Time did not pass cleanly after the tree.
It smeared.
Some days went quicker than others.
Some days, he was completely locked-in, cleaning tools a dozen times, marking trees with the finesse of a Da Vinci, but other days, he wasn't too sure what happened.
It was as if finding your way in the dark.
At first there was only waking and not-waking—long stretches where Xavier existed without realizing he was doing so.
His body moved before his thoughts could catch up, muscle memory dragging him forward while his mind lagged behind like a torn banner.
Hunger came as a pressure, not a feeling.
Pain arrived as information, not alarm.
Sleep came as sudden crashes, not resting.
He functioned the way animals did after injury: quietly, stubbornly, without ceremony.
There was no tending to his wound, or compensating for a sprain with a limp. There was a subtle hopelessness to his willful defiance of nature—as if anything meant to happen… would.
His shoulder, through one fall or another, had popped back into its socket but never truly regained its full range of motion.
It hung wrong, lower than it should have, grinding when he moved too fast.
The pain came in bursts of distractions.
He learned—without knowing he was learning—to cradle it with his forearm while he walked, to brace it against his chest when he climbed.
The torn flesh along his jaw scabbed, split, scabbed again.
Speaking was impossible; even breathing too deeply pulled at the wound. Whatever liquid leaked from the obviously infected wound, he had no interest in investigating.
His teeth ached constantly, a low electric throb that never fully faded.
His right hand twitched when he was tired—residual venom, damaged nerves—fingers jerking as if trying to remember instructions they could no longer follow.
At times, he would grip the air as if holding a cup.
Slap the wind as if the surface of a pool.
Or shake with the contained motion of an addict trying to appear normal.
He stayed near the hollow tree for days. Or maybe weeks.
He slept in fragments, curled into the rot and damp, waking whenever rain pooled too close or insects crawled too boldly across his skin.
Mold bloomed on his clothes; he scraped it away and ate some of it without thinking, gagging silently and forcing it down.
He vomited once and lay in the dirt afterward, forehead pressed to the ground, waiting for the shaking to stop.
It didn't stop.
So he moved.
Whatever wastes his empty body managed to expel traveled with him, in what remained of his pants or caked on his feet and knees, like layers of mud.
He remembered things in flashes—not memories, exactly, but impressions lifted from books he half-read in school, from survival shows he'd mocked while half-asleep on a couch.
It was amazing just how particular a mind could be in the midst of crisis—it could dull you to everything but preserve just the bits of your sanity meant to act.
Had he been fully present, the thought of his love for Wolsi would have wrenched out his heart, the blame he held toward his parents would have burned through his nerves, and the shame he felt for ignoring his grandfather's lessons would have stifled his feet.
But on some subconscious level, parts of him—whichever parts it was—knew such revelations made in clarity would have been counterproductive… so, it shielded him from them.
One unraveling at a time.
His grandfather's lessons—half-heard, thoroughly-ignored—echoed in his mind like magnetic strips playing in reverse.
Don't stay in one place. He said. Predators strike still prey first.
Water first. He said. Always make sure other animals drink from it as well.
Mark where you've been. He said. Everything will be tracking you—no need to track yourself.
Whisper to everything. He said. The number one killer in any situation is loneliness.
The advice came without order, without context, and he followed it the way drowning people follow light: desperately, relentlessly… incorrectly.
He broke branches and leaned them against trees to point the way back.
The first time, he forgot which direction they were supposed to indicate.
The second time, rain knocked them down.
The third time, he carved shallow marks into bark with a sharp stone, hands shaking so badly the lines looked like scratches from an animal.
He learned—slowly—that some trees bled white sap when cut, others red-brown, others nothing at all.
Some would numb his fingers for hours.
Some would, with careful application, close wounds better than stitches.
He learned which ones attracted ants, which ones smelled wrong, which ones made his stomach cramp when he chewed their leaves.
Failure taught him faster than success.
And perhaps, the mountain having acknowledged his defiance saw it fit to only put edible flora in his path—nothing he ate, crushed, bit or tasted brought any sense of discomfort.
He tried to build a shelter once—a lean-to of branches and palm fronds—but it collapsed in the night, dumping wet debris onto his chest and knocking the air from his lungs.
He lay there choking, too exhausted to fix it until morning.
When he did rebuild it, he made it smaller. Lower. Cruder.
It held.
He learned fire three times.
The first attempt blistered his palms and produced nothing but smoke and frustration.
The second produced a spark that died as soon as it was born.
The third—days later, after he'd dried moss inside his shirt and split wood until his arms trembled—caught.
The flame was ugly and small and perfect.
He stared at it until his eyes burned, chest hitching, something tight and suicidal unclenching at the sight of something that could accomplish the deed—his death, if there was ever a need for it.
That night, he rolled onto the flames in his sleep and didn't feel the third-degree burns until the morning—luckily, it was permanent but nothing the right sap couldn't alleviate.
With fire came improvement.
He smoked fish when the river surrendered them—small, silver things stunned by current and chance.
He burned parasites out of meat he didn't trust.
He boiled water in the roundest stone-basin-look-alike thing he could find, replenishing himself sip by sip because drinking too fast made him retch.
His stomach rebelled constantly, but it adapted in the way bodies do when given no choice.
Injuries closed slowly.
Skin knit itself back together with uneven seams. The swelling in his shoulder lessened, though the joint never stopped clicking. His jaw stiffened into something usable.
He stopped bleeding. He did not stop hurting—if anything, the hurt became more pronounced.
The jungle pressed in around him, indifferent.
He learned its rhythms without understanding them.
Mornings came loud with insects, afternoons heavy and wet, evenings sharp with sudden cold.
He learned that moving at dusk was dangerous—visibility dropped faster than expected, and he once walked directly into a nest of bees that stung with lances inches long.
Luckily, the creatures didn't drift more than a couple of meters from their hive.
The attack—the worst yet—left him thrashing on the ground, face swelling, breath wheezing until he crawled into water and some of the symptoms were miraculously relieved.
Whatever was not washed away by the waters just required a thorough treatment of varying tree saps. After the bee attack, he started to take navigation evermore seriously—using the sun and stars—those he could recognize—as navigation aids.
Xavier failed at navigation more times than he succeeded.
He circled the same fallen tree three times in one afternoon before realizing it was the same one.
He screamed once—silently, mouth opening without sound—when he understood how easy it would be to disappear here.
How many people had. How many bones lay beneath the green.
So he adapted.
He marked trees higher, at eye level, then higher still when undergrowth swallowed his signs. He tied strips of cloth where bark wouldn't hold.
He counted steps between landmarks. He talked to himself without words—taps of fingers, breaths measured in fours, rituals that anchored him when the world tilted.
Weeks passed like that. Maybe longer.
He became thinner. Harder.
His movements grew efficient in a brutal way. He wasted nothing because waste cost him energy, and energy was survival. He stopped trying to be comfortable.
Comfort was a luxury he no longer recognized.
It was only when stripped of everything that he understood one thing.
And then, one morning, he woke up and realized he was thinking again.
Not just reacting. Thinking.
The realization startled him more than any animal encounter had.
He sat there—back against a tree, hands dirty, shoulder aching—and noticed the sound of his own breathing. Not ragged. Not panicked. Just… present.
He noticed the ache in his body and understood it as something happening to him, not as him.
He thought about Wolsi's smile—the love they shared. The memory no longer brought pain, but comfort… knowing that, even for the briefest of moments, he had found love. Even if it was just his side that was genuine.
He thought about his parents—thoughts no longer dripping with resentment.
His grandfather's lessons, buried under years of skepticism, now churned in his mind with the fluidity of a well-oiled engine.
It was only now he appreciated it.
The fog thinned.
With it came weight.
Memory crept back in pieces.
Names without faces.
Faces without context.
A girl's laugh—not Wolsi—that hurt worse than any wound. He clenched his jaw and forced the thoughts away, standing too quickly, dizziness washing over him.
Survival came first. Feeling could wait.
But the fact that he could postpone it at all told him something had shifted.
He was no longer just enduring.
He was learning.
The jungle hadn't beaten him—not yet.
It had scraped him raw, taken its due in blood and fear and sanity, but he was still here. Still moving. Still making decisions, however flawed.
Anyone else, he suspected dimly, would have died somewhere between the river and the tree.
From infection.
From panic.
From lying down and not getting back up.
Xavier wiped his face with a trembling hand and looked out through the dense green, eyes sharper now, mind clicking into place with a quiet, dangerous clarity.
Survival had been instinct.
What came next would require something more.
And for the first time in a very long while, he was awake enough to know it.