Я вернулся в деревню

[balancedlight]

Who: Svetlana and Open + a prompt for Fraser
What: Venturing forth and also dealing with April shenanigans!
When: April catch-all!
Where: Milton, then the path up to and including Lakeside. See prompts in post!

Content Warnings: Nothing as of yet; will update!

Comments

[balancedlight]

It's a little endearing, the laugh, and she manages to suppress most of her smile at it. She mutters a soft apology, closing her eyes to focus on the breathing itself.

It doesn't sound - terrible, but it's not great, either. The soft sound of wheezing whistles through, but there's no rattle of pneumonia that would send her worrying. No fever, either, though she is worried about his heart rate.

She stays for longer than necessary, waiting for it to settle after what they went through.

"What have you been doing since the last time you encountered the fog?" she asks, sitting back on her heels and looking up to him.

[salamanca]

That's a good question! Lalo blinks. He's been busy.

"Oh, the usual. I've been traveling back and forth between Milton and Lakeside, I went hunting a few times, I've been to the General Store, I brought food down to the Community Hall, I've been renovating" -- improving the traps on -- "the front of my house, shoving the snow off the path leading up here..."

Lalo ticks off each event on his fingers, listing them one by one.

"So, not a whole lot! Why?"

[balancedlight]

She tsks softly and sits back. "You might have bronchitis," she explains. "And if you don't want it to turn into pneumonia or something else, then you need to be resting. Sitting. Not moving. Letting someone else take care of you."

She stands and puts her hand on her hip. "You cannot be working as hard as you have been."

[salamanca]

"Bro---" Lalo interrupts her explanation with another bout of coughing. He clears his throat, trying to get himself back under control. He looks up at her, still sitting. The scolding tone and the hand on her hip are enough to tell him she meets business.

"Let someone else take care of me?" A foreign concept to Lalo. "Ah... c'mon! It can't be that bad, can it? I've been through worse. I'll be fine!" Lalo smiles up at her, trying to convince Sveta of how 'fine' he will be. Somehow, though, he doesn't think she's likely to budge. She strikes him as someone surprisingly formidable, when she wants to me.

Or maybe not 'surprisingly'. Maybe there's nothing surprising about it.

[balancedlight]

Sveta stands up. She is not tall, not in any way intimidating except for the way that her eyes narrow and she points a finger at him. "If you let this linger, you will develop pneumonia," she tells him. "Do you know what pneumonia will do to you out here where I may not have the right antibiotics and you are not resting?"

She puts her other hand on her hip. "You will rest and you will settle, and you will wait for that cough to subside. Two days."

[salamanca]

...well. Even Lalo can't argue with that. She might not be tall, but it's clear the blonde woman standing in front of him is not to be taken lightly. He coughs again, shoulders briefly moving up and down.

But then Lalo looks up at her and smiles. "Svetlana," he tells her. "You are a force to be reckoned with. All right, all right. Two days. I'll rest."

Then he can run around like a crazy man again, right?

[balancedlight]

She nods. Of course she is. But that does soften her slightly and she relaxes her shoulders, going to the window to look out into the bleakness of the forest.

"I will come to check on you once this - this damned fog has gone."

[salamanca]

"Ah, yeah. It's a nightmare, that fog."

Lalo coughs a little, covering his mouth with a fist, and looks at her as she does to the window. "For now, come. Here. Sit with me. I'd like to get to know you better."

[balancedlight]

She looks back but doesn't sit quite yet. "What would you like to know?" she wonders, cautious. There's so much she's hiding from people that it's difficult to remember where the lies end and the truth begins. Getting tangled in it starts like this.

[salamanca]

"Oh, whatever you want to tell me. Can you blame me for being curious about such a beautiful woman?"

[balancedlight]

"Do you say that to every woman you're stuck in a home with?" she wonders, smiling as she returns her gaze to the window.

[salamanca]

Lalo thinks about Chloe, and snorts. "Not exactly," he says. He would've never used that line on her. He stays relaxing in his chair, watching her look out the window before he speaks again.

"I can go first, if you want. I'm from Mexico."

[balancedlight]

Not exactly. And Chloe is the first person Svetlana thinks of, too. She can't help but wonder how that happened.

"Is that where you were born or where you live?"

[salamanca]

Oh, Sveta. It's a long story. But if you asked, he'd probably tell you! Maybe. Parts of it, anyway.

"Both! Well, I live all over. I travel for work. I'm in pharmaceuticals, you see. Maybe it's fate that we met."

[balancedlight]

She looks rather skeptical about that.

"Maybe it is. Fate is more complicated than that."