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track for now

[eliza]

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darcy knew sickness well enough. growing up on the tropical paradise she'd called home all her life, the young woman was familiar with most illnesses. people would wash ashore, dehydrated and half drowned, and she'd watch her aunt's, her grandmother, treat a plethora of complications. pneumonia, broken bones, skin bunt and blistered. every now and then, someone would find themselves at their shores sick, choking up mucus and blood, their skin hot as the sun in the black of night. when men like this turned up, her family would treat them, but the sickness usually contaminated the whole island, hardly any of their immune systems trained to fight each particular strain.

she'd been inside of her room, the whole place unfamiliar but starting to become some sort of normal, when she'd deduced that she needed to stretch her legs. so she dog eared the page in her book, fixed her hair in the mirror, giving a few vain fluffs to the ginger curls. she hadn't anyone to impress, but it was an action trained into her from decades of watching her mother. all the women on the island were either celibate, or quite fancied other women - except for her mother. vivienne took any chance she'd had to seduce any man who so happened to show up on their shores, and though darcy was far less scandalous, the freckled featured young woman had picked up far too many habits from her mother.

shrugging on her coat as she slipped out of her room, she wasn't really sure where she was going - she didn't have the proper shoes on to go outside, and there wasn't a whole lot to do without going outside. just a walk, darc, she told herself with an eye roll, though stopped on her loop around the entrance when her eyes settled on andor. lips pressing into a baffled frown, she'd warily force the door open, arms crossing against the cold, and peer down at him.

"andor, right?" it was a rhetorical question. "what are you doing out here-" she took in his... well, everything, and felt her brows furrow, hearing her mother chastising her in the back of her mind. "don't make that face, darcy, you're gonna get wrinkles." she didn't particularly care about wrinkles. "you're sick, you should be in bed right now, not spreading it around. everything you touch, you contaminate." was she really scolding him? whether it was her place or not, her entire life she'd seen the women she knew scold every man she'd ever met for how they cared for their health. it was instinctual.

[ajdawny]

[align=center][div style="width: 450px; min-height: 25px; border-left: #7887AB 4px double;"][div style="width: 440px; height: auto; font-size: 14px; line-height: 101%; text-align: justify; font-family: times"]Andor was sitting on the front steps of the lodge watching the snow drift down lazily. It was a welcome change from the whiteout weather that they had received just that night. The bearded man was wrapped in many layers, and bundled up in two blankets, and still he was cold. Yet he couldn't stop himself from coming outside. He had work to do. He'd taken care of the animals, and had been on his way to the greenhouse to tend to the plants when he suddenly felt dizzy and weak. And this was why he could be found sitting on the steps leading up to the main entrance of the lodge. It was too much work to climb them, it was too much work to go to the greenhouse, he'd probably die here.

His nose was raw from the constant blowing of it, his cheeks flushed and red from his fever, and his lungs screaming from the non-stop hacking cough which etched away at his chest, eroding away any protective layers he had. He coughed again, the fit lasting for a few minutes as he tried to stop it from happening. Shit, he was sick, he needed rest, but the lodge wasn't going to take care of itself. He'd rested enough, he had been feeling decently well, so he had done work, but now he couldn't even get into the damn lodge. Andor sighed and coughed a few times from the exhale of air.

If not him, then who? If not now, then when? And if not here... then where? Andor asked himself, he was an adult, he could take care of himself, he WOULD take care of himself and the group that had been his home for months now.