Chapter Text
He feels heavy, like an emerging headache, or the weight in your eyes as the exhaustion creeps up and forces you to sleep.
He’s tired, as if he spent days still and sleeping, and the weight presses down, and he needs to move.
Supporting himself with his hand, he sits down. Despite the hay he feels the hard ground, and it just makes his body ache more.
The blanket he wore wasn’t of silk, or cotton. The way it moved under his touch, two layers and fur outside. He sees his hand, black— not that, a dark gray, paler than anyone he’s seen before. The fingers are long, too much, he wants to throw up.
The urge rises to his throat, burning as something that shouldn’t be there and he sends it down again.
He gets up, he didn’t notice before, but only a loincloth covered his body at all, he doesn’t mind. His legs wobble even while still, with the first step he nearly falls down onto the other people in the hay bed.
Three of them, all so alike. The same dark skin, the hair even darker and seemingly unkempt, he wonders if the three are siblings, and he notices their skin looks just like his. They wear a wooden mask secured to their face, and it takes him a moment to notice he does too.
He looks away, to the floors, to the walls, to the ceiling. Mud, wood, wood, wood. He doesn’t know what to call it, nothing he recalls quite match. A hut, perhaps.
There’s no door, but there’s a entrance, big, yes. Blocking sunlight with cloth… or leather, leather it is. He stares at he entrance, it doesn’t seem he’ll fall over from a light breeze.
One step, two steps. He hears the crackling of fire outside, eating and ripping into wood. There’s a enticing smell in the air, and now that he notices every smell feels much more intense, much more clear, than it ever has been before.
Three steps, four steps. The weight gets worse, he falls.
He doesn’t.
His hand stops it, catching the ground, he’s always been good at that, catching himself. He thinks he shouldn’t have gotten so close to the ground so fast, doesn’t think about it, and gets up again.
Five steps, he opens the curtains and somehow doesn’t expect the sunlight blinding him. Shouldn’t it wake him up? Why is it more heavy, he can’t think.
Outside, a campfire sits under a big piece of meat. Beside it sits someone. So much larger than he is, maybe he could fit in the palm of their hand, and they are alike to the three sleeping inside, save for the faint yellow lines adorning their body. He stares, his eyes seeing past the faint smoke and to the figure of the person. A word caught in his throat.
He recognizes, but in a different way. More of word than a nickname like before. He says it before realizing any of this. “Mama?”
“Lili Moli?!” She says (she?), he can see surprise from her body, he can hear disbelief from her voice. The weight closes in, he can’t—
“Lili!” His leg falters, he can’t bring the strength to brace himself. The wind rushes and loud noises ring, and the person catches him before hitting the ground, she should be too far for that.
Lili, is that his name?
He falls asleep.
.
He wakes up again, the blanket over him and wrapping around, what he feels isn’t the hay. There’s a voice over him, Mama, she singsongs and he catches the words, familiarity coming to him. He can’t tell what she means.
“Mi lili li awen,
Ale li ala kiwen~
Apeja pi jaki olin,
Ken paloli mi nasin~”
She’s singing, somewhat. Her voice is a little rough, but it’s good. He can’t appreciate it much, he prefers to resonate with the lyrics, but despite making out the words so easily he doesn’t have any meaning to any of them.
Still, he lets his mind follow along the song, familiarizing with the rhythm. After a minute or so she starts again, the start of the song coming by until it gets to a rhythm he remembers. The lyrics change, she’s coming up with them on the spot, and so do slightly details of her intonation.
She’s ruffling his hair, he can’t tell since when. His sleepiness can’t decided between increasing or fading away at the gesture. He puts his head deeper into the covers.
“Wan-nanpa!” There’s a laugh outside, lined with fondness. The word feels like a title. “Sina kute mi musi kalama, o?”
He grunts inside the covers, he can feel her body surge with her laughs.
Mama pats his head twice with two fingers, an amused humming as she does, “Oke, Wan-nanpa. Sina awen, kama lape.”
Wan-nanpa. Is that his name now?
He falls asleep again, he thinks it would be better if never woke up at all, if it was to be like this.
.
It happens three to five times more, as far as he can tell, getting up and falling asleep before he gets the chance to feel like he even woke up at all. She’s never as far as the first time, she’s his mother, probably. He believes it, anyway.
A bit obvious, he’s small and growing too. The mask started to feel too tight, he watched Mama measure and carve an identical but slightly bigger one, an oval blank mask. Wan-nanpa stared at her intricate mask, the caricature of a bear and with intricate painting of orange and yellow lines, the prominent symbol between the percentage and divide symbols that come to mind, and wondered what’s the difference, if it was a coming of age thing.
He doesn’t have the words to ask.
Without the lethargy, it gets obvious to him how much energy he has to burn off. He jumps, and runs, and does cartwheels until he’s almost as good as he remembers. Two hands sideway, one handed, then forward, and backwards.
He makes Mama sit with him and play dots and boxes on the dirt, and tic-tac-toe, and watches her swing an oversized sword in the middle of their camp.
There’s a place to dry wood, one for fuel, one for building, she uses the word for “hold” in the name of the tree, she used the first one for the wheat, but also the dirt, so grains. There’s a place to dry leather, and Wan-nanpa insisted enough to get a step-ladder to be able to put them up and take them out so he can help a little.
Wan-nanpa finds out “nanpa” means st, or nd, or rd, or th— it means order universally, and “wan” means one. Mama called him “First”, he can’t believe it. There was another name, he can’t remember what it was between the headaches and the exhaustion. Mama avoids the topic, but acts like naming him First was normal. Maybe in this culture a name is a ceremonial thing, he doesn’t have the words to ask.
He wakes up before Mama goes to hunt, she’s breastfeeding the other kids in the nest. They didn’t wake up at all while he’s been awake, one or two weeks now, maybe that’s why she seemed surprised when he woke up the first time.
After she leaves he finds the carvering knife, and by the time she comes back he has a game of tic-tac-toe in grain-hold wood, no scratches in his hands(that she knew about) by the time she’s back. The board, five pieces for squares and circles. Wan-nanpa would’ve tried connect four, but he doesn’t know how he’d keep the board in one piece for that, and tic-tac-toe toe is easier, simpler. She puts the carving knife on a shelf she has to stretch to reach. The hut is dome-shaped so he can’t even climb it, unfortunate.
Mama calls him when she gets back, she teaches him how to dismantle a fish, making me practice for a few fish before doing the rest herself a cooking for us. Wan-nanpa thinks there’s a bit of hypocrisy in taking a knife away from him just to give him a different one two days later.
.
It's been three weeks since he woke up, doing stuff here and there to pass the time. He’s watching Mama carefully hold her the edge of sword over a flame after sharpening it, when he hears foots steps in the grass.
There’s a man walking the plains, smaller than Mama and both his skin and hair much lighter, silver rather than black, the lines in his body much more intricate, just like the staff he carried. His mask was different too, two horns pulling back while the shape came forward. He can only think it depicts a dragon.
“Hey! How you go, Pinisona?” He waves, nearing the camp. I look to Mama, the feeling of finding out Mom’s name isn’t really Mom being nostalgic.
She sighs, or groans but I can’t discern, not moving from her task as she calls back. “Good. You early much.”
“Five days only,” He shrugs, his mask turning to me as he pauses, “…child is awake, in one moon?”
“Day after you leave, yes.”
He stares, Wan-nanpa waves, he raises his hand in a friendly gesture before whipping his hair towards Mama. “The hair… that is None in All umagi child.”
“And, Lawa-Sinnasin?”
There’s a pause, the both of them staring at each other.
“Have good fortune, Mita-Pinisona.” He twirls the staff, staring at the ornaments at the top, before turning to Wan-nanpa and crouching down to his level. “Greeting, Wan-nanpa! I be Sinnasin, you own parent-male.”
His eyes glowed blue like the skies, and he’s suddenly aware the lines in his skin glow faintly of the same shade.
“Ah…” Wan-nanpa starts, trying to think of something to say, his father? He didn't think he had one.“You want play?”