Chapter 29 #3
Every night, I watched him die in my nightmares.
Sometimes I dreamt of other horrible things, but most often it was Trey’s death.
I watched the light fade from his eyes over and over again until sleeping began to feel like torture.
So I stopped sleeping. At night I stayed awake and worked.
I relabeled all the tinctures. I deep-cleaned everything.
I mended all the tears in my clothes. I caught up on my medical notes.
On really bad nights, I went outside and walked alone along the wall of the Vault until my body was too exhausted to keep going.
Griz or Sam always asked if I wanted company on those walks, but I always declined.
I pretended not to see Trey’s pack sitting in the corner of the room.
In the daytime, I dozed between patients, which usually kept me from having a full-fledged nightmare.
People got used to shaking me awake when they needed healing.
A knot of guilt lodged itself in my stomach as people kept trying to talk to me.
I couldn’t be anything but this empty shell of a person.
I kept waiting for people to snap at me or tell me to get over it, but they didn’t.
They were kind, and that was almost worse.
“Nemo approved the plan to start a school for the kids,” Leda told me one day as Jet toddled around the clinic.
“We’re looking at a few buildings, but they’re all gonna need some renovations before we can do anything.
I’m hoping we can spend the spring and summer working on it and the kids can start in the fall. ”
“That’s great,” I murmured.
It took me a bit to realize she’d gone silent, and I looked away from Jet to see Leda studying me.
“Bones, you know you can talk to me anytime, right?” The earnest kindness in tone reminded me painfully of Trey. “I’m here for you.”
I nodded.
“The grief never goes away,” she added after a moment, her voice slightly shaky.
“I lost my partner before I even knew I was pregnant. Having Jet helped a little, but the only thing that really dulled the pain was time.” She covered my hand on the exam table with hers. “Just know it’s okay to feel.”
After she left, I stood at the table for a long time.
I had to be broken, because most of the time I felt nothing.
Besides the moments where the grief and pain suddenly came pouring out of my eyes, the emptiness consumed me.
I remembered sitting in Madame’s cell, watching the blood spurting from her neck and feeling nothing at all.
Maybe time couldn’t fix me. Maybe I was more like Madame than I was like Leda.
How much pain could a person take before they went mad?
I wasn’t sure how much more I could bear.
Mac’s crew started going out on missions to get supplies for all the new projects as the snow in the mountain passes melted.
I wasn’t sure if Mac had asked people to check in on me, but in the crew’s absence, the clinic stayed full of people.
Apple and Sky came every day. The two girls had bonded, and I was grateful for that.
At least they had each other. Leda and Jet stopped by most days. Even Nemo came by once.
Then one day, the door opened, and Mist walked in.
An ice-cold guilt filled the numbness. Her face had a little more color to it and she looked less skeletal. She wore her hair down, hiding the awful holes where her ears had once been. Scars covered her arms, scars that I’d helped put there.
Mist smiled, looking nervous, but she came up to me and handed over a bar of soap. “I thought you might be getting low.”
I took it, my fingers trembling.
“And I wanted to make sure you knew, I don’t blame you,” she added in a whispered rush. “It wasn’t your fault, Bones.”
I looked down at the soap in my hands. I didn’t deserve her forgiveness.
Hawk at least agreed with me. I’d seen him a few times around the hold.
He hadn’t said anything, but the simmering anger in his eyes when he looked at me spoke for him.
Hawk hadn’t forgiven me for what I’d done, and it made me feel relieved.
I would never forgive myself for the torture I’d helped Madame inflict, and it strangely comforted me to know that at least one other person out there felt the same way.
“I’m sorry about Trey,” Mist added in a trembling whisper. “He was a good man.”
She squeezed my shoulder before she turned and left.
I caught a glimpse of Apple and Sky watching, their faces solemn.
I had to bite back the impulse to snap at them to leave.
They shouldn’t be here with me. They should go help someone better, someone like Leda.
They could learn how to be good from people naturally that way.
What could they learn from me? How grief could make a person wither away until they crumbled into dust?
I didn’t see Clarity at all.
I tried to convince myself it would be disrespectful to go to her. If she didn’t want to see me, I could at least honor that. She probably hated me, and I couldn’t blame her. Seeing me would probably just cause her more pain, and gods, hadn’t I done enough?