” the blur says, voice getting louder, clearer. It hovers for a moment, then drifts closer to the ground. Sitting, the Surgeon surmises, or the paranormal equivalent of it. A way of moving closer to the action, of fulfilling curiosity. Mellow is the same, that wide-eyed child. “Organic is good. Dad used to buy organics all the time! It means that there's been no pest-i-cides.”
The Surgeon tilts his head in inclination; the association is solid for a child, if flawed. “Where is your father?”
The longer he looks at her, the more she takes shape: the floppy curve of an ear here, the blotch of a spot there. Whether it is his senses adjusting, or her focus building, the Surgeon cannot quite say. Even now, after all his research, spirits are nebulous things.
“He's tired,” she says. She's clear enough by now to observe the droop of her ears, the disappointment in her pout. “He's always tired, now. Because of his headaches.”
Blunt force trauma to the head. Yes, that would make sense.
“A difficult transition,” he acknowledges, overturns another shovel's worth of dirt.
“What's a transition?”
“The change from one state of being to another.”
He allows the stretch of silence to go uninterrupted, transferring another mound of dirt to his growing pile. Processing time is a critical component of learning, doubly so for children.
He is six inches deeper when she speaks again.
“I don't like the change,” she says quietly, fiddling with her paws. “I don't like dad being tired all the time, and I don't like feeling cold all the time, and I miss my house and I miss my food. Dad said we're going to find mom, but he doesn't know where she is. And he doesn't play with me anymore.” She hunches, the bright cheer from earlier gone.
He pauses slightly, lowers his shovel. Of course. The mother died outside of Timesville, and has no grave.
“As I said, a difficult transition,” the Surgeon says simply. “It is natural to feel upset. Speak with your father. Does he know how you feel?”
She shakes her head, sniffling. He can perceive now the bedraggled wet fur, the rhythmic echo of dripping seawater from her limbs, the rust of her princess tiara from salt and spray. The bruising on her small neck, visible beneath her thin coat.
But she blinks hard, and rubs at her eyes with a paw. “Okay,” she says, voice crackling. And then after a while: “Thank you, mister resources.”
“You may call me the Surgeon, Chloe,” he says, but it is a courtesy; her edges are beginning to blur again, shifting back into the ether, and he can see they won't meet again.
Chloe yips out a startled laugh, a little fainter than before. “You know who I am,” she says, happily, and then, “that's a silly name! I'm not calling you that! Whose dad are you?”
It takes a fraction of a second longer than normal to process this statement. “I am not a father.”
“Oh,” Chloe says, confused. Her patterns fade out of sight, details smearing back into obscurity, crown melding into an amorphous spiky shape. “But you sound like one. You explain things so they make sense. And you listen.”
“The ability to converse with children is not restricted to paternal figures,” the Surgeon points out.
Chloe doesn't seem to hear him. “I wish you could meet my dad,” she says dreamily, silhouette nothing but soft mist. “I've never met another dad before. Then I could play with someone else, and we could play house together! I've never had a playdate... Dad always said he wished there was another kid my age in town.”
“Mellow—” the Surgeon starts, and cuts himself off.
Chloe is gone.
He stands there for a moment. Something sparks in the back of his thought processors, on the cusp of emotion, of want.
Slowly, the Surgeon picks up his shovel, and resumes digging.