Killan Josta, World’s Saddest Boy, gets... a moment with a rabbit. Killan exists in @wildfaewhump‘s Iesin and Talvos universe!
CW: Referenced beatings/whipping, ill-treatment, debt-slavery, referenced animal death although none occurs during the piece
Tagging @quirkykayleetam who asked to be tagged for Killan, plus @finder-of-rings, @burtlederp, and @astrobly who asked to be tagged for ‘everything’
Killan couldn’t tell if the rabbit looked scared, or just… resigned. Either way, he knew the feeling.
The poor thing had stepped right into the little trap that Vanya had built for it, boiled and soaked wood to get it soft and pliable and then bent it into a kind of box that resembled all the bushes around it, especially when he’d covered it with some leaves and brush. A bit of bait right in the middle, and then you wait for something to creep in for a bite.
Then, crash! The little door he’d made fell down, trapping the rabbit inside. It had thrashed around for a while, but it was quiet now. Feet pulled close, chest puffed a little bit, ears flat against its head laying against its own back. Thin like wild rabbits are, but not too thin.
Vanya had a whole row, six or seven cages just like this one. The last round of traps had gotten them a fox - which had bitten Killan when he tried to feed it and good riddance to bad rubbish as far as he was concerned, foxes were nothing but bad luck anyway - and three rabbits. The other traps had come up empty, but Beron and Ren had brought down three deer between them in the time they’d spent in these woods, caught two river-eaters, plus six of what Beron called ‘fur-rats’ that made poor meat but their fur meant something enough to the rich that they could eat for a week (well, everyone else could) on a single sale.
Plus, Tinch had caught a real living hawk with a reddish tail and a mean beak, and meant to teach it to fetch. Their haul to bring into town would be a good one.
Ren would sell the hides and fur separate from the meat, he claimed to know the tanner in the next town, could get a good price for them. Fur-rats made poor meat but they knew well enough that Killan would eat anything he was given, too hungry to care what it tasted like at the end of the day, so they’d smoked and dried that, too, to pack away with some fat and crushed-up berries and seeds.
He was chewing idly on a bit of the foul-tasting nastiness - the kind made from deer meat was good, this tasted like mud fed on poison - while he fed the rabbits in their cages and found his gaze caught by the last one.
It had big liquidy eyes, one on either side of its head, so it could only really look at him with one or the other.
Prey eyes, Beron called them. He’d sat Killan down once and shown him that the foxes had eyes both to the front, like people do - and the rabbits had one on either side. Hunters like us, like wolves - we see to the front, because we focus on what we’re going to bring down. Prey like that has to see every which way so they see us coming.
Might be nice to have an eye on either side. Killan might get fewer surprises, then.
Its fur was a kind of grayish-brownish-reddish mix, the exact shade of a sun-dappled grassy meadow. It could use those hind legs to run and jump and hide, faster than Killan could ever run. Its little nose twitched in his direction and he wrinkled his nose back at it, grinning around the food in his mouth. At least they mixed berries in - now and then a bite was nothing but sweet. It made the rest of the bitterness easier to handle.
“What do I smell like, bun-bun? Huh?” The rabbit didn’t answer, of course, but Killan watched with surprise as it shifted slightly closer to him, an oddly thoughtful look on its fuzzy little face. “Do I smell like prey, too? Or like wolves? I’m not like them, I promise.”
The rabbit’s nose kept twitching, and Killan leaned in closer, moving down into a crouch so he was eye-level with the cage where it sat stacked on top of another one. Somewhere behind him, the men who owned his life were laughing and joking as they set up their camp for the night, for once giving Killan a little rest instead of making him do it all himself.
Ren had felt bad about the fox bite, currently hidden under bandages wrapped around Killan’s left wrist. I’m not a cruel man, Matti, Ren had said, and Killan hadn’t argued with him. Hadn’t pointed at the scars on his back and his legs and his front, or the little scar on his head from the first week. He could hide that one with his hair, mostly.
He hadn’t even mentioned how cruel it was to take someone’s name away, so almost three years on he had to remind himself of what his name was every single day, had to wake up whispering I’m Killan Josta, I’m Killan Josta, I’m Killan Josta as he got more and more afraid he’d become Matthias, not just answer to it.
He’d only nodded, and tried not to scratch at the itches under the bandage, and Ren had given him the night off, then. Didn’t even have to cook, it was Beron chopping away with his big heavy knife, cleaving meat from bone to toss into the stew. He would’ve felt nice about that if it didn’t mean Killan probably wouldn’t get to eat tonight.
Killan shifted, blocking the rabbit’s view of the cooking-fire, not that it mattered all that much if it saw what had happened to another rabbit it probably never knew. Who even knew if a rabbit could even see so far?
It shifted closer then. And closer again.
They were so close Killan’s eyes crossed a little trying to look at it. He stuck a finger into the trap and it held perfectly still as he traced a fingertip over the fine soft fur at the top of its head, the silken feeling of its long flat ears. He expected it to start shivering - he’d seen shaky little scared rabbits right before their necks were wrung.
This one didn’t shake. It looked at him calmly, like it knew him. It looked at him like, hello, you belong out there with us, not here with them.
Killan bit down on his lower lip, then winced as that pressed on a busted spot from the last thing he’d messed up. “I wish I was out there with you,” he whispered, leaning in close. “I wish I was in the woods somewhere. I wish I could go destroy all their traps instead of helping build them. I promise.”
“Wish?”
Killan stiffened, looking up and blinking. “What?”
The others were busy, no one even heard Killan speak, and none of them had heard it - a hissing sibilant whisper-sound, that seemed to be as much inside his mind as outside it. He turned to look over his shoulder, seeing nothing around their little campsite but the trees, looming eerily overhead at the sun went down.
“Make wish.”
Killan slowly turned back to stare at the rabbit, which held itself so perfectly still under Killan’s petting fingertips. He leaned forward, as close as he could get, until his forehead rubbed up against the twisted wood. The rabbit leaned slowly forward too, and Killan caught his breath as its soft, cool nose brushed, with little twitches, against his own.
“Pretty,” The voice said. “Pretty human boy.”
Killan had been living for years with Beron’s stories of nature magic and the dangers of the mountains and the monsters who lived there. He’d been raised on his own mam’s stories of wild women who could change shape and sneak into bad childrens’ houses and steal them from their beds. But he was grown now, or as good as, and he had no fear of those stories.
Right?
“Are you the one talking to me?” Killan whispered to the rabbit, which nudged forward against him again with its little twitching nose. Killan held his breath as the rabbit pushed its head up into his two fingers pressed to its soft ears, which no wild rabbit had ever done that he knew of. “Do you want me to make a wish?”
“Make wish, pretty human.”
Killan smiled - small so the others wouldn’t see, but there all the same. He leaned in as close as he could get, lost in the way the rabbit looked at him so calmly, so sure of itself even though it was trapped in a cage, to have its neck wrung to make a good dinner soon enough, just like the other one that Beron was tossing into the stew while singing to himself, just a dozen or so feet away.
“I wish that you would be free,” Killan said, as low as he could speak and still be audible. “You don’t deserve to be soup.”
The rabbit didn’t speak to him again, but it did nuzzle up against him once more, to Killan’s delight.
Then Beron yelled at him to stop being lazy and do some damn work for once in his life, and Killan pushed himself up on aching legs to stumble over and help Beron put together the bit of ground-up dried treenuts and water and salt for the dumplings to cook on top of the soup.
They’d given him the day off work, but if you don’t work you don’t eat, so Killan ate the bit of treenut-bread they’d given him out of mercy and watched them with their bowls of rabbit stew jealously from his bedroll, stomach growling, and determined himself to work even harder to get more food tomorrow.
He was so hungry it took forever to get to sleep, the fire banked and Ren and Vanya on first watch, and he only got a couple of hours before it was his turn to sit up with Beron, who was in a foul mood. Bad dreams, he said.
Killan mostly didn’t dream any longer - sleep was too precious to waste on dreaming.
Killan took his ill-tempered ‘jokes’ in silence and thanked him with real gratitude when Beron got tired of that fucking kicked-dog look like we don’t take better care of you than a lazy arse deserves and gave him more of the fur-rat and berry bars to eat.
Killan made it through half of the bar and then looked up, into the dark woods that pressed close around them. The horses were restless tonight, ears flat against their heads and shifting until their ropes were pulled tight from the trees, but they never liked the woods much so that wasn’t unusual.
The animals in their cages were restless, too, shivery little rabbits and and the fur rats clawing at the edges of their cages.
Killan checked on his favorite rabbit - it was perfectly still, but alert, head head and neck stretched, looking away from Killan entirely. When he turned around to follow the direction of its gaze, he could have sworn he could the glint of yellow eyes watching him in the dark.
He should have been afraid, but he wasn’t.
Instead, Killan stood up, walked to the edge of what little light the fire still gave off, and set the uneaten half of the bar down. A gift for-... for the woods, maybe, they’d taken better care of him than any person ever did, anyway.
His watch ended and Killan fell asleep more quickly with the heavy weight of at least some food in his stomach. He curled in his bedroll as small as he could make himself, and he did not dream.
When he woke up the next day, to Beron’s shouting and Ren kicking him awake gasping for air and scrambling to stand, one of the cages had been busted open. Only one cage, all the others still held the trapped animals shaking and shivering. But Killan’s favorite, the rabbit that had kissed him the day before and been so still, was gone.
So was the half-bar of food he’d left at the edge of the camp.
Killan’s eyes were wide as saucers as he stared at the wood twisted back out of shape or broken, somehow done in silence while they slept, never waking them at all.
He could have sworn he heard a kind of laughter whispering through the trees above his head.
