Sweet Disaster

A living body can only take so much torment before it crumbles, and Mikko...well, his had been so great that his mind had blocked much of it out. That, or he simply hadn't been coherent enough to grasp whatever had happened between then and that first restful morning that had followed so many months later. Regardless, any attempt to relive the past few seasons only left him foggy, angry, and--admittedly--a little sick to his stomach. A combination that wasn't easy to create in Mikko. Yet, as he staggered absentmindedly behind Shiba and his sister, he might have looked as feeble as he felt.

One thing that did manage to hold his attention, and had ever since she'd first found them, was the ashen female whom had brought him back from Death's door, even despite some of his quiet attempts to resist the slow trickle of life back into his bones. If there was any way that Mikko felt, it wasn't that he'd been deserving of any amount of help, let alone the literal blood, sweat, and tears that this still near-stranger had rained down upon his broken body. So why had she? What in the gods' great names had this...passerby...seen in what could've very well been a corpse lying in her path?

And what did she want from him?

He felt he had a debt to her regardless, but she'd still made it clear that she expected to be repaid for the immense time she'd spent on him. In what way she still had yet to specify, but she didn't entirely seem like she was hiding anything. Yet, anyway. At least for now, Mikko allowed himself to be strung along by her, resigning himself to the fact that if she'd patched him up and treated Acciona well, then surely nothing she'd ask of him could be as nightmarish as all the things the siblings had left behind.

"We can rest here for the night," she said, though before she could finish, he was already easing onto sore haunches, glancing with some hesitation at the fireflies that floated up from the ground in flight of his much larger body. Taunting him, they were, like a bunch of little stray eyes in the sky. Mikko then skimmed their surroundings briefly for any sign of Acciona, but she'd already taken the signal as her cue to disappear for the night. A clenched jaw, a slow blink in the direction he'd guessed she'd taken. Until Shiba pulled his attention back to his own present, checking in with him to see how he was feeling.

"I'm alive," he sighed hoarsely, turning away with some force to bring his focus to the woman. Mikko studied her closely for a few seconds through his single eye. "What about you? You're about to see your kin for the first time in seasons." And if he knew anything about that, it was that those reunions tended not to go over well, particularly when they were the result of an absence left unexplained.

"