Blackthorne

The Mercy of Forgetting

DRACO

Iwas watching the ceiling when Nico started to move.

His hands opened and closed against the sheet. I turned my head and looked at him in the dark and saw the sweat at his temple before I felt the heat coming off him.

I sat up. His pulse was fast when I put my fingers to his wrist. His skin was damp along his neck and collarbone. The wound near his ribs looked clean, the silver damage healed, which told me whatever this was had a different source.

Then he started murmuring.

I have heard men speak in sleep in more languages than most people know exist, and I know the slurred cadence of dreaming speech. This was not that. The fragments coming out of Nico's mouth were too formed.

“Nico,” I said.

He didn't surface.

“Nico, baby.” I put my hand to the side of his face and felt the fever in his skin. “Nico, wake up.”

He came awake all at once, gasping into the dark.

For a few seconds, he did not know the room. His eyes moved over the walls, the window, the shadows near the door, searching for whatever had followed him out of the dream.

Then he found me.

His hands caught in my shirt, sudden and desperate, and he pulled himself against me as if I were the first solid thing the world had offered him.

I wrapped my arms around him and held him back.

After a while the heartbeat slowed.

“Sorry,” he said, into my shoulder.

“Don't apologise.”

“I grabbed you like a—”

“Nico. Don't apologise.”

He exhaled. “I was dreaming again.”

“I know.”

“They've been getting worse.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“He was laughing. In this one. He was laughing at something — at someone — and it was morning, early, and there was cold stone under his feet.

And he was wearing something too big for him, like a coat that wasn't his.” He paused.

“He kept calling the other person an insufferable statue. And the other person was trying not to laugh and was very bad at it.”

I pressed my lips together because I remembered that morning exactly.

“Come on,” I said, and got Nico up.

He was unsteady on his feet while I lead him to the bathroom, and I kept hold of him while I got a towel and dried his face and neck.

Then I ran the bath.

Blackthorne had opinions about baths. The water came out the right temperature before I'd finished adjusting it, and items from the manor's stores appeared on the edge of the tub that smelled like minerals and old herbs.

I tipped it in without asking what it was because the house's instincts were usually more useful than my scepticism.

“In,” I said.

“I'm fine,” he said.

“Get in the bath before I put you in it.”

He got in slowly, and then the water took his weight.

I pulled the low stool from beside the vanity and sat and looked at him and thought about where to start.

“What you dreamed was a real morning. It happened in a camp.

He had lost his boots in a game of dice against a cavalry officer who absolutely cheated, and Cassiel knew he'd been cheated and played again anyway because he had the stubbornness of a man who believed he could outrun bad odds if he just stayed in the game long enough.” I paused.

“He couldn't, usually. He was wrong about that as often as not. But he believed it.”

Nico had gone still in the water, listening.

“He stole my campaign cloak to keep warm because asking me for something was a defeat he couldn't afford. So he took it while I was asleep and wore it around the camp for two hours before I found him.” I looked at my hands.

“He said I looked like a monument awaiting dedication and he was going to find me a plaque.”

A very small sound came out of Nico.

“He said my face had no right to be that dramatic before sunrise. Then he gave me a piece of the stolen apple like that resolved the situation. I stood there in a war camp at dawn holding a piece of stolen apple and he was laughing, and for about fifteen minutes I forgot entirely that there was a battle to survive.”

Nico pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. It didn't work. Two tears went down his face and he looked deeply annoyed at both of them.

“You don't have to apologise for those either,” I said.

“I'm not—” He stopped. Wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “I don't even know why it's making me cry. I don't remember him. I barely remember the dream now.”

“You don't have to remember it clearly for it to matter.

It sits in you somewhere. It's been sitting in you your whole life.” I picked up the cloth from the edge of the tub and brought it to the back of his neck, where the fever had been worst, and felt him lean into the contact with the trust of a man too tired to be careful about it.

“The grief in it is real even when the memory isn't.”

He was quiet for a moment. “He sounds like he was a pain in the ass.”

“Profoundly. He was the single most inconvenient person I had encountered, and he was fully aware of it and considered it a personality strength.”

I washed his hair. He didn't comment on it, which meant he was more exhausted than he was letting on. His head dropped slightly under my hands and I worked the shampoo through slowly and rinsed it clean.

I washed his shoulders, the back of his neck, the skin around the healed wound that had gone pink and new. He winced once when I touched it and I adjusted the pressure and he relaxed again. The fever heat was fading by degrees, the bath pulling it down.

“You're sweet,” he said, to the water. “I just wanted you to know.”

“If you tell anyone I am sweet, I will revoke your sex dungeon privileges.”

The laugh that came out of him was real and a little broken but I was glad that he was laughing again.

I dried him afterward with a towel from the heated rail and I carried him back to bed, which he accepted with the weak protest of a man who had decided the argument wasn't worth the energy.

“You're going to be asleep in four minutes.”

“I'm not—”

He was asleep in three.

I settled beside him and lay in the dark and listened to his breathing even out and felt the fever still working its way down, slower than I wanted, but working.

The house had dimmed the fire to low without being asked.

The curtains were still at the windows. A door somewhere in the suite clicked shut softly, and I said, quietly, to no one in particular, “Thank you.”

The lamp on the near side of the room glowed fractionally warmer.

I looked at it for a moment. “Don't be smug about it.”

A floorboard shifted, somewhere beyond the bathroom, with the satisfied creak of a house that was absolutely being smug about it and had no intention of stopping.

Nico didn't wake. His breathing was deep and slow and the heat coming off him was ordinary now, and his hands had gone loose against the sheet.

I was watching the line of his shoulder when he said, without opening his eyes.

“Will I ever actually remember them? His memories.

Or is it always going to sit in the corner like a room I can't open?”

“The memories can return in pieces, but the full weight of it, that would need a different kind of bond.”

He was quiet. Working through it.

“Turning,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That would do it?”

“It might. A full blood transformation brings you close enough to the old bond that Cassiel's memories could flood back. The connection between his life and yours exists at a level deeper than thought, and turning would push everything into proximity.” I looked at the ceiling.

“It would also hurt you, possibly overwhelm you.

It could blur the line between who you are now and who you were then.

I don't know if you would surface from it as Nico, or as someone that remembered both lives and couldn't reconcile them.”

“But you could do it.”

“Yes.”

“So why won't you?”

I took a breath I didn't need and let it out.

“Because eternity is not a gift. Not the way it sounds.

People hear forever and they think of everything they would do with the time, all the things they'd learn and see and survive, and they don't think about what forever actually does to a person.” I turned my head to look at him, his eyes still closed, his face tilted toward me in sleep.

“You would watch everyone you love die. Not once.

Over and over. Evie, Remy, every person you've ever cared for, gone, and you still here.

You'd watch languages die in your mouth because no one speaks them anymore.

Cities changing until your grief has no address left because the place you're grieving doesn't exist. You'd watch yourself outlive not just people but the versions of yourself that loved them, and wake up in a new century wearing a name that no longer fits, and start over, and do it again.”

He had gone very still.

“Power turns every desire into temptation.

Hunger never fully sleeps. There are years, long ones, where the world feels like a stage you've seen too many times and everyone on it is playing roles you've already watched played by better actors.” I paused.

“I once turned someone because I could not bear to lose him.

I told myself he would choose it if he understood what it was, and I didn't give him enough time to understand before I decided I knew better.” I stopped there.

The rest of that story lived in a room I kept locked and would not open tonight. “It ended badly. For both of us.”

Nico was quiet for a long moment. “Do you think I'd regret it?”

“I don't know. And that is exactly why I will not make the choice for you.”

He made a small sound.

“I have taken many things in my life, Nico,” I said. “I will not take your mortality because my grief recognises your face.”

The room held that for a while.

He reached across the sheet and his hand found my wrist and closed around it. His grip was light, loose, and I turned my hand over and let him hold it.

Nico's grip went slack as sleep took him all the way down.

I didn't move. I stayed with his hand loose around my wrist and the house breathing around us and the fire low and the necklace warm against him, and I thought about Cassiel, who had laughed at me in the dawn and been dead by nightfall, and about the fact that the man sleeping beside me had laughed at me tonight in a bath with tears on his face and was breathing steadily and would be here tomorrow.

I had spent centuries believing remembrance was the only mercy left to either of us.

Lying in the dark with Nico's pulse under my fingers, I wondered if forgetting might be a mercy too and whether the self he had built in this lifetime was not something to mourn for failing to be the old one, but something to protect for being entirely new.

The lamp burned warm. The house settled around us. Outside, the city kept its permanent indifferent noise.

I stayed awake until dawn, watching him breathe, and I did not find that a hardship.