And listen to it all I did.

Scarlet scooched her chair closer to mine, and we sat there, leaning against one another, watching the dull fire crackling in the fireplace and sipping hot chocolate while she filled me in on everything that happened in the months I was dead.

Apparently Ulroke was still fucking about with whatever agenda he had. The assassin hadn't shown his face around the Seventh Sanctum since before I dropped in with that airship.

Oh, and the Ar'Tuel had her kid, which was evident by the lack of bump on her. It was an emergency birth, though--induced by magicyte, which had poisoned her so bad that she was still feeling the effects of it. The kid was being raised by Advencia (who I'm sure was absolutely thrilled about the task), stashed away in a place where Lye wouldn't be able to find it should he ever return.

And then she found another guy to bang. No surprise there, really. Did kind of shock me that the dude was over a thousand years old, and that Scarlet discovered she was his wife in a former life. It's a small world after all, isn't it?

But then she told me about the times she tried to kill herself, overcome with grief and stress after our... after our little adventure in a remote village in the snowy wastes that no longer existed. Just the pain and sadness in the woman's voice as she opened herself up to me... I felt like I should say something to comfort her, to tell her everything was going to be alright--except, yeah, I was a few months late to that party. And a lot of this was my fault to begin with.

Fucking... what would Hype do whenever I unloaded on her? Whatever it was, that always seemed to help make me feel better.

But she was specifically designed with a sort of healing aura and comforting pheromones... A custom-engineered Hug Elemental who would diffuse any situation with a smile and an embrace.

I'm just a pile of acid and plague wrapped in vines and moss.

It didn't stop me from trying to be a good friend, though. T'was the least I could do after tricking her into helping me commit suicide, right?

Flipping through my memory for how Hype went about this sort of thing for a moment, I snaked my arm around the backside of Scarlet's chair. Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached up with my briar-knit fingers, softly buried them in the Ar'Tuel's hair, and began running them through her crimson locks, tracing thin lines along the curves of her head as she continued to spill her guts out. Sensing that she might need just a bit more of... of whatever this is called, I gently tilted her head towards mine until we were resting against one another.

Hype would also softly hum a song while she did this, but fuck that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket to save my life.

As I continued to run my fingers through her hair, I could feel wisps of her corrupted soul leeching into my skin, slowly nibbling away at the waxy surface of my vines while my briarheart woke the hell up and started to heal the damage. Thankfully, it was more of a dull itching sensation than outright burning, both on the side of my head and in my fingertips. But I'm a big girl. I could take it.

What I couldn't take, though, was Scarlet's joke about dying my vines silver and jumping me. I nearly choked on my cocoa, and had to set my cup down on the table. Everything was now incredibly awkward--the chamber's walls were closing in, the air grew thicker with the silence. Take a deep breath, don't make eye contact.

"But you should totally make things even worse," my asshole brain commanded.

And so I did.

"I don't think you'll have to worry about that," I said, a dismissive chuckle rolling off my tongue. "I don't... yeah, I don't really have anything to bang, anyway. After I got torched the first time, I found out that that stuff was one of the few things that didn't grow back. B-but, I'm sure if you pressed down hard enough, you could part some of the vines there enough to stick a couple fingers in--"

Ah gods no fucking shit goddammit what the fuck are you saying, Madison?! Too awkward! Too awkward!

Deep in the darkest corners of my head, my subconscious mind beamed proudly, satisfied with how thoroughly I ruined a moment.