The enemy mage’s bolt blasted past Enna as she threw herself out of the way. She could hear shouting behind her, but ignored it, moving in closer to the necromancer. Her rage carried her right up to him, and though he tried to shoot a fireball at her it spattered uselessly off her enchanted breastplate. She raised her axe into the air and put all of her strength into the downstroke. The wizard dodged backwards too late, and her swing opened him up from shoulder to hip. He doubled over, gasping for air, coughing blood and bile onto the ground. Enna spun her axe in one hand and chopped his head off, sinking the blade of her axe into the ground and breathing heavily. She looked around for her next opponent, but all she saw around her were shattered skeletons and blackened craters still smoking from lightning strikes. The rage cleared from her vision and she breathed out, finally focusing on her teammates behind her. They were all gathered in a huddle back where she’d left them. Their backs were turned to her, and most of them seemed to be looking at something on the ground. Grumbling, Enna yanked her axe out of the ground and headed over to them.
As she walked closer, her stomach dropped in a sick moment of panic. Dany was lying on the ground, her bow and arrows scattered around her, eyes closed and not moving. Enna rushed the remaining few feet, but stopped when she realized that nobody seemed particularly upset by their dead comrade. Then Dany let out a raspy snore, and Enna felt stupid. The mage must have tried to cast Sleep on her, and when she had dodged out of the way it must have hit Dany instead. Enna stuck her thumbs in her belt and tried to act like she hadn’t just almost had a heart attack because she thought her coworker was dead. She knew that Lyle had noticed, though, because he smirked at her from under his ridiculous hat. God, she hated that sorceror sometimes. She decided to ignore him and focus- for once- on what Elleri was chattering about.
“-but I really feel bad about slapping her but it might be the only way to wake her up because I don’t think I have a spell that can remove sleep and anyway I need to save my spell slots so we might have to so she’ll wake up but I don’t want to do it so if someone else would volunteer that’d be really nice of you!!” Enna heard “slap” and “volunteer” and put her hand up, but Baruun glared at her until she put it back down.
“I can do it,” Emiel said, stepping forward. “I won’t hurt her, just enough to wake her up.” Enna rolled her eyes at them. They’d been spending a lot more time with Dany lately, planning their stupid (hot) sister’s wedding and giggling about flower arrangements and seating charts. Dumb rich person shit. Enna was glad she’d been spending almost all her evenings at the Night-Slip so she could get away from pastels for ten goddamn seconds. So of course Emiel was gonna give Dany some sort of special treatment, they needed her to like them so they could keep picking her brain about what was the best credenza for a reception or whatever. Losers. Emiel kneeled down at the dwarf’s side and gently smacked her face, more of a pat on the cheek than a slap. Dany’s eyes slowly opened, prompting a cheer from the group. Then she groaned, blinked groggily a couple of times, and closed her eyes again, her breathing evening back out.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Enna griped. “Y’all want me to hit her harder?”
“No!!!!” Elleri yelled, flying angrily into her face. “Nobody is hurting Dany, and especially not you, you’ve got a +11 to melee!!!!”
Enna shrugged and folded her arms over her chest. “Have it your way, but I don’t know what you wanna do about the sleepy sniper here. We gotta get out of here, and it’s not like we have a horse to carry her.” Slowly, every member of her party turned to look at her. “What?”
“Aye, lassie, but we’ve got an even dumber beast to carry her!” Enna really, really hated the way Baruun was grinning at her.
Enna drew the line at piggyback rides. That was where her axe went, and unless Dany wanted to get a faceful of flaming blade she was absolutely not going on her back. This left Enna with a few options. Ultimately, and at the urging of her more safety-minded teammates who informed her that she “couldn’t throw Dany over her shoulder like a bag of potatoes” and “wasn’t allowed to drag her,” she gathered Dany up into her arms and rested her against her chest like she’d seen people hold children. Dany, being a grown-ass dwarf, weighed significantly more than a child, but it wasn’t the weight that made Enna uncomfortable with the situation. It was the way that Dany stirred in her sleep, wrapping her arms around Enna’s neck and tucking her face under Enna’s jaw. Enna shot Emiel a panicked look, but the bard was unsympathetic, instead cooing over how sweet they looked. She could hear Lyle snickering to the side and resolutely ignored him. She could handle this. It was only a twenty-minute walk out of the dungeon and back to the entrance where they’d left the dogs and her horse. She could carry her sleeping teammate for that long.
At about minute ten, her shitty garbage coworkers had failed to run out of snarky comments to make about her situation. The amount of time Baruun had spent chuckling about her “newfound maternal instincts” was directly proportional to the amount of times she’d threatened to rip his dick off, but that didn’t seem to dissuade him. Meanwhile, Lyle was cracking some terrible puns that she was doing a pretty good job of tuning out. Elleri kept fluttering around and making sure that Enna wasn’t about to drop Dany, which honestly was making Enna more inclined to drop her just so Elleri would get off her fucking case. Instead she shifted Dany farther up her chest and adjusted her grip on her. This had the unfortunate side effect of bringing Dany closer to her body, and the sleeping dwarf had the fucking audacity to nuzzle at Enna’s chin. Enna growled at her, which only made Lyle laugh.
“Awww, I’m so glad you’re getting closer to Dany!” Emiel cooed, strolling alongside her. “You two look so sweet, it’s like you’re hugging!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Emma replied, glaring at the smiling bard. “This is a tactical carry.”
Emiel laughed at her. “Tactical carry? For a koala, maybe! You should get two of those baby slings, one for Baruun and one for Dany.”
“I should get five of them so I can carry this entire goddamn party!!” Enna snapped, adjusting her hold on Dany so she wouldn’t slip down. “Oh wait, I do that every day of my fucking life-”
“Yeah, but I never get a hug!” Lyle chimed in, mock-pouting up at her. Even though the guy was probably older than her, he looked like a goddamn twelve-year-old when he did that. “When’s it my turn, my legs hurt!”
Enna aimed a kick at him, but he scampered away, laughing. She fucking hated her team. Thankfully at that point she felt Dany stirring in her arms. The dwarf yawned, opened her eyes, and then almost jerked out of Enna’s arms when she realized where she was.
“Oh- oh my god, I am so sorry!! Have you been- were you-” Dany looked like she was on the verge of fainting, blushing down to the roots of her hair and struggling to put a coherent thought together at the idea of being held in Enna’s arms. Enna appreciated this, but took pity on her and set her down. She immediately fell on her butt, her legs still unsteady, and Enna had to suppress a grin. She loved the effect she had on women. “Oh my god, what happened, I got hit by that bolt of energy and I- did you have to-”
“Yeah, it’s not a fucking issue, so don’t worry about it.” Enna rubbed the back of her neck, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “It’s not like, a thing, or anything.”
“Oh no, it was totally a thing, you and Enna were snuggling and it was really cute and you looked like you were sleeping so peacefully that none of us wanted to wake you up and did you know that you smile in your sleep because it’s really cute!!!!” Enna wasn’t sure where the pixie kept all the breath she used to say that shit in one sentence, but she was tempted to cut off the supply.
Enna coughed. “Anyway, now that we can all fucking walk, let’s just get back to the entrance and get the fuck out of here.” Her companions agreed, and she took her usual position at the front of the line, where it was easier to ignore the laughs of her shit idiot coworkers.
Author's Notes:
This is one of the first fics I wrote for Enna! 7/15/17. It takes place in the earliest parts of Enna's personal timeline, when she was still being standoffish and insisting that she didn't need friends. And look how that turned out for her!