Rin was rudely awoken from a feverish nap by the fact that the window came splintering inward. She turned over and propped herself up on one elbow to survey the -
Kody sat up from a coughing fit, rushing to her bedside to cling to her - "You're alive you're alive you're alive."
She sniffled and pushed his hands away with a tentacle. "The note I left said not to disturb me. Do you not have reading comprehension?"
"You disappeared for four days and -" Kody looked at the bookshelf that had been pushed across the doorway and coughed again and again and gasped and continued - "you barricaded yourself in and you didn't answer any knocks and your curtains were drawn and I thought you -"
She cleared her throat and drank from the now decidedly cold cup of tea she left on the bedside. "I'm not that dumb. I set up everything for myself. I have tea and honey and a kettle, I have crackers and applesauce, I have handkerchiefs and blankets, I'm fine." Rin stated it with the kind of coldness she usually reserved for talking to belligerent nobility, the effect only slightly lessened by the bags under her eyes and the coughing she was clearly trying to stifle. "Now if you don't mind, I would like to go back to resting."
Rin laid back down and pulled the covers over her head, fully intending to ignore -
"People -" Kody was struggling to get his words out past the coughing and the crying - "leave that kind - of note - when they - decide to die."
Rin sat bolt upright.
Kody was looking up at her from where he sat on the floor in tears, looking so very pathetic and exhausted and he was still sick, wasn't he?
She had made things worse for everyone. They thought they'd lost her. Like her - she didn't want to think about it. There were tears in her eyes even when she squeezed them shut and she fell to the ground next to Kody and hugged him and sobbed.
"You look awful," Kody said.
"I could say the same for you." Rin pulled away from him gently and pointed towards a soft armchair near the fire. "Sit down, I'll make you something to drink."
As Kody climbed up into it and settled down to watch, she turned around and walked over to the fire, pouring water into a kettle and setting it over the coals. It took a careful eye to realize just how much Rin was leaning on her tentacles to be able to stay upright, but Kody knew her long enough that he knew this wasn't her normal gait.
"You look exhausted," he said, sniffling. "At least sit down while it boils."
She sat down right there next to the fire, berating herself all the while about how stupid she had been and how much pointless suffering -
"Please don't beat yourself up," Kody said, as gently as he could. "You didn't realize."
"I could have, I know already what that kind of note looks like, I saw it before when my mother -" She stopped herself with a false cough that turned into several real ones.
He'd slipped down to sit next to her. "I'm so sorry," he murmured.
They all already knew what had happened to her parents. But she hadn't meant to say anything about it.
The two of them sat next to each other for a long, long time.
The kettle whistled.
She didn't bother getting up. She slipped a few tentacles over to the nearby table she'd been using, brought all the tea things down to the floor, and assembled the tea and the teapot and the cups to brew right there where they sat. It was the fourth pot she was brewing of the same leaves, but she couldn't be bothered to add any more, and this tea was meant to be steeped more than once anyway.
They sat there and they drank tea in silence and they were both so, so tired but then -
Kody suddenly looked up at the door. "I need to let them know you're okay."
She eyed the bookcase at the door and cursed her past self. "Neither of us are in any state to be moving that thing right now."
"I don't want to get up," Kody said. "Or else I'd have jumped back out the window already."
"We can throw something else out the window," Rin said, looking over at her writing-desk. She brought a paper and a quill to herself and wrote about how she was so sorry to worry them, and that she and Kody were fine but very tired. She flapped it in the air several times to dry the ink more quickly, then wrapped the note around a book and tied it in place. Then she threw it out the window.
Thankfully, Gaster didn't also climb through the window to help move the bookcase until a good six hours later.
