Emmeline, the girl in the storm

Learning to communicate

Under the spluttering fluorescent light of the greasy kebab shop Emmeline found herself looking at Charon truly for the first time.

The awkward point about this was that he was watching her too, eating her doner wrap, shovelling it down her throat like she was a starving man. To be fair, she almost was.
Emmeline hadn't eaten a meal in over twenty hours, so in all honesty she didn't care that the Ferryman of the Dead was sitting in the booth just opposite her, watching the oil and chilli sauce run down her chin. It just didn't matter.

What did matter was how good the hot, disgustingly unhealthy food felt in her mouth and down her throat.

Once every last morsel had been drowned in her oesophagus she wiped her lips as politely as she could before she spoke.

"I hope you don't have any other appointments you intend me to make," she said in a subdued voice.

His eyes had not moved from her face since they arrived at 2am. It was now 2:30am and Emmeline was intensely aware of all the things her body now demanded she receive. Food, cleaning, bandaging in some places, sleep and hydration—not necessarily in that order. She grabbed the bottle of water off the table between them and downed it all in one go.

He didn't seem to have anything to say, so Emmeline just stared back at him. His clothing was beginning to dry, but she thought he still looked a lot like a grey-faced, half-drowned rat.
Truthfully he looked nothing remotely like a rat at all, but Emmeline liked the analogy.
His midnight black hair hung now in dreadlocks that clung to his face. Even when he raked them back, they came tumbling down again to obscure his vision. On close inspection, Emmeline would have called his skin tone an olive-grey, though it was hard to describe, and whilst she was sure it would look awful on a human being, it looked just right on him. During their fight, Emmeline had ripped his hoodie and the plain white shirt he wore beneath. Embarrassingly, she found that she didn't at all mind the view of his collarbone, shoulder and neck that she was currently privilege to.

She had already observed the way he set his jaw when he was angry or thinking deeply, and that was how it was now, so noticeable because of its harsh line, running parallel to his high cheek bones and broken in the middle by pale lips that were slightly too full to be as harsh.
Emmeline blinked twice. Despite all the things she had learned in the last twenty-four hours of her life, the knowledge that she could still be so easily distracted annoyed her, a lot.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Nothing," she replied, embarrassed.

"You looked away."

"Yes, I guess that means you won," she said.

"Won what?"

"The staring contest we were apparently—" she stopped herself short and sighed, "It's like I'm going to have to teach you English, I don't think you understand half the things I say," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you even understand what normal is? The way humans act? The things we say?"

His chin quivered for a moment, and Emmeline realised he was trying not to smile, "I've been in and out of your world for thousands of years," he said. "I speak English very well."

"You don't look like you've been around that long," she replied critically. It was true. He looked like he was twenty-two or twenty-three at most.

He shrugged, "Time passes differently in your world and in mine. Different creatures age differently. We age funny when we are in your world too."

"Age funny?"

He nodded, "Like your Grandfather."

She felt the sharp pain of anguish rise in her chest at the mention of her grandfather. "My grandfather," she whispered, "why does he have to be brought into this?"