iv
He's awash in cold midday light when he regains consciousness, laying underneath his own cape that had been draped over him in his sleep. With a groan, he props himself up on stiff elbows and sees Lilina kneeling by his side. Pichu is worryingly absent.
He begins pushing his makeshift blanket aside before Lilina moves so fast she almost warps and hovers in front of him, holding her palms up. Her expression is firm even though her eyes are puffy and red.
"Is Pichu okay?" he asks, surprising himself at the effort he needed to speak. Lilina nods and pats the ground. Rest, she says. Roy almost falls back down, his arms collapsing beneath him. He lies cross-armed, fingers tapping away the seconds his animal friend spends exposed in the daylight.
"Has he been gone long?"
Don't worry.
"Is he looking for help?"
I'd say so.
The panic rising in his throat almost chokes him. "It's not safe for him to be alone out there."
Lilina hovers over him again as he begins to shift his weight. She closes her eyes and droops her head forward before staring at him again, unflinching.
Roy diffuses the tightness growing in his chest before noticing that his arms are stinging. Then he sees the singed vambraces, the exposed skin peeling and red. A similar pain flares up along his neck and jaw. His hand moves to trace the wound but he withdraws it with a hiss.
"Lil..." he croaks, through the pain that had finally emerged to snare him. "I'm sorry about last night..."
Lilina shakes her head slowly and reaches out to stroke his hair, nudging him back down for what she hopes is the final time. She smiles, blinks back her tears and fades away, leaving him to himself.
He bites back the thoughts running through his head, shutting his eyes so he can't see in his mind's eye the spirit of his best friend whom he'd failed over and over again. I've become such a burden. What's the use if I can't help Pichu or Lilina or...
His burns simmer in the cold midday air. The reality of his injuries is dizzying. He's taken back to the beginning of the war where a young lord does all he can to quell his panic as he clutches a bleeding arm, half cut off.
How childish.
He spirals down until the pain fills him with a strange, analgesic sense of relief. His mind drifts.
He flickers in and out of sleep, for the first time in this world finding solace in the quiet shade of an empty mind, a plane away from his world of infernal light. A silence away from the wailing souls and the adulterated forest, the cliffs, the sky. Nothing he'd failed to protect. Not even his mind that in waking poured the oil that required merely to catch the light of the new world to bring to life the flames of agonising conclusion.
It's a watery void that fills his lungs with air as he floats, drowns in its darkness.
Pichu pulls back the curtain of shadow, brushing gently against Roy's unburnt side. He chatters and squeaks energetically, peering up at his companion with wide, brown eyes and erect ears, almost smiling.
"Hm?" Roy rubs his face and sees two lights hovering above his head. Rubs his eyes again and finds that they're still there. He reaches out to touch one of them and it flutters against his finger, warm and glittering. It weaves around his arm and settles on his chestplate. He stares at it with crossed eyes and soon fills with despair.
"You didn't need to go to the trouble of—"
"Pi!" Pichu squeaks with an almost vicious force that makes Roy blink. Lilina emerges from his peripheral vision threatening to put his head back down.
"I hope you didn't have to go far," Roy laments as the fairy brushes its wings against his burnt jaw. Pichu gives a satisfied squeak, to which Roy sighs. I'll never know, then.
The other fairy steps in to heal his arms. The pain gives way first to numbness and then to a pleasant tingle, both warm and cool at once, that he doesn't deserve—Get over yourself!
He fills his lungs with the cold afternoon air and finds it too hard to focus on the healing, so he draws the curtain on his mind again, remembering the quiet peace of his dreamless dreamscape. Too soon a prickly golden tail brushes past his face, pulling him back to the world and his two companions. Lilina and Pichu gaze at him with eyes sparkling with cautious hope. He shies away from them and turns to the fairies hovering about his head.
"Thank you," he mouths, for a moment too weak to vocalise. The fairies nod about in the air before retreating back to their hollows, leaving the three of them looking at each other again. "Thank you, Pichu, Lilina," he says, out loud this time, peering at them through a tangled flame of hair. They smile. Lilina seats herself next to him and beckons him to sleep again.
Roy shakes his head. "We'll move under the cover of night."
A/n: As soon as we start talking I break the style here oh well.