Gourry watched Lina stare at him, and suppressed a grin. The look of confusion on her face was classic, so unlike Lina, but such an improvement over any of the various masks she'd been wearing to hide her feelings from him. Her brow was furrowed, and crouching down in front of her, he reached out with his right hand and gently traced a line between her eyebrows, smoothing the lines away. "If you think too much, you're gonna hurt yourself, you know."
Lina quickly, but gently, pushed aside his hand. "Gourry," she said with a frown, "you don't think . . . we're really dead . . . do you?" She sounded worried, but also on the verge of launching into a lecture.
Gourry masked his disappointment at being pushed away so quickly. At least she didn't fireball me, he thought. "I know you think I've got the brains of a jellyfish, but give me some credit, will ya." Gourry snorted. "Watching you beat yourself up over the past is hardly my idea of a pleasant afterlife."
"And what exactly is that supposed to mean?" she demanded with some asperity.
"Exactly what it sounds like," he returned. "Did you ever think that there was a reason everyone else seemed to think you were responsible for saving them?"
"I know I was out of action, just as certainly as when we fought Copy Rezo! Only this time, there was no Sylphiel to cast resurrection, because Hellmaster had killed her when she tried to Dragon Slave him again! If I was out of it, how could I have saved everyone?"
"A-again?" Gourry's brain tried valiantly to wrap itself around an image of Sylphiel casting a Dragon Slave. He could picture Sylphiel making the movements to summon the power, but when she finished chanting the spell, a large carrot floated forward from her hands. He tried again, and this time at the end of the spell the destructive energy burst forth, but it came from a small red-head with an innocent smile. Apparently the image of Sylphiel in his mind was unwilling to be linked with wholesale destruction.
Lina smiled wryly. "Yeah, again. Apparently she started practicing after we left Sairaag the first time. You know what she said? She said, 'I thought if I was going to travel with Gourry, I should be able to do this.'" Lina paused, and then said with a mischievous glint in her eyes, "You know she's in love with you, don't you."
"Yeah, I know." If Lina expected him to be surprised by that, she was going to be disappointed.
"Y-you what? You do?" Lina looked confused again.
Gourry found himself fighting the urge to grin again. Somebody must like me, he thought. I've managed to confuse Lina twice in the same conversation. "Yes. I do know. That Sylphiel is in love with me." He put a brief space between each statement. Before he could continue, his stomach growled insistently. "Look. I'm gonna go check that snare I set." He glanced over at the pot they had set to boil. "I'd better get some more water while I'm at it. Why don't you pull out the rations. This shouldn't take me too long."
He picked up the empty water sack and threw it over his shoulder, doing his best not to saunter out of the clearing, so as to give Lina no excuse for a parting shot. He felt smug about the way he had dominated the conversation, but also annoyed that she thought him so unobservant. An unobservant warrior is a dead warrior, his sword master had been in the habit of saying. In battle, the smallest thing could mean the difference between life and death, between victory and defeat. Something as trivial as an unnoticed ant-hill could foul footwork; a low-hanging branch could impede a sword-stroke. A warrior can't always choose his battleground, but an observant one can use it to his advantage, was another of his sword master's sayings. As much as footwork and blade movements, learning to quickly judge his surroundings had been a part of his training. His ability to notice small details from his surroundings was one of the things that made him a good swordsman.
However, Gourry wasn't just good, he was one of the best. Through years of training and experience, he had learned how to judge his opponents' moves by watching the way their eyes moved or listening for small changes in their breathing. Unfortunately, his heavy reliance on such unconscious cues made fighting mazoku particularly difficult. They just didn't do things like blink or even breathe. Actually, the breathing had been what tipped him off about Xellos, although he knew the others hadn't taken him seriously. Xellos looked human, but he didn't breathe, unless he was talking. That, plus the fact that he didn't react to his surroundings the way people did, was a dead giveaway. Gourry might not pay attention to history lessons and lectures on magic, but "unobservant" was not a word that could be aptly applied to him.
When he said that he needed to go to Sairaag to get their lives back, he had been thinking that he wanted to get their lives back to the way they were before. Lina had said that there was nothing else to tell, but he still felt like there was more, something important. He could understand why Lina didn't want him to remember how Phibrizzo had controlled him. Just thinking about how close he had come to killing her made his blood freeze. He was supposed to be her protector, to go on protecting her for the rest of his life, and he had almost killed her. He wished he could just forget how he had bowed before Phibrizzo, and the thrilling power he had wielded with his Sword. Yet, despite the horror of that memory, he still felt the urge to remember the rest. He needed to know what happened between the time when Lina cast the Gigaslave and when she hurled him from the pillar.
As Gourry approached the brook, he heard the faint struggles of an animal, and he began to grin. Sure enough, there was a rabbit caught in his snare. He quickly dispatched it, and refilled the water sack. He went downstream a ways to skin and gut the rabbit, and then began the walk back to their campsite. When it was nearly in sight, he whistled out their code, and paused to await the reply. The code had been his idea, but the reply had been Lina's. After receiving the "all-clear", he made his way into camp. There was also a "privacy" reply, because sometimes Lina decided to change her clothes or do other girl things while he was away. No reply meant that something was wrong. All in all, it was a neat system, and he was heartily in favor of anything that kept him off the receiving end of Lina's magic (he was equally likely to wind up flying through the air if she walked in on him).
Lina had placed some travel bread on flat stones near the fire. Cold, the stuff was as hard as a rock, but it softened up as it got warmer. Lina had tried to explain how that worked as well, but the results were all that really mattered to him. She had also dug out some sweet potatoes. She had skewered one and held the stick over the fire with one hand, while the other reached into the sack next to her and then popped a ripe blackberry into her mouth. Gourry held up the rabbit as he approached.
"Just one?" She asked in disappointment.
"Yeah. I left the snare out, so there might be another one in the morning." Gourry started dressing the rabbit, assembling a make-shift spit and moving and placing it near the fire to roast. "Toss me a potato," he said after he finished. As he speared it with a stick he said, "We should turn in early tonight. I want to start out for Sairaag at first light."
"Whatever you say," Lina said around a mouthful of blackberries. "This is your journey, after all."
"You know, Lina, now, I think it's for us both."