Like Father, Like Daughter

Chapter 3 : Retail Therapy

Chapter 3 : Retail Therapy

Marco opened his eyes to find his arms wrapped around Hekapoo. It was a rather pleasant-though not entirely unexpected-way to wake up. He slowly unwrapped his arms from Hekapoo, careful to not wake her up. As he sat up next to her, he reflected upon how he'd ended up here like this with Hekapoo.

His trial had been going on for several years now, and despite the purpose of the trial being to keep him from getting close to her, Hekapoo would sometimes come right to him.

In the very beginning, all those many years ago, she would offer to make him a portal to take him back home from time to time, and every time, he refused. How could he not? How could he even begin to trust that it would really lead him back home, that he wasn't simply being set for disappointment? Back then, he never wanted to give into her temptations until his mission was complete, not until he had a pair of scissors whose user he could actually trust to take him home. Eventually, after seeing enough the clear determination in his eyes to blow out her flame and finish their chase, she stopped making her offer to him.

Afterwards, her taunts and her words had started to slow down. At some point, she'd just keep popping up, quietly like a specter, at the edges of his vision, always out of his reach but not his sight. She never spoke a word when she did appear. He never was sure just why she kept doing it, but he had his suspicions that she was just making sure whether or not he was still alive, as she most frequently appeared right after he had just narrowly avoided certain death for the umpteenth time.

Marco was sure she had her ways to keep track of him either way, but he appreciated that she personally came to check up on him from time to time. Sometimes, she even brought a few supplies like tools and medicines for him when he had run out of things to survive off of, or when he was teetering on the brink of death. She never did give him any more than necessary, and she often just dropped them off without a word, but he stopped looking the gift-horse in the mouth after the sixth-seventh?-time they saved his life.

From what Marco could guess, Hekapoo didn't want him to just drop dead on her. At first, he would have prefered not to take the items, but he was not stupid enough to believe that they wouldn't come into handy. He was still inexperienced and unskilled in the art of surviving in the wild, and without them he might have died. For that, he was grateful for the help.

Eventually, Hekapoo started calling these kind of events 'timeouts.' The rules were fairly simple; he was not to try and blow out her flame, and in turn, things would be a bit easier for him during these breaks. She made sure to state when these events started and stopped right off the bat, as she claimed she didn't trust Marco to figure it out on his own if she didn't spell it out for him.

After the first couple of times he had been caught unprepared for these timeouts and mistakenly tried to fight her off when she appeared, Hekapoo warned Marco that she'd signal him with a signal flare in the air before she'd appear to him.

As Marco slowly adapted to his new environment, these breaks started to occur less and less frequently, to the point where he thought that they were over. As a result, it came as a surprise to him when one of her bright flares flew out from over the horizon one day. This was especially unusual since he wasn't even in danger of dying and wasn't in need of anything when she signaled to him.

When she approached him, he knew that this timeout would be quite different than the ones before. She had come to talk, to ask him a question. No games, no tricks, no supplies, thatwas all she had come for this time.