"The Moments Between"- Brea, Gurjin, Kylan, Naia
Brea blinks in surprise as a leather ball sails across the page she is reading and lands in her lap. She looks up to find Gurjin in the doorway of the borrowed Spriton hut, a lazy grin on his face that she rarely sees these days.
“Where did you find this?” she asks, turning the ball over in her hands, finding the trademark scuffs and stains of a well-loved toy.
“Out in the grass,” he answers. She cannot help but wonder if it was merely lost during a game or dropped as some child was snatched up, never to be seen again, but their lives have become dictated by pragmatism too much to dwell on it. Food is food, shelter is shelter, a ball is a ball. “Come on,” he says, uncharacteristically soft. “The book will be there later. Take a break.”
She opens her mouth to protest- there is no guarantee of that, they could be raided again tonight, and she hasn’t seen a new book in weeks- but she knows him well enough now to know that he’s unlikely to leave her to her solitude. She glances over at the basket in which she’s nestled Kira, but she is sound asleep, tiny fingers curled into the blanket. Brea shakes her head, chuckles. “Alright. Just until she wakes up.”
Sami Thicket is quiet compared with her foggy memories of it from visits as a child, but not the abandoned ruin her own home has become- not yet. Naia leans against a tree trunk, arms crossed, and Kylan offers her a warm smile as she emerges. “I’m glad you joined us.”
She raises a brow and tosses the ball to him. “I didn’t take you for the sporting type,” she teases. The air of normalcy about them feels somehow wrong, but for once she tries to put the constant stream of worries aside and just breathe.
He fumbles the catch a little, laughing. “Trust me, I’m not. But this is a Spriton game, so I’d say being the only one to know the rules gives me an advantage.”
Naia barks out a laugh in return. “We’ll see if it holds once you explain them.”
“Careful,” Gurjin calls, “or we’ll make you a team by yourself and see how well you do!”
Naia grins, the playful rivalry obvious. “Go ahead! It will be all the more embarrassing when I still win.”
Brea glances at the ground, at the plants already beginning to show signs of decay, at the footprints of gelfling whose fates are now unknown. Any joy they can find today could be gone tomorrow. There is no point in being half-present and allowing it to slip away even sooner. She takes another deep breath, and lets herself smile with them. “Alright, Kylan. How do we play?”