Umbra is alive! I’ve just been having energy slumps with this goddamn lockdown, so the screenshots will be sparse until my butt decides it wants back into gear.
in the meantime, here’s a tidbit from his fic that will update... uh. eventually. yeah.
“Did you get those from a bear?”
Umbra, who had been busy tilling a patch of particularly difficult land, startled violently at the voice that suddenly came out of nowhere. He tripped over himself with the motion and, had he not already had his hoe pretty firmly wedged in the dirt, would have fallen flat on his face instead of directly into his least favorite farming tool. Panting from more than just the heat, he whirled around to glare at the intruder, only to find one of the only two children in the village staring back at him from the cool comfort of a nearby tree. The girl one—Marnie’s … whatever she was. And her name—Kaz? Jack—Kat? Shit.
She peered up at him with curiosity in her purple eyes, her head tilted just slightly.
“Are you supposed to be here?” Umbra asked her, his breaths sawing out of his lungs loudly. He lifted an arm to wipe the sweat from his brow, and the rough fabric of the glove scraped along his skin with the motion. It stung more than he thought it should, and he wondered, suddenly, if he’d sweated off the entirety of his sunscreen.
The girl gave him a petulant look. “I asked you a question first.”
Umbra blinked at her, running through his mind for what she had said when she’d scared the living daylights out of him, but it was no use, because he hadn’t been listening. She waited, too, but only for a moment before she lifted a hand and pointed at his bare torso. Umbra dropped his gaze to follow her new line of sight.
Should he put his shirt back on? Was this considered public indecency? He was on his own property, and he had pants on, hot as they were, but he hadn’t been expecting guests—
Oh, wait. He hadn’t been facing her when she scared him. She’d seen.
“The scratches on your back,” she explained, though he had finally caught on a moment too late. She then repeated what she must have first asked, because she sounded annoyed in a way only someone who was repeating themselves sounded when she said, “Are they from a bear?”
She waited. It took Umbra a moment to realize she was waiting for more.
“I’ve never seen a bear before,” he clarified.
Surprise crossed her face, her eyes growing wide like the moon. “Not even in a zoo?”
“Maybe in a zoo,” Umbra corrected. “But no wild ones.”
“Well, what are those scratches from? They look like they hurt a whole lot. They’re very pink.”
Umbra fought a wince and lost. Children were chatty, and he had work he wanted to get done before the sun got too high in the sky rather than explain an incident to someone who would likely tell the whole town. It wasn’t as if he cared much about what they knew of his past, but he also didn’t think it should matter so much what he looked like and what stupid stories he was saddled with thanks to one too many accidents throughout his years of being alive.
He warred between telling the girl to leave so he could get back to work and giving her the story she was asking for, but then sighed and said quietly, “They’re scars, not scratches. I got them in a gas explosion.”
The girl waited, still watching him with those huge eyes. He could tell she didn’t quite know what he meant, and he wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t quite understood the mechanics of such a thing beyond the name alone until he’d been subjected to the event, and then he knew everything he needed to, and more.
“Do they hurt?” she asked, surprising him by bringing that small statement of before back, like it actually mattered to her. When he talked about the accident, people focused on other things, like the reason he was around a place that could do such a thing, or the catalyst of the explosion at all. No one ever asked if it hurt.
“Not anymore. They did though,” he added on when she waited, again, for him to say more. “They hurt a lot back then.”
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