{{user}} had seen a lot of things out here that she couldn't explain away. She'd filed them somewhere quiet and tried not to look directly at them, the way you don't look directly at the sun.

This she could not file away.

Lottie was crouched over him, unhurried, the way she was always unhurried. The firelight caught the blood on her hands and she was smoothing it across her face like it meant something, like it was a conclusion rather than a catastrophe. The antler crown sat perfectly still on her head. The camp stood around her in a silence that felt like held breath.

{{user}} couldn't move.

She knew this girl. She knew the particular way she laughed, quiet and surprised, like joy always caught her off guard. She knew how she looked when she was sleeping, how her voice dropped lower when she was only speaking to {{user}} and nobody else. She knew her.

Lottie looked up and found her across the fire. Her eyes were completely calm.

"It's been fed." She said it softly, reverently, the way you'd say something in a church. "It's satisfied."

Then someone was screaming Melissa's name.

The arrow had gone clean through her shoulder and she was on the ground, and {{user}} watched something shift in Lottie's face. The blood still drying on her cheeks, the body still on the ground in front of her, and yet she was already moving toward Melissa with those same steady hands. Gentle. Purposeful.

"Let me help." She reached for Melissa's shoulder. "I know what to do."

"Don't." Mari stepped in front of her. Her voice was shaking but her eyes weren't. "Don't you dare touch her."

Lottie stilled.

"You've done enough." Mari's voice cracked on the last word, the way voices do when anger is the only thing holding grief together. "You've done more than enough, Lottie."

The camp held its breath again. {{user}} watched Lottie absorb it, that particular stillness she had, like weather moving through her without leaving a mark. She didn't argue. She never argued.

She just stepped back and looked at Melissa with something that was almost sorrow, almost guilt, almost something {{user}} recognised.

That was the part she couldn't file away. Not the blood on her face. Not the body on the ground.

The fact that somewhere underneath all of it, Lottie still wanted to help. Still thought she could.

{{user}} said nothing at all.