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"Did you know," Wrld says, picking his way over pit of mud and shallow water in order to not sink into the the forest floor, "that humans have an uncanny valley reaction to things that look human, but aren't?"
Boffy, already sensing where his tangent is going, chooses to stay silent. Let the train run its course, as they say. At least Wrld isn't complaining this time.
"That means that sometime in our past, we had reason to fear, like, some kind of animal or something that mimicked us, right? Like enough that it's instinctual. Do you think we're gonna see one of them?"
A pause.
"Wrld," Boffy says patiently, "You're so fucking stupid."
"Hey! What?"
"Think about it," He coaxes, only hobbling a little bit as he follows Wrld's back, eyes on the arrows hooked into a strip of cloth wrapped belt-style around his shirt bouncing with the movement of his legs, over branches and under trees. Absently, he checks the number every so often, just in case one falls out. "What looks human, but isn't? What do we actually have definitive reason to fear?"
"Definitive," Wrld mocks, turning his head just so Boffy can see his eyes roll. Boffy sticks his tongue out at him.
"Corpses. The answer is corpses, Wrld. Not some kind of prehistoric shapeshifter that, like, ate our babies."
"But corpses are human."
"Shut the fuck up."
"Why do we have definitive proof that we should fear corpses, but not shapeshifters?"
They've come up on a gulley while talking and in front of him Wrld hops over a dead deerlike, sort of capybara-looking animal. It's been dead for a while; it's half-in a puddle, bloated, bits of fat skimming the water's surface and bone shining underneath, not yet given in to algae. Boffy goes around it, grimacing at the smell, eyes catching on the fat, iridescent flies that buzz around it. He snaps one out of the air, catches it between his teeth and chews it before deigning to answer.
"Think about the plague. Like, the black plague. You could still get that from dead bodies, and the plague's been around for, like, hundreds of millions of years. There's this whole theory that a plague lead to the neolithic decline."
"I don't know what that is."
"Sudden drop in the amount of prehistoric humans. I'd say look it up, but..." He shrugs, fiddling with a knife in his belt. A shiv, really. It's just a sharp rock with cloth around it so he doesn't stab himself. "Anyways, all of the uncanny valley symptoms are, like, exactly describing a corpse. Pale skin, glassy eyes, unnaturally wide mouths... that's just a dead person who's been dead for a while. Shapeshifter my ass."
"You're a shapeshifter." Wrld points out.
"Yeah, and you don't have an instinctive fear of me." Boffy doesn't mention that it's because he's way better at looking human than a corpse is.
They fall silent after that, Wrld in annoyance and Boffy with relief that Wrld's stopped pressing it. They're still stuck walking together, so inevitably the boredom will get the better of them and they both know the silence won't last long; granted, though, it's only a short journey, relative to the others that they'd taken before Boffy's leg had gotten all mangled. Now he can't really hobble very far, though he's working up to it and he's got a cane made out of a long stick, so they've both just resigned themselves to searching closer to their mountain for food and material.
A while back, Boffy had been exploring and had found a small clearing a short ways away with a bunch of fiddleheads pocked into the ground, barely shoots of tiny green all scattered across the soil. It had been cooler then, and now it's sweltering; nearly seven months, give or take concerning their homemade calendar's iffy reports, have passed since his injury, and he's just now returning. Neither of them are sure how long ferns take to grow but fiddleheads are good and pretty damn filling if you cook them right, so both of them have their fingers crossed for a dash of luck and a bag carried on Boffy's back for retrieval, if there are any.
The heat, though, has bore down on them all through the walk. It had stopped raining just before they'd stepped out in the morning, so the temperature is only amplified by the oppressive humidity, and the ground smells acrid with petrichor that has sweat rolling down Wrld's back and soaking into his clothing. Boffy doesn't sweat, but he still shudders with sympathy.
He pokes a log across their trail with his walking stick, winces when something chitters angrily from inside of it and gestures for Wrld to scoot away from it a little.
For a few months there, neither of them had thought Boffy was going to survive.
It had gotten infected, the stab wound. Because obviously. Boffy's pretty sure that Wrld washing his hands in the parasite-infested water before sticking them in him wouldn't have saved him any pain, but he'd still needled at him about it while the fever ate him alive. He'd gotten so hot, at a point, that his skin had melted and started dripping off where it met the bed, at the joints, really anywhere.
Wrld had said, afterwards, that it was the worst he'd seen Boffy look. At its peak his eyes had crusted shut; he'd been unresponsive for a few days, dehydrated, throwing up anything. Water, food, potions; none of it stayed down. He wouldn't talk, wouldn't move, wouldn't do anything but lay there as Wrld was forced to forage and work, making weapons and food and clothing. Once he got a little better he'd begun muttering and tossing deliriously; at one point, he'd hallucinated Wrld sitting on a lawn chair and sipping a mimosa from a frosted glass, laughing at him melting into the straw mattress.
Slowly, though, horribly and gratingly, he'd gotten better. A crazy immune system, he guesses. Wrld, with the same injury and infection, would almost certainly have died.
Boffy veers around a suspicious-looking bush and looks up at the sky, frowns. It's nearly midday and they've still got a little ways to go, but more pressingly his leg's killing him.
"Yo, I need a break. Can we stop here for a sec?"
"Seriously, right by the dead deer?"
"It's not right by the dead deer. We've walked, like, five minutes since the dead deer."
"Fine, whatever."
He sits down on another fallen log. This might be the period where there wasn't anything that could decompose wood, but he isn't entirely certain; the whole world is a weird blend of time periods. Animals that shouldn't exist yet do. Animals that had never breathed at the same time graze at the same watering hole. Trees sprout in the forests, kinds he's seen before, but vegetables he's used to eating are naught to be found. The log he's sitting on might decompose in a few months, or it might sink to the ground and get buried and live on for a million more years. He pats it with his hand. A million years seems like a long time to be around.
Wrld sits, uncaringly, on the ground in front of him. It's kind of grassy, but mostly mud. They're so dirty it doesn't matter anyways.
"How bad is it? Because I can't carry you there and then back," Wrld asks, gesturing at his leg. They'd found out after the fact that the triceratops had basically pulverised a part of his femur bone with the impact, not to mention the part where it had actually stabbed him; they couldn't set it properly without seeing it, so Wrld had tied his leg to the straightest stick he could find and prayed it worked. It kind of did, but whenever it rained or he used it too long it would hurt, burning and white.
"Not that bad. Just an ache."
"You can get there, at least?" Wrld asks, and Boffy nods.
They continue on after Boffy's leg stops shaking every time he puts weight on it, which doesn't take all that long. As they navigate the forest he leans heavily on his cane; Wrld will literally have to leave him if he can't walk further, so he's got to conserve energy somehow.
"Up there," He directs after a while.
"Do you see any?"
"Mm." It's hard to tell, considering baby ferns aren't all that tall. Maybe? The clearing's definitely green.
When they get there, they discover that there are, in fact, fiddleheads. Like, billions of them. Wrld actually, genuinely starts tearing up at the amount of food in front of him, and Boffy wants so badly to lay down and make fiddlehead snow angels, but he's worried with his leg that if he gets down he might not be able to get up again, so he settles for whooping quietly and pulling out his bag to begin immediate collection.
They don't take them all. For one, they have to be eaten relatively quickly; for two, leaving some there will keep them growing, which means more food, which is very good. Wrld uses his shiv and fills the bag up halfway, shuffling it over his shoulder to free Boffy of some of the pressure.
"What can we make with these?" Boffy asks once they're a safe distance away. Wrld hums.
"Salads. Um, soups, I think, and you can fry them. Maybe a stir fry, with those lettuce-looking things we found?"
"Stir fry sounds good."
In their house on the mountain, Boffy thinks that Wrld has changed somehow. Like the fever had taken something out of him, too; like the triceratops had taken more than the use of his leg with it when it left. He's harsher, now. Less keen on joking. He snaps easier, gets angry over little things, finds any excuse to needle Boffy over some tiny slip or another. He's still Wrld, and they still talk just fine, but he's different sometimes. Maybe it was in response to his weakness that Wrld was forced to get meaner, tougher, but Boffy finds with the shiv in his hand to chop fiddleheads that he doesn't like it.
The light from their torches flickers gently with the wind, throwing shadow over Wrld's hands as he stirs their pot, a stone bowl over a fire he'd scrubbed raw to make sure they weren't eating dirt. Boffy looks at him over the cutting board, leg propped up on Wrld's knee-- Wrld had told him to, to stop the swelling.
He wants, more than anything. Wants to be functional. Wants to be able to move around, to walk, to forage. Wants to have never gotten hurt in the first place. It has to be stressful-- had to be stressful, having all of the pressure on him, the need to feed and heal and support when Boffy had been sick. And now Boffy isn't even able to stand for a long time, isn't even able to run, with all of Wrld's effort? It just... it feels disrespectful, almost. He finds that he can't blame Wrld for being snappy, when everything he did to save him still wasn't enough.
Wrld takes the chopping board out from under him and dumps the half-chopped fiddleheads into the pot, watching the liquid in it bubble. He'd gone for a simple soup; bone broth, meat, fiddleheads. Not very tasty, but filling enough. Both of them have lost weight here, but Wrld's got it worse; Boffy can see each bone in his wrist as he rummages for spoons, gives Boffy one.
"Thanks for cooking, dude," Boffy says before he takes a bite.
Wrld shrugs a little bit, chewing already. Swallows, hums. "'Course. If not me, who else?"
"I can cook!"
"Don't even fool yourself, dude. You couldn't even cook instant noodles, back when... you know. In the future."
"I might have to learn, though," Boffy pokes a chunk of meat with his spoon, breaks it into a smaller piece. His words linger. Wrld is kind of looking at him, kind of not, lips tight. "Like, if my leg gets worse then I can just... stay at home all day. Cook, clean, sew. You know, the works."
"What, like a housewife?"
"Yeah. I'll wear a dress and everything."
"Oh, I'd like to see that."
They eat the rest of the soup in silence, and Boffy can say for once that he's pleasantly full. He'd kept pushing over bits of meat and fiddlehead into Wrld's side of the bowl, not that he thinks Wrld had noticed, but even then it was a pretty hearty meal.
He washes the pot as Wrld gets ready for bed, carries it all the way down the mountain on his back and then scrubs it in the pool at the bottom, water frigid on his numbing fingers. Climbing the ladder back up is annoying when he can't feel his hands, but he manages, and he's only shivering a little when he puts the pot into their wooden dish-box (effectively a crate) for storage.
His leg is easily ignorable, but even then he avoids putting pressure on it as best as possible. No cane he can use on a ladder.
Methodically, he checks all of the windows and doors, extinguishes the torches one-by-one, changes into his nightgown-- a tunic, basically, just without sleeves because he was lazy making it. Wrld's already in bed whenever Boffy pushes back the covers, beanie off, hair matted along his makeshift pillow. He hisses at the cold and rolls over to glare at Boffy, who just shrugs as he climbs in, snuggles down and sighs at the warmth of body-heat already trapped beneath the blanket.
Neither of them say anything as the world quiets down around them. Wrld shuffles, once or twice, and Boffy rolls over in an attempt to fix the odd position his knee is in, but returns to his back when it doesn't help. Wrld's hand finds his wrist at some point; just keeping pressure. It's something that Boffy has vague memories of him doing when he was delirious: sprawled on the sheets, Wrld beside him, curled inwards but not too close with two fingers on his wrist, even in sleep. Checking his pulse. Checking to make sure he's still alive when he wakes up.
He supposes it's for reassurance, now, so he lets it be when it happens. It's kind of like a reminder that Wrld still cares.