Everyone's Favourite Fluff

Yes?

Yes.

Chester can barely imagine what it would be like to have nothing to carry, he'd feel so... useless. He's not a fighter, or a medic, not even a good conversationalist so being a helping hand is his self assigned role.

“I do stay dead.” Abigail pinched the bridge of her nose. She’d gone over this with Maxwell a thousand times over, too. “I will always be dead, and that’s why I’m a ghost.” The misconception that ghosts weren’t dead would never make logical sense to her.

“Nobody who dies is truly gone. Ghosts like me can go between the world of the living and the once living freely, as long as we go back to recharge our energy. The catch is very few are aware enough to see us.” Her shoulders hunched up in a shrug, “Wendy was the only one who could see my ghostly form before we arrived on the island. Neither mother nor father could see me even if I were right in front of their eyes. It’s like we’re gone, but… we’re not.”

He thought that over for a few moments, it just... didn't sound right.

"I don't understand then. Dying for me is like... going to sleep. And then I wake up." It hurt no doubt, he hasn't thought of a way yet that he hasn't died. Freezing: Yes. Impaled on a spear: Done. Devoured by cave spiders: Quite a few times actually.

What?! No! Goodness no!

Abigail laughed, not expecting him to take that seriously. “I was kidding with you, Chester… but if you must know how it feels… I can speak from experience.”

She cleared her throat, looking away from Chester solemnly. “I was sick for most of my life, and almost every day was spent in bed, coughing up blood, watching my family praying for a miracle… I won’t lie, I was scared.” The ghost took a moment to take a deep breath before continuing. “My last memories were being in my father’s arms, hearing him sob as the doctors declared my limp body dead. It felt like the nurses had to pull him off of me and hold him back as I was covered with a sheet.”

Now she was making feeble attempts not to cry, for Chester’s sake, but failing miserably. “I could hear father mother and Wendy crying from behind the slammed door, and having to listen was the most painful experience I had ever endured… More than the illness that was eating me from the inside and killing me slowly, the most heart wrenching aspect of death is…seeing those you love in grief and pain over the loss of your life.”

“You’re... not gone though?” He could be frankly, tackless. Well meaning but very tackless. “I can still talk to you, and you can talk to me even though I’ve died a lot.” Could Abigail even be considered a ‘survivor’ existing as a ghost?

Empty.

Alone.

Dark.

Chester was a quiet man of few words but things like this always got him thinking. It must be somewhat comforting that survivors had an ‘end’. That at one point their pain would stop and they could slip into a void of nothingness away from their suffering. He’d seen so many die and never return, the ones that did through the island’s power or their own tenacity were never the same afterwards and it broke his heart every time. 

“Just look wherever you can.. Its a string with stuff on it. Trinkets and stuff.” He said, flapping his wing as he jumped up to the lowest branch of the tree and looked around for his favorite belonging. The harpy hung the backpack on the end of a higher branched as he looked in the hollow of the old tree for the string. Little did he know, poor Chester had been sitting right in front of it the entire time, and it had been covered with the remains of tumbleweeds.

And Chester began to do just that, getting to his feet and starting to looking around obediently. A string with some trinkets tied to it, that couldn’t be too terrible to find, right? 

He was a lovely man, kind and sweet but sometimes not the most critically thinking. He looked in the rock piles and nearby dried bushes, even peeking inside burrows in the dry dirt but not in the pile he created of dry grass. 

“Just look wherever you can.. Its a string with stuff on it. Trinkets and stuff.” He said, flapping his wing as he jumped up to the lowest branch of the tree and looked around for his favorite belonging. The harpy hung the backpack on the end of a higher branched as he looked in the hollow of the old tree for the string. Little did he know, poor Chester had been sitting right in front of it the entire time, and it had been covered with the remains of tumbleweeds.

Looking around his nest for the trinkets he’d collected himself, Kaukas kept a firm grip on the bag. He kept silent as he turned his next upside down in a search for his things. When he couldn’t find them in his nest, he began rifling through the contents of the bag. But nothing was familiar.

“If you want these back, help me find my collection..” He said reluctantly as she stepped back to get a different view of is nest. The ‘collection’ he mentioned was a long string with bones, rocks, and other things on it.

He could only nod and hope the things in his pack hadn’t been broken, being particularly fond of the little gnome he found this morning. Chester sat where he fell when his bag was snatched, looking up at the strange creature. He’d never met someone like this before, they said they weren’t a survivor so they were a local like him. Even if they did try to call him a thief, he felt some comradery towards them.