Chapter Nine--ROBIN
Days after our run-in with the cannibals, Lia announced that her wrist was almost completely healed; only remembering its injury with a tingling in the cold. We hadn't made nearly as much progress as we had hoped, but after our last fight, we didn't feel like going quite so fast. Lia didn't say anything, but I know she was bothered by the incident. Her complaints lessened until she was nearly silent. Sure, I welcomed a break in her pessimism, but the silence that resulted was almost unbearable.
At night, though, she was far from silent. Even from where I slept in a tree, I understood every emotion she suppressed during the day—consciously or otherwise—through her constant mumblings at night. They weren't loud, and anyone else would have slept through them entirely. I, however, was not anyone else and was kept awake for hours at a time, despite my attempts at relocation.
I never said anything about it to her because it didn't seem like too much of a problem. She asked me why I looked so awful once, but I pleaded insomnia. I guessed she had enough troubles as it was, and I saw no need to add another one to her load.
Even when I was able to sleep, I had no rest. My dreams had returned and were hard at work relaying information to me, telling me things. Not psychotic things; never psychotic things. But Sunagakure… There was something wrong there. People were upset, some were hysterical… But my stupid vague dreams would only tell me what they were feeling and not what was causing it. So if Lia was plagued by her own emotions in her dreams, then I was haunted by the feelings of others.
I did not rush our movements, as their anguish was lasting, neither getting progressively better or worse. We would arrive, I knew, in a few days. Three or four, but maybe two if we were lucky. And we were lucky enough, finally catching sight of the village's taller buildings over the tops of rolling sand dunes dyed pink in the failing sunlight. We set up camp for the night, deciding that we would approach the village in the sunlight.
There was no tree for me amongst the sandy hills, so I dug a quick hole in the sand. It fell away easily at the top, but a foot or so down, it became tightly packed, holding together not by water, but by the pressure of a million footsteps. When my burrow was complete, I climbed in, eventually settling in a rough fetal position. Lia threw a blanket down to me, and I wriggled until I was comfortable.
"Can't you ever sleep normally?" she asked laughingly for the surface.
"Oh, ha ha. We're in a i desert /i Lia. It'll get really cold really fast, and the sand is warm."
"You might've said something earlier…"
"Sorry 'bout that." She disappeared from my field of vision, and shortly I heard the scratching sounds of her burrowing to my left a bit. I listened to her dig for a while, but when she had finished, I looked up to see the most amazing stars I had ever seen. "Lia, look…" she followed my pointing hand, the tips of my fingers barely visible from above the top of my hole.
"Suna people see the same stars…" she trailed off.
I didn't dream that night.
