This fic was an accident, but apparently as long as I fandom-hop rapidly, I can write pretty quickly. Filing this away for future reference just in case this is actually just a manic fluke. Only warnings are for canonical background character deaths. Reviews are very appreciated, and thank you
000
There wasn't really an orphanage in Jiha village—there were a pits carved out for those without families to sleep around, but they were not orphanages as Simon would in years come to understand the concept.
The places those-without-families slept surrounded a great firepit, with only a semblance of privacy provided by a tent of root-woven canvas stretched over the top with a hole in the center for smoke to rise. Many of those-without-families dug holes to sleep in on their own around the pit, nestled between the rocks and wood. It was the job of those-without-families to watch over the fires and keep them burning as constantly as possible. Jiha had generators and batteries for electricity—metals and clay were their calling, their strength—but more than light, fire gave off warmth, and in the cold hands of the earth, warmth was precious.
So the fire pits were tended. They were social areas. Meals were eaten around them. Gossip shared.
It was one day when Simon was nine, and could still curl into the same hole as his parents to sleep, he came to the fire pit and listened to Old Naga tell the origin of the world. They were root people, she'd said—the first man and woman wove themselves out of fibers, digging themselves deep into the dirt, until they wove themselves to life and became human. The moment they realized they were something other than roots, they began to dig, hollowing out the earth around them to create the first tunnel. It was from that tunnel Jiha village grew.
It was one day when Simon was nine, and could still hold his parent's hands when he was scared, that the sapling boy called Kamina wandered into the fire pit with an armful of roots to build the fire with, and declared, "That's not what happened. We came from the surface."
There was not a collective groan, but a titter went out through the resting villagers who had gathered there that day.
Simon did not know Kamina so much as he knew of him.
At twelve, Kamina was a pigmole farmhand when he wasn't tending the fires—the sort of job which did not overlap much with diggers. He was big enough to handle the full-grown hogs, and for that he ate better than most of the other kids. Consequently, he was the tallest twelve year old Jiha had to offer, but that was not what Kamina was known for.
Years after his mother had gone in childbirth, Kamina's father had stumbled off into the oldest, longest, deepest tunnels of the village, taking Kamina with him. Hours later, the boy had come back stumbling, half-batty with overexposure to darkness, and babbling about the 'surface.'
Simon was barely a toddler at the time. He didn't remember the incident. Didn't remember Kamina before he was crazy, didn't remember anything but the constant muttering of his elders to be kind to that boy. He probably watched his father die in those tunnels. Let him be.
The intervening years hadn't dulled Kamina's babbling in the slightest. If anything, he'd grown more insistent, until finally he now stood front of the fire pit, saying Old Naga's stories were wrong, with one arm full of roots and the other heavily bandaged, because he'd taken blue stones used for dye, ground them up, sterilized them, and had one of his friends inject the color into him until his skin turned blue and swirled with patterns, and now his arm was infected.
Very little about Kamina inspired any confidence.
Simon buried his face in his knees, the secondhand embarrassment rapidly doing him in.
Old Naga didn't seem to mind, fortunately—she'd seen enough in her years. It took a certain kind of grit to live long enough to get the title, 'old,'—she smiled and chuckled along with the rest of the group at Kamina's declaration, balancing her cane across her old knees and tapping against the coals cheerfully, motioning for Kamina to empty his arm of the roots. "Really, child? And how would we have gotten here from your surface?"
Despite himself, Simon lifted his face from his knees and leaned forward a bit to listen.
"I don't know," Kamina said, dumping the roots into the fire. Another pearl of giggles went out. They didn't mean to be unkind. Simon slumped down again, now less embarrassed and more disappointed, while Kamina's finally went faintly red. "But we must've somehow! Maybe we dug down for some reason and were trapped in a cave in?"
It wasn't that funny, but just watching Kamina struggle for an explanation and then coming up with such a silly one set off another ripple of laughs. Simon also covered his mouth with his hand, not trying to be rude, but unable to fight the smile and snort that rose in him. He would know better than most of the others around the fire pit—at nine, he was already a deep-hole digger, and there wasn't anything to drill down from. It was dirt in all directions. He would know.
Kamina looked flustered.
"Now, now, everyone," Old Naga said, lifting one of her veiny hands to bring them all to quiet. "Kamina's just inherited his father's talent with stories. He was my apprentice once, you know. One day, Kamina, we will teach you to refine your speech, and—"
"But they're not stories," Kamina said, throwing his arms in emphasis and then wincing when his bandaged one disagreed with the motion. "I saw it!"
Old Naga was ignoring the rest of the group now, speaking only to the boy in front of her in a low voice. She reached out and took his bandaged hand in her own sagging ones. "Stories often come to us in visions, Kamina. You create things which you have never seen before, it is the way of dreams. Your father before you was excellent at—"
Simon knew if his parents were dead, he probably wouldn't want anyone to talk about them as much as the elders liked to talk about Kamina's father. Though it was sort of Kamina's own fault for garnering attention every time he did something, like saying—
"—My father's still alive, you old hag! Don't talk about him like he's not!" Kamina jerked his hand away, cradling it to his chest and scowling deeply. He spun and turned to where the rest of the villagers who had come for storytelling were gathered, still watching the scene. "He went to the surface and I came back here, but that doesn't change that I saw it! The dirt has an end, it's like a massive clearing above, but it's bright and hot from a fire that burns in a huge field of blue!"
He pointed cieling, but all Simon could think of was Kamina's blue tattoos that had so ravaged his arm.
"How's a fire like that keep going, Kamina?" someone called out from the crowd. Simon knew the voice—Pinni. She was a few years older than him, and a little bit cruel, but Simon hoped perhaps this question wasn't asked for the sake of that. Kamina already was red-faced and huffy.
"I don't know! I only got a quick look. But standing on the surface was like standing this close to a bonfire, no matter where you went!" Kamina set his jaw and fumbled a bit with his one usable hand. "Maybe there's. I don't know, maybe it's like a ceiling and there's people who walk on it to tend the fire?"
"That's even worse than the one about us digging down from the surface to live under here!" another voice called. A few more kids chorused agreements.
Old Naga held up another hand, and silenced them all. The other hand she placed on Kamina's shoulder. He did not pull away this time, his head down and his face left in shadow, even as his shoulders heaved in some barely-suppressed emotion.
"All of you," Old Naga said, staring out over their audience with beady eyes, "be still. Be silent. All stories have their inception. All myths begin in dreams. Just as you do not butcher a pigmole before it is of age, do not shatter a story when it is only newborn. How do we not know that the roots which grew us did not flee down into the earth to escape the all-consuming heat of the blazing fire? Kamina?"
He jerked a bit.
"Kamina, what do you say?"
He bit his lip and looked up over their small audience first, and then to Old Naga. Voice low, he said. "Humans didn't dig down into the earth to escape. We were meant to walk on the surface."
This time, Old Naga laughed too, smiling as she did. "You, boy, are a gem."
She offered, again, to apprentice him in the ways of a storyteller, but Kamina shook his head and shoved his way through the gathering crowd, finding a hollow near the far back of the firepit to fall in where people wouldn't speak with him anymore.
That seemed to be his plan, at least. He shouldered his way past anyone who so much as tried to lay a hand on him, much less called out his name, and slunk into the shallow hole with such a sour look on his face that Simon considered hurrying to the other side of the fire pit as fast as he could.
Old Naga began telling another story, one of how the tiny, clever digger Einar had lured the first herd of molepig into their village and turned what was once a pest into their main source of food. Simon liked the story, though he had only heard it once before. It was tempting to go back and listen in, and hear about how Einar had coaxed the pigs with roots and beans before befriending the massive molepig chief, but Simon shuffled the other direction, towards the hole Kamina had hidden himself away in.
He sat down by the entrance, fidgeting and pulling his cloak around himself more tightly now that he was farther from the fire. He cleared his throat, but Kamina made no motion to indicate he'd noticed the nine year old at the entrance.
"Hi," Simon said. From the shadows of the pit, he saw a flash of light reflecting off of Kamina's eyes. When he wasn't shouted at or told to go away, he continued. "I, uh,"
Be kind to him. Let him be.
"I, uh, I wanted to… to hear more about the surface?" Simon looked down at his cloak again, pinching the fabric with his nails and trying hard to hold his ground in front of the older boy. "I think? I mean, if you want to go back so badly, why haven't you?"
Kamina grumbled a bit, resting his cheek against the cool wall of the earth. "My dad showed me the tunnels to take. I don't remember them now. For all I know they've all been sealed up by earthquakes."
Simon nodded, filling the time he spent thinking of what else to say with a hum. He'd never seen a tunnel that brought him to some weird other world; never heard of one, either. There were cracks in some of the solid walls where if he pressed his hand against them, he could feel air, and the smoke from their fires filtered through naturally formed tunnels to who-knew-where, but that really didn't mean anything. How much smoke would a firepit as large as Kamina had described make? If it really were an upside down fire on the blue surface, would the smoke go downwards instead of up? "…Was there really a huge firepit above your head?"
Kamina shifted in his tunnel, pulling himself partway out of the earth with one hand on the tunnel's entrance and his bandaged hand settled between his chest and the ground. With Simon sitting and Kamina virtually belly-down, they were on the same eye level.
"Yeah, I swear, there really was," Kamina said, a thin desperation in his voice that hadn't quite been there when he was speaking in front of the group. "It was huge, I could barely see with how bright it was. Coming back to the village was awful, it was like if you stared at the fire for ten minutes on end and then someone blindfolded you and told you to go walk around. I've never had that much trouble seeing in the dark."
A bonfire that destroyed your eyesight for a while? "W-what? Why do you think we could live up there then, that sounds like we'd die immediately!"
Kamina's face hardened, "Well we sure don't belong down here! If humans were meant to live underground, you'd be able to dig holes without that stupid drill of yours, right?"
Simon flinched. "I-I like digging, though! I wouldn't be good at anything if we were on the surface."
"Yeah," Kamina said. "Well I guess I'm not really good at anything down here, either."
"You're good at telling stories," Simon said, hoping it was the right thing to say. Kamina snorted.
"They're not stories, I'm telling the truth."
"Stories don't have to be lies, though?"
There was a shift. Something softened in Kamina's face. Something small and hesitant, like a grin, crept through the gloom cast by the tunnel and the fire's flickering light. He opens his mouth to speak, when suddenly—
"Kamina! Boy! Get your lazy ass up here!"
The new village chief was not as sympathetic to Kamina as the old one had been. The new village chief was the same age as Kamina's father would have been but hadn't known him, unlike Old Naga. He was as big as he was a jerk, and stood up on one of the carved stone walkways with two buckets on each arm, shouting, "Fill these up with water and get them to the hogs, stat!"
Kamina groaned and pulled himself the rest of the way out of the tunnel by his good arm. He was still alternating between holding his bandaged arm up against his chest and keeping it just slightly cocked away from his body and anything else around him. There was a slight hunch to him as he got to his feet.
"Are you gonna be okay?" Simon asked, watching as the older boy stood and readjusted his cloak.
"Me?" Kamina said, jutting his thumb to his chest and grinning a bit. "I'll be fine! Carrying water's tedious, but I'll get it in no time!"
Simon nodded again, smiling a little at the renewed confidence in Kamina's voice, before glancing back and forth between him and Old Naga's storytelling circle in front of the firepit. "I'd, uh, I mean, can I follow you?"
The smile dropped from Kamina's face and was replaced with some measure of shock, his eyebrows raising up to his hairline. "Seriously?"
Simon nodded again, more nervous now than he had been a moment ago. He fidgeted with his cloak once more, rising to his feet. "Is that okay?"
Kamina laughed.
It was a very different laugh from all the ones that had rang out around the firepit while he was telling his story. It didn't hide itself trying to be polite, but belted out full-force so strongly that Simon could see his chest heaving at the end. Some of the villagers around the firepit even stopped listened and turned to look.
"Of course!" Kamina said, grinning even wider than he had before. "That'll be cool. Let's do it."
Simon smiled a bit and hurried after Kamina's retreating back, leading the way on the winding path upwards.
000
Simon sees more of Kamina afterwards than he ever had before. Perhaps it was happenstance—the recognition of a face he'd conversed with making it stick out more to him in crowds. Perhaps Simon is keeping an eye out for him without consciously deciding to. Perhaps Kamina is likewise keeping an eye out for Simon.
It's months later, but not many, when the enormous earthquake collapses half of Jiha, and Simon watches as his parents are eaten by the earth. They're screaming his name when they die.
The village has a funeral. A single funeral. More of a memorial service. Not for Simon's parents specifically, but for everyone who lost their lives in that particular, massive quake. His parent's names aren't mentioned. Most dead never are. This time, there are too many who lost their lives to even consider a list.
Most of the dead are, people Simon didn't know. Their survivors are friends and family he'd never spoken to. He is lost in a crowd of mourners, isolated at the same time without no one else who understands, while the pits of those-without-family rapidly expanded to accommodate the sudden influx of children too young to be entirely on their own.
On the first night—which is cold and lonely, no matter how hot the firepit burns, no matter how many bodies are huddled around it alongside him— he refuses to sleep in a hole, the crunch of bone and welling of blood turning the earth into mud is still too fresh in his mind. On the first night, it is Kamina who approaches him and sits down beside his cuddled form.
It is Kamina who is shuffling and uncomfortable like a boy who still has hope for a father out there somewhere, confronted with a new-made orphan. It is Kamina who places a hand on Simon's back, which turns into an arm around his middle when Simon flings himself into the touch and splays across Kamina's chest, heaving sobs and shaking so hard he cannot form words.
It is Kamina who holds him that first night, until the chief rings the shift-change bell, and those who are supposed to be sleeping must rise while those who have been working move to rest.
It is Kamina who tells the chief that Simon cannot go back in a hole just yet. Kamina who volunteers to dig instead until Simon grips his cloak hard enough to tear it off, begging that he not go under the earth. Don't send him there to die, too.
It is Kamina who waits at the end of the tunnel Simon drills that day, ready with a plate of fresh pigmole steak and a jug of water.
Kamina who tattoos his other arm a few weeks later, and gets his wrist so badly infected the bandages will probably become a permanent feature. Kamina who starts getting known for causing trouble and telling stories. Kamina who comforted Simon after the second cave in, when they were trapped underground and unsure much air they had or which direction to dig in.
Kamina, who gave Simon the strength to drill them to safety, saving him and three other lives. Boys who would come to call Kamina a tentative friend.
Kamina, who had a thoughtful look on his face when Simon cried out one night that he would never have a family again.
Kamina, who put an arm around Simon's neck, held him close, and said, "You still have a family, Simon. Promise, I'll get my dad to agree when I find him. But even if for some dumb reason he won't adopt you—Simon. I'll be your big bro."