Author's Notes: I don't even know what I'm doing with my life. Filling it up with Don't Starve fic, apparently. It's a sickness.
Chapter 2
In the morning, the sun returned to banish the terrors of the night, and the young man slept still.
By the light of day, he looked like a thing dead: too-pale skin, face paint a mask half beset with blood and filth, shirt torn to something near useless. Mrs. Wickerbottom hmm'd disapprovingly. She dipped a scrap of spider silk in water and used it to wipe away the blood. Then she fetched a clean one and did what she could about the face paint.
Wendy left to check the spider traps, and she returned near midday, offering small, glistening chunks of gland as trophies. Mrs. Wickerbottom squeezed them out onto the man's burns, then onto the smaller injuries littering his torso. Still he slept, senseless to the world, and Wendy went out again to gather berries.
It was late afternoon by the time he began to stir – a slight shifting, a careful parting of lips. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the plush white fur of the bedroll, then brushed back and forth, as though uncertain what they were feeling.
Blearily, he opened his eyes.
"Finally," said Mrs. Wickerbottom. "You were out longer than I'd expected. How are you feeling?"
He seemed to think about this for a moment. His fingers quested downward, touched the place where the salve and bandages had done so much to keep his insides on the inside. His eyes widened, just a little.
"I would not have suspected that the secretions of arachnids had medicinal properties, either," she told him. "I take it you're better? Somewhat, at least."
The man nodded carefully, hesitant. Paused – pressed his lips together – shook his head.
Shaking fingers twisted a twig from one of the saplings planted in the camp, and the man lowered it to the ground, scratching at the dirt. It took her a moment to realize that he was writing something there, and Mrs. Wickerbottom tilted her head to see what he'd spelled out.
"Food?" it said, and the man stopped, biting at his lip. "Please," he added.
Beneath the "please," he drew a line, and then another. When he glanced up to see her reaction to the words, there was a certain wariness to him.
"The soup will be done any minute now," she said.
It was as though she'd promised him a doorway out of this world. The grin that split the young man's face was bright and sudden, full of gratitude. He seized her hand and kissed the back of it, and Mrs. Wickerbottom snorted, unladylike, and took it away.
"Don't get your hopes up too high," she warned him. "It's a new recipe."
He sat back, somewhat abashed, but all the same his eyes were roving the camp – sweeping over the even row of drying racks and the farms with careful white fences. When he reached the crockpot, full and bubbling, his gaze skittered to a stop, distinctly entranced.
To keep him distracted, Mrs. Wickerbottom held out a hand. "Eleanor Wickerbottom," she said – and the young man broke off staring for long enough to shake it.
When she'd let go, he retrieved his twig. "Wes," he wrote, in the dirt next to his earlier words, and she looked at him, appraising.
He glanced up from his name – offered a smile that was almost apologetic. He put the flat of his hand over his throat and shook his head.
"I thought as much," she said. And by the easy familiarity with that explanation, she guessed it wasn't recent.
His attention had begun to wander already, though. He was watching the soup again, and so much for distractions.
Mrs. Wickerbottom counted back the time in her head, judging as best she could by the relative position of the sun. She liked to be sure the meat was cooked enough – had gotten quite ill indeed when she first arrived, by being hasty. But Wes was entirely too thin, all sharp lines and hard angles, and she didn't like the way he couldn't seem to pull his eyes from the crockpot. He was half-starved; that much was plain.
"Well," she said. "I suppose a little early won't hurt anyone."
Again came that grin, sudden as a break in the clouds after a spring storm, and Mrs. Wickerbottom made her way to the crockpot to check the contents.
It was a new recipe; that much was true, even if she didn't think they had to worry about it being a failure. The soup had thickened nicely, rabbit and mushroom, with a pinch of sea salt they'd scraped from the cliffs overlooking this world's strange, wild ocean. The smell when she lifted the lid was rich and savory, and she scooped some from the pot into a rough-hewn wooden bowl.
"Don't eat too fast," she warned him, as she set the meal in his hands. "You'll be ill."
His fingers closed on the bowl; he nodded, once, the gesture unsteady. Then he ignored her advice completely.
Wes ate like he'd never seen food before – tipped the bowl back and drank, throat working as he swallowed.
It was a small miracle he didn't choke himself, but when the broth was gone, he had the presence of mind to lower the bowl and fish the pieces left at the bottom out with his fingers, so that they didn't go down whole. That was something, at least.
"Better now?" she asked.
He smiled, dazed and euphoric, and gave her a nod. But his arm was snaking around his stomach already, and she thought he might be having regrets about not pacing himself.
Briefly, she considered lecturing him on the body's physical reaction to starvation and the reintroduction of nutrients after a prolonged period without. But it was too late now; and anyway, she suspected that common sense would have fought a brief war with willpower and lost somewhat spectacularly. So Mrs. Wickerbottom only sighed and said, "If you're going to throw up, please do it in the corner."
He didn't. He bit his lip and closed his eyes for a little while – seemed to be struggling. But everything stayed down, and when ten minutes had gone, he looked much better. There was even some color in his cheeks now.
Mrs. Wickerbottom's fingers carried on with their work while he recovered, wove dried strands of grass together as though she'd been doing it for years. It wasn't terribly different from knitting, once you had the rhythm down. In, out – watch the placement – pull.
She glanced up, only mildly surprised, when he came to join her, sat himself down cross-legged on the dirt, and helped himself to a few handfuls of grass. His eyes were on her hands, just watching; then he laid the first strand flat and began to weave, a clumsy mirror image of her own method.
The minutes stretched away, and he grew steadier at the work; he had quick hands, and he picked up the rhythm with surprising ease. In, out – watch the placement – pull. He was a fast study.
She'd meant the pile to take her until full dark, but it was only sundown by the time they set the last trap aside. They'd gone through the entire store of grass.
"Thank you," she told him. "That was kind."
Again that abashed expression, and he tapped a finger lightly on top of the bandages at his torso. Then he began to weave – in, out, pull – with nothing but air. He broke off abruptly, turned both hands out, held up the imaginary basket like an offering.
She might have taken it the wrong way, if not for his expression. But his face was remarkably easy to read, and written there now was a painful sort of earnestness, the same gratitude that had been there when she gave him the soup.
Mrs. Wickerbottom breathed a sigh. She set the traps to one side, stood, and brushed her skirt off. "You don't owe me anything, dear," she said.
He started to shake his head, but she cut him off. "I know what you meant. I just mean to say that this is the sort of place where you have to look out for one another. You don't have to thank me for it."
Wes stared at her for a long moment, looking for an instant as though he were about to cry again. Then he blinked twice, hard, and nodded. She ignored the suspicious way his eyes had grown wet at the corners.
"Now," Mrs. Wickerbottom said, as she glanced up to check the dwindling light in the sky. "Wendy ought to be home any minute. Are you feeling up to some tea?"
She heated Ardisia crenata jam on a flat rock beside the fire, spooned honey into three rough bowls while it warmed. Wes scrubbed out his soup bowl from earlier, then turned to pack away the bedroll – drew up short when he saw the stains his blood had left.
He flustered a moment, distraught, until she said: "Ice will get out the worst of it. It's in the ice chest." And he nodded, rallied, and did as good a job cleaning as could be expected.
He was hanging it out to dry on the low segment of the wooden wall, still fussing over the spots left behind, when she brought the tea.
"It's white fur," she advised him. "Don't worry too much. Not all of those are new."
He nodded reluctantly, turned aside to accept the bowl and inspected the contents with some interest.
"Ardisia crenata jam, honey, and water," she informed him. "Not strictly a tea in that it's not of the species Camellia sinensis, or even in the family Theaceae." He was looking at her with something she couldn't place, something frank and a little surprised. Mrs. Wickerbottom cleared her throat. "We call it tea because Wendy says it reminds her of afternoons with tea and biscuits. See if you like it."
Wes nodded – raised it to his lips to take a sip.
If the reaction was anything to go by, he liked it. The tea was gone in ten seconds, and then Wes was busy scraping the last of the jam from the bottom with his fingers.
Mrs. Wickerbottom frowned, reminded again of the word "please" with two lines underneath it.
She set a hand on the boy's shoulder – noted with some disapproval that he startled at the contact. "There's more if you want it," she said, and of course he did. So she turned to fix more tea.