He tries to say something clever about that, but he starts crying, instead.

"You idiot," he sobs.

She rubs his back. "You too," she replies, more like a promise than anything.

It's decided that Susanna, being poorly shod, will set up their encampment, while Pietro goes foraging and looking for other survivors. (They can't be the only people in the city who had the feather-fall spell.) So she sets to cleaning their little cave. Not sweeping up all of the dirt like an idiot, but - making sure the stones are dry. Peeling moss from the walls and withering it for tinder or other uses. Determining if the mushrooms she finds are toxic, and when enough of them turn out not to be, seeing if she can figure out how to prepare them. (Not poison doesn't mean tastes good - or, for that matter, won't give you a night of misery if you prepare them wrong. But if she checks them again when they're done, it'll mean something closer to the latter.)

Pietro stumbles back. He's bleeding in a couple of places.

He is also dragging a lizard the size of a small pony, which has seen some equally rough treatment. (Probably worse.)

"Pietro -"

What's she going to say, here. You're hurt is a completely vacuous statement; he knows. Are you alright? He'll tell her if he isn't, physically; emotionally, of course he isn't. I hate this, I love you, I want to kill every demon in the world for doing this to us?

...it'd get old.

"Any joy?" she asks. Instead of those.

"Well. This sure is meat," he says, kicking the dead lizard. "...no survivors I could find. Some corpses."

"Did you... find anything of note."

Did you loot them. Is what she might say, if she weren't a coward.

He turns, revealing himself to be burdened with more bags than he set out with.

"I didn't take anything that was. On. Anyone. But bags don't really... count."

There's blood on most of the bags. One, a sort of backpack, looks positively gruesome at the straps, which have been sawn apart. Susanna wonders how on someone it might have been.

"It doesn't seem like they would count," she says, helping him unload and not thinking about whether she believes it. "By any reasonable definition."

When the bags are off of him, Pietro nods curtly at her, walks about ten feet back out into the passageway he took, and vomits.

Then he wobbles back into their cave-camp and sits down.

Well. Cleaning magic exists for a reason.

She takes care of the main event, then starts on her brother.

"I hate this," she says. "And I love you."

"Love you too," he says, automatically.

Then he shakes his head. "I love you too," he says again, more firmly. "We'll get through."

"We will," she says.

She doesn't think about whether she believes it.