Short and sweet (Chapter 3)

She wakes up in the cave with the boy, who she finds herself at odds with. (1,200~ words)

She wakes up slowly the next morning, with her mouth and brain stuffed with cotton balls. Groggy and confused, her first instinct is to expect to be lying on the cold stone floor only to find a folded jacket cushioning her head. The puzzle pieces come together slowly by recalling yesterday's events and looking at the black jacket, which is of nice quality outside of the rips and dust. The smell explains that it’s been on the floor of this cave for long enough to get rid of any scent outside of 'cave.'
Disoriented, she considers lying back down on the jacket�" which is still warm and inviting�" when she notices movement from the corner of her eye. She squints through the darkness, struggling to keep her eyes open, to find the boy from yesterday doing pushups and sweating. His shirt is discarded on the floor, folded like the jacket had been, with a suspiciously head-shaped dent in the center. It's easy to conclude that he sacrificed the jacket he used to sleep on for her, and removed his shirt to make a new pillow for himself.
She wonders why. However, she ends up choosing to not think hard about it. If he was so determined to help her yesterday, it'd surely be a waste to let the wound in her hair get infected. She isn't sure if it bled, but it must've. It doesn’t make sense thinking like this either. The injury is facing the roof like her hip, not the floor.
Well, maybe he is a knight with honor. Or a doctor, following a code. Though it seems a little ridiculous for a boy close to her age to be an accomplished knight or scholar, it makes less sense when she tries to understand the pointless jacket he gave her. Her arm would've been comfortable as well. The hard floor is familiar too, if not that.
The boy from across the cage doesn't acknowledge her as she shuffles around, so she takes it as permission to do whatever she wants. It'd be a lie to say she isn't afraid of him�" but she's more afraid of Father, who will be coming to retrieve her at some point today. That could be in a few minutes, several hours from now, or the moment the sun starts setting. Now is her chance to practice standing and walking before she's forced to.
Her hip throbs, though not as bad as it had last night. She can force down a groan when she pushes her upper body onto the wall behind her. Sweat beads on her forehead and she quietly pants from her dry mouth, enduring the strain it has on her body so that she can barely sit up, awkwardly leaning to one side as her hip breathes fire in its anguish. Awful. Really, really awful.
"Wait- hey!" She jerks open her eyes, which inadvertently closed while she recovered. The boy approaches her, brows pinched and lips set in a frown with his shirt crumpled in his sweaty fist. "I worked hard to heal your hip as I could, and now you get up as soon as your eyes open?" She can't say anything in response. He sighs. "You need to avoid moving for several days, at the very least. It's only been half a day, maybe a little more. It's still the darkest part of the morning.”
Woah, she thinks, astonished. She slept for that long? And how does he know that in this dark place?
"So just lay back down." He stares her down, and she feels his emotions flow into her through his gray-blue eyes. They're more complex than yesterday, but in the same moment that she feels them they simplify into feelings like the ones before.
She doesn't lay back down, stubbornly, and a twinkle of frustration bleeds through the boundary of pureness he exudes like a cloud.
It's a method that's often used against golden eyes like her. She read it in a book that was confiscated a few hours after she got her hands on it. To avoid getting their emotions read, a person can simply overwhelm their own mind with a single emotion. It's what the servants do whenever they make eye contact with her. This boy must have utilized the same tactic yesterday and she didn't notice. Blame the head injury. The only difference is that the servants cloud their mind with strong feelings like anger, frustration, or fear, but this boy chose to use comforting and gentle emotions instead. Which, surely, would be more difficult to conjure than something like anger.
She isn't bothered that he manipulated her. She was the one who somehow fell for such a familiar trick. What is bothersome is that he still hasn't done anything. Even when she has been unconscious, weak, in pain, or unable to move.
Instead of lying down as he commanded, she narrows her eyes and glares. Maybe he did do something and she hasn't noticed yet. Father likes to do things like that on occasion. Poisoning her food, keeping eye contact with her until she exits the room, where she’ll vomit or collapse right outside of his door so that he can get upset with her as soon as she recovers and punish her for it. False hope isn’t fun to experience either.
"You know," he starts, shaking off the dust from his shirt and pulling it over his head. "I thought we got off on the right foot last night, because you let me treat you," he pops his head out of the hole, threading his hands through the sleeves next. "But even though I made a promise, you don't believe me."
He crouches in front of her and holds up his pinky finger meaningfully, a sour pout lowering the corners of his lips while he gives a faint glare back. She can feel a faint expectancy from his eyes.
She panics a little. She doesn't want to get on his bad side. And it's true that he made a promise. Barely, she recalls the rule of breaking a promise: cutting off your pinky finger. A promise should be a very big deal, yet he still made one to her, just for the sake of her comfort.
The boy intensifies his emotions, letting a faint sense of upset come through, and she impulsively locks her pinky in his outstretched one. Unable to communicate because of her throat, she can only wait in dread as the boy stares at their two connected fingers. A bead of sweat runs down her temple.
The boy looks up at her, down at the fingers, back up, and smiles brightly.
She deflates in relief.
"This means what I think it means, right?" The tension comes back twofold and she sweats nervously at his question. Without a clue as to what she's agreeing to, she nods aggressively, like signing away her life to the devil. No time to think about it, just get it over with.
"Good." His smile suddenly drips with guile. Vividly, she feels a ball of dread drop in her stomach.
"Then listen to what I say is best for you,” He points at the floor. “And lie down."

Author's Note

I still struggle with consistent characterization. Does this come across well?