Chapter 17: Chapter 16: The Moon on the Water

A’s POV

A gentle hand brushed against my shoulder and I jolted awake, I didn’t even realize I’d been asleep. My eyes cracked open to the morning sun, and Erica sitting beside me.

“Good morning, tiny. I’d love to let ya sleep some more, but I wanna get some distance from here by sundown.” She pulled me to my feet, “Ready to go?”

I made a noise somewhere between a whimper and a yelp, but I guess that was enough of an answer for her as she started gently guiding me forward. I was tired, my hands hurt, and every step revealed some new sting or bruise, but Erica was right. We had to move, there was just one thing I was worried about.

“You didn’t sleep, did you?”

“What?”

“You took first watch, those fucking ants showed up less than halfway through my watch, and once we made it outside, I’m the one who passed out, right?”

She looked back at me.

“Yep, we still gotta move though.”

I don’t know what it was, but something about that pissed me off. It’s not that I disagreed with her, we had to move, I just- I didn’t have “friends” before, and now I did and she was going to take care of herself dammit!

I stopped walking.

“You need to worry about yourself too, Erica! You could’ve woke me up or something but you didn’t, and now you’re just gonna walk till sunset? Eat some goddamn celery on the road and call it good?”

I might have been overreacting here, but honestly I didn’t care. These last two days had been awful, and I was still hurting from last night, and I was still covered in dried bug juice, and there was no way in hell I was going to be able to make this trip alone. Even if I could make it, I wouldn’t want to, I’d be too scared. I needed her to care about herself, to worry about herself. While she was running around punching heads off last night, I’d been making a fire, or worse, nearly getting eaten alive. I couldn’t protect her, I couldn’t do anything, and that hurt worst of all.

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Erica took a slow, measured breath.

“Okay”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. How about this, we walk till noon, that’s probably about two or three hours off. We get some distance, then we take a break. We both have some food, and you keep an eye on things while I get a couple hours of beauty sleep. Sound fair?”

I figured that was the best I was going to get.

“Yeah, sounds fair.”

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Erica’s POV

A was being a pain, but I guess I couldn’t really blame them. Last night hadn’t treated them well, and even though I stopped the bleeding, they were probably hurting a lot worse than they were letting on. Even though they were being a pain, they weren’t exactly wrong either. I was absolutely exhausted, but that just made it all the more important that we get as far away from those damn bugs as possible.

We trekked on, weaving our way through the crumbling city as the sun crept closer and closer to its apex. Soon though, we came upon a brand new problem. A massive river had sprung up, slicing across roads and through buildings where there most certainly hadn’t been a river before. It spanned well over fifty feet, with a worryingly powerful current, and a steep drop off about 5 feet in. We stopped at the river’s edge, the sun having nearly peaked anyways. I sat by the water, and decided I’d try to clean some of the ant juice out of my shirt before I took a nap. As I finally got the neck of the shirt past my horns, I figured I’d try to make a little conversation, so I asked the question I probably should’ve asked a long time ago.

“So A, what are your pronouns?”