Prompt: Will you do Hero/Tomix for "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere." ;_;
When she stepped out of the portal, she was fully expecting to see Tomix fiddling with the gate like he always was. When he wasn't there, she paid it no mind. He was probably sleeping, or even better taking a break. Honestly, sometimes she thought that Tomix was going to run himself into the ground worrying about that thing. It'd do him some good to take a little down time.
Without anything else to do, she ambled over to the Equilibrium Gate, finally taking in the sights of the ruined city of Ravenloss. With all the drama with these keys going on, she'd never really stopped to take a look at the underground city. While she wasn't an architect or archaeologist, she'd been questing through enough ruins to know that this place must have been beautiful in its heyday.
Kinda sad to see what it'd turned into.
She peered up at the gate, eyeing the key placed in the first lock. Their trip through Dusk Alley had been—interesting, but fun. Maybe when all this was over she could take Tomix to Riverine Keep or something. That would be awesome!
So without anything better to do, she began to wander around the ruins of the old city. Occasionally there'd be an altercation with the odd monster or chaosweaver, but nothing too bad. It was kind of relaxing. Nothing was looming over her head that needed to be worried about (well, aside from Sepulchure and the quest for the orbs), and she could just venture at her leisure.
It was at that point that she slipped in something on the pavement and fell right on her face. Ow.
She turned over to glare at whatever it was that had caused her impromptu pratfall, but her eyes widened and froze when she saw what color it was.
Red.
Dark red, thick and coppery, and spread out over a two-foot pothole making a very slick but shallow puddle with splatters trailing to the side, leading to rough smears of disturbing length.
For a moment her mind stopped and she started trying to rationalize things—it could be monster blood, it could be chaosweavers, or some other sort of monster, but no, her brain reminded her, their blood wasn't that color.
There was an actual human down here, and they were hurt, badly, and either they'd been dragged somewhere or had stumbled away to find cover. She didn't think. She ran.
And prayed that who she found wasn't who she'd come to see.
The trail led to an alley, and another large pool, but no body as far as she could see.
She tore the place apart, moving bags and boulders and trashcans in hope for something, anything, hidden parts of the trail that she might have missed or—
Or a body.
Eventually she collapsed in that alley, tears spurred from worry running down her face and dry heaves wracking her frame. Some logical part of her brain told her there was probably nothing she could do, but she could have come here earlier, it wasn't like she'd been doing anything important earlier in the day, she could've—
"What are you doing in here?"
Her heart stopped.
….
"Hey—! What is wrong with you, get off me!"
Tomix, who up until that point had been dead to the world on the only decent mattress in the entire city, really had no idea what to expect when the travelling hero he'd gotten the Cloud Key with buried her face in his shirt, bawling her eyes out.
Eventually he managed to catch the words "blood", "fresh", "you", and "missing", and was able to piece together what went on.
"Hey, calm down, calm down, I'm alright, okay? There's nothing to worry about." He said.
"But—but there was blood and you were gone, and, and—" Whatever intelligent response that might have been made was quickly drowned by more blubbering and Tomix groaned in annoyance.
"Look, it's fine now, alright? I'm right here, I'm not going anywhere. So stop crying."
They failed to do so, and he groaned again.
That was his favorite shirt, too.
NOTE: I almost had Tomix lying bloody in that alley. Almost.