Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

The group planned out watches for that sleep time.

No one knew whether it was day or night beyond the confines of the dungeon anymore, and the artificial sun outside was probably still shining, though it was impossible to see through the densely packed mass of bodies in the cave opening. So, their "night" was simply whenever everyone was tired and it was time to sleep.

After a long day of fighting, including a surprise attack after the ants discovered them in their hiding place, that time was now.

Finally, even these hardened warriors allowed themselves some downtime.

Everyone but Rosslyn gathered around the single lit hunk of wood they had in the cave, which was one of the last pieces of wood in the group's inventory. It produced little heat and fortunately very little smoke, but they kept it going simply for the light.

Even if the group wanted to sleep, no one wanted to be in the dark—or alone.

Adon heard chatter, witnessed displays of camaraderie, saw the men and women who had agreed to defend their lieges in this deadly place breaking bread together, sharing their different kinds of food—Dessia and Claustria had two very different notions of what bread ought to be, with Claustrians tending to prefer a slightly sweetened dough and eating it with cream or jam, while the Dessians were into more savory fare—but Adon also knew that it was all something of an act.

He felt the anxiety hanging over the group as a whole, thick as a cloud of ozone from an automobile and twice as noxious.

It was for that reason, as much as anything else, that Adon decided to distance himself from the main group. He couldn't do anything about the toxic atmosphere of fear in the air—at least, nothing more than what he trusted the group to do for themselves. The only cure for fear was reassurance.

All he could accomplish was to distance himself—and maybe fix one of his earlier screwups.

Rosslyn had separated herself from the group on the excuse of performing what Adon could only consider a thankless task: extracting, or creating, more kindling.

Specifically, she was now drying out the ant corpses that were not jammed into the opening of the cave, which had been scattered around the tunnel haphazardly over the course of the battle. The Princess claimed that based on her extensive, though hobbyist level, entomology knowledge, she thought the ants might either be entirely flammable—besides their outer gold coating, which was the only truly metal part of them—or at least partially combustible. Their gaseous secretions, which the whole party was all too familiar with, were made of a cocktail of chemicals, some of which ought to be usable as fuel.

Of course, this was not a matter that she or anyone else she was aware of had studied closely. Giant ants were a rarity in the non-dungeon-delving world, and they were not particularly common even for adventuring parties to see.

Perhaps that was why she was quietly swearing to herself as she propped another dried out looking husk of ant flesh against the cave wall beside her and reached for a fresh corpse to experiment on.

"Goddess damn it!" she said under her breath. She kicked a rock, clearly restraining herself at the last second as she did so. The stone, roughly the same size as her foot, flew down the tunnel until it struck the golden barrier that the group had made, and it clanked off a piece of exoskeleton before it came to a stop on the ground nearby.

Rosslyn let out a quiet huff of air, then turned and waved awkwardly at the small group of people who were now looking in her direction because of the noise her kick and the resulting impact had made. After a moment, they returned to what they were doing and saying by the fire.

Then the Princess noticed Adon was approaching her. That was the screwup he hoped to fix.

Even if the words were hard for him to find the courage to say, he had to respond to the Princess's feelings. If she was being honest, they matched his own. He felt his own awkward infatuation, at least.

But as she looked at him, he felt the stormy feelings that had been beginning to cool within her blazing up again.

Before he could get close enough to land on her, she spoke up, out loud, though the words were probably only voluble to him.

"Adon, I really do not feel like talking right now, unless you have more good news to share about our situation," she said in a harsh stage whisper. "I know how to cope with both adversity and rejection. You do not need to console me if that was what you were coming over to do."

She knew exactly why he was approaching her, and she didn't want to talk.

The butterfly felt like he had taken a punch in the guts, but he felt equally as strongly the necessity of talking. No, maybe it was more important now than it had been before she tried to tell him to get lost.

Rosslyn, I feel the same way! he blurted. The way you described before. I'm interested in you.

He was grateful for Telepathy, then, grateful that he did not have to speak the words out loud where the rest of the group could hear them. He knew that, with his awkwardness in these moments, he would have yelled them or something foolish like that. The others all would have laughed at him. Even Rosslyn probably would have laughed.

Her expression pulled him away from his fantasies of rejection in the hypothetical reality. It wasn't exactly overjoyed, but she was not angry anymore either.

If Adon had to describe it, Rosslyn's expression was a kind of guarded skepticism.

You feel the same way? she thought, clearly in somewhat better control of herself than she had been a few seconds ago. She swallowed, and Adon felt a surprising whiff of the same emotion he had sensed from the others earlier—the same emotion that still held him in his grip at this very moment. Anxiety.

"How—" She stopped herself before her sentence could even get started, then cleared her throat, still clearly nervous. "What made you change your mind?"

I didn't change my mind, exactly, Adon began.

"Then why—" She paused mid-sentence again, but Adon was confident he knew what she was going to ask.

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Why had he left her hanging earlier? She had exposed her own feelings to his judgment, his potential ridicule, and he had failed to reciprocate the gesture. It would be one thing to be non-responsive because he did not share her feelings, and he was trying to find a way to let her down easily.

But since he actually did feel the same way, he just looked like an idiot—at the very least an awkward oaf with no social skills. Which, he reminded himself, was just what he was.

I've never done this before, he sent. I really have no idea what I'm doing. I didn't have any prior experience to draw on.

She lowered her voice again, to a slightly frustrated whisper. "Listen, I know you are a matter of months old in this life, Adon, but you have already admitted to me in the past that you have centuries worth of accumulated life experience which you could draw upon if you chose, at any moment—at the speed of thought. You truly did not know what to say because you lack prior experiences to draw on?"

Adon felt faintly ashamed of his inexperience now, but having thrown open that door, he had to walk through it the rest of the way.

That's right, he sent. It's embarrassing to even admit this. But in all my other lives, through all those enriching experiences that have given me the occasional leg up on the other two month old insects out there, I still never—I was always—that is…

"You lived through all of those lives alone." She whispered the words, and Adon only understood them because she thought them so clearly at the same time.

The emotional residue he felt in the words was faintly disbelieving, but the overwhelming taste of her personal cloud of telepathic residue was the cloyingly sweet flavor of sympathy. As much as it might help him extricate himself from this situation without too much further humiliation, above all else, Adon did not want that sympathy to turn to pity.

I only mention this so that you understand part of why I'm a bit more rough around the edges than you might expect, in this area, Adon sent quickly, trying to be diplomatic—but also frustrated underneath that. I absolutely do not want you to feel sorry for me or something.

She shook her head quickly and forcefully. "No, that is not it. It sounds sad, yes, but—" she chuckled quietly and ran a hand through her hair in a gesture that felt slightly embarrassed—"if I am being honest, it makes me feel more special. The idea that, if things between us worked out…"

Rosslyn did not finish the thought aloud—perhaps could not, for in this area, she seemed to be awkward herself, though not as much as him. But she spoke it in her mind.

Then I would be your first love, she thought. The one who you were waiting all these lives to meet. I think it is universal that a woman wants to be special to the man in her life. This would just make me—or any woman who caught your eye—more special by implication.

He felt the same sincere affection from Rosslyn that he had received when she poured out her feelings in their previous intimate chat. And it seemed just a little bit deeper.

Adon did not understand how a woman could have any romantic feelings toward a butterfly—or an insect of any kind—but he suddenly realized that he could not doubt Rosslyn's feelings for him. They were the real deal.

I would like that, Adon sent back, overwhelmed by her feelings—but aware that he needed to say something, again, or risk the same result as before. I would like to explore that future more with you.

Rosslyn's eyes darted behind Adon, and she thought, loudly and distinctly, and with a slightly exasperated heave of her chest as she sighed, The others are coming over.

Oh, Adon transmitted back. They have no sense of timing.

She giggled. The Princess actually giggled, and she bent slightly, covering her mouth, before she recovered.

"Or perhaps it is us who have poor timing," Rosslyn whispered.

We probably should leave these matters until we are outside of the dungeon and can be alone, she added in her mind. Or we should have settled them before we came in. That would have saved a lot of awkwardness.

So would me having decent social skills, Adon replied. I'm sorry about earlier. I just choked.

I will never understand, Rosslyn thought, how someone so brave in mortal peril can have such trouble discussing matters of the heart.

Adon sensed a tiny sproutling of doubt, still there, in her mind, one that would grow if left unattended. It would have to be pruned, and he wondered how he would do it.

With only a slight bit of hesitation, he delved slightly deeper into her mind, just barely below the surface that he normally skimmed, and he touched it, that poisonous plant. He just wanted to understand what he would need to say or do to make Rosslyn feel all right—to make her feel secure in their mutual affection for now, whatever it might come to in the end.

But when he reached in, he felt that the sproutling was actually connected to deeper things within the Princess than he would have guessed. There was an entire tree of feelings of inadequacy. There were troubles with her father, both in the sense that she felt that she could not live up to his example of strong leadership, and that she had this quiet wish to live in his shadow, under his protection, for longer than she imagined she would be allowed to. The latter wish also fueled the former sense of inadequacy.

Then there was the fact that she had remained single for so long. As a noble or royal, it was typical to get betrothals or marriages sealed at a later age than the commoners—many of them just married the neighbor—but Rosslyn's family had been trying to find her arrangement for years and had considered many of the most notable families on the continent. She was starting to feel like the leftovers that no one had wanted, which were now beginning to smell slightly off.

And Rosslyn had a number of complexes about her physical appearance. She thought her bust was too small and that her physical strength might be too intimidating—despite also being aware that it was a selling point for most noblemen that a potential wife be strong. She was desperately scarred inside by the loss of her eye and the actual physical scar that had been left in its place—which, in her mind, took the form of a monstrous gash disfiguring half her face, even though in reality it was a thin white line that was easy to ignore next to her otherwise pale skin.

Adon might have gone on like this, seduced by the complexity of, and the affection he felt for, Rosslyn's mind.

But something bumped him, and he was pulled back to the present.

"Would you like to perch here, butterfly?" Frederick asked.

He was offering one of his shoulders to Adon. Goldie was on the other.

William, moving a little slowly, perhaps as a result of the injury from earlier, came up behind Frederick, carrying Samson on his own shoulder. He nodded to Adon and then the Princess.

"What brings you four over here?" Rosslyn asked quietly. "I did not think I would get any more volunteers to clean ant corpses up and harvest their innards."

"Nor will you," William replied, chuckling. "It was his brother that suggested we come over—" He tilted his head at Adon, indicating that the suggestion had come from Samson.

Damn it, Samson! Adon sent reproachfully to his brother only. Timing!

Sorry, bro, but we could get attacked at any moment, Samson replied with the mental equivalent of a shrug. We need to get prepared for every eventuality. The dungeon probably isn't the best place to deal with whatever you're dealing with.

Adon knew that, but it didn't make it any less annoying to hear the words transmitted by Samson. He felt good about how the conversation had gone—he was about ready to give himself a gold star for smoothness—but now he felt that it had ended just a little too soon.

"Just here for a little strategy session," William finished, oblivious to the sidebar taking place between the brothers.