“… It is where my brother is.”
The ensuing silence is deafening. Entrapping. Like being plunged into icy waters that swallow light whole.
If it weren’t for the gel-like hand in his, Jarl would have thought that Oak had abandoned him.
Luckily (?), she didn’t.
~
… It is also where a great danger is.
The air inside Jarl’s lungs (if that even is air—it’s still hard to tell what’s what in here) hurts to breathe—feeling more like the water he’d just felt submerged in than the precious life-giving gas he’s always lived in. The one Oak, as a tree, probably produces (Probably; again, who really knows logic here.).
Slowly, shakily, Jarl nods: “Y-yea… Manus… told us the prophecy.”
And yet you still go?
Sky blue eyes glance up at the voice, wondering not for the first-time what Oak truly looks like. He frowns, brows furrowed, as confusion sets into him. Why does she sound so surprised? And confused?
How is this at all strange?
Jarl’s baby brother is—O.
~
“T’ey don’t care.”
Áesta’s voice rings harsh and true in Jarl’s ears, brutally honest orange eyes ringed in lime filling his mind.
“T’ey’re jus’ curious.
Entertained.”
~
They don’t care.
All they DO care about is the “cosmic good; so, if we appeal to that, they’ll stop hindering us.”
Manus had a point—even if Jarl had been too alarmed—too anxious—to notice it before.
But how do you get literal TREES to care about you saving your brother?
~
Jasey used to get bullied a lot.
Part of this was because he was mute—unable to talk, shout for help, or defend himself—but the other part was his family situation: with just over ten years separating him and Jarl, it was obvious he wasn’t planned. This wasn’t to say he wasn’t wanted, of course: their parents HAD tried to have another child many times, boy or girl, but it never worked no matter what they tried—they weren’t sure why, either.
(The doctor, Hagen’s father, had suggested to my father that mother was no longer fertile—or, perhaps, father was the infertile one—but there had been no way of knowing for sure back then.)
So—when Jarl was three—they finally gave up.
It was seven years later when they had Jas’.
(A literal miracle child...)
~
Jasey was a tiny thing.
He’d inherited their mother’s black hair and their grandmother’s off-white eyes with their father’s dimples and grandfather’s jawline showing up a few years later after he’d begun to mature. But that’s the future.
As a babe, Jasey was tiny—about as tiny as an ant, really.
Jarl, surprisingly, hadn’t cared too much for him back then: he was more worried about school, his mother, and the strange cat he kept seeing milling about. He was too old to worry about an attention stealing baby but too young to really have it in him to want to protect and nurture the boy he’d grow to love above all.
Sans maybe God.
It wasn’t really until Jasey was three that this began to change.
~
It was around that time that Jasey’s inability to talk became a problem for Jarl.
He’d learned Sign Language along with his parents and helped them teach Jasey when he wasn’t in school; but that was it: they never really took him outside of the house—outside of the family, into the real world—before he was three; so, when they finally did, it hit Jarl that no one else in Shantown knew Sign Language. Who, then, would Jasey speak with when he’s older?
Who’ll he hang out with if no one outside his family can understand him?
That was when Jarl’s attitude towards Jasey began to change.
(That’s when I started to CARE about him…)
~
But why?
What was it about that thought—about that realization—that made him suddenly care?
Was it the outrage that the people he’d spent his whole life with could be so insensitive?
(No. We were the ones who never spoke to them about Jas’ needs.)
It was because Jarl didn’t want Jasey to feel unloved.
~
Wonderful.
Love is what made him care.
But love seems to be what these trees don’t understand.
So how is he supposed to get THEM to care when the one thing that does it makes no sense to them‽
~
“T’ey’re jus’ curious.”
Of course…
“You want to know why?
“Let me go there—let us ALL go there—and we will SHOW you why.”
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