Her words, of which he only understood 'help', 'speak' and 'again', were oddly comforting. He understood most of what she said, thanks to his minute grasp on the language most people spoke; she was going to make him speak again. Lucivar had promised the same, and he'd been a patient teacher, if an unwelcome one, at the time; Daemon hadn't wanted to learn then. He'd wanted to recover, wanted to go away from the place of his crime and forget it had ever happened. He'd done one, though not the other; he would never forget the fire. Not when the reminders he carried never left, the welts that had come from his blood nearly boiling within his veins. They still hurt; they still bled. And Daemon, though his moments of clarity were rare, remembered exactly what it felt like to have them burn.
They reached the clinic soon, although Daemon could have done with reaching it sooner. His eyes followed the goat as it bounced toward them, and he remembered eating goats for holiday meals, and drinking goat's milk when he was young, with Oana and Viorica. He remembered milking goats, and making Felix and Daria, his charges in the youngest litter. He looked at the little black and white goat, and he remembered, for a moment, a time when he wasn't so dependent on others, a time when people had depended on him. He remembered who he used to be. And then it was gone, because this wasn't his goat, his siblings were nowhere in sight, and Fion was too old to need goats' milk to survive.
For a moment, though, he saw it; and for another moment longer, he wished he was still that man.
Daemon's attention was caught on the skull display, and he paused on the steps to admire it, stretching one hand out to prod at the fox skull before thinking better of it and dropping the appendage slowly again. He turned back to Sky, but she was waving him into the house, so he obeyed, trumping in and looking around curiously before another thought occured to him, and he carefully pulled his hood back, hiding shyly in a shadowy corner away from windows and taking off his mask, revealing the welt across his face and several around his neck and on the back of his head.
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