SOPHIA
Idon’t sleep.
I tell myself I will, so I lie down on the narrow couch the doctor pushed against the wall, close my eyes, and listen to Reth breathe six feet away like it's the only thing anchoring me to the earth.
I count his breaths the way I counted days on that bench in Japan.
One. Two. Three. Still here. Still fighting. Still mine.
I get to forty-seven before the breathing changes.
I'm sitting up before I've even decided to move, heart slamming. The lamp’s still on, turned low, casting everything in sickly amber.
He's restless now in a way that turns my stomach—small movements at first, his hands twitching, fingers curling and uncurling like they're searching for something that isn't there. His jaw clenches so hard I hear his teeth grind. The muscles in his face twist with things sleep should never produce.
Then his legs.
That's what stops my breath completely. His legs jerking under the covers—sharp, involuntary kicks, knees pulling up then slamming down like his body is trying to run from something inside his own skin.
The doctor warned me about the muscle cramps, the withdrawal.
I understood the words. I didn't understand this—watching Reth's legs thrash like they belong to someone else, like his own muscles are punishing him for the weeks he was kept dependent.
Before the doctor left, he administered the first dose of meds, explained it would ease the worst of it, said it would take time to level out.
Whatever the medication is doing, it isn't enough yet.
His skin is already slick with sweat, the collar of the shirt soaked dark at the neck.
Goosebumps ripple across his arms in violent waves even as sweat pours off him.
Burning and freezing at the same time. His body has no idea what temperature it's supposed to be, swinging between extremes with the cruelty of a system in full revolt.
I cross the room fast, knees hitting the floor beside the bed.
"Reth." I keep my voice low, steady. "I'm here. You're in the mountain house. You're safe. I've got you."
He doesn't hear me. Or hearing me changes nothing.
He's shivering violently now despite the sweat, teeth chattering hard enough that I can hear them from here, pulling his knees tighter to his chest like he can make himself small enough to disappear inside the pain.
His eyes, even closed, are doing something wrong—rapid movement underneath the lids, chasing something through a dark I can't see into.
Terror claws up my throat.
This is Reth. My Reth.
The man who moved like violence and certainty, who took out seven, eight, nine men in order to keep me safe. Now he’s curled up like a broken child, shaking so hard the bed frame rattles, sweat pouring off him in rivers while his body betrays him in ways I can’t fix.
The sight of it rips something inside me wide open. I feel sick. Helpless. Like my love is worthless against whatever poison they pumped into him for weeks.
“Reth,” I whisper, voice cracking. My hands hover over him, trembling, terrified to touch him and make it worse, but even more terrified to do nothing. “Please… come back to me. I’m right here. I’ve got you.”
A low, guttural groan tears out of him, and it breaks me. The sound of a man enduring something rather than experiencing it, something beyond the reach of language or intention, something purely physical and purely merciless.
I’ve sat across from people in withdrawal. I’ve worked in settings where I've seen it, heard it, documented it clinically. I have never—not once—sat on the floor beside a bed where the person withdrawing was someone I loved.
There’s no professional distance for this. There’s no clinical framework that reaches the part of me sitting here on this floor counting the sounds he makes and knowing I can’t stop any of them.
His eyes fly open, darting around the room in rapid sweeps, taking inventory, the eyes of someone whose brain is trying to determine which reality it surfaced into and trusting none of the options.
I reach out and lay my hand on his arm. Gentle. Just contact. Just the information that something warm and present exists in this room beside him.
He jolts like I've burned him. Wrenches back so violently the headboard slams against the wall.
“Shit, Reth. I’m sorry. I didn’t think…” Exactly.
I didn’t fucking think. Withdrawal strips the body of its ability to filter sensation, that everything becomes too much, that being touched can feel like being struck, and all I can think of doing is touching him.
Holding him. Kissing him until everything’s okay again.
"Reth—"
“No.” He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “You’re not real. You’re not here.”
"I'm real." Leaning closer. Keeping my voice even through sheer force of will. "Reth, look at me. It's Sophia. I'm right here. I'm not leaving you."
His breathing is ragged, too fast, the panicked gasps of a man whose nervous system is misfiring on every channel simultaneously.
Sweat pours down his temples and drips from his jaw onto the sheets.
His legs kick again—harder this time, the cramp visibly seizing through the muscle, his whole body curling around it—and the sound that comes out of him, the sound of that level of pain finding the only exit available to it.
“Reth,” I whisper, voice breaking. “Please… I’m here. I’m right here. I would take this from you if I could. God, I would take all of it.”
A sob catches in my throat as another cramp rips through him. I feel so small. So useless. All the strength I thought I had crumbles in the face of watching the man I love more than anything endure this kind of torment, and there’s nothing—nothing—I can do to make it stop.
I reach for his hand.
"Get away from me,” he snaps, and the force of it knocks me back.
Not his hands—his voice. The raw, gutted authority of it, coming from somewhere underneath the delirium, somewhere that’s still him, still Reth, still the man who has spent his entire life calculating exactly how much distance to keep between himself and everything he might damage.
"I'm not going anywhere—"
"You bleed." His voice cracks apart at the seams. "Every time—every time I get close, you bleed. I watch you—”
“No. I’m not bleeding, Reth. I’m okay.”
“Get out.”
“Reth, please. Let me help—”
“Get the fuck out!”
Tears falls. “No, Reth, please—”
“Ian!” His shout fills the room and the hallway and probably the whole mountain. “Ian! Get her out!”
My hands start to shake, my heart thundering as I try to absorb it the way you absorb something that hits too hard and too fast for any defense to be useful.
I know it’s the withdrawal shouting. The delirium. But it's not confusion about who I am. He knows exactly who I am, and he’s screaming for someone to get me away from him. It’s a kind of devastation I wasn’t prepared for.
Ian’s through the door in seconds.
“What the fuck is going on?” Eyes sharp, hair disordered, taking in the room with the rapid inventory of a man built for exactly this kind of worst case.
He sees Reth against the headboard, legs still cramping, face streaming with sweat and tears indistinguishable from each other.
He sees me on the floor with my hand still extended toward a man who just screamed for me to get away from him.
“Sophia, Jesus.” Ian’s next to me within a second. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“No.” I shake. “He didn’t hurt me.”
"Get her the fuck away from me!" Reth starts rocking, and everything inside me breaks.
"Crazy, come on. Back up."
"I'm not leaving him like this."
"Back up." Ian moves between us, not roughly, just solidly, a wall I can't get around. "He doesn't know what's real right now."
"He does know." My voice cracking. "That's the problem. He knows it's me, and he still—"
"Sophia."
"He needs me, Ian."
"Right now, he needs you to leave." His eyes find mine, and I can see how much he hates saying those words, almost as much as I hate hearing them. "I can’t have you in here. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, and if he hurts you—”
“He won’t hurt me,” I spit out. “Reth won’t—”
“He’s not Reth right now, okay?” He pauses. “At least not the Reth we know. So please. I need you to trust me right now and go into the hallway."
I look at him for a long moment. At Ian, who slept next to me when the nightmares came and gave me Gerald and made things on sticks and held me in a kitchen at midnight when I fell apart.
The Ian who walked into Valeria’s estate and brought him out.
Who is standing in front of me right now looking like it costs him everything to send me away.
I look past Ian's shoulder at Reth. At the man I flew across the world for.
At the man I sat on a bench in Japan for counting days.
At the man who built a house from my diary and left me lollipops and once pressed his forehead to mine and said I love you like he was handing me something he'd been keeping in a locked room for years.
There are no words for the kind of torment clawing at my bones, being willing to give my life for him if it meant saving him, yet he doesn’t want me here.
He's looking at me from across the room with his back against the headboard and his legs seizing underneath him and his face doing something I have never seen it do, not in any of it, not in any of the worst moments we've been through—he looks terrified.
“I’ll stay here with him, okay?” Ian’s hands are on my shoulder now. “I’ll take care of him, I swear it.”
Something solid breaks. Deep. And it steals the air I breathe. It’s the worst defeat I’ve ever felt, loving someone with your entire being and discovering that love isn't the solvent you believed it was—that it can’t dissolve years of damage that was never meant for him to carry in the first place.
I nod. My legs carry me to the door the way legs are supposed to, steady and functional and utterly indifferent to the fact that I would rather they give out entirely than walk away from him.
There’s a second where I hover at the threshold, everything inside me pulling me back in, toward him. I’m two breaths away from doing just that when Ian places a hand on my shoulder, thumb brushing the back of my neck.
“You did not break. Through everything. Not once. And you’re not breaking now, understand me?”
My throat closes, and I’m barely keeping myself upright. Barely able to breathe except in sharp, shallow bursts. “I love him, Ian.”
“I know you do. And that’s why you’re going to get through this. For him.”
I nod without looking at him; one step, and the door closes behind me. Shutting me out. Cutting me away from the man my heart’s aching for. It’s a different kind of sadness, grief—when you’re unable to help the one person whose pain has become yours.
I press my back against the wall, look at the ceiling of the hallway of the house he built for me, and I let the sob out, finally, the one that has been building since forty-seven breaths.
From inside the room—sounds. The crash of something. The violence of a body in war against itself, the medication not yet at the level where it makes a meaningful difference, the withdrawal doing what withdrawal does in its first peak hours regardless of what you give it to fight with.
His voice, sometimes, saying things I can't make out through the wood. Ian's voice, steadier, lower, anchoring.
I slide down the wall until I'm sitting on the floor. Pull my knees to my chest.
Gerald is still in my jacket pocket, downstairs, and I want him stupidly badly, want the small solid weight of him in my hands, and instead I have the hallway floor and the closed door and the sounds coming through it and the cruel knowledge that the most loving thing I can do for the person I love most is stay on this side of the fucking door.
And I don't understand it.
I don't understand any of it.
But I don't have to understand it tonight. Tonight, I just have to be on this side of the door and keep breathing and trust that Ian is in there and that the medication will build in his system and that the doctor is twenty minutes away if we need him and that this—all of this—is survivable.
Even when it doesn't feel survivable.
Even when I'm sitting on a hallway floor at three in the morning listening to the man I love suffer through something I can't touch.
I close my eyes.
One.
Two.
Three.
Still here.
Still loving him through a hell I can't enter.