4. Leave me alone.
Lymle commented that the cloak he wore over his shoulder looked bad on him. Faize chuckled at this and said that it was more reason for him to wear it. However, Lymle didn’t seem to take it as amusedly as he did and simply gave him the silent treatment that she was prone to giving him whenever she was displeased with him. Faize let out a sigh. He wasn’t sure what the Lemurisan was thinking, and her expression was always unfathomable, almost doll-like without any emotional gradients whatsoever upon its landscape. Faize wasn’t sure why Lymle was acting colder to him than usual. She was always difficult towards him, in her child-like ways, though Faize supposed that it couldn’t be helped. Still, he hoped to make amends with the young girl, especially since they needed their camaraderie to be in high spirits, now more than ever. None of the Calnus members could afford to fall apart, now.
Faize walked the Calnus while following Lymle, who appeared to be drawing all over the ship with more fervor than before. He thought about scolding her for drawing on the ship, though decided against it. He didn’t want to encourage more ill feelings towards himself that way. So he simply watched Lymle while she did her own thing, though she seemed very rigid whenever she noticed that Faize was following her. She gave no sign of acknowledgment towards him, simply drawing symbols on the ship in her unhurried way, as though she had all the time in the world. Faize cleared his throat, and Lymle acknowledged this gesture with a slight furrow of her brow as she drew another symbol on the ship.
“Dumb Faize,” Lymle finally said after a long while of Faize watching her draw on the ship. “Go away. Leave me alone.”
“I won’t do such a thing,” Faize said, continuing to watch Lymle draw on the ship. “Lymle, you’ve been acting distant towards me ever since I’ve received this cloak. Is there any reason why that is?”
“I don’t care anymore, ‘kay?” Lymle said though the furrow in her brow indicated that this wasn’t so.
She turned her back on him, trying to hum to herself to block out any conversational noise that Faize would make towards her. The pointed ignoring of him was starting to annoy Faize, and Faize said, while barely holding onto his patience with the girl, said, “Look, I want to make things right between us. We need to work together as a team, and if you’re acting this way towards me, then well, our coordination is going to suffer for it. Do you want that to happen? Do you want our team to fail because we haven’t smoothed out our squabbles with one another?”
Lymle paused for a moment, and Faize thought that he might have gotten through to her. Her expression still remained rather doll-like, though she looked towards Faize with honey-brown eyes and seemed to appraise him. Faize wondered what she could possibly be searching for in his demeanor, his face, his eyes.
“You care about her,” Lymle said after a long while. “I don’t like talking about it, ‘kay?”
Faize suddenly got a realization burrowing into his brain, and he suspected that it might have been this, but he didn’t know it until now. Lymle was jealous of his attentions towards the bunny girl, wasn’t she?
“I do care about her,” Faize said, though he reached a hand gently patted the Lemurisan on the head. “But I care about you too, Lymle. Nothing will change that.”
Something in her gaze flickered, though Faize couldn’t tell what kind of emotion she expressed in her porcelain doll face. “Do you feel that I’ve been ignoring you all this time, Lymle?”
Lymle hugged her wand close to her chest, before she gave a nod, causing her pigtails to sway forward with the movement of her head. “It’s stupid, but I don’t like the bunny girl. I don’t like…” she scrunched up her face, searching for the right words to say. “How she looks at Faize. I don’t like it, ‘kay?”
“Oh Lymle,” Faize said, almost laughing at the absurdity of the situation. It was simply a matter of Lymle getting a little jealous of the bunny girl, is all. “You’re a silly little girl, you know that? There’s nothing to worry about. As long as we’re together, you’re…you’re the only one for me.”
The glow in Lymle’s eyes seemed to brighten at this, and Lymle stood on her tiptoes to face Faize. As he knelt down to her level, she bumped her head against his. The impact of her head crashing against his hurt a bit, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle.
“What was that for, Lymle?” Faize said while rubbing his head a little dazedly.
“For being a big dummy,” Lymle said simply, though Faize thought that he caught a blush on her cheeks before she turned away from him. He could live with that, he supposed. At least he had been forgiven.
