AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re very brave,” I tell her. “If there had been elves waiting for me rather than you when I returned, I wouldn’t have been able to fight them.”
I leave the most important part out. I wouldn’t have survived. And who knows what they would have done with this place with no one left to defend it?
“I did it for you,” she says. “It was the least I could do.”
“You do more for me than you know.”
She rewraps the last of the bandages. The pain of the ointment fades away. Already, I realize, it must be doing something. The wounds hurt less than they did before.
I’ve been hurt before, but I’ve never had someone try to care for me. My first instinct is to simply hide away, suffer on my own, and return to her when I’m fully healed. But at the same time, I’m glad that she’s forcing me not to do that.
It’s good to have someone to share my suffering with. It’s good to see her wince when I make a pained sound. It makes it all more bearable somehow. She makes recovering feel like a part of life, rather than a failure to be hidden away.
“Anyway, I hope this will be good to eat when you’re hungry,” she says, setting the dish near me. The smell is wonderful. “Is there anything else you need?”
“Don’t leave.”
She looks surprised for a second but then smiles. “I wasn’t going to.”
She sits down. I wrap one of my few tentacles that isn’t injured around her waist and pull her closer to me.
“You know that you don’t have to do all this for me?” I remind her. “I heal quickly. You can just leave me alone and in a few days…”
“But I don’t want to leave you alone,” she says. “I want to be with you while you’re getting better. I want to help you.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. And yet, at the same time, I believe her. Even though I don’t understand how it can possibly be true, I know that somehow for her, it is.
“I’ll make it worth your while as soon as I get better,” I promise her. “Somehow.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she says seriously. “Please. It’s good to be able to do something for you after everything that you’ve done for me.”
Once again, that’s what it always comes down to. Part of her being mine is learning to trust her. It’s letting her show that she cares for me. Sometimes, I have to be the one who is weak and needs help.
With her, I can do that. Being weak with her sometimes is better than being strong alone.
“We aren’t going to have to go on land again anytime soon, are we?” I joke.
She laughs. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be happy if I never see a boat again.”
There’s a pause. She’s clearly thinking about something, and I decide to wait for her to say it.
“You know, it’s funny,” she begins finally.
“What is?” I ask.
“I don’t think I ever realized that at some point, I’d start thinking about this place as home,” she goes on. “I thought it would always be this strange, foreign place I’d been pulled away to. But it’s not. This is where I like being. Not the land. This.”
“You know what else is funny?” I say.
“What?”
“I never realized that you’d be a part of here,” I tell her. “You accused me of thinking of you like a shell that I’d collected. And maybe I did, at some point. But you’re more than that now. You’re a part of my life. This place wouldn’t be complete without you.”
She smiles. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted that.”
“How long you’ve wanted what?”
“To be a part of something. A real part of it. Not like a slave. Not an interchangeable thing. But a real part, as a person.”
