"Hey!"
The cry of surprise was met with an all encompassing silence, which was outright contradictory to the onslaught of laughter he was expecting from the girl crushing him in a hug.
"Patty?"
Any further questions were put to silence as he heard a great intake of air, followed by the release of a sob. Suddenly, her face was inches from his, and he could see the tears steadily trailing down her face.
"Welcome home."
Her face was once more buried in his chest, and the warmth from her body so forcefully encompassing him was welcomed in contrast to the wind from behind him, blowing in from the still-open door.
"Why's there blood on your face?"
He tensed.
"When I woke up this morning, Liz had said you left to scout. She said you'd be fine."
He hadn't realized he had started holding his breath.
"So why's there blood on your face, Kid?"
She broke down into sobs, face burring deeper and arms wrapping harder as if to protect her meister and comfort herself.
"Why didn't you take me and Sis along?"
The question, nothing more than a whisper through tears, had obviously been gnawing at her heart and been difficult to vocalize. It left Kid dazed.
The sudden crash of thunder broke him out of his trance, and he suddenly become knowledgeable of the drenched state he was in, currently being transferred to Patty.
A shaky breath left him. In spite of the constant buzzing and knocking of ideas swimming through his head, Kid couldn't find a voice to produce a single one.
He suddenly felt the constant coldness behind him cease as the room was drenched further into darkness. The door snapped shut, and suddenly the house around him came into a clearer focus, alerting him that, while taking in every bit of Patty's speech and movements, he was still gripping a precise focus on the more immediate occurrences.
A washcloth was run across his face, and his eyes drifted to the side, watching the white material rub at his cheek. The white suddenly peeled away to reveal a light crimson blush across the once pristine surface.
His gazed lifted from the cloth to Liz, who then leaned forward once more, this time scrubbing at his chin, where he apparently had been tossed into a pile of mud by the brown coloration and the small nick that was located around his front, lower, jaw.
Once done, the cloth revealed much more dirt than he had thought remained on his skin.
She grabbed his face and tilted it up and to the right, revealing another- this time horizontal- cut on his other cheek. Again the cloth ran across his face to smear and then wipe away the blood. "I thought you were just going to scout. Since when does scouting involve a face-plant into the mud?"
It carried a lightweight feeling to it, which lifted both Kid and Patty, the latter failing miserably at drying her tears.
"It was nothing serious. Stepping on one of Patty's LEGO's is both more serious and painful."
It was a little rigid, but he immediately began feeling a reverberation on his chest. Within moments, the laughter bubbling from Patty erupted into a full on laughing fit, and she was forced to turn her face outward to avoid suffocating.
Granted Patty's bone-crushing hug had agitated his injuries (which he would admit to himself, hurt a heck of a lot worse than stepping on a LEGO block), he found comfort in the familiarity of the younger sister. It was part of the innocence that he loved about returning home.
However, a sigh rose from Liz, coupled by an ironic grin. "Do we even have a mission anymore?"
There was a break; and then Kid replied, in the hope Liz got the rhetoric nature of his question.
"Liz, do you think I got all bloody and covered in mud in the hopes that I could do it again tomorrow?"
End