35. Gravity Inevitable
Kneeling over them on the floor, Bastian gives Briar Ease like it’s morphine, his hand on their wrist like he’s trying to push it intravenously.
Briar’s mind, previously buzzing with animal panic, unable to think of anything but the pain, clears.
The pain is still there, unavoidable, but it’s manageable now, something they can survive.
‘I’m bad at this,’ Bastian says, his eyes darting from Briar’s fingers to their face. ‘I haven’t spent much time on it. I’m sorry. I wish I was better.’
‘It’s okay,’ Briar wheezes, head pillowed on their balled-up jacket. ‘It’s helping.’
They shift upwards onto their elbows, and Bastian moves back, keeping his grip on Briar’s arm with just the tips of his fingers.
‘I had no idea what he was planning,’ he says, his teeth gritted.
There’s a small cut on his face, one drop of blood, the telltale mark of some tiny shrapnel.
‘I thought he was going to the library, but then I saw Sokolov on his way out, he’s never had a poker face, and it was easy enough to .
. .’ He tries to sit down, but has to move Briar’s green book aside, open face-down where it fell during his search for Briar’s keys.
Briar watches the text with weary detachment, the faded marbling on the edges shifting like a magic eye, doing anything but looking at their mangled fingers, and then .
. . something falls into place for them, the ending of the very last chapter they’d spent so long bent over, suddenly reunited with the first line of the introduction in a pure bolt of understanding.
Maybe the pain is narrowing their focus; it’s like they can hold the whole thing in their mind at once, now, every page open wide to them if they care to see it.
They look at Bastian - his face white as a sheet, hazel eyes pinched with anger and worry - and then reach up with their unbroken hand to touch the cut on his forehead, mouth moving as they anchor their intent.
The wound heals over with understated instantaneity, hastened to nothing more than a faint, pink mark.
Briar doesn’t believe it at first. They’re out of their mind from the pain, the Ease; this is some hallucination. A dream. But the blood is still there, and the cut is not.
The Working called for mending. Repair. That’s all it is, really. The undoing of something organic gone wrong.
‘Bastian,’ Briar says, their head woozy, the words hard to find. ‘Look.’
Briar can feel a stinging cut on their cheekbone, the skin split where Alistair’s fist had made contact.
They close their eyes, touch their faltering fingers to their cheek, clinging to the contents of the book with the last of their strength as they whisper - and know that they’ve succeeded when they open their eyes and see the expression of aghast wonder on Bastian’s face.
‘But . . .’ Bastian touches Briar’s skin gently, tracing a long line. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s the book,’ Briar says, voice hoarse, tilting their chin towards it with monumental effort.
Bastian picks it up, turns it over, like some rational answer might come leaping off the pages. ‘But . . . Briar,’ he says. ‘You’re doing the Work.’
‘Can’t be,’ Briar says, and then they’re overcome with such a shivery wave of exhaustion that they forget what they were going to say next. Their elbows buckle, the world whirling around them, and they collapse back onto the rug.
‘Briar?’ Bastian drops the book, leaving twin smears of blood across its pages. ‘Briar, look at me.’
But Briar’s vision is spotting, splintering. They feel Bastian’s hands on them suddenly, face and then neck, followed by a panicked searching, and then a sharp intake of breath.
‘Okay,’ he says, his attempt at calm betrayed by the shaking of his voice. ‘Okay Briar, you’re bleeding. Your leg - it’s your thigh. I think someone must have cut you and it’s . . . but everything’s going to be all right.’
Briar thinks vaguely of that long, wicked knife sitting next to the dull mallet on the stool, and Alistair’s shouting as he cast around, looking for someone to punish.
Nearby, Bastian is scrambling for something, hands at his waist, nonsensical until Briar realises that he’s taken off his belt.
They feel a deep, dull ache in their left thigh as Bastian works over it, and then reach to touch it with their unbroken hand, warm leather belt and torn polyester; their fingers come back coated in dark blood.
‘Fuck,’ Bastian says. It almost sounds like a sob. ‘Briar, is there a phone in here?’
‘Mmm.’ Briar can’t remember right now. They can’t do much of anything.
The room is spinning, so they can only watch in stolen fragments as Bastian kneels next to them, hands grasping uselessly at the air in front of him, mouth open as if he’s been arrested mid-speech - before his face changes, and he turns in a flurry of action and snatches up the green book.
He flips to the introduction and bends over it, hair almost brushing the page, eyes scanning fast.
‘Hold on,’ he says to Briar, an order. ‘Slow your breathing. Relax.’
It’s easy to do; Briar feels half-asleep already, strangely cold, grey static pulling on the corners of their vision.
They can see Bastian’s lips moving, keep catching snatches of the text, familiar and almost comforting to them now, like the fantasy books they’d worn thin from re-reading when they were little.
‘Fuck,’ Bastian says again, turning the pages as quickly as he can.
‘Come on, come on. Please.’ He’s so upset, but Briar feels fine.
It’s all faded away; their pain, their worry.
It’s an unburdening. A relief. Their eyes are closed for a while, and when they manage to crack them open, they see that Bastian is crying, wet splashes on those ancient pages.
Briar wants to tell him to be careful. He’s going to smudge the ink.
It’s silly, anyway. There’s no way he can take in the whole book like this, to understand the intricacies of it, even with seven years of Temple behind him.
Briar wishes he’d put it down, come over here and just hold them until they fall asleep.
Bastian’s bloodied hand reaching towards them is the last thing Briar sees before they sink into the rug, and the welcoming dark beneath.
Briar comes to in a cooling puddle of blood.
It feels absolutely disgusting; it’s soaked through their trousers, their shirt, left the rug black and sticky, and the smell of it is everywhere, a revolting, coppery tang so strong it’s like Briar is drinking it.
‘Jesus,’ they say, scrambling away from the mess. They’re on their feet before they realise what they’ve just done - used both hands to push off from the ground, easy and painless. They glance down at their fingers, bracing for the worst, and find them unblemished and whole.
Bastian is lying on the sofa, head tilted back, eyes half-closed, Ophelia among the flowers.
For a heart-stopping second, Briar thinks he might actually be dead - but then his gaze shifts to Briar, and Briar realises he’s just completely drained, taking long, slow breaths, blood smeared up his arms to his elbows.
‘Hey,’ Briar says, going to him, trying to help him sit up. ‘Are you okay?’
Bastian just reaches for their thigh and touches it tentatively, frowning, like he can’t quite believe it’s healed.
It is, though. Briar unbuckles the black belt tied there punishingly tight and lets it fall to the floor, and then parts the torn fabric and only finds a pink scar and the blood it’s left behind.
‘You did it,’ they say, marvelling at it. ‘It worked for you.’
Bastian nods, moving his head as little as possible, and closes his eyes.
The full magnitude of what’s happened hits Briar, then.
The Work. They did the Work.
Their heart leaps, and they let out a giddy laugh, wiping their hands on Robert Parker’s blanket, then saving the book from the floor and smoothing down the pages.
‘I can read it,’ they whisper, and the words spark bright and warm in their chest. They’re ten again and buoyant with hope; eighteen, healing a heart seven years broken.
Temple was wrong. Briar is magic. Maybe it’s just this text, this strange Working - but it doesn’t matter.
They’d belonged here after all, all this time.
With Bastian and the others, becoming someone who would shape the world.
It’s monumental. Unbelievable. It changes . . . everything.
‘Briar,’ Bastian says, his voice cracked and insubstantial, and Briar puts the book down and goes to him, hauls him up and into their arms, pulls the blanket over both of them. Briar touches Bastian’s face, the place where the wound had been, and thinks, I fixed that.
‘What does this mean?’ Briar asks, but Bastian is too tired to answer. He shakes his head, then turns it into Briar’s neck and falls almost at once into an uneasy sleep. Briar holds him, adrenaline waning, and they’re surprised to find their own eyes closing, too.
They drift together for an hour, two; Briar blinks awake first and has to do something about the smell of blood in the room.
They crack one of the ancient windows open wide enough that they can roll up the rug and shove it through into the shrubbery outside, then, with a glance at the blueish pallor of Bastian’s lips, sacrifice some of Robert Parker’s empty notebooks to light a fire in the grate.
They turn back to discover that Bastian is easing himself up off the sofa, crossing to the chipped sink, where he turns the tap with a shaking hand and then has to wait a long time before the water starts pumping out in slugs and bursts.
He begins to wash, clumsily, his arm slipping and cracking hard against the porcelain.