95

--The Enclave--

“I had a few girlfriends back on Yidar, Sathuren was saying as he rocked back and forth on two legs of his stool. They’d lost track of time and drank far too much by the time their food was gone. Sav was on at least his 4th drink, though she had no idea how strong his drinks were. She was on her third drink; her second rum and coke — the Zombie had been enough. “There was this one,” he said. “Lime? Reem? Rima. Rima was her name. She was a singer. My brother set us up… Don’t... have a very high opinion of blind dates, myself.”

“A singer, huh?” said Dassah. “Garuli?”

He shook his head. “Valkyrian.”

“Pretty?”

“Mhmm. She had yellow hair,” said Sav, wistfully. “Yellow is an auspicious feather color, you see,” he stuck his finger in the air and waved around. “Like white is seen as mystical, yellow is seen as a symbol of success.” He frowned and added, “It is a male color though, so I don’t really know if that means the same thing…”

“Stay on one topic,” said Dassah with a snort. “How did your brother know a singer well enough to set you up with her?”

“That’s what he does,” Sav said, eyes wide. Then he chuckled. “The minute he discovered music, he had to be a part of it. Didn’t matter I told him he was crazy — he wanted to do it and he did.” He rose his bowl up. “To he who proved us all wrong.”

Raising an eyebrow, Dassah went, “I guess that explains why Behana says that her brother make more money than her.”

“Our other brother is a model,” he nonchalantly noted, causing Dassah to nearly spit out her drink.

“How does that work?”

“My family is obscenely talented. And good looking. Except me. I’m just the weird one.”

“Apparently.”

“What was I talking about?”

“Rima, was it?” said Dassah.

“Oh, her,” Sav went, the frowned. “Why was talking about her?”

“Blind dates, I think,” she said.

“Right…,” he scratched his chin. “Yeah. Things were okay for a while, I guess. Then she got fed up with me. Most of them did, to be honest. I either worked too much or spoke to them too little or some mix of the two. Things never quite worked out.”

Smirking, she asked, “Professors don’t work that much, do they? Were you so preoccupied?” She leaned in. “Did you cheat on them?”

He grunted, but instead of denying it, said, “I can’t say I didn’t. Especially in those last years.”

“Sathuren Sul!” exclaimed Dassah with a gasp. “What is this shocking revelation?”

But his expression was rather charming as he chuckled. “There was this girl,” he started, swirling his drink as he looked into it. “This one, beautiful girl…”

“Also valkyrian?” she asked, suddenly finding his private life fascinating.

“Mostly,” he shrugged. “Her mother was half human.”

“Look at you,” said she, picking at the remaining french fries on the plate in front of her. “What a womanizer. Did she have yellow hair too?”

Sav scoffed. “Brown,” he told her. “Actually, she looked a little bit like you.”

Scrunching her nose, Dassah went, “If you are about to tell me that I look like this lost love of yours, I’ll need another drink.”

“She was much cuter,” he told her, smirking. “But she was eleven last I saw her, so I’m not sure it’s all that fair to compare.”

Her jaw dropped as she struggled to get out a response. “Y-You like younger girls, is it?” she coughed.

“It’s not what you think,” he told her. “I wasn’t a professor on Yidar. I was… a doctor, of sorts. She wasn’t my girlfriend — though she liked to say she was — she was my patient.”

“A doctor?”

He nodded. “Technically I wasn’t a ‘doctor’, so much as I was a ‘healer’. I was studying valkyrian medicine at the time, but I was working in a rehabilitation and care unit as… well... As an Undying,” he told her.

“Does this story get even more ridiculous?” Dassah went. “Are you going to start throwing fireballs around now?”

Laughing, Sav shook his head. “It’s not like the game. The Undying are real, but they are healers and lore keepers, not magicians. Despite being a culture of science, the valkyrian quickly recognized that Gathori has a lot of valuable resources when it comes to medicine, and the Undying are the ones who know the resources the best.” He gave her a mischievous grin. “Thanks to that, their emigration packages are very generous.”

“You.. so you were an Undying before you went to Yidar?” she asked. “So, when you left your family…”

“Mhmm,” he went, his eyes closed. At this point, he seemed to give up on speaking English, and instead the the translator work over his native tongue. “I traveled a bit, but I reached the Mother Mountain all on my own. Being a sutak made things more interesting, but the Undying still took me in after a couple years on my own.” He laughed, “I was kind of like… their pet.” Blinking he said then, “I’m not really supposed to talk about it.”

She wanted to ask him more about it, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to know exactly, so she asked, “What about the girl?”

“Girl?”

“The one who looks like me?”

“Oh,” he said. He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not supposed to bring that up, either,” Sav told her. “How’d that happen?”

“We drank too much,” she muttered. “You gonna eat this last chicken leg? It’s getting a bit late.”

“Nah,” said he, shaking his head. “I should call Bahena to help us get home…”

Dassah went to smack her fist in her hand, but missed. “I forgot,” she said. “Wasn’t that something we were supposed to talk about? Getting on Bahena’s goodsie?”

“Ahhh,” he went, opening his arms wide. “This is it. My plan. Get drunk like friends then have her scrape us off the floor. Camradardeire-like. We can laugh about it later.”

“Pft,” laughed Dassah. “You think that’s gonna work like that?”

“Ehhh,” he went, followed by a very unconvincing: “Probably?”

“Maybe I should call her,” Dassah said, pulling her number up on her smart watch. Emboldened by the alcohol she clicked Bahena’s name before Sathuren managed to do it.

“Dassah?” Bahena answered rather quickly. “Is something wrong?”

Suddenly feeling very silly, Dassah laughed. “Bahena!” she said — probably too loud, as even Sav tried to shush her a little. “Bahena!” she whispered.

“...Yes?” came the answer.

“Your brother is drunk!” she giggled. “Your brother is drunk and I think so am I!”

“Dassah — Shhh,” Sav laughed next to her. “You’re gonna get us into even more trouble!”

“...Drunk?” said Bahena’s voice flatly. “My brother — and you? Your… drunk? With my brother? Sathuren?”

“I think he’s falling asleep,” Dassah whispered into her phone. “What happens when a person pokes a sleeping garule?”

Sav gave her an evil smirk. “Try it and find out,” he mumbled.

“Paaass-u!” she said, which obviously confused him. Dissolving into giggles, Dassah tried to cover her face.

Leaning over, Sav said, “Hena… We are at Benni’s… Can you come get us before he kicks us out, please?” Unable to stop laughing, Dassah hit the counter and tried to breathe. “I think I broke Dassah,” he laughed.

“Mother Mountain save us all — I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Both of you drink water. Lots of water,” Bahena hung up before Dassah had a chance to respond.

“Hena?” Sav said.

Pointing at the bowl of water on his side, she did her best to communicate that he should drink it. She downed her own before she managed to calm herself down. Benni gave them a refill and a couple of mints each. Gratefully, Dassah ate one of the mints right away, settling her stomach which had started feeling a bit queasy.

“She on her way?” asked Sav.

Dassah nodded and sipped at her water. “What happened to her?”

“To who? Hena?”

“The girl,” she said, looking over at him. “The one who I look like.”

Licking his lips, he downed another bowl of water. “She died,” he said.

Sobered by the revelation, Dassah froze. “Oh,” she went, awkwardly shifting in her seat. “I’m sorry.”

But Sav shook his head. “No, it’s not like that,” he said leaning forward. “She was… she was always going to die. She had a childhood illness that had no known cure. We all knew it. She knew it. I knew it. Her father knew it, as did her sister. We accepted it, to a degree. Most of us, anyway. And if we didn’t we lied about it. To each other. To ourselves. To all the children in that ward with the same illness.” He looked into his water bowl the same way he had looked into his drink.

“What did you do? Help her?”

“I… my job wasn’t to make her live longer,” he said. “My job was to make her as comfortable and happy as possible for the time she had left. But ‘comfortable’ and ‘happy’ are two very different concepts — and if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not so great at the making people happy part.”

She looked down at her hands. “I-I don’t know if that’s fair to say…”

“No, I really am not good at it,” Sav said, a bit more hostile than she felt he meant to, but it hurt to hear him talk like that all the same. “But I was worse before her. I’m a sutak and an Undying — an exile among exiles. I failed at my bedside manner test — twice.” He held up two fingers to add emphasis to that number as if it really meant something; Dassah didn’t even know it was something that one could be tested in. “On Gathori, no one expects the Undying to do anything aside from what they need to do to preserve life. ‘Happiness’, to them, is somewhat of an illusion. But on Yidar… and here…”

“I’m sure that anyone that you helped knew that you were happy to do so,” she said.

“Was I?” he asked, glaring rather coldly. Dassah tilted her head. “Who ever said I wanted to be an Undying?”

Gaping at him as she tried to wrap her head around who he was, she went, “I-I just… thought —”

Sathuren sighed. “I didn’t, but it was all I knew,” he told her. “I didn’t care at all, really, until I met that girl. And then I realized I would have given anything — anything — to be like an Undying of legend. Magical. Powerful. Able to work miracles. Able to cure her illness and the illness of all the others.” He chuckled, saying, “She didn’t just make be into a better person, she made me believe in things like I never had before. And then she died. I had lived alone almost my whole life till then, but I’d never felt alone before. Until that moment. I gave up being a doctor, then. I couldn’t continue, feeling as inadequate as I did. I went back to Gathori — back to Mother Mountain — and I learned everything I could about my people; about the Undying and their legends.”

“What did you find?” asked Dassah in a quiet voice.

He smiled at her. “Everything,” he said, then added, “Nothing. The truth. I couldn’t change the things that had already happened, even if I had managed to find an answer.”

“Did you? Find and answer?”

“Not one I liked,” said Sav. “So I came here. Where I am getting drunk with a girl who doesn’t like me and becoming even more of an expert at pissing off my sister.”

Pouting, Dassah grumbled, “I don’t hate you.”

“Really?” he asked with genuine shock.

“‘Hate’ is a very strong word,” she told him, crossing her arms. He laughed — then cried out as he fell off his chair. “Sav?” Dassah went in panic — then saw Bahena stepping on his tail.

“W-Why would you —?” he was going.

The bronze garule glared down at him with her hands on her hips. “Just what is the meaning of this?” she demanded to know.

Grinning a little, Dassah turned and sunk into her chair as if she could hide from the wrath behind her.