Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Wren
Ikeep him alive through the night, and it turns out keeping watch is mostly just refusing to look away.
I don't sleep. I check the bandage every hour by firelight, the way he taught me before he went under, watching for the dark seep that means trouble, finding only the slow honest healing kind.
I check his color. I check his breathing, even and deep, the breath of a man whose body has decided to live, and every time I confirm it I let myself breathe too.
I feed the fire. I keep him warm. I sit up against the headboard with his head heavy in my lap and my hand in his gray hair and I watch the dark windows for lights that don't come, because the lights are done coming.
We won. He won. I won, down in the cellar with the structure and the pistol, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't.
Sometime in the deepest part of the night he surfaces, eyes finding me in the firelight, and for a second there's the old braced look. The man expecting to be feared, the man who thinks the worst of himself is the truest thing about him.
"Still here," I tell him before he can ask. "Still keeping watch. Still in love with you. None of it wore off while you slept. Go back under."
But he doesn't, not right away. He reaches up with the arm that works and traces my jaw with two fingers, and his eyes in the firelight are doing the thing they did the first time he looked at me bare. The wonder, like the mountain handed him something he can't believe he gets to keep.
"I have to tell you the thing I'm afraid of," he says, low. "Now, while I'm too weak to talk myself out of it."
"Tell me."
"That you'll go down off this mountain and the world will be the right size for you again.
Twenty-four. The whole thing in front of you.
And you'll look back up at this and I'll be the strange dark chapter, the older man in the cabin who killed for you, and the daylight will make me look like what I'm afraid I am.
" His voice doesn't break but it goes very quiet.
"I'm not afraid of the men anymore. I'm afraid of the daylight.
I'm afraid of what I look like in it. To you. "
And I understand that this is the last wall.
Not the line on the floor, not the rules, not the nine years.
This. The fear underneath all of it: that he's only lovable up here, in the cold and the dark and the emergency, and that down in the ordinary world the difference in our years and the blood on his hands will turn me away the way he believes, in his bones, everyone eventually turns away.
So I tell him the truest thing I have.
"Eli. Look at me." I wait until he does.
"I'm a scientist. Do you know what I do?
I look at things in the worst possible light, on purpose, to find out if they're real.
I take a sample and I run every test that could break it and I only believe in it if it survives.
That's the whole job. That's my whole nature.
I have spent four days running every test there is on you.
Snowed in, hurt, scared, then in your bed, then in the cellar with a gun, then with your blood up to my wrists on the floor.
The worst possible light, every test that could break it.
And you survive all of them. You don't crack.
The structure holds." I lean down so my forehead's on his.
"I'm not going to look better in the daylight, because there's no light I haven't already seen you in.
I saw you in the worst one there is and I chose you in it.
The daylight is going to be easy. The daylight is going to be the reward. "
He's quiet a long time. The fire pops.
"Eli, I've spent my whole life being told everything about me was temporary.
By my dad, who left, by my mother, who decided I'd inherited the leaving.
And then a man pulled me out of a wreck and turned me down on a clear day for my own sake and killed three men so I could keep breathing and bled on his own floor rather than let me be touched.
And that man is the first permanent thing that ever chose me back.
You think your past or your age or anything else is going to scare me off the one fixed point in my whole life?
You're the bedrock, Eli. You're the billion-year-old stone I can put my hand on.
I'm not afraid of the daylight either. I want to stand in it with you.
I want everyone to do the math and make the face.
I want to watch them be wrong about us in person. "
He pulls me down, careful, his good arm around me, and holds me, and I watch the last wall go. Not break, he's not a man who breaks, but lower itself, all the way, the way a man lowers something he's been carrying so long he forgot it was heavy.
"Okay," he says into my hair, wrecked and certain. "Okay. The daylight. With you. All of it."
"All of it."
"Say the thing again. The thing from the cellar. I want it as the last thing before I sleep."
"I love you, Eli Brandt." I say it slow, so it lands, so it's the thing he carries down into sleep and up into the morning. "Clear day, solid ground, blood and all, age and all, no taking it back. I love you, and we both lived, and I'm keeping watch."
He sleeps. I keep watch. And somewhere toward dawn, with his breath steady and the bandage clean and the windows finally going gray with a light that isn't an enemy, I hear it. The first drip off the eaves, the first water in days, the mountain breathing out.
The thaw.
The road's going to open. And for the first time the thought of it doesn't scare me at all.