“You alright, Kayen?” Kohra smiled as he let himself in, throwing his keys and wallet into a nearby bowl. Ever since the whole “being captured” thing, none of them had been particularly right. Kayen in particular had been taking it all rather badly. In fact, he had basically been living out of one of Phovos’s spare bedrooms. Today was the first in a while that Kohra had seen Kayen in the living room.
“Not really.” Kayen was fiddling with the communicator on his wristband. Kohra was used to carrying a mobile phone and things like that, to the point that he’d forgotten that a Skyavok’s wristband was basically the same thing, just attached to the wrist rather than held in the hand.
“You want to talk about it?” Kohra flung himself on the sofa opposite Kayen. The television screen to his left was on, but muted. Some sort of fancy light effect was playing on it.
“Uh…” Kayen hesitated at first. He was tapping on a virtual keyboard, writing a message to someone. He sent it, then sighed. “I don’t know.”
Kohra picked himself up off the sofa and headed into the small secondary kitchen. Despite having eaten a lot of ice cream over the last few days, he decided he wanted some more, and he knew that Phovos had some unopened low sugar strawberry sorbet in the freezer. “You do or you don’t want to talk? Or is it something awkward that you can’t talk about?”
The little Skyavok hesitated some more, then finally muttered something.
“I didn’t catch that, what did you say?”
“I said… uh…”
“You can tell me.”
“Do you ever feel like we’re being celebrated as heroes even though we didn’t really do anything? That all of this is a little undeserving of us?”
Kohra shrugged. There were no clean bowls, so he quickly washed a couple, as well as some spoons, then happily put himself some ice cream. “Okay.. before I answer, do you want some ice cream?”
“No thanks…” Kayen tutted.
Happy with his double serving of icy sweetness, Kohra headed back to the sofa opposite Kayen and sat down. “So you think we don’t deserve praise?”
“Yeah. I don’t feel we deserve it. Or even that we did anything.”
“Well…” Kohra wasn’t quite sure how to answer. “We kinda did. We were responsible for about a hundred imprisoned beings, mostly Temthans and Ksithans, saved from having their organs sucked out by the Goddess of Life.”
“You mean…”
“No I mean WE did. If you guys hadn’t found each other then freed me and all that…” Kohra rubbed his eyes, then sighed. “I get what you mean. It feels weird. Like it’s all a blur. I find myself wondering if it all actually happened. But there’s a ton of beings out there who wouldn’t be out there if we had done nothing.”
“What about all the other stuff though? I can’t even begin to explain that to my dad, I don’t even know how to talk about it myself!”
Kayen expected Kohra to not understand, but Kohra was nodding in agreement.
“The whole… death thing, I really do get it. I think…” Kohra paused. “I think we need to talk about that together. The four of us. But we also need to speak to others who have had rough experiences with gods.”
“Like who?” Kayen asked.
“Like the Dessaron!” Kohra smiled. “We should have a meeting with them. Especially Tenuk. He kinda really wants to meet you and Timik.”
Kayen shrugged. “I guess that would help.”
“Trust me, it will.”
“How do you know?”
Kohra smiled again as he tucked into his ice cream. “Because it already helped me.”