"Hey, watch it!" The wax girl shouted as she shoved him away. She was surprisingly strong for someone of her size, as in someone smaller than Leeyoon. He wasn't used to being pushed around, and that was the sole reason he stopped, rather than plow on by her. It took a second, too, to realize that it was still the middle of the night, and that no wax girl should be out and about at that hour.
No wax girl, except-
"You?" Leeyoon said, quite wisely.
"Yeah?" She said, after a long moment.
"What- what are you doing here?" He finally managed. She looked at him for another hard moment, as if she didn't know why he didn't know why she was here.
"I come here every other week?" She said. "I haven't seen you around. Maybe I should ask what you're doing here."
"I- I live here!"
"Do you? I really haven't seen you around, you know, uh.." She twirled her hand in the air, searching for- "Leeyoon." -his name. He was offended, of course, that she didn't even know his name, that she was here at all.
"Right." He scoffed, and turned away, crossing his arms behind his back with dignity. "Forgive me if I don't feel the need to entertain guests to a community that's not even mine." He sneered, and tried to appear cold.
"Right." The wax girl replied, looked at him for a moment, and then turned away. "I've got to be going now."
Leeyoon turned his head to track her, watched her dip down into some faun's den without him, without even looking back. Being ignored like that stung, and more than he enjoyed admitting. He hesitated in the clearing, unsure what to do. He was now very curious about Mune's wax girl, what she was doing in his- or, rather, in the faun's community, but he daren't display interest, as he'd just declared that he wasn't interested in being interested in other people.
The wax girl, however, stepped out of the den with a faun at her heels. She was saying something to the faun, who smiled and then did something very strange. Leeyoon would have considered it far stranger, however, if he hadn't seen someone else do it recently. The faun, of undeterminable gender, moved their hands around, seeming to emote along with the gestures. Most odd of all was the wax girl, who reacted as if the faun had just told a funny joke, smiling and laughing.
It suddenly made sense.
The feral faun wasn't mocking him. She was speaking, just not with words, with her hands, and he was a damn fool for not realizing it in the first place. He'd known about it, about this and other fauns right under his own supervision who could not or would not speak with audible words and instead spoke with visible ones. He'd never bothered to learn how to speak it, being too 'important' for most fauns to speak to at all, and it had never come up.
He would have smacked himself if he weren't in the middle of the clearing, and if the wax girl wasn't approaching him again.
"Is this how you spend your time nowadays? Standing still and doing nothing?"
"No, no, I.. Where did you learn to do that?"
"Do what?"
"Speak in hands."
"Sign?" She asked with exasperation.
"Yes." Leeyoon said quite flatly. He felt ridiculous, but she didn't need to know that.
Once again she sort of just stared at him, squinting like that would help her read him any better, but of course it didn't. "I learned from my books, and practiced with my neighbors, and the librarian."
"Hmm." He said, but what he really wanted to ask was if he would show her, but that meant admitting interest, and he didn't want to appear foolish to her.
"What's this about?"
"Oh, nothing. I'm thinking of picking up a new hobby, and that seems like a, ah, useful one." He lied, though it wasn't entirely a lie. It would be useful.
"You mean you don't already know? Weren't you trained, you know, to be a leader?" She looked him up and down, taking a defensive stance, though she had just called him out, and not the other way around. If he could blush, he would have, for her words stung and infuriated him again.
"Of course, but that didn't include learning handspeak. We're trained to be self sufficient, to guide others from afar, and to know about how the broader world works in order to do so." He nearly huffed, but controlled himself. That annoying squeak of emotion came through in his voice, however, and he felt all the more irked for it.
"I see." She raised an eyebrow, then adjusted the bag on her shoulder. "Well, since you're so eager to take up this new hobby, you could probably start with Siah, or if you're too above actually talking to other people, you could go by the library. The books there have tons of sign dictionaries." She said, and began to walk away.
Leeyoon trailed after her, however, "I'm not above anything," he sneered.
"Maybe not anymore." She said with a point.
"What's that to mean?"
"Mune told me about you. You're one of those mister high-and-mighty jerks who lets their position get to their head. You think you're better than the common people, because they're common, and you're oh so special. Well, you're not the guardian, or even a guardian in training anymore. You're not so special, but I bet the ego ride is hard to get off of, huh?"
"I-" He started, but couldn't finish, too overcome. She'd cut to the heart of his months-long melancholy in just a matter of a few sentences. He stopped in place, unable to follow her, and just grit his teeth. To his surprise, she stopped as well.
"Mune also told me he thinks you could be a pretty nice guy, if you could get over yourself. Well, I think the second part. He already thinks you're a pretty nice guy, but don't go letting that get to your head either." She said, looking at her feet, feeling bad for having cut him so easily. "If you do decide to go to the library, you'll want to go close to dawn, I think. It won't be too warm for you yet, and they open as soon as the librarian wakes up." She advised him, then smiled, just a little, and headed off into the woods. Leeyoon did not follow her. He stood there, opening and closing his hands and feeling small and childish and quite, quite horribly lost.
But she turned back, smiling a little wider and more enthusiastically and called, "Oh, and tell them I sent you." Then, with a wave, she was gone for real, disappearing into the forest.
Leeyoon, a little too late, waved back, and then turned and walked back the way he came.
He spent the next few days, first sleeping, then thinking deeply about what had happened. His own motives still eluded him, even in hindsight. Part of him claimed it was boredom, part of him claimed it was curiosity, but he felt that truly neither of those things were entirely true. After sleeping restlessly, he thought on this for two days, sleeping off and on again intermittently. He did not dream, he never had, but his thoughts never let him deeply enough into sleep to properly escape them.
The whole while he was reflecting on his actions, he thought about the faun in the forest, and he wondered if she was still mad at him. He was flush with shame for ridiculing her, thinking that she had been mocking him, acting like a pretentious and self-righteous child the whole time under the pretense of being anything but. Like always, he'd been trying to be the image of maturity, decision-making and wise and so calm, but a few gestures had rendered him acting like the brat he really was.
Furthermore, he hoped she was alright, and that she hadn't left or gone too far. He'd thought briefly about making her his friend, but it seemed impossible, and sort of wrong to try to force her into that position. He really just needed to apologize, his curiosity or whatever be damned. He was making so many mistakes, and he wanted to clear some of them before..
Well, that didn't matter much.
It took a while to get over the shame of his encounter with both the faun and the wax girl, but he'd decided he would try to fix at least one of those situations. Seeing as the wax girl was likely with Mune on the moonbeast temple, finding the faun was more realistic, though finding a decent way to apologize in that scenario was going to be more work upfront.
After deciding this, he rested for a night, and woke in the late night, and started the walk to the dusk community before Sohone had walked the sun across the horizon.