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It's when they meet the sixteen-year-old half-beastkin girl that Chilchuck knows this world has really, truly, gone to hell.
The whole adventure down here was half-cocked at best, something that nearly got them killed at worst. He knew, logically, that he would’ve done the same, but for a moment the Touden siblings’ loyalty to one another itches and burns, chafing like a bad rash, like the shadow of a noose.
And yet here he is, unwilling to find another party, unable to leave well enough alone. It’s not even that he likes any of them, these halfwits, parading around like some kind of adventuring party worth its salt. The cast-iron of Senshi’s pan has to hold more grit in it than his party is now worth, what with the only sense in it gone and the ability to rationalize boiled down to what Chilchuck himself possessed.
These kids (and Senshi) were going to get him killed. He was getting up there in years, as his hip loved to remind him every morning as he levered himself out of bed, getting harder and harder every time. Some days he contemplated laying there until time ran her course, coming for him just like it came for everyone else. A peaceful death, like falling asleep.
But then his skin starts to itch and the thought of decay worries at him, his skin sloughing off to reveal the muscle underneath, fungi and moss and rot growing where his ligaments and tendons should be. He can’t sit still for the life of him, for all that he enjoys a nice drink and a hot meal. He never could; not even when he should’ve.
His mother said he came out hurrying, nearly a full month early, too eager to get into the world. If he had known what that would entail as a newborn infant, he would’ve just stayed put. He hurried through childhood, through courtship and marriage, through having three children. And then he was hurrying off to the next venture, the next guild, the next dungeon. He missed his wife growing impatient, his daughters growing up, the only other person he had ever willingly given his whole self to picking up and leaving one day, Chilchuck coming back from work to an empty house.
(The floorboards creaked in a way that had never been eerie before beneath his boots. He stood in the kitchen, front door still open, warm summer afternoon drafting in.
He thought they’d been attacked (or murdered or kidnapped or—) at first, before seeing the note left on the counter under the coffee pot in his wife’s careful handwriting.
I can’t take it anymore. it read, simple Halffoot alphabet he’d known since childhood. I’m leaving.
The coffee was cold in its pot yet he drank it anyway, pouring himself a cup mechanically in his favorite mug, the one Fuller had made him one year for father’s day as a wee little thing. I can’t take it anymore.
Coffee grounds stuck bitterly to his teeth.
I can’t take it anymore. I’m leaving.
He’d hated the taste since that day.)
And then he hurried himself to another death, one deep in the levels of the dungeon where no one would hear him scream, crushed to death or eaten or mauled by a red dragon, one they were hunting just so Laios could get his damn sister back.
(Would anyone ever hurry like this into the heart of danger for him?
He ripped at a hangnail with his teeth, blood swelling up in the corner of the nail bed. Blood stuck to his tongue, bitter and metallic and heavy. Doubtful.)
(His daughters don’t talk to him anymore.)
Chilchuck is the middle of five children, an ex to one wife, a father of three adult girls. He knows for damn sure none of them would come running headlong into the heart of a dungeon for him the way Laios has for his sister, for blood and bones digested in the belly of a red dragon. They wouldn’t use forbidden magic to revive him, hunt him again and again to save him, face the lord of the dungeon just for a chance at getting him back. He’s just a man who’s light on his feet and good with his hands, they can find a new locksmith(— father— husband—) anywhere.
(He tells them to go find Mayjack if he’s ever permanently decommissioned, but a hastily buried part of him hopes she stops following in his footsteps. Getting married young, having children she won’t see grow, blinking and years have passed by she’ll never get back. An adventurer’s life is not one he would wish for his little girl, not any of them.)
(Maybe May would grieve if he died, if a group of strangers showed up on her doorstep with news her father had passed, permanently this time, and wouldn’t she please help them? Maybe she would cry, great big blubbering sobs like when she was little. Maybe they would even have a funeral, without a body to bury. Just a ceremonial shroud they would’ve wrapped his body in, burying him whole without a piece to be found.)
Izutsumi keeps crawling into his bedroll at night, for all that she’s prickly and sour during the day, an unripe fruit with a tough outer skin and a pit to crack your teeth on. She’s almost a feral child, a half-beast girl. Her table manners are atrocious and she spits and swears at them every other word, but every night it’s her body curling up under the scratchy blanket Chilchuck tucks tight around himself.
“What is that?” he asks one evening, the two of them at the bank of a river with their feet in the cool water. The others prepare a fish dinner around a small campfire, Marcille drying her hair by the heat of the flame and an ivory comb. It flashes gold in the low light, shards of ochre refracting off Izutsumi’s crystal-bright irises.
Izutsumi lifts her right shoulder, peering at the barely-scabbed-over scrape nearly a handspan wide there. She sniffs, nose and upper lip curling sourly. “Fell. It’s healed now, though, look.”
She presses at it with a claw tip. Dark red oozes from the edge. Chilchuck gags.
He leans in to check for the smell of infection anyway, swatting Izutsumi’s hand off her own wound. “Leave that alone! When was the last time you bathed? You stink.”
Her fur bristles, hanks of black and white sharpening at her cheeks, the back of her neck. “I do not—“
“Do too. Get in the river, you need a bath— and to clean that wound properly.” Chilchuck stands, lower back creaking, hip protesting. Today is an alright pain day. “Marcille, still got that bar soap?”
Marcille helpfully drops a horn of soap at the edge of the bank while Chilchuck removes his own outer clothes, stripped down to just his smallclothes. Izutsumi eyes the river warily. Chilchuck braces a foot on her lower back and shoves her in.
By the time Izutsumi finds up from down and comes up gasping and spluttering and swearing at Chilchuck he’s already waded in up to his waist, which isn’t very far. Izutsumi growls and lunges for him, which he dodges easily, but the resulting splash manages to soak him from the head down. His wet hair drips in his face and he grumbles, yanking Izutsumi up by the scruff.
“Knock it off!” Chilchuck says, shaking her a little. Izutsumi huffs and puffs and settles, raking handfuls of cool water over herself half-heartedly. Chilchuck crams two fingers in the horn of soap and produces a sizeable lump, which he begins working into Izutsumi’s scalp with both hands.
“Hey!” she grunts. Chilchuck sneers.
“What, never had anyone wash your hair for you before? I’m not gonna kill you, relax.” The obstinate creature relaxes minutely, spine drooping more and more with each knot Chilchuck untangles from her scalp until her entire form is curved in a pleased S, head reclined all the way back. An unmistakable rumble starts in the bottom of her chest, vibrating all the way up to her skull. Chilchuck grins, just a touch.
Loose hanks of black hair come free along with his hands. Chilchuck pulls a disgusted face and dunks his hands in the river to clean them. Izutsumi’s eyes begin to blink open blearily, purr cutting off in a few staccato rumbles. “Hey—“
“Relax,” he mutters again, tipping her back with an arm braced against her shoulders just until her head nearly touches the water and he can scoop handfuls into it, “just rinsing.”
Izutsumi’s eyes slip back closed.
Chilchuck rinses all the suds from her hair, bending her ears— relaxed and pliant from his ministrations— out of the way so as not to drip water down them. He levers her back up into a sitting position and sits down nearby, scooping a much smaller crumb of soap out of the horn to wash his own hair. Izutsumi blinks awake again from her temporary slumber as he dunks himself into the river face-first to rinse. She laughs raucously as he emerges, soaked hair hanging to obscure his face, until he parts the damp curtain to glare at her, at which she laughs harder.
Chilchuck removes another pebble of soap to wash his body with, throwing the horn at Izutsumi’s face with a growl. “Oh shut up. Wash yourself off then.”
Izutsumi’s cackles die down to something much more tolerable (and are eventually gone completely) as she works much more of Marcille’s soap than she’ll be satisfied with parting with into her fur. Loose hanks of fur float down the river away from them. Chilchuck sticks his tongue out in disgust.
He’s scrubbing at the leftovers of grime and dried blood and frog mucosa clinging valiantly to the rough folds of the wide scar that spans his lower stomach when Izutsumi pipes up again. She’s kneading between the toe pads of a foot when he looks up. “That’s nasty. Where’s it from?”
“Patty’s birth,” Chilchuck sighs, regarding another, newer set of stretch marks with disdain. He’s getting so old (even the hair on his stomach is starting to silver.) “Her’s was a difficult one.”
“And your chest?” Izutsumi motions upwards, to the anchor-shaped scars cut messily on either side of his chest.
“Had them removed. Didn’t need the damn things after she switched to solid food.”
Izutsumi’s eyes widen then narrow to slits, her head at a wary tilt. “But you’re a man.”
Chilchuck regards her from the bank as he climbs out. “And? You’re a cat.”
She throws the soap horn at him, hissing and spitting. “That’s not the same!”
He dodges, sticking his tongue out and pulling an eye wide. The horn nearly sails directly into the fire, if not for Laios’ quick reflexes. Marcille shrieks.
“Izutsumi!”
After the girls have been plied with heaping servings of a hearty fish stew (Marcille’s with extra rice, Izutsumi’s with all the green onions picked out into Laios’ bowl) and Chilchuck stops straining his ears to hear for activity headed their way, he sits down on an overturned stump at Izutsumi’s back, already finished with his comparatively meager serving— along with her green onions removed into his bowl, Izutsumi had relieved Laios of several large fish chunks from his own helping until Senshi spotted her and reprimanded she stop.
(Chilchuck had attempted to start teaching Packpatty dinner manners once she turned two, as he had with Mayjack and Fullertom before her. May could use a fork and knife all on her own at four, and Fuller always waited politely for her mother to cut her meal into pieces before feeding it to herself on a fork and spoon.
“Baba,” Patty would say, every time he tried to position a fork correctly in her hand, little lower lip wobbling and eyes wet with shining tears. She’d tug weakly at his sleeve with her free hand, tiny voice warbling, “Baba….”
And he’d let go every time, sitting back in his own chair as she immediately happily went back to stabbing her dinner with fork gripped in hand like a dagger, Chilchuck sighing to himself and his (ex-)wife shaking her head.
He was never that good at actually enforcing them, damn those crocodile tears, damn his soft heart.)
(Damn his soft, breakable, cowardly heart.)
“Let me take a look at this.” Chilchuck says, prodding the wound along Izutsumi’s shoulder. She hisses, spoon clenched between her fangs. Maybe the tissue hasn’t started necrotizing after all, despite her valiant attempts to get it infected. “This is going to sting.”
That’s all the warning she gets before he presses an alcohol-soaked rag against it, jumping so hard she nearly starts choking on her stew.
(Chilchuck makes sure her airway’s not actually obstructed before continuing, of course.)
The wound isn’t as bad as it looked initially, with the leftover gore Izutsumi had carried around with her finally washed off. He separates her fur around it, combing it back with his fingers. It’s just barely damp enough to stay in place when he does.
The edges are pinkish-red and irritated but not infected. He frowns. It’s not as closed as it should be for how old it looks, how old it should be if he’s pairing the moment he remembers (Izutsumi scaling a stone wall in pursuit of prey and falling ass-over-teakettle to the ground a few days ago) to the wound correctly. He taps her on the back of the head. “Have you been letting this hang out uncovered for the past week?”
Izutsumi shrugs, mussing his careful work with her fur. “Open air is good for healing.”
“Not when you have an injury that needs stitches, stupid cat.”
“Stitches?” Izutsumi’s ears lay flat back against her head, nestled in the mess of cowlicks her air-dried hair has become.
“Just a few in the middle here.” Chilchuck mutters. Her shoulders relax, just barely. He moves to retrieve his sewing kit, going through the familiar motions of disinfecting the needle, prepping the thread, pinching the sides of the wound closed with his free hand. “I’ll try not to get any of your fur stuck in here.”
“You better not.” Izutsumi grumbles around a mouthful of fish.
(“You better not.” his wife had said, before she was his wife and after he had joked that he was going to prick his finger and bleed all over her wedding dress, the one he was stitching up at their kitchen table the night before their wedding.
She sat antsily in the chair across from him, going to tap her fingers on the table before remembering the small gash he’d stitched up earlier that evening on the pointer finger of her dominant hand. She crossed her arms sourly. “Can’t believe I cut myself cooking bad enough you had to stitch me up. Where did you even learn field medicine?”
“Oh, the same place I learned to stitch up wedding dresses.” He cut the thread with his teeth, cocking a playful eyebrow at her. “My ma’s lap as she made clothes for all us kids.”
She laughed, covering her mouth with a hand. He’d always tried to get her to stop, ever since they met. Her smile was the most beautiful one he’d ever seen. His own face split into an easy grin as she blinked those big blue eyes back at him.
“I can imagine you sitting in that old chair of yours in the living room, making clothes for all the little children we’re going to have running around this place.” Her face grew soft, looking out into the shadowed living room where his leather recliner sat.
“How many are we going to have?” He threaded the needle anew, perfect white cotton thread against perfect white cotton lace.
“Oh, at least five.”
“At least five she says!” he snorted. “I am not going through it five separate times at minimum. ”
“You’re one of five, aren’t you?”
“Just because my mother did it doesn’t mean I will.”
“You’re right.” Her eyes twinkled, candlelight off the silver of a sewing needle. “Maybe we’ll get lucky with twins.”
“Hey!”)
“I won’t.” he huffed, sinking the tip of the needle through both the tender edges of the flesh in one quick motion. Izutsumi’s ears pinned but she continued to eat, a tensing along the muscles of her upper back.
“Izutsumi,” Laios’ eyes brightened from across the fire. “Do you have any advanced healing capabilities since getting turned into a cat?”
“Shut up!” Izutsumi growled, kicking at him. Chilchuck swore as his patient jerked. He smacked her unwounded shoulder.
“You shut up, you’ll make me tear these damn stitches before they’re even done!”
Marcille groaned. “Both of you shut up and eat your fish.”