Chapter 3 #2
For one second his hands are on the sides of my face and his forehead is almost against mine and the light is screaming out of me and he doesn't flinch from it, he never flinches from it, he just holds on and says "I'm here, I've got you, breathe, you're awake, it's over, you're awake"—
And it's warm.
He’s so warm it’s like a contradiction to his true nature. He grabs the parts of me that have been starving for peace and my whole ruined body leans into him before my mind catches up, leans into his hands like a plant into a window—
And then my mind catches up.
I shove him.
Both hands flat against his chest and I push with all my might does nothing, he's stone, he doesn't move, and that makes it worse. He could let me move him and won't. "Get off. Get off me—"
"You were dreaming—"
"I don't care what I was doing." I'm on my feet somehow, the light still coming off me in waves, and he rises with me, slow, hands open where I can see them.
"You don't get to do that. You don't get to break the door down and put your hands on me and say I've got you like you didn't—like you weren't the one who—" My voice tears.
My magic flares with it, and I feel it burn bright, and I don't even care anymore, let it.
"You pushed the button, Aamon. In front of all of them!
You put me on the floor and you let them scrape me down to nothing and now you want to kneel down here in the dark and fucking hold me? Pick one! You don't get both."
"I know." Quiet. Not defending it. That's almost the worst part—he just takes it. "I know."
"You don't get to be the warden and the—" I can't say it. I don't have a word for the pain of the fail-safe. "You don't get to be both."
"Hit me, then."
I stop.
"If it helps." He's steady as the stone he's made of, and the passage light catches the wreck in his eyes and I look away from it too late.
"You've got all of it and nowhere to put it and it's going to come out of you one way or another.
So put it here. I can take it. I'm the only thing down here that can. "
I can’t stop myself.
I can’t be fucking nice anymore. I can’t keep it all in.
So I don’t.
God help me, I hit him. I get a fistful of his shirt and I hit him in the chest with the other hand, once, twice, and it's like hitting a doorframe but it doesn't matter, it's not about moving him.
He lets me, he stands there and lets me swing at five hundred years of vampire like I'm hammering on a locked door, and the light's pouring off me and the grief is coming up my throat in something that isn't words, and I'm hitting him and hitting him and saying things I won't remember, you hurt me, you destroyed me, I killed him, I killed him, I killed the only one who was ever—
and then his arms come around me.
Not to stop me. To hold me. He wraps me up, both arms, my hitting hand caught against his chest and my face pushed into his shoulder. He doesn’t tell me to calm down, he just holds on—
And I feel it start to go.
The light. The coal burning inside me. The unbearable pressure climbing my throat and down my limbs with nowhere to burst. It starts to go out of me, drawn down and out through everywhere we're touching—his hands, his chest, his arms banded around my back—and I feel him take it.
That's the part I've never gotten used to, the part that undoes me every time.
He doesn't block it and he doesn't smother it.
He opens some still, deep channel in himself and lets it pour into him, pulls it out of me the way you'd draw a splinter, slow and steady and endless, and I feel the terrible pressure ease off my ribs one degree at a time.
It takes a while. That's the thing nobody tells you about a surge this size—it doesn't stop, it drains, and he holds me through the whole long draining of it.
His hand comes up to the back of my head and presses my face into his shoulder.
His other arm stays locked around my back.
And he just breathes, slow and even, this deliberate in-and-out against me, and without deciding to my own breath starts reaching for the shape of his—dragging in on his in, letting go on his out—until the two of us are breathing the same rhythm in the dark and the light is guttering down out of me and into him, dimmer, dimmer, going.
I feel it leave the way a fever breaks. That sweet, awful loosening.
The heat and anguish that's been crushing me from the inside for two days pouring out through my skin and into his, and him taking all of it, every degree.
My hands unclench. My shoulders come down from around my ears.
For the first time since the chapel there is room in my chest to breathe, because he's carrying the thing that wouldn't let me.
And under the heavy pressure of my starving, cruel magic, when it’s finally found a place to go that isn’t cooped up in my body, all that’s left are tears.
Great ugly heaving sobs I've been holding behind since the chapel, maybe since I was thirteen, and they come up out of me into the dark of his shoulder. He holds all of it, the magic and the grief and the whole shaking weight of me, and for one long moment I’m not carrying it alone.
For one long moment I’m just held.
Like, perhaps, I haven't been held in twelve years.
I forgot what it does. I forgot that a body can put its arms around another body for no reason but to say you don't have to hold this by yourself, and that it undoes something.
That it reaches all the way down into the oldest locked-up part of you and turns a key you didn't know was still in the door.
His hand is on the back of my head. His chin is against my hair.
The magic has gone quiet and the tears are slowing and I could stay here.
That's the thought that surfaces, clear and horrifying through the wreckage: I could stay right here.
I could let him hold me and I could stay.
Which is exactly when I understand what's happening.
Who is holding me. And why I can’t feel that way about him.
I go rigid.
Because the warmth pouring through me, the loosening, the safe—it came from him.
And I can’t trust him. I thought I could.
I thought he wanted to help me, no matter the cost. I thought he’d rather take the pain of my magic ripping through him over pressing the fail-safe and electrocuting me any day. But I was wrong.
He’s just like the others.
He’s an extension of the Council.
I get my hands up between us and I push back.
He lets me go at once. I stumble back until the stone's at my spine and I wrap my arms around myself where his were. All I can do is stand there in the dark, empty-handed, magic spent, face wet, more frightened than the nightmare made me.
"Don't," I say. My voice has nothing left in it. "Don't ever do that again."
His eyes go dull, the light snuffed out. His shoulders fall and for a second I could imagine him hurt–crushed by my words. As if he wanted the warmth of that embrace just as much as I did.
“W–” A vein jumps beneath his eye and he steels himself. “Whatever you want.”
He doesn't mean it. I can tell he doesn't mean it. But he says it, and he steps back over the threshold into the little common area and leaves me alone.
I slide back down the wall to the floor.
I don't take the cot. I don't drink the water. I still can’t do it.
But this time, when I put my head down on my knees, my skin still remembers the shape of being held, warm where his arms were, and I lie to myself that I'm shaking from the cold.
Behind my sternum, in the dark, the voice doesn't say a word.
For once, I'm grateful. I don't think I could stand for one more thing down here to be kind to me tonight.