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bouncingkadachi · 2 years ago

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Silvered in the Moonlight

Summary: Kyle's spoiling for a fight, except they’ve already fought. He’s said his piece already. He’s said more than his fair share of his piece, truth be told, but then so had Astrea, and look where it got them. He should let it go now.

Too bad he was categorically awful at letting things go.

Word Count: 4,676

Note(s): that night flying scene from HTTYD but make it MonHun. Set post-game with gratuitous descriptions of Pomore Gardens. Getting kidnapped by a Rathalos and then accidentally unlocking a heart-to-heart.

Also available on AO3!

Dinner is a tense and angry affair.

It’s a shame, really. There’s a bubbling pot of tomato soup hanging over the fire, sweet and fragrant from the fatty tomatoes used. There’s fish, skewered and set to roasting in a ring around the flames with a generous sprinkling of salt, until the skin turns crispy and the flesh flakes off with minimal resistance. And there were donuts, obviously—piled high on waxed paper and drizzled liberally with warmed Lamure honey. It had all the trappings of a picturesque dinner for a picturesque campsite, given how nice Pomore Gardens was at this time of day, when everything was washed in soft sunset orange, the breeze wafting in from the sea carrying just the slightest tinge of salt. It had everything, except for the air of tranquility that it so desperately deserved.

Kyle snaps another twig and pokes at the embers. He is stuck on the previous hunt, fury still thrumming hot and heavy in his veins. He keeps a firm grasp on that anger, because the alternative is to open up the floodgates to worry, to fear. Anger is easier, even if it clawed at his chest like heartburn.

Across the camp, Astrea scrapes a whetstone along the edge of a blade with such ferocity that it screeches under her hands. They’d argued the entire way back from the hunting grounds, spat vicious words at each other all throughout the search for a suitable campsite, and had dissolved into stony silence only when they had split up to actually pitch camp. Both fire and meal had been prepared with brutal efficiency, accompanied only by chewing from the donuts that Tsukino had hastily stuffed into Navirou’s mouth when the Felyne had attempted to make the grievous mistake of intervening.

Kyle stabs his stick deeper into the flames. He’s spoiling for a fight, except they’ve already fought. He’s said his piece already. He’s said more than his fair share of his piece, truth be told, but then so had Astrea, and look where it got them. He should let it go now.

Except that he was categorically awful at letting things go. He tosses the burning twig into the fire and stands up. Instantly, Astrea’s eyes are on him, hard as flint and colder than steel. “If you didn’t have Ratha,” Kyle starts, stalking around the fire, “would you even pause once to use your brain in a fight?” The words are familiar, because the problem with picking a fight when you’ve already fought less than an hour ago is that there is often no new material to fire with. Thankfully, Astrea was too angry to care. Whatever she sees on Kyle’s face when he parks himself right in front of her has her curling her lip in answering disdain.

“You have no right to say that to me,” she hisses. Her hand is shaking around the whetstone, as though she can’t decide whether she wants to crush it in her grip or chuck it at Kyle’s head. “I told you we should’ve retreated when that Qurupeco started calling. You never know what kind of monster will be called, and guess what happened!?” She throws up her hands in exasperation, sending both sword and whetstone flying. “A Boltreaver! BOOM! And what were you doing then? Nothing!”

“I was absolutely doing something!” Kyle yells, incensed. “You have to target the throat sac and break the beak for those guys! What did you think the sonic bomb was for? And who was the one who threw themselves at the blasted Boltreaver’s tail and got shot way to the back!?”

“I wouldn’t have had to if you were actually paying attention when I told you it was calling for help!” Then, immediately after: “Actually, you know what? I don’t have to stand here and listen to this. No, really! I don’t!” She spins on her heel and marches over to Ratha, who perks up at her approach but otherwise doesn’t move.

“You can’t just leave!” Kyle shouts back, stomping after her. “We’re in the middle of the Gardens and you’re—what—gonna navigate all the way in the dark to the Shelter?”

She rolls her eyes, and Kyle only catches it because she’s had to angle her body towards him as she hauls herself onto Ratha’s back. “Please. You’re annoying but not nearly annoying enough to kick me all the way back to the Shelter. And it’s still light out,” she scoffs, settling in as the Monstie experimentally stretches out his wings. “I am going to go and enjoy my evening with Ratha—maybe catch the full sunset from somewhere peaceful and quiet. You are going to stay here and calm down or whatever it is that Hunters do when they try to return to being more pleasant company. Do some self reflection or something. I don’t care anymore.”

The color floods hot and angry onto Kyle’s face. He goes to snarl something—she can see his mouth moving—but Ratha’s already spread his wings and is lifting off, clearing the ground and the spluttering boy with ease. She sighs as he gains altitude, scrubbing a hand down her face as he climbs up in lazy circles.

“He didn’t have to be so rude about everything,” she grumbles through her fingers. Ratha tips his head back towards her and she huffs, leaning forward and patting the warm scales protecting his neck. “Maybe I should take Orgo up on his old catfight suggestion. What do you think my chances are, Ratha?” Her Monstie only gives a snort and a shake of his head, and she laughs in faux offense. “Oh, please, I should be able to get at least one good—”

Anything else she’s about to say is cut off with a scream, as Ratha twists and dives towards the ground with no warning. With no saddle to grab onto, she’s left with bracing herself against the rigid spines on Ratha’s back. Like this, dive-bombing towards the ground, she can see the exact moment when Kyle looks up and all the color rapidly drains from his face. His eyes are huge, and for one delirious moment she wonders if Ratha is using the blue as a target for which to lock onto. The next thing she knows, Ratha is shifting in mid-air, and then there’s a thud as they crash into Kyle. The momentum would have sent him straight into the campfire had Ratha’s claws not curled around his shoulders, finding purchase in the pauldrons of his armor, wings beating rapidly as he shoots back up into the air on a near-vertical take-off. There’s screaming coming from underneath them—at first, she just thinks that it’s Tsukino and Navirou who are doing all the yelling, until she realizes that the screams don’t diminish in volume no matter how high they go.

She leans over Ratha’s shoulder and gapes. Kyle is actively clutching at one of Ratha’s legs, his own kicking madly where they’re dangling in mid-air. He turns wild eyes to her when he belatedly notices that she’s staring at him. They narrow impressively even as he clings harder, scrabbling against Ratha’s rough scales.

“What the fuck!?” he shouts, which is frankly a sentiment that she can get behind. “Get me down from here this instant!”

“Uh,” she says, making a pointed glance to the ground a good terrifying distance below them. Kyle makes the mistake of looking down as well, and goes even paler. She didn’t even know such a thing was possible, and now she’s starting to get a little concerned. “Yeah—um—we’re going to wait on the whole dropping thing—”

Ratha chooses that instant to roll into a spinning dive, because of course he would. They hurtle through the air, weaving wildly through the trees, muffled unintelligible shouting coming from Kyle every time they brush past the tops of the branches—sometimes so close that Kyle has to curl up to avoid smashing his knees into them, oftentimes with so little warning that they do so anyway. When his shouts start becoming clear enough that they could make out individual words—Hunters truly had a some colorful vocabulary—Ratha actually drags him even closer to the trees, like Kyle was a battering ram to be used solely for kicking up huge showers of blossoms.

He emerges from their latest tree coughing, leaves and twigs and blossoms practically glued to his armor and hair, wheezing and out of breath. His eyes are screwed shut and he’s just about plastered his face against Ratha’s leg, as though he might stick there through sheer determination alone. “I give up,” he croaks, voice cracking with strain. “Please, I’m begging you—put me back down on the ground.”

Ratha does not put him down on the ground, despite Astrea’s very spirited attempts to get him to do so. Instead, he circles for a bit until he locates the largest tree in the area, and drops Kyle none-too-gently onto one of the topmost branches. He looks a bit green now as he dangles miserably there, which really doesn’t look very good in the light of the sunset. Eventually, he collects himself enough that he can wobble precariously up onto the swinging branch while Ratha hovers in the air nearby. All three of them are silent for the longest time, broken only by the regular beating of Ratha’s wings and the heave of Kyle’s chest as he pulls air back into his lungs.

“OK,” he says eventually, after trying and failing to get a word out several times in a row. “OK, fine—I’m sorry. I was out of line earlier. You’ve proved your point.”

“I really wasn’t trying to prove a point,” Astrea protests, though the words sputter and die when he glares weakly at her. Petals and leaves slake off of him with every sway of the branch.

“For what it’s worth, I really am sorry,” she tries again, shifting uncomfortably. She had truly—genuinely—just wanted to get up in the air and take a breather, before the indignation that Kyle was so good at stoking up in her got the better of her and she tackled them both off a cliff. Nowhere in her evening plans had she factored in Ratha swooping down and yanking him into the air for the world’s worst joyride.

Kyle straightens into a wobbly bristle, though the uncertain look he gives to the distant ground really undermines how intimidating he looks. He seems to be wavering on how to best clamor down on his own, and she’d have probably let him take his sweet time to figure it out if only he hadn’t just pitifully screamed himself hoarse. Currently, he looked like he’d sooner fall out of the tree than do anything as coordinated as climb it.

She also had genuinely no idea where Ratha had taken them in the Gardens anymore. They’d hit so many trees and done so many spins since unceremoniously grabbing Kyle up from their campsite that just navigating back in the dying light was going to take some time, even from the air. She liked to think that she wasn’t that mean.

Decision made, she extends a hand, wiggling her fingers a little in the way that she does when she wants to call Fish to her. Kyle eyes it warily. Several long minutes pass before, looking supremely unhappy, he starts edging along the branch towards them. Thankfully, Ratha obligingly drops a couple inches down, and Kyle clamors on with little difficulty. He does, however, spitefully refuse her hand which results in a rather awkward scrabble, but there’s so little real estate on Ratha’s back that she can still feel him trembling behind her.

“I don’t know where we are,” he confesses quietly once he’s settled.

“Ratha’ll get us back,” she reassures him, paying no mind to the incredulous little snort that escapes his mouth. To her unrepentant Rathalos, she says: “C’mon, Ratha. You got us into this mess, the least you can do is get us out.”

With a sound that can only be described as a laugh, Ratha twists, clearing the tree in a few easy beats of his wings. It’s not the smoothest of lifts, which has her frowning because she knows that Ratha can do better, and then she’s yelping as Kyle’s hands latch white-knuckled onto her shoulders. Ratha—the insufferable, ungrateful reptile—doesn’t even spare her a single glance backwards as he accelerates with no warning.

What are you going to do if he actually strangles me, she thinks sourly, grumpily digging one of her thumbs into the base of one of his larger scales, pressing underneath to the tough leathery skin. Ratha just gives a good-natured flick of his tail and banks into a wide turn. Grumbling, she reaches up to pat at the back of one of Kyle’s hands in an effort to get him to loosen his grip. It works, but barely.

The wind’s picked up some now, rolling in cold and brisk. Ratha takes them out to sea in a rocky path that has Kyle groaning miserably, head dropping between her shoulders and sending with it another puff of leftover petals. She sneezes as they whip past, but otherwise, it is quiet for a long time, with Ratha picking every draft of air he can find and running headlong into it. It’s enough to make even her feel faintly nauseous, though she grits her teeth and weathers stubbornly through it.

“I’m reflecting,” Kyle finally mumbles into her back, although she’s not sure if he’s addressing her or Ratha or both of them. “We were both careless in the last hunt despite having legitimate concerns for each other's safety. I should have addressed them better though.”

“Yes, you should have,” she answers hotly, irritation flaring up briefly in time with a particular bit of turbulence before they both fizzled down to nothing. She heaves a sigh. “I’m sorry, too. It was unfair of me to say you weren’t doing anything when you were already trying to deal with the Qurupeco.” They’d had a flexible enough plan going in, and the reality of the matter was that she’d gotten flustered when the second monster had descended in a rage much faster than anticipated. She’d opened them both up to attack, and so had been reckless in trying to rectify her mistake. Getting blasted back by the Boltreaver’s electricity had hurt just as much as the flood of relief when one of Kyle’s arrows had sailed over her head to fend off a second strike.

She chews nervously at her bottom lip. By now, they’ve completely cleared the Pomore coast, and all that was spread before them was a wide expanse of glimmering surf, stained in all manner of oranges and pinks and reds. “I just thought that you were there, and you’d definitely cover for me one way or another,” she confesses in a small voice that tapers off into a joyless laugh. “Sorry. Should’ve known that eventually you’d get tired of carrying all the weight around here.”

Kyle goes uncharacteristically stiff, then peels himself off of her. She can feel him frowning at the back of her head, and so stubbornly keeps looking straight ahead, even if that means having the light reflecting right into her eyes. “I’ve never felt that,” he says, confused and angry all at once. After a moment of judgemental silence, he amends: “I haven’t felt that for a while.”

“A while—”

“No, listen,” he says. She tells herself that it’s only the tight urgency in his voice that has her compelled to turn towards him. He’s looking at her like he does one of his monsters, gaze sharp and clear and utterly focused. It’s a little unnerving, actually—even now that they’re friends, smug annoyance was still generally his go-to expression whenever their eyes met. “Sometimes I want to shake you because I have no idea what you’re thinking, but you generally tend to know what you’re doing and you have fairly good instincts—”

“Are you trying to insult me or—?”

“Not the point!” Kyle snaps harshly. “The point is that it’s the same for me, alright? It’s not like everything works out exactly the way I want it to all the time, even if we have instinct in droves and work ourselves to the bone. But I still trust you. I trust you even if you mess up, because I know you do the same for me. I’ll pick up the slack if you need to drop back, even if it’s annoying at the time of, because you’ll do the same with the same amount of complaining. This is a two-way street. Don’t you ever act like it isn’t.”

She stares at him. Blinks in baffled confusion. Stares some more, before finally tearing her gaze away, looking embarrassed. “Wow,” she mutters. “Wow—just—wow. You’ve clearly been putting some thought into this.”

“Shut up,” Kyle hisses, face flaming. “This is all your fault for putting me in this position in the first place. Are you happy now? Can we please get back to camp so that I can forget this ever happened in the first place?”

This manages to pull a laugh out of her. “No, no, no,” she says, any timidity fleeing her voice and being replaced only with teasing amusement. “This is now going to be one of my most treasured memories. I need to keep this for when I am old and gray.”

“You are the worst,” Kyle declares loftily. She just tosses him a cheeky little grin over her shoulder and turns back around.

Night creeps up on them as Ratha, no longer up to his petty mischief, catches a thermal and climbs into the sky in graceful spirals. As the moon climbs and brightens with them, Pomore Gardens is transformed into something spectacular far beneath their feet. The multitude of blossoming trees are silver in the moonlight, not a sliver of pink remaining, and so bright that they seemed to glow all on their own, soft and inviting. In the dark patches between them, dotted here and there, were monster dens that Kyle could just about make out if he squinted. And if he had to take his eyes off the ground, finding the whole thing too dizzying, it was only to see more stars than he’d ever seen before in his life. The waves breaking on the rocky cliffsides sent up silver spray, while further out to sea, the horizon took on a warm purple tinge.

For one brief moment, he wondered if there were any monsters out. There had to be—plenty of monsters were nocturnal by nature—and he’s just about to voice his concerns when he sees the bubbles rising. The alarm is immediate, rising only higher when Ratha tops out of the thermal and starts dropping, slowly but steadily, towards an open patch of clifftop with a lazy beat of his wings. There’s a Mizutsune rolling around there, doing some sort of mesmerizingly complicated dance amidst a veritable swath of shimmering bubbles.

His attention is dragged away from the dance by a gasp of delight from in front of him: “Look, over there!” Hidden beneath the heavy branches of the nearest blossoming tree was another Mizutsune, rather drab compared to the first, and keenly interested in the display in the clearing.

Very quietly, Ratha climbs back up into the air, skirting around the bubble show. For one terrifying moment, Kyle swears that the dancing Mizutsune spots them. When it rears back its head, Kyle is convinced that they’re going to be blasted out of the sky with a pressurized jet of water. Instead, the one hiding underneath the tree chooses that moment to come bounding out, accompanied by a shower of silver petals. The first one blows out a continuous stream of little bubbles as its partner dances over. They catch on the petals, capturing them like how Kyle’s seen aggressive Mizutsune try to corner prey and Hunters alike, only far gentler. The contrast in their behavior now from anything that Kyle knows is astounding. He keeps his eyes on the dancing figures even as they grow smaller and smaller, until finally Ratha sweeps back inland and the pair are swallowed up by the night to dance away in peace.

“They’re prettier than I ever imagined they could be,” Astrea confesses quietly, tone colored with awe. “Everything’s prettier than I ever thought it could be, actually.”

“Hard not to be when the Gardens are touted as spring eternal,” Kyle manages after a moment of startled surprise. With nothing but the moon and the stars to provide light, the lightly-colored highlights in her hair were as silver as the trees they were flying past. Kyle had never noticed that before.

She chooses to ignore his snarky quip. “I don’t think I had the time or the means to appreciate it the first time around,” she says instead. “And we didn’t really get to fly at night then. Pity, really—it’s my favorite time to do so.” Her voice is wistful and faraway. “It feels like there are hundreds more stars than you’ll ever be able to see on the ground. And when you go out over the sea, it feels like you could go anywhere. Alwin says that that’s what Grandpa liked best about it, too.”

Kyle hums quietly. He can just about place a person with the name, though what he remembers most clearly is just an unfairly handsome Wyverian face pulled into a tight frown as sharp eyes looked Kyle up and down and found him lacking. He distracts himself with a glittering golden rare den off in the distance, winking like a beacon. “Did your gramps also see the Mizutsune dance?”

“Who knows. I know Alwin went at least once with him, because he had quite a few stories about the Gardens, but I’ve never heard anything particularly about Mizutsune before.”

“If he hadn’t, he’d probably have liked to see them. He’s got that Legiana too, right? Could’ve flown besides Ratha and all that.” Kyle is trying for casual, though he’s pretty sure he misses by a wide mile and lands solidly in something bitter instead.

“Mm, Shaulk would look pretty in this landscape,” comes the dreamy response, which only exacerbates the bitterness. The worst thing, Kyle thinks, is that he can’t even refute it—a Legiana would look absolutely beautiful amidst all the soft silver blossoms, bright markings standing out even more starkly against a velvety backdrop pinpricked with stars. Meanwhile, Kyle had probably woken up half the neighborhood earlier with his screaming. The contrast in the two images is disheartening.

“But it’s better like this. I want to have this all to myself.”

“Oh,” says Kyle, a little dumbly, and still very disheartened. “Sorry I’m here, then.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she laughs, although her tone softens into something wobbly when she reaches back to squeeze his hand apologetically. “I meant that I want to go to all the places that my grandfather did and see them with my own eyes, only this time without his ghost taking over. I want to carve out something that’s wholly mine.”

Kyle turns the words over in his head. He gets it, he thinks. His ghosts were all still alive and kicking, thankfully, but the shadows they cast were equally long. Sometimes Kyle would look back on himself from the past year and wonder at how he ever managed to start stepping out from them. Then he’d have spats with Astrea and her continually baffling Rider ways that were so vicious that he’d wonder if he ever did.

“It’s all very confusing, isn’t it?” Astrea asks, when Kyle fails to come up with something to say in a timely manner. In his defense, he’s a bit distracted—she’d turned back around to address him again, and it’s with a certain amount of despair that he realizes that it’s not just her hair that’s silvered in the moonlight. So are her eyes, looking rather uncertain. “We can drop it if you’d like. I just figured that you’re the only friend I have that would get me, even if just a little. I mean—I like Ena and Alwin a lot, but it’s hard to talk about separating myself from Grandpa with them. Same with Kayna. As for Cheval, he gets antsy about discussing the past because he thinks that he has to reciprocate. And I’m still paying back Avinia for what happened before so it would just feel awkward, you know? So that leaves only you.”

“I’m flattered,” Kyle says dryly. He instantly wants to kick himself when her face falls. “No, really—I am. I’m not good at this.”

“Clearly.”

He grumbles, poking at her cheek until she turns back towards the front. “I’ve got four older brothers. And my dad, obviously. I get trying to chase after a legacy. When you mess up it feels like you’ll never get it right. If you do something right it feels like there’s immediately something else that you have to live up to. So I get it—I get wanting to have something that’s entirely your own.” He swallows, focusing intently on the steady beating of Ratha’s wings.

“No one in my family’s ever ridden on a Rathalos, you know? No one’s got a Rider best friend. I’m sure they’ve come to the Gardens before but no one’s ever been rammed through the trees or seen dancing Mizutsune from the air. I like that—having this just for myself. It’s no problem to share it with you.”

“No problem to share—” Astrea repeats, flabbergasted. “You’re really something, you know that? Absolutely horrid. I can’t believe I’m friends with you.” But she’s lost the uncertain slump in her shoulders, which was the most important thing. “Fine then. Two can play at this game. You’re decent enough company when you keep your mouth shut.”

“Yeah, because it takes one to know one,” Kyle mutters without heat. Ratha does a cheeky little shimmy at that, causing him to clutch back onto Astrea’s shoulders. “Fine! Fine! You’re the greatest company I’ve ever known.” He pokes his head out from around Astrea’s shaking figure to glower at the back of Ratha’s head: “Does that please you, you great big menace?”

Astrea bursts into laughter, the force of it nearly knocking her head right into Kyle’s. “You’re the best, Ratha,” she says fondly, to which the overgrown lizard answers with a pleased rumble. Then, quieter: “And you’re actually decent company even when you’re infuriating, Kyle.”

He scowls, although he’s surprised to find that he’s largely unbothered. “I let you treat me like a battering ram and I’m still only decent company?”

“Maybe you should try not being a major jerk beforehand, then,” Astrea replies dryly. “It’s fine, though. I liked being pleasantly surprised when you made it up to me later.” A pause, then: “I like knowing that I have you at my back, even when you are being insufferable.”

Kyle buries his face in his hands with a mortified groan. “You can’t just say stuff like that.”

“I’m sure one day you’ll learn to accept truths with grace,” Astrea says mildly. “Next time, let’s go night flying in Loloska. There aren’t many trees to run you through there. We can do some other stupid thing, like try to catch the aurora.”

“Planning ahead, are we?” Kyle asks. “Sure, why not. You can suffer through some Hot Drinks too, while you’re at it, since you’re always spraying the mist in my face.”

“Maybe I’ll just invite Avinia instead.”

“You won’t,” Kyle says with a confident grin. “We’re carving something new for ourselves out from other peoples’ shadows, aren’t we? You’re stuck with me now.”

“How awful,” Astrea says, even though she doesn’t bother to hide her answering grin. The faint light of their camp flickers through a distant break in the trees. “Guess I’ll just have to make the most of it, then.”

#WOW I am on a roll lately #monster hunter stories 2 #monster hunter kyle #Monster Rider Astrea #Annie writes #this has also been in my drafts forever so I am glad it is finished now #Have some lighthearted shenanigens after what happened last time

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