Chapter 1 #3
“Griff…” Nyx’s heart squeezed in her chest. They hadn’t talked about Seth.
Not really. Neither of them seemed to know how.
What would help, what would hurt. But she’d felt, through the Station, Griff wander daily to Seth’s old room.
Sometimes he only opened the door and peered in, a brief glimpse into a life that had been.
Sometimes he went inside and remained for an hour or more, sitting with his grief in his own way.
Nyx still couldn’t look inside, couldn’t bear to see all of Seth’s things there, exactly as he’d left them.
If it weren’t for Griff, she would have excised the room from the Station, cut it out like a hole in the center of a heart.
But though she left it for Griff, she was careful to block her awareness of it out, the same way she did with all of her friends’ rooms to allow them privacy.
She only kept her awareness of the doorway, one she could feel Griff open and go through, but feel nothing once he was on the other side of.
“What if I lose you,” Griff said again, “and it is for something that does not even matter?”
Nyx was grateful for the distracting anger that statement sparked within her. “It does matter. You matter.”
“Not at the cost of your life.”
“I’m not going to die.”
“No one believes they will,” he said simply. He didn’t have to say Seth did not think he would for her to feel that truth in her bones.
She smothered the urge to fly off the handle, because she knew she wasn’t angry at him.
And she wanted to take his feelings into account even if a different, selfish part of her wanted once more to be alone, where she could be as miserable as she wanted without having to consider how it affected anyone else.
Except she didn’t truly want that, either.
She was tired of being alone, and tired of being miserable, and tired of not being able to simply get over this, of not being able to be with her friends without faking the emotion behind every smile and comment that came out of her mouth.
She longed for the driving sense of purpose she’d had when her mind had been consumed by the need for Kiev A-Morridahn’s death.
She needed to make Griff understand that, so he could understand why she had to go.
“I’m not doing so great here,” she admitted.
“I want to be. I’m trying to be. But I’m not.
When I first came to the Station, I just wanted somewhere to belong.
Somewhere to be seen and safe. I could have spent my entire life taking Arrivals and Departures and marveling at the universe and reading books and never wanting much of anything more.
“But now…it isn’t just about Seth being gone. It’s knowing that none of this is built on anything good. It’s knowing that there are over one-hundred other places like this in the universe that millions of people pass through every day and none of them know the suffering those Stations are built on.
“I can’t have the life I wanted.” The life she’d thought she could have after she’d gotten her memories back.
“And I think the only way I know how to deal with that is if I can fix it for someone else. For you and Jevryn. For all the other Stations and Avatars. I need to do something. Do you understand?”
His wings drooped. “I do. I assure you, I do.”
And she felt like an asshole, because he must have felt that way so many times over the centuries, but he couldn’t do anything. Not anything that required him to leave the Station.
“Can you promise me that you will not take unnecessary risks? Can you promise me that you are not trying to be hurt?”
“Yes.” She didn’t have to think about it, or lie, like she would have a few weeks ago. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”
He heaved a great sigh. “Every time you leave, promising to be careful, you return to this Station with concerning injuries, or death on your heels.”
“That’s not true.”
He raised his left wingtip, as if lifting a finger to begin listing things off.
“Arkadia: acquisition of chaos thorns after nearly being sucked into a chaos pocket. Encounter with a desert under-dweller. Prison break that resulted in the councilors coming here and Koral nearly ripping open your mind. Tenebris Umbra: you woke Laiveran, nearly died escaping Calista, then led a contingent of Kumir back to the Station. Amentia Furor: mermaid bite, severe sunburn, multiple near-deaths from untrained portal use, and Laiveran taking temporary control of Kaliaris. Nethrayne: fractured memories leading you to portal to a councilor’s planet, where that councilor nearly killed you.
Kiev’s domicile: nearly killed by a horde of undead, nearly killed by Kiev himself, and nearly host to the next generation of salyrian resurrection plants. ”
He very carefully left out Kyvren, for which she was grateful.
“In all fairness to myself, I never promised to be careful on Amentia Furor or Nethrayne, because I never intended to go to either of those places. And I definitely didn’t promise to be careful at Kiev’s.
And I’m having difficulty remembering if I made specific promises regarding the prison planet or the Shadow Market, but look, those were both Very Dangerous Places, so really, I think I did pretty good there, all things considered.
“All of my prior trips have been off-planet to really bad places. This is Dead Earth. How bad can it be?”
Griff covered his face with his wing. Nyx stepped forward and gently drew it down. “You okay?”
“Why would you say a thing like that?”
“What? Asking if you’re okay?”
“‘How bad can it be?’ You are practically begging cosmic forces to intervene to correct your hubris.”
“I didn’t know you believed in cosmic forces.”
“I believe in something bigger than myself, I simply do not know what form that something takes.”
“Well, if the something shows up to correct my hubris, I’ll just tell them they misinterpreted the statement. I’m being positive, not hubristic.” Griff attempted to draw his wing back over his face, but she was still holding on to it. “Do you need a hug?” she asked.
He opened his wings in answer. She stepped in, then felt the comfort of those wings close around her. “It will be okay,” she promised him. She didn’t know how, or when, but she had to believe that somehow, some way, it would.