Communication

Leif had fallen asleep. He was still wearing his glasses. Stefan rustled around with the arm that wasn't in a sling because of a shoulder that needed healing and soon produced a leather pouch. He pointed the pouch's opening towards Lalli:
-Can you fold his glasses and put them in there?
Lalli obliged, making sure to handle them delicately. Stefan put the pouch back where he had gotten it from:
-Some on my older family member need them. I swear that every single one of them fell asleep with them on at least once within a week of first getting them.
Lalli briefly focused on encouraging his stomach to settle down. They were now on a road between towns, which meant that most of its maintenance came from the mere fact that people were using it often enough to keep plants from regrowing. He had made sure that Isak knew in advance, as he had noticed that drivers who were told took him more seriously if he said they needed to stop as soon as possible. Another good side effect was that if the driver was genuinely pressed for time out of necessity or personal preference, they admitted to simply not be able to stop for him. Stefan spoke:
-You know, I heard that trying to sleep is quite good for that.
-Roads can be dangerous and the two of you are just out of the clinic. If I'm here, I should keep an eye out. I know I can do it, I had to when I came with Anne-Mari.
It was Isak's turn to intervene:
-In that case, try looking far away rather than places that are closer to us. Win-win. The place at which I plan to stop for lunch has a special meal for people prone to transportation sickness. I don't remember what's in it exactly, so you may need to come in to check if there is anything you really can't eat in it.
Lalli remembered to thank Isak after a few seconds. After a few minutes of looking at the town they had left fading into the distance, a question he had for Stefan once the trip was at about its current step came to the forefront of his mind. It also happened to be something he preferred asking while Leif was asleep:
-A lot of the things you were worried about happening if you choose to leave town with Leif have happened. What do you think about them now?
Stefan was silent for some time before answering:
-Milla told me a little about how things were going. It's more of a mixed bag than I expected it to be. Chances are that you don't know this yet, but it turns out that a couple of the men who are closer to doing the job that requires privacy from lack of other options have been getting more customers. That sign at the Lodge was mostly for people who were unable or unwilling to go look elsewhere. Or just plain didn't listen when first told how long I was going to take to recover. A couple days ago, one of the men who got more customers asked if he could use the room in the Lodge while I was away. He's currently allowed to as long as he sticks to a few rules, including visiting Helena on a regular basis. If he's still around when I come back, it might be worth seeing for how long he's willing to continue doing such work.
-Could you have found him earlier and have time to teach him anything you wanted him to know yourself?
-Those who need that job are wary of being offered better work conditions out of the blue, no matter what they are expected to do in return. The Lodge needs workers who are not part of the family so rarely that anyone showing up to offer a job there is assumed to be lying, especially if the one being offered the job has no existing ties whatsoever to the Lodge. For more complicated reasons, they would be even be wary of myself or Milla in most circumstances. The man who asked about using the room heard of the accident and realized that the Lodge might actually be looking for someone to do that particular job, for once. Others probably thought of it, but he was the only one who took the chance of actually showing up.
Lalli figured out on his own that if the situation really was as Stefan described it, he would genuinely have no idea that there was a person ready to replace him within that group of people.

Another question came to Lalli's mind:
-What about you not being the right person for Leif to leave town with?
When Stefan spoke, it was clear he was trying to not cry, as he had earlier:
-I once wanted to rescue him and imagined that things had to go well after that. Something about Göte's means of keeping me from actually doing that made me realize that reality would most likely be very different. Soon enough, I had gotten in my head that I was the very last person Leif should be leaving town with and that almost literally anyone else would be better. From there, each time my mind came up with another practical reason for which I shouldn't leave town, I was all too happy to accept it. I took me too long to realize that trying to become the right person for Leif to leave town with was an option. Then I realized that Leif didn't have time to wait for me to become good enough, so I went back to trying to make him leave with someone else, then that his life was in much more immediate danger than both of us had realized up to that point.
Lalli thought a little, and an idea crossed his mind:
-Is it possible that he wanted to leave town with you or not at all, but he didn't feel like he could tell you because you keep wanting him to leave with someone else?
Right after finishing his sentence, Lalli realized that if Göte had a specific character trait in common with Onni and Roni, Leif might also be scared of saying anything that obviously risked being something the person he was speaking to didn't want to hear. From there, it became all too easy to treat being silent and agreeing with whatever the other people was saying as the two only options that wouldn't get him yelled at. Stefan stayed silent for a few moments before speaking in a low voice:
-I knew I wasn't ready to be the one helping him yet. If you're right, I managed to scare him away from sharing his true thoughts with me without meaning to. I'll ask him later. I should have asked him months ago.
-Why didn't you do it then? You are good at asking the right things when you're working.
-For what it's worth, it did cross my mind at some point. But when it first happened, it was not that long after my realization that my plans for what to do after getting him away from Göte only treated him as an accessory to what I wanted to do, and such a situation was the last thing he needed. At the time, I was focused on giving him space for his own desires and I considered that one of my priorities was to avoid asking him about myself when Göte would send him to the Lodge. As he came closer to being old enough to leave without Göte being entitled to have him back, I started seeing another problem with asking the question. If the answer was yes, it would mean that my inability to become a better person while off the job fast enough was what was keeping him under Göte's thumb. So I got the idea that there had to be someone who was already better suited than me to leave town with him and I just needed to figure out who that was. You were present for most things worth mentioning that happened after that.
Isak chimed in:
-You trying to change and managing to do so, even a little, shows that you have the capacity to become the person you want to be someday. Getting the idea that you need to have gone all the way to becoming that person before you are able to properly help Leif shows that you still let my father get into your head. He got you by asking you how much better your companionship was going to be compared to his own, didn't he? Uh… wait, were those two told yet?
Stefan answered:
-Lalli figured it out on his own and I warned Leif on the off-chance his lack of glasses was the only reason he hadn't noticed yet.
Göte had been off in terms of how his son would look like in his mid-twenties, but not enough for the sketch in the general store to look that different from the real person to Lalli's limited capacity to remember faces. Lalli realized that this might be a relatively good time to ask a question that felt best asked to Isak himself:
-Does Göte know?
-When I first came here, I thought I'd surprise him by approaching him while he was alone outside the store. He didn't immediately recognize me, so he treated me like any random stranger whose only potential value to him was buying something and refused to talk to me any longer when I told him it wasn't what I was coming to him for. He reminded me of the reason why my mother left with my sister and me in tow all too fast. While I'm at it, I have my own part in things having gotten this bad for Leif. After finding out about his situation, I assumed that if he didn't want the store anymore, he would leave as my mother had managed to do as soon as he would old enough, my father would be desperate for a new successor and I could swoop in with my savings as a solution to his problem. I could have been the solution Stefan had been looking for all this time, but providing him with a place to stay outside of town only to be able to have a try at taking the future he was promised felt like too cruel a move. Stefan, if you think, "hey, any chance you're enduring a terrible situation because you're in love with me and don't want to leave me behind?" is a hard question to ask, try having "I want that store you were promised for myself, want to go stay with my mother and sister?" in a corner of your mind. Though if it had been Milla and I had no idea whether she actually felt that way about me or not, I could have easily been in your shoes… and gotten a punch that would have made me look like that sketch if I was wrong.

Isak's comment reminded Lalli of an earlier comment about what might have happened if the verbal fight between Milla and Leif's bother had turned physical. The incident with "Father's new friend" had shown that she most likely needed those skills on the job just as much as Lalli needed his own fighting and hunting skills while at work. Before Roni, it hadn't been rare for him to physically push people away, Onni and Tuuri included, if they insisted upon interacting with him at a time where he absolutely needed to be alone with his own thoughts. Roni had made him stop, but it had turned out to be so he got to do the pushing away himself, on Lalli's behalf, for a range of reasons broader than Lalli had ever had. Lalli found himself wondering why he hadn't been particularly wary of making Milla angry all while currently having some apprehension to seeing Onni again, then something fell into place: she only got angry about big things and she was consistent in terms of what she considered "big things". People who started fighting with each other or employees of the Lodge, who were all family to her. People who didn't understand that they could look, but not touch. People who started loudly questioning her ability to do her job over being refused something that the tavern was simply unable to provide, be it punctually or permanently. As far as Lalli could tell, she didn't go out of her way to find a reason to get angry, complain or worry when there genuinely were none. Milla could fight when it was needed, but chose her fights via criteria that Lalli approved of. By that metric, most situations in which Onni got angry were warranted as far as Lalli could tell, but he got worried so often that it was still… he remembered the water image he had come up with some time ago and finally truly understood the meaning of all the times he had heard the word "draining" when someone was talking about another person. With the new word of vocabulary in hand, he mentally updated an item in the list of what he wanted in his future partner.

xxxx

Leif ended up only waking up when they stopped at a roadside Inn for lunch. Only after Isak insisted for only the two of them go fetch the food did Lalli remember that Stefan meant to ask Leif something and might not want to do it in their presence. The establishment was much less noisy than Lalli expected, which was explained by the fact that the place had a storyteller, as well.
-Isn't it early for lunch?
They were having an early lunch to make up for everyone's early breakfast. Isak explained while looking though what seemed to be a menu:
-Even when they travel, people like eating at their usual lunchtime. The storyteller works right before and right after the preferred times to encourage people to spread out a little more. Here, I've found it.
He gave Lalli a piece of paper and pointed at a specific item. The two ingredients he didn't like looked easy to do without, so Isak had a waiter ask the cook. Lalli had once tried to ask such a thing at a small eatery. The cook had been furious, apparently taking the request as an insult to their cooking while Lalli had genuinely asked for the ingredient to be removed because its taste alone tended to trigger something Tuuri called a "gag reflex". To this day, Lalli still had no idea how choking on food prepared by someone else was supposed to be more insulting than refusing to eat it to start with. At least, if it wasn't eaten, someone else could have it. Lalli knew enough of Stefan's tastes to be able to pick a food item for him and Leif's morning-long sleep had made the standard version of the "transportation sickness special" the safest bet. Luckily, it was a nice day, so eating at various places inside or against the cart worked for all of them. Leif ate most of his food and most of what he left behind was all the same ingredient, one of the two that had been removed from Lalli's own dish. Between Stefan and Isak, the remains were quickly snatched up. Lalli silently approved of that response to someone refusing to eat something and added that to the list of things he'd like to have in a partner.