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Frieren, obviously, knew the way through the dungeon. Which would have been perfect and helpful if she hadn’t been swallowed by a mimic and disappeared into a sandpit through the floor within the first two rooms!
Fern wasn’t too worried about her, despite everything. Frieren was obviously beyond powerful and would get herself free even if Fern and Stark didn’t get to her first, the issue was that Fern and Stark did not know the way through the dungeon. So they’d had to figure it out themselves!
It was fine. It would have been fine. If there hadn’t been yet another sandpit in some other room, one where Stark had smashed some ancient stone fountain as he’d fought off an incoming horde of giant scorpion. From the smashed stone, a geyser of noxiously vivid liquid had sprayed out, soaking the sand Fern had unwittingly been walking (sinking!) across, and—
Well. The rest was history, so the saying went.
Stark had fished her out using the long handle of his axe before she could sink through the floor in the way Frieren had, but there was no saving even a single layer of her clothes, from her black cloak to her white dress, all now a faintly glowing shade of blue-gray mud.
Fern came out sopping wet, her clothes sticking to her limbs with a cold, grimy feel. She felt a sickly pit in her stomach at the mere thought of what her hair might look like, and what it might take to save it.
Stark managed to drag her out of the room and into the next, which was, thankfully, quiet and empty. No prizes, it seemed, but no enemies either. He stared down at her, his face twisted in equal parts shock and disgust.
“That is… foul.”
She considered blasting him through the nearest wall, but decided to save her energy.
“Where are my spare clothes,” she demanded, looking around to see if they would find water anywhere. There was a small crack in the floor in the corner where a stream ran through, and the water looked clean and clear. She wouldn’t dare drink it (at least, not while they had a waterskin to keep them), but it would do. She bent over it and dunked the ends of her filthy hair in, scrubbing them vigorously between her hands.
The grime was nearly impossible to remove, but little by little, the friction and running water began to work. Her heart sank. Her clothes weren’t just ruined for now, but they were beyond saving. If her silky, untangled hair could hardly be cleaned, the dense weaves of her clothes would have soaked that mud right up, never to be removed. She may as well burn them off her body.
But first: “Mister Stark? My clothes?”
“Uh. I think Frieren has them?”
Fern froze, her hair dripping water and glowing mud from between her hands. She blinked down at her broken reflection in the little stream. “Why?” she asked carefully. “Mister Stark should be carrying all the luggage?”
“Right,” he said, sounding slightly nervous. “Only she wanted something from her bag. The one… you two share? So I gave it to her and she was looking through it when—”
“When she got distracted by the mimic.”
Stark’s silence was answer enough. Fern finished cleaning her hair in silence, and the tension behind her grew and grew. Finally, she put her hair in a simple knot on the top of her head to keep it clean, stood and turned, facing Stark dead on. She took in his twitching fingers, nervously flitting eyes, and his fearless stance, squared to face her.
“Mister Stark,” she called, drawing his attention to her utterly filthy form. She felt her face heat with anger. “What am I supposed to wear?”
Stark flew into action, opening all their bags and rifling through them in a blind panic, calling out options to her as he did: Axe cover? Frieren’s snow hood? Leather notebook cover? My clothes? My—
Well. It was the only reasonable option. She wasn’t going to go around with pieces of fabric strapped over her intimate bits like— like Ubel. She had some decency! And very few choices!
Stark was silent as he handed over a spare pair of black trousers and a black, turtleneck sweater. Fern wasn’t sure if the sweater was just all he had, or if he was giving her that instead of another of his sleeveless vests out of… decency? Courtesy?
Still, she couldn’t take them yet. Like it or not, she was disgusting, and she was going to get grosser in the process of undressing, and she needed these clothes as clean as possible. “Hold them, please, Mister Stark. I will… rid myself of these. They are not worth the trouble.”
“Rid yourself—!?”
Fern peeled her robe off and didn’t bother undoing the tiny seed buttons on her dress. They were a hassle on a good day, and she was having a very bad one. She tore them open, throat to stomach, and grimaced as she pulled the dress off, praying that none of the mud got back on her (relatively) clean hair.
“Fern!”
She would have liked to keep her underclothes, but the bad part of wearing a dress was that falling downwards into mud meant it had all gotten under the skirt and stained everything beneath as well. Fern tore those off clinically as well, shivering in disgust at the slick sound the mud made as it peeled away from her skin.
“Please wait a moment while I rinse,” Fern requested, though she had to admit that she already felt a million times better, and therefore less likely to bite Stark’s head off. She grabbed her staff off the wall, and with a simple blast, incinerated the mess that was left behind of her clothes. Then she shuffled back to the stream and stepped in, soaking her thick leather boots and starting to wipe the filth off of them too.
And then, finally, she began to wash herself off, splashing water wherever she could reach. The stream was too small to get into—not that she felt particularly inclined to submerger herself in some random mystery dungeon river—but squatting close and cupping water in her hands, she was able to clean herself with relative ease. The mud seemed to sink into fabric far too quickly, but it didn’t seem to have stained or damaged her skin, so that was good at least.
When she felt like she wasn’t covered in a full layer of fluorescent mud, Fern pushed herself back up to standing. She became aware, then, of the fact that she was quite naked, with nothing on but her boots and not even her hair to hide behind. She felt her face heat again, and knew that without her high-collared dress, there would be no hiding the fact that it went all the way down over her shoulders and chest.
There was nothing for it, unfortunately, except the clothes that Stark was still holding in his white-knuckled grip. His own clothes, that he was offering Fern in her hour of need, so to speak. She tried not to think about the obvious differences in their statures, like how much broader his shoulders were than hers, or how much taller he was than her, or any of those usually unimportant things that suddenly felt much more relevant.
She didn’t know whether it was worse to go over to him, naked and shameless, and take the clothes, or pretend to have some modesty left and ask him to bring them to her, or if it made any sense at all to ask him, now that it was probably much too late, to cover his eyes or look away—
She should probably be past embarrassment, she decided wearily. She had just squatted over a stream, as naked as the day she was born, and splashed water all over herself like a little bird bathing in a puddle. If there was anything he hadn’t seen, she would eat her staff.
With that in mind, she turned to face him and walked back over, trying her best to remain upright and normal, to walk as though— as though she weren’t bare and ashamed and utterly exposed. Coming to a stop in front of him, she held her clean hands out expectantly, and waited.
“I’m ready now, please,” she said when Stark didn’t move. “Mister Stark?”
She could feel her own flush darkening, her will to act normal wavering in the face of Stark’s clear reaction, though reaction of what kind, she wasn’t really sure. Had she made him uncomfortable? Was he distracted? Was he offended? Was he being weird?
She risked a glance up to his face, hoping to assess the situation, and was taken aback by the… the depth of emotion she found there.
Sure, he was staring at her body, eyes roving over her exposed skin and bared breasts and— and the dark hair between her legs, as well as the milky skin of her thighs, stomach, arms, but he wasn’t just looking the way Fern sometimes saw drunken men stare at women in taverns, like they would own them or eat them if they had the chance. No, Stark’s eyes were dark with some animal kind of want, but they were also wide with awe, like he could scarcely believe what he was seeing, or maybe that he was seeing it at all.
He was certainly distracted, and maybe even being weird, but… Fern felt even warmer under his gaze. Maybe it wasn’t so bad?
Even so. She reached forward and snatched the clothes out of his hands, ignoring the way his eyes zeroed in on her chest as it moved with the action. “Thank you,” she said tersely. Then she took a big step back, and turned around.
She wasn’t sure why she did it, why she didn’t ask him to turn around instead. She knew he would have done it, if not right at first, then certainly after she glared at him for a moment or two. He wasn’t a bad guy, deep down, even if he could be a little perverted at times. Even if he— if he looked at her like that. But she didn’t ask. She just turned back towards the stream, her heart pounding in her chest, and hugged his clothes to her chest for a moment, steadying herself.
Now that she knew what it was, there was no way she could miss the weight of his gaze watching her. His eyes were fixed on her back, trailing over the exposed length of her spine like a blaze. Her bun revealed even the curve of her neck, which was always kept hidden, and she felt his eyes linger there nearly as much as they did on her— on her buttocks.
But she didn’t tell him to turn around. She didn’t ask him to look away. Instead, she pulled the pants on over her damp boots and bare legs, frowning slightly at the way they threatened to fall right off her. Before she could do anything about it, a hand suddenly appeared beside her, a strip of white cloth held out. Stark’s belt sash, still warm from his body. She took it, hesitantly, and tied the trousers around her waist. The hand withdrew.
The sweater went next, and while unfamiliar in style, Fern had to admit she felt much more herself when she was fully clothed, covered from head to toe. She turned back to face Stark, and was shocked when she found—
That dark, wanting look had only doubled. His eyes roved with twice the hunger, along the hem of his sweater, the tucked-in end of his pants. When he met her gaze, he startled and shook himself out of it, seemingly by force.
“Are you ready?”
Fern blinked. “I— Yes. Let’s go find Miss Frieren.”
Some things were best not talked about.