Waking up always felt a little bit like drowning.

Rannok gasped in a breath as a crack of thunder split the sky. His feathers stood on end as he looked around inside the tent, scrambling for something familiar in the darkness. The sky flashed again. His eyes caught the mound of blankets curled up in the opposite corner. The person underneath them breathed only slightly. 

He sighed and ran his hands down his face before peeking out the tent flap. The ground was still dry, which meant the storm had either left, or that it hadn't gotten to them yet. How long had it been, a year? Close to two? And thunderstorms still made him feel like crawling out of his skin every time. 

But everything was quiet when he stepped outside. One of the horses made a noise from where it was tied to a nearby tree and the hairs on the back of Rannok's neck went up.

The embers from the previous night's fire still glowed when he stirred them around with a stick. He fed it a handful of dry kindling and blew life back into the fire until it was big enough to chase off anything that might come out of the woods. In some ways this place wasn't so different than Terres. 

He snorted. In Terres he wouldn't have had to rob the innkeeper to make sure they had food, and he wouldn't be sleeping in a tent out in the middle of nowhere. In Terres he might have had some clue what he was doing, but not here.

A few more hours went by before Sasha emerged from the tent. Then she stirred the fire. Got coffee and a little steel pan and water from the canteen without a single word. She didn't ask him why he was already awake. She didn't need to. 

"I slept a little," he said, without looking at her, though he could feel her nodding like she didn't believe him. 

"We could stay in one of the inns again," she said, as she tied her mass of copper curls behind her head. There were rings under her eyes, which made him feel terrible. They were miles from the nearest town, with good reason. 

"No," he said, shaking his head, probably a little too eagerly. The last innkeeper was probably looking for them still, and Rannok didn't savor inviting more trouble into their lives. Even in the mountains, people talked.

Sasha came back around to the fire and threw the pot on it, then frowned. She stirred the coffee a few times before looking back up at him.

"I'd like to sleep inside for once," she said, before looking back down again. Rannok sighed out his nose and didn't meet her eyes. Of course she did. An uncomfortable feeling grew in his stomach. They were short on cash still, even with what he'd taken when the innkeeper wasn't looking.

"We could if we could stay in one place," he said, then regretted saying it almost immediately, because her face fell a little and the uncomfortable feeling grew worse. Her father might still be looking for them, no matter how far they got from the port cities. They'd had this conversation a million times. And every time she looked hurt and he felt like shit, so he let the subject drop.

There was tense silence for a few moments while Sasha unpacked the dry meat from the saddlebags and crept back to the fire. Rannok rubbed at his temples and tried to unfurrow his eyebrows.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm tired."

She shrugged before pushing a piece of dried meat into his hand without speaking. The tension lifted as they chewed and as morning light filtered in through the trees.

"What was it about, this time?"

Her voice was soft, non-accusatory. She didn't push anymore for him to talk about it, the reasons he stayed up at night. The shadows that chased him while he was sleeping.

"I don't remember," he mumbled.

It wasn't a lie, though sometimes it was. Sometimes he only remembered drowning. 

"There's a town over the next ridge, I think," she said, looking past the treeline. They scarcely looked at the maps anymore. "We could stop there and sell some of the skins from trapping."

Rannok nodded. He knew as well as she did that it was just as likely as not that no one would want to buy things from them -- him because he didn't speak Ascaran, her because she was with him. 

That and she looked too Terrean, too much like her mother, like she didn't belong in the mountains with the stickiness and the heat. And this far away from the ports people noticed. They stalked them to the edge of town to make sure they'd leave. They refused to buy things from them and gave them rates at inns high enough to discourage them coming back.

"I hate these mountains," she said after a little bit.   

He nodded. "I do too." He hated the mountains because they weren't his home and also because he was with her, and that just made things harder. He hated himself for being too selfish to wander off on his own.

She squeezed his hand and he flinched. He knew the look on her face without having to check. Eyes wide, questioning, mouth turned down slightly in a frown.

"Do you actually not remember?" she asked. "Or are you just saying that again because you're afraid of what I'll say?"

Rannok looked away. "The night before last it was someone punching me in the face, I don't remember who."

Except he did, he still remembered like it had just happened, how he got the faint scar down the middle of his mouth. He didn't like to think about it much anymore. But if he gave her a little piece of truth, sometimes she stopped asking for a while.

"I'm not going to run away."

She leaned her head on his shoulder. Rannok tried not to flinch. It still made his stomach roil, the thought of waking up alone one night, having to learn the language of this place, trying to hunt for food without someone else to keep watch. The thought of not having anyone ask over and over what his dreams were about until he broke.

The thought of being too much terrified him.

"I know," he said, though he didn't quite believe it.

A few more minutes passed in silence, and Rannok found himself grateful that sometimes they didn't need to talk much. Sasha got up to tend the horses. It was a job she always did and never asked him to do, not anymore. Not since he'd punched Driver and sent him running. He got up and began to roll the tent, mindful of the height of the sun in the sky.

"Let's find an inn that doesn't hate us," he said, when she'd finished putting the saddle on Chestnut. He shoved the remains of their tent into one of the saddlebags, mindful of where the animal was standing. Sasha paused and sighed very deeply.

"You don't need to placate me. I'm not angry with you."

Rannok didn't respond for a minute. Instead he took a step back from his horse and closed his eyes. He really didn't remember, this time. But that didn't mean he didn't remember all the other times he'd told her that.

He wished he could tell again, between when things were dangerous and not. He used to be able to tell that, the difference between tension and anger. The difference between an explosion and a thunder clap and rain. 

"Look, it's--" He paused again. There was no good explanation. A year and a half hadn't made things any easier, hadn't made the memories any less, and had only partly stopped her from questioning. But he didn't expect that to last forever.

"Rannok," she said. She paused what she was doing for a moment and looked at him, eyebrows raised, over Patches' rump. 

He looked back and flushed a little. "Yeah?"

"It's okay."

Sasha stared at him until he nodded, and only then did she let her gaze drop back to the horses. His shoulders relaxed a little bit.

It wasn't as if he had any other choice.