Light dimmed and it came time for Amardamu to sleep. Jun was waiting, sat as he usually was with his legs crossed. Hovering in front of him, she could see his face was lit up in a smile, bright eyes almost twinkling in the twilight.
As soon as he noticed her, an enclosed fist in his lap wriggled slightly, his thumb making a rolling motion. "Here," he said, raising the hand to present a sliver of smokey-brown meat balanced on his finger. "For all your hard work."
"But I didn't do anything?" What work? The meat was completely unfamiliar to Sachiko.
Jun shook his head, still smiling. "The spear, it turned out to be really good."
Understanding, she picked up the chunk of food, immediately noticing the smokey aroma and the stiff texture that was much unlike the vegetable she had last time. If it had come from an insect like back home, such an enormous cut would've been quite expensive. But here, like all things relating to the giants, a feast for her was so negligible that even she ended up paying more attention to how it rubbed off onto her hands like a paste rather than its potential value back home.
Yesterday, it seemed, had recalibrated her definition of valuable, and no mere cut of meat could ever compare to the legendary product of a supposedly extinct species. Sachiko scrunched her hand to try and get the paste off.
Jun apparently had been paying close attention. "Oh, right," he said, and reached over to the window sill to pick something tiny up; between his pinched thumb and forefinger was a particularly sharp-looking splinter of wood, roughly 10cm long. "It's not much, but it should be better than eating with your hands," he told her.
This was... Sachiko's face felt warm. Where was this coming from? He'd thought about her, unprompted. Did he...? No. Of course not. Jun was just overly kind, and she was merely overreacting. She thought that, but the unguarded smile he gave her really wasn't helping.
Too flustered to properly respond, Sachiko instead asked for some water. She'd been feeling strangely thirsty throughout the day, perhaps due to the honey being too dry. That would definitely be annoying if it were the case. Without the benefit of the bottlecap, Jun was forced to tilt the multi-tonne "water bottle" so that she could cup some of it to drink. This ended up taking place on the ground, which suited her just fine to eat.
As she ate in his metaphorical shadow, Jun talked about the different ways to prepare fish. The sample he'd given her had "cold smoked" in one of the smaller buildings away from the village, but there were also "hot smoking" and various ways to preserve it in salt. He'd also learned, although this was yesterday, to cook fish for immediate consumption over an open fire - yet another thing he'd been taught how to make.
Once she'd finished, Sachiko considered the skewer. "I'll need somewhere to keep it," she said. She knew it was just a splinter, but it was still a gift.
"We could make a bag for you," he started, and with enthusiasm continued, "Actually, how do fairies even wear bags? Wouldn't they get tangled up in your wings?" Sachiko's good mood fell at the comparison. Certainly, he had to mean something else by "fairy"; the thought of being compared to some flightless, ogrish brute or 'merely' an inhuman trickster was not pleasant.
"'m not a fairy," she mumbled before raising her voice. "And it's simple." It was also about time she made one. But first, the tool:
A triangular prism shaved from the scissors was tapered to a point. For the eye, Sachiko was forced to carve a sharp-edged angular oval before slimming the piece to a thickness approaching that of her spear. Any further, and the precision would suffer. In the end, the "needle" was crude beyond belief, but so was the fabric it had to thread.
Tool in hand, Sachiko went on to explain how she'd seen the design on soldiers as she folded the fabric in on itself to stiffen it, puncturing a hole in one of the larger strips before closing it into a belt and two leg-diameter rings. She joined the three together by perpendicular strips and presented the ensemble to the fascinated giant.
"See? You step into the ringlets and tighten the belt. The bag sits beneath your wings - out of the way," she said, doing just that before securing the belt.
"Huh. I think I've seen something like that before on mountain climbers." Throughout the monologue, Jun's eyelids had started to droop, and by the end of it he yawned. "Anyways, we'd better call it a night," he said.
"Yeah- oh, um, I'll need some writing supplies," she asked. After the unexpected rush from receiving his gift, the degree to which she relied on his generosity struck her; she couldn't help but feel bad for all of the precious pieces of his home she was cynically repurposing. How could he smile so kindly? "Sorry," she said, suddenly aware of how she was even taking his time without consideration. "And I guess I'll need to make a satchel for them." She promised herself to be quick, at least.
Jun nodded, weary, and dug into his supplies. Unlike the harness, it didn't take long to thread a drawstring through some cloth and tie that to her belt. Being secured by only one point, it would be a little annoying to fly with - but she could make do until they had time to assemble a proper bag.
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Looking at the skewer and needle, Sachiko decided that she could tuck them into her belt for the meantime. It risked puncturing the heat suit, but at least on this word temperature was less of an issue.
When he produced the writing supplies, she was surprised to see that one of the styli was remarkably familiar. Guided by a grippable transparent casing, a cylinder of graphite that might as well have been a control rod for some reactor jutted out the end to function as an adjustable pencil. Sachiko shaved off a sliver and grimaced at how it rubbed off onto her hands, but bore with it.
The "paper" was stiff, not unlike card to her touch, and was easily cut into rough sheaves. Sachiko mused that it was fortunate that the giants made it so thick - it would mean she wouldn't need a surface to write against.
Satisfied, she gave a demure "Thanks," and tried to make use of as much of the dying fire's light as she could. Sachiko noted down what she remembered of Eulli's lessons until she was forced to use the glow of the waning moonlight instead.
Minutes or hours, the peace of sitting outside, legs dangling from the ledge of the window sill, filled Sachiko with a timeless serenity. Wind played through her legs as it rushed against the walls while the local insects chirped their song into the night. Notes on writing became more comprehensive, and she wrote out her observations and feelings on everything that had transpired since she arrived.
Eventually, the words ran out, and Sachiko knew it was time to sleep. First stuffing away the paper and sliver into her satchel before grabbing her spear, she rose up to the roof and towards the faintly illuminated blue of the bottlecap. Sachiko's grip tightened.
Crawling about the stone-covered bottlecap, their abdomens bobbing as they ineffectually stabbed at the ground with their stingers, was a group of insects - all identical to one of her earlier kills.
Landing softly, Sachiko looked around, committing the scene to memory before taking a steadying breath. She could do this. Confidently, she stepped towards the sound of buzzing, spear readied to pierce the fleeting shadows.
Whether it was her scent or the sound of the vibroknife, there was a noticeable wave of anxiety in the insects. Antennae waved frantically and several more took to the air, circling around the bottlecap.
One flew too close. Sachiko jerked her spear across its thorax, slicing away a section of the chitin. A split second later, a gruesome "rainbow" of gore spilled out across her path as the victim arced into the ground. Wing muscles severed, it could only crawl, twitching and blindly stabbing at the plaster roof as its organs slowly failed.
Another, its yellow chitin glinted in the moonlight as it impaled itself on Sachiko's hastily pointed spear. Six clawed legs wriggled desperately to grab onto the steel shaft, but Sachiko heaved, slinging it bodily onto the ground and jabbed it in the head before it could find a grip. Seeing the beast still writhing, she stabbed into the thorax and cut an arc down through to its side, committing it to the same fate as its (likely) sister.
Gripped by the somehow-lingering serenity of earlier, Sachiko wove her spear through the swarm, a detached part of her taking in the movements and refining them. She was unskilled. She could see that now. In the dark, it was obvious that every kill was owed to her quick reflexes and the sharpness of the vibroknife. A sharpness that would not last.
As the last insect fell, dead, Sachiko stood there, panting. Once more she was victorious, but now she knew that it was by the skin of her teeth. Silently, she promised herself she would learn to properly use the spear.
When the adrenaline rush had passed, Sachiko considered the gruesome scene before her. The return of a single species of insect and their murderous rage sent a clear message: the area had been marked. Sachiko would need to find somewhere else. She sighed, and stared down at her feet. The safest place -without a doubt- was inside the hovel. She would just have to find somewhere safe to hide out of sight and hope she wouldn't be seen.
Hefting the tub, Sachiko flew back down to the window. Bottlecap-in-arms, she could see that the hole wasn't large enough for both it and the rock, and so she was forced to pass through each separately before stacking them again. Thankfully, the window sill was relatively spacious for her.
"Hey, Jun. You awake?" she whisper-yelled into the silence. Without attention payed to it, the embers had died down into an ineffectual glow - too weak to make it useful as anymore than a landmark and leaving the room almost impenetrably dark.
Silence. She couldn't blame him. Deciding it was safer to leave the honey by the window than risk dropping the rock in the darkness, she pushed it into a corner and took flight.
In the silence, the sound of her wings took a deafening quality. Even though she knew, intellectually, that they were not particularly loud, the animal fear that the unnatural droning would wake the giants bid her to land. And so she did - hard. Sachiko grunted, sinking to her knees from the impact after she had all but launched herself at the ground. Why was she so nervous? Jun and her had talked for hours while Amardamu slept. She had even fought wild animals mere minutes ago for immortality's sake! All of that prior serenity had evaporated in the face of the sleeping giants.
Backlit by the dead fire and what little moonlight could make it this far, they looked almost like landscapes, cliffsides rising about her. Without faces, wrapped in shadows - there was very little she could do to convince herself she was looking at people. It was humbling, in a way. With Jun, with Eulli - she could focus on their faces, let the distance fool her into thinking they were almost human. In the darkness, there was no such illusion.
Walking stiffly towards the wall, she tried to look past the terrors and instead at the barely-distinguishable mess which cluttered the floor. There! A cluster, three pots in a corner barely visible in the dim light called to her. She remembered them, vaguely, as being the kind of unremarkable that almost seemed to repel attention.
Closer, and she could see that they were packed together tightly. Sachiko had to squeeze into the cramped space, and coughed as her movements kicked up dust. In the triangular space between the three, there was only enough room to stand. She felt out the wall and leaned her spear against it. Mindful of the items at her hip, Sachiko sunk to the floor and hugged her legs.