#ash bear

“Ah,” the dull-eyed draenei objects in that paper-thin voice of his. “One does not... quite understand... the exercise.”

He speaks in something not quite a wheeze, not quite hesitation. He drifts from syllable to syllable, word to word, and sometimes not in all the right places.

Di hates it.

“Be a simple ting, bwa,” the forest troll retorts, brow wrinkling ever lower. “Bettin’ who I tek, us.”

“Humble pardon, and faint... bewilderment. “Take?” Where would... Sir Di take anyone, and... why? Withal: who is... “Us?””

He resists the urge to grind teeth. He likes these teeth, and aside from marrow-snacking, he works harder to take care of this false set made for him than he ever tried for his real ones.

And all else aside, few ever guard Macaw’s health. Fewer still, as much as this one runt of a draenei did over the years of the Swiftblade’s run. If he must count in his head until his temper cools, then so be it. He owes this ugly little alien the effort, for a son that doesn’t know him and might well never know him, if he has his way.

He gets to six, as high as he can safely count without tripping over his own thoughts, and then repeats Xajal’s suggestion.

Slow-like.

“De Snaptusk, him say: Ya kin erryone in dis place. Ya kin who wort’ I fists. Got a ting, us, bettin’ who I tek.”

“Quiet uncertainty.”

He squints his eyes nearly shut, and juts his chin just shy of giving in. Of giving all his teeth, and then his fists.

He says, flat and entirely done: “‘Bout?”

“Well, Sir... Current garrison... capacity for those on... active duty... stands at approximately--”

As Sunchoke’s smallest officer drones on, Di’s jaw works back and forth. What he gets from the soft-spoken white goat amounts to: he doesn’t, in fact, know everyone in the garrison as Xajal led him to believe.

And there’s more in the garrison now than Di ever thought. Too many for anyone but a draenei to bother to count, at that.

“Fuck. Shu’up, den.”

The endless, bland words cut off mid-thought with an almost inaudible click of teeth snapped together.

“Follow I,” he finishes, because if nothing else, at least this soldier in Sunchoke’s crazy little war party can and does obey commands.

He stalks around the garrison grounds, one small goat in tow. He picks out those he recalls Xajal asking for, and picks some of his own, too. Each time, he makes sure when he asks, “Dis’n?” that said goat writes the answers down.

After, he comes back to Xajal. He walks with his usual, arrogant step, and with all those words fisted in hand so that the paper needs smoothing but the ink needs not a thing. He waited for that, at least.

The rude sound of his palm roughly smacking against one lounging, lazy shadowhunter’s chest satisfies, but it doesn’t last. Xajal plucks the list up, looks at the names penned so careful by small white hands, and then makes that face Di recognises for smothered fun at his expense.

Getting the results read to him sours his weathered face into something past done and well into insulted.

The lively voice of a gnome cuts away from chatting with a visiting arakkoa as he collapses not three steps past the stump she sits on.

Two draenei, one in full battle plate and the other in stained coveralls, drop the crate carried between them. They look between each other with brows raised against their cranial ridges, then to the body in their path.

The latter murmurs something low before sprinting away down a different path.

The former watches the larger draenei until they round a building.

The dozen or so soldiers milling about and waiting on repairs at the forge to their left get an unexpected order barked in strident Draenic. This sends them first into attention, and then into motion. They patiently work to block curious onlookers. One even thinks to bring their broad purple-on-silver shield.

When the smith’s apprentice returns with a half-dressed healer in tow, the buzz that ripples through the crowd grows. Beneath the glut of too many languages spoken at once and with only a few persistent rubbernecks, the group of draenei ferry the inert body away.

The entire incident occurs in less than an hour.

The gossip about it takes less than six minutes to circulate the whole of the garrison outpost.

Some talk about the deep teeth and claw marks torn into a tattooed and mossy hide. Most focus on the reek of fel and the blood itself over any injuries. None mention the two most striking details, because neither were found until after the healer directed one of the soldiers to unbend the limbs locked so stubbornly in place.

It takes more than just the one soldier to manage it.

When they do, this exposes a crippled runt of a wolf pup hidden under folded arms, and a dirty scrap of parchment crumpled inside one big fist. The pup itself is curiously free of the taint the troll bears.

No one thinks to try and translate the badly scribed runes until the druid on duty sees them. To even the trained eye, they look too little like anything at all.

Everything is wrong.

Can’t fix big things.

Word of Tanaan comes to him next. More than a year after the portal’s death, the fight goes back to where it all started. Sunchoke’s garrison has marching orders once more, and he thinks: this. The idea sets its roots in him, and he accepts it with bitter relief.

This Tanaan Jungle, this is it--the battle he should join, the battle he can finally die in.

He speaks then, at last--

I will go.

He never expects to see the Snaptusk again. It hurts to think this. It hurts worse to be wrong.

Sunchoke’s new outpost, Light of Dawn, will take time to build out, to grow big as the one in Talador. Attempts to entirely avoid each other here proves a useless effort. He can keep from seeing all he lost, but the other troll’s name lingers on too many tongues, and the scent of lightning salts the air.

He won’t name it something so cowardly as running, but he stays away from the Dawn. He takes every mission he can get his hands on that will keep him far outside its walls. He reports to the outlying camps, but he may as well live in the wilds of Tanaan by the time enough soldiers arrive to force the fight into the land around the orcs’ citadel.

He returns with victory on his hands for every mission given, but it merely means to him that he still can’t escape the truth in the moss rubbed free around his empty throat.

"Auntie... Ray?"

Another twitch, this one forceful enough to knock the crown of his head against the wall.

"Ya en't s'pose'ta be wake," he says at length. His words are flat and worn--like the teeth he used to own before Sunchoke’s little goblin shaman replaced them.

"Old Bear," the boy in the bed mumbles. "You came back."

Something inside throttles his voice for this. It squeezes him until his eyes sting and his breath goes. He reluctantly drops his hands away from his wrinkled face, and lets his arms go slack.

“Yeh,” he manages after a while, and tries not to think about why it sounds like lying, or why You came back hurts him like it does.

Since he says nothing more to his son, the mosshide expects the silence to resume. For a while, this holds true. He hears from the bed only a faint whistle of air and the occasional dry swallow.

Then the blankets shift about. He thinks them piled unnecessarily high for someone with such a small body. In another time, he might voice the thought aloud. He stares blankly, instead, as a bandaged hand pokes out between thick layers. Several pillows dislodge and fall to the floor by his knee.

“My last one.”

Red eyes tilt to the tubing trailing from the back of that small hand. It paps him weakly on the curve of his bicep before retracting and tucking out of sight again beneath the nest of bedding.

He thinks of the skin peeping through the gauze and tubes: slivers of blurry red under soft white fabric. Paler than his own eyes. More red, more dark than the stupid roses Smiles grows.

After raising a hand to knuckle at his left temple, he finally notices the tug of something vaguely tacky pressed to his skin. He squints, then thumbs dumbly at the spot of colour.

“What is this?” he asks, choosing Zandali over the common Orcish.

“Stick-’Ems.”

He grunts through his nose at the answer. With his son’s liking for words and for giving anything and any person new names to suit his changing whims, this should annoy.

It only leaves him resigned in his impatience.

He waits.

“Gobbos make them. Paper and--”

A delayed yawn interrupts.

“--sap.”

He looks more closely, twisting his shoulder around and raising his arm higher to try and bring the clouded smears of colour into focus. He makes out only a yellow oval--and something he suspects must represent a face in it.

Distantly, he hears a tiny beep and then a somewhat louder hiss, like machinery waking.

“Gotta--”

Another yawn, long and leaden.

“Gotta get more for Look Out.”

It takes him some several minutes to recall that “Look Out” refers not to a goblin, but one of a pair of dead goats Sunchoke assigned as meatshields.

He says to the empty air, “Lateh,” and does not know how to tell his son the truth.

“Look Out” did his job. He sheltered the boy from the full brunt of the Iron Star’s impact, and could only be coming back to the garrison in pieces too ruined for even the other dead goat to fix.

“Old Bear?”

His son’s voice keeps wavering closer and closer to silence, before it wobbles softly into being again.

“...Wut.”

“Where is... Uncle Snake?”

“Away.”

“Oh. Will he--”

“Later.”

“Auntie Ray says you are angry. Says: you hurt him.”

His lips pull back in a grimace.

“That woman says a lot.”

“Did you make him your sorries?”

“Did I--What?”

With the words muted too much by an absurd amount of blankets, and strong drugs, he only catches the last half. “--and I made my sorries. Remember?”

He looks away, decorated ears folded flat against scalp and neck. If he does not look, he does not see. If he does not see, then he will not need to admit to weakness.

Like that of his son’s hand sliding back out to rest on his arm.

Or like that of uncertainty: who his son intends for this to comfort most.

“Sleep--”

Him, or--

“--Red Bird.”