"If you'd said that when I wasn't long off the Plains I would have been shocked," Lashan says with a self-deprecating chuckle. She doesn't want to scare the boy off doing new things. She also doesn't really want to talk about Gambino, a man she has already had a stupid fantasy or two about stabbing several years ago, when it would have done some good. "I think we talk about names more than we use them. But, it's sunk in by now, different people find different things important. Hesri thinks it's some version of 'Gustav'. I like the idea that it comes from 'August' but I think that kind of name went out of fashion when the old empire fell." It's still the name of a month, but she hasn't met anyone named August.
There had been a presence - Lashan had rooted around pretty shamelessly before deciding she could take a boy who'd attacked her back to a place she'd dedicated herself to protecting - in Guts' life who had been warm and caring in a way that man hadn't been. Long gone and hazy though she was, she must be the reason he'd survived infancy and learned to walk and talk and is actually capable of acting like a human being at all.
That does not mean, if she was the one to name him, she necessarily had much in mind but that's fine. Some names are just syllables or combinations of syllables that pleased the ear, even if it doesn't please Lashan's. Guts being named 'guts' even if it is literally just 'entrails' is the most neutral thing about his upbringing.
This is a nice moment. She has a sense of this half-feral boy extending a fragile degree of trust towards her. Some of that's alcohol, some is... Lashan ruthlessly controls her feelings so they don't ruin it, and glances back towards her girl, who's more deeply asleep now. That cat's eyes are slitted, too wary to fully close. "Vena's mother, if she had anything really in mind, didn't tell her. At best, it's from an old empire word that means 'hunter'." Which would be a good name and probably what Vena would say if asked. "At worst, I've heard a dialect where her name sounds a lot like their word for 'vein', plus 'a' to make it feminine."
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There had been a presence - Lashan had rooted around pretty shamelessly before deciding she could take a boy who'd attacked her back to a place she'd dedicated herself to protecting - in Guts' life who had been warm and caring in a way that man hadn't been. Long gone and hazy though she was, she must be the reason he'd survived infancy and learned to walk and talk and is actually capable of acting like a human being at all.
That does not mean, if she was the one to name him, she necessarily had much in mind but that's fine. Some names are just syllables or combinations of syllables that pleased the ear, even if it doesn't please Lashan's. Guts being named 'guts' even if it is literally just 'entrails' is the most neutral thing about his upbringing.
This is a nice moment. She has a sense of this half-feral boy extending a fragile degree of trust towards her. Some of that's alcohol, some is... Lashan ruthlessly controls her feelings so they don't ruin it, and glances back towards her girl, who's more deeply asleep now. That cat's eyes are slitted, too wary to fully close. "Vena's mother, if she had anything really in mind, didn't tell her. At best, it's from an old empire word that means 'hunter'." Which would be a good name and probably what Vena would say if asked. "At worst, I've heard a dialect where her name sounds a lot like their word for 'vein', plus 'a' to make it feminine."