6. Elara
Elara
I am dying.
I’m almost sure of it.
Why doesn’t anyone see that?
They’re all looking at me like this is fine. Like I should just breathe.
Yeah, right. Breathe.
In and out. Out and in.
Doesn’t matter.
Because none of it’s working right now.
If I could breathe I would be breathing.
My heart is going too fast to count and my hands are doing something electric and there is a sound in my chest. There is a sound IN my chest. Low. Rolling. People don’t make that sound. Chests don’t make that sound. It’s getting louder when I panic and I’m panicking about it getting louder and—
Hospital. I need a hospital. Do they even have hospitals here? I’m going to die in a weird place with four moons and no urgent care and my last meal was very good, at least there’s that—
A chair scrapes.
Erik’s hand closes around my wrist.
Oh.
That helps.
Why does that help? I don’t care why it helps. Don’t take it back.
He’s saying something. My name, maybe. His thumb is on the inside of my wrist, right over the panic, pressing like he’s holding a wound closed, and one notch of the awful comes down. One. I grab that notch and I hold on.
Someone moves behind me. Big. Warm. Rayner — I know without looking, don’t ask me how, my back knows, my back has apparently met him — and heat soaks through the chair into my shoulders and something up there lets go.
I take a breath. Not fully but way more than three seconds ago and that’s something.
More. I need more. Of what? Who knows, I just need it.
Okay. Okay.
Brock is on the floor next to my chair now. He’s saying words. I can see them happening, calm ones, reasonable ones probably, his mouth is making very good shapes. None of them are arriving. What’s arriving is his knee, pressed against mine, steady, and I hold onto that too.
In for four.
It gets to three.
Three. I could cry about three.
I open my eyes to tell somebody about three—
Gerald is on the windowsill.
WHAT?
Gerald.
My Gerald. My pothos. My plant. Chipped pot, the trailing arm I keep meaning to trim, the leaves, GERALD, sitting on a windowsill in a cabin in wherever the hell we are like he pays rent here.
My whole chest seizes, because there are only two explanations and both of them are that I’m dying.
Either I am hallucinating my houseplant, which means my brain has started showing me comfort content on the way out, or my plant teleported, and plants don’t—
The three is gone. The three is GONE, I’m back to nothing, my breath is a fist beating on a locked door and the sound in my chest surges and—
Gunnar keeps almost touching me. Hand out, hand back, hand out — hovering at the edge of me like the world’s largest tattooed hummingbird, and if I had any air to spare I would scream at him to pick one.
“Closer,” Leif says.
That I hear. How does that come through?
Don’t care.
Everyone shifts and looks at him.
“She needs us closer.”
“I can — hear you,” I get out. Two words per breath. That’s the budget. “Discussing me. Like a — malfunctioning — appliance.”
“You’re not malfunctioning,” Brock says, gently, right against my knee.
Rayner shifts behind me — half a step, coming around, probably to see my face —
Worse. Immediately worse. The heat leaves my back and every dial he was holding down comes back up and my body tips after him, tips, in the chair, like a plant, like GERALD—
“Why does it feel worse when you move?!”
It rips out of me on air I couldn’t afford, and it lands in the room like a dropped glass.
Nobody answers.
Nobody. Answers.
Erik’s hand tightens on my wrist. Brock looks at Leif.
Gunnar looks at the ceiling. And Rayner — Rayner just moves back.
Doesn’t say a word. Puts himself exactly where he was, solid behind my chair, because my body asked and apparently that’s reason enough for him.
And slowly everything starts to come back down, and I hate all of them, and I don’t want a single one of them to move ever again.
Glances go around the table. They talk in glances, I’ve watched them do it all day, and this round ends with everybody moving at once.
Brock settles against my chair leg, shoulder to my shin, knee bracing mine.
Rayner sinks down at my back — the floor complains — and becomes a wall, warm straight through the chair, through my shirt, into the hinge of my shoulders.
Erik keeps my wrist and adds my hand, folding it into both of his.
Gunnar drags a chair around with entirely too much noise, drops into it at my other side, and finally — finally — leaves his forearm on the armrest, two inches from mine. There if I want it.
And it works.
In for four gets to four.
The breath lands. All the way down, the first whole one in — I don’t know how long, panic doesn’t keep time — and it’s loud in the quiet room, and everyone hears it, and I don’t even care.
Because my heart starts descending from my ears back toward its legal residence and the sound in my chest drops to something almost like a purr.
A purr. That’s — no. Later. That’s for later.
Words start arriving again. Brock’s, low and even at my knee, something about you’re all right, we’ve got you, nothing here will touch you. I catch about half. The half is nice.
My fingers, I notice, are knotted in Erik’s sleeve.
When did that happen. I don’t remember grabbing him. I look at my own hand like it’s wearing a costume.
I should let go.
I do not let go.
And there’s still a gap. I can feel it — which is a sentence I hate — a missing piece off to my left, across the table, where Leif is still sitting with his forearms braced and his jaw set, holding himself outside the whole arrangement like somehow that’s helping.
“You too,” I say.
It comes out small. It comes out on the first air I’ve had to spare in a while, and I spend it on that.
His whole body goes still. Something moves through his face — fast, there and gone. And for a second he looks at me the way he looked outside the cabin door. Nothing cat about it at all.
Then he gets up, comes around the table, and pushes it out of the way. Like it was nothing. A full dinner table, dishes and all, moved the way you’d nudge a footstool.
He kneels in front of me.
Erik scoots out of the way without letting go of my wrist, and Leif’s palm comes to rest against the side of my neck. Warm. Heavy. Certain. He leans in, and his forehead touches mine.
“Breathe,” he says. Low. Just for me. “Just breathe.”
I do.
The engine under my sternum goes quiet. All the way quiet. Everything, all at once — pulse, breath, the shaking, the heat, the fist on my chest — settling like a house after a storm passes, and the room is so silent I can hear the fire and five other people breathing.
Nobody says a word.
And now that I’m not actively dying, there’s room in my body for a brand-new feeling, which is that I would like the floor to open.
I just fell apart in front of five men for absolutely no reason.
Full production. Gasping, shaking, yelling about a plant that grew legs.
They had to assemble around me like sandbags around a flood, and now everyone is being very quiet and very kind about it, which is worse, and I am never getting out of this chair.
I live here now. This is my chair house.
I don’t know what implications that might have on using the bathroom.
Deep breath. I’m fine. This is fine.
We stay like that. His forehead against mine. His breath and mine sorting themselves out until they’re doing the same thing.
“You’re a hell of a lot stronger than you look,” he says.
“Says the man who used me as a landing pad.”
The chuckle moves through him and into me, forehead to forehead. I feel it in my teeth.
“I’m not complaining.”
Oh.
That’s — he — okay. My face goes hot for an entirely new genre of reason, and there is no air in the budget for this, so I do the thing I do best.
I change the subject.
“How did you even know to —”
Erik glances at Leif. Leif looks back at him, and something passes between them that has weight on both ends.
“Later,” Leif says.
I add it to the pile. The pile is now load-bearing. Like the fireplace.
This is not cuddling, just so we’re clear.
Cuddling is voluntary and usually involves fewer tactical boots.
This is medical. Probably. Some kind of group-administered nervous-system intervention that nobody put on a consent form, and I am participating in it the way you participate in a fire drill, which is to say completely, while maintaining the right to complain.
I close my eyes.
“Nobody move,” I mumble, into the warm dark. “This is medical.”
Somewhere above my head, Gunnar makes a sound that’s almost a laugh.
But nobody moves.
On the windowsill, Gerald’s leaves are pointed at me.
All of them.