Healing Spirit

This week's story from the archive is one of the oldest I'll be posting here, and is a sfw story featuring Brock, my halfling barbarian, trying not to get too into his own head as he worries about the absence of his best friend Bale. 

It would take a nonzero amount of work to edit this in, so instead of doing that I will just say that the relevant backstory for Brock here is that his father was a warlock who lost himself after trying to learn too much, to a point where he wasn't coherent enough to recognize his own family.

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Generally when Bale got caught up in his druidic studies, Brock wouldn’t think much of it. He was well liked, after all. He could go to the gym and work out for a while, talk with some people, and by then Bale would surely be done studying for the day. At least, that’s how it normally played out. It helped that Brock tended to spend a long time at the gym, and that Bale would eventually get so hungry he’d stop studying.

Some days were different, though.

Normally Bale would tell him he was studying, at the least, but Brock couldn’t figure out why he was so in his own head about it. He decided to get up and go to the gym to power his way through his workout, adding weight until he approached his personal best on most of his lifts—and, more importantly, couldn’t think long enough to focus on anything other than the weights in his hands.

He pushed himself to lift as much as he could for as long as he could, alternating between chest exercises until he felt that he had maybe one rep left in him at absolute most. When he couldn’t bring himself to lift any more, he dragged himself to the gym showers and washed off as fast as his arms would allow, trying to drown out his mind and finish up before he had too much time to think.

Brock hated nothing in the world quite as much as having too much time to think.

When he got home, there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary, which was to say that Brock’s home was a mess. Dirty clothes, empty plastic cups, beer and soda cans, bags, and greasy plates were strewn about on almost every surface of the small one room home, from the small wooden dining table to the kitchen counters. The only part of the bed not covered in clothes was the patch of messy blanket where Brock slept each night, but even that patch looked messy in its own way, particularly when Brock collapsed into it after flinging all of his clothes off in various directions.

The only thing in the place that sparked any light to Brock in that moment was the small succulent settled in a pot on the windowsill, brought there by Bale.

“Its name is Sol. You know, like the sun, since succulents can live off of mostly sunlight. Just make sure to water it once a week and it should do just fine. Plus that way you’ll always have a little companion in your home!”

He could practically hear the tenderness in Bale’s voice as it played in his mind.

It was strange, the way that Bale made him feel. It was normal for halflings to be close to one another, and certainly someone who’d known and been with Brock as long as Bale had would make for the perfect friend regardless, but the absence of the smaller halfling hung on Brock’s heart even when he’d only been apart from Bale for a few hours.

Brock tried to push it to the back of his mind, but he wasn’t good at keeping his brain occupied for long, and inevitably memories of time spent with the small druid flooded his head: days when they hung out at parks, Bale studying plants while Brock jogged; evenings when they sat cuddled up together, tails entwined; mornings when they made trips to the beach, Brock diving into the water as Bale warily tested the tide’s temperature; nights when he would press his face into Bale’s shoulder, so grateful to have someone there who remembered his name—

Turning onto his side, Brock pressed his face into his pillow, trying to force away the memories he knew he couldn’t avoid for long, but to no avail. In his mind Brock was that boy again, staring at the wall as his own father failed to sputter out his name: a child staring at the perfect imitation of a broken water fountain, a boy trying to draw water from a stone.

Brock remembered, against his better intentions, every detail of his childhood with the father who cared in moments but was so far gone that the moments were fleeting at best. He remembered the mornings where he would quietly sneak out to go to school, in the hope he could avoid seeing his dad splayed out in a recliner, staring out into a darkness beyond space that called for him stronger than anything on the planet could, a darkness that Brock knew without knowing was the reason his father didn’t recognize him.

Caught up in memories he spent waking hours trying to repress, Brock drifted into a restless sleep, tossing and turning in his messy bed as lonely night after lonely night of his childhood played out in his mind uninterrupted on a loop.

“Brock?”

The loop shifted slightly. It was a messy morning where Brock had not managed to avoid the gaze of his mind-absent father, who had been absentmindedly surveying the ceiling until Brock’s hand grazed the door handle. In the haze of sleep, Brock could see his father’s mouth moving, could sense the heat coming off his body, but couldn’t hear whatever words his father spoke at him. A sense of dread crept up his spine, and Brock turned away, pulling the door open and running outside—

“Are you awake?”

—into a garden. Brock stopped and looked around, caught off guard by the sudden shift, an earthy scent in his nose that soothed his heart and steadied him. In his dream, he planted on the grass to rest, spreading himself out along the floor. As he did, the earth itself moved to embrace him, verdant soil and gentle grasses beneath him reaching upward and gently coiling around him. A soft breeze rustled his coarse chest pelt, and he settled into a calm, meditative state that seemed to last for weeks, then months, then somehow years.

When Brock opened his eyes, dazed from unexpectedly falling asleep, he stared groggily at the silvery, hazy figure of what he thought was a lemur hovering just above him. He blinked to clear his mind and the figure vanished, but as he looked around he spotted Sol on the windowsill, early morning light just peeking through the window.

A moment later, he realized that Bale was pressed against his chest, curled up with his arms around Brock’s larger, broad frame. With a smile, Brock wrapped his arms tight around Bale’s shoulders and breathed in the gentle petrichor the druid took with him wherever he went, heart at ease.