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magnus-is-swagness · 4 months ago

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Kayla will never tell her older brother in a million billion years. Plus one extra.

But she knows more about Lee Fletcher than he does.

It is not something she did on purpose. Nor is it information she necessarily wants, she most certainly did not ask for it. Nor is it information she will offer.

She will not tell him that she knows the crumple of Lee’s face when he tells a lie. She will not tell him she knows the stark pain in his shoulders at the end of the day. She will not tell him she knows the grooved scars on the palms of his hands from bitten-sharp nails. She will not tell him she knows the sounds of his quiet, pillow-muffled sobs as well as or better than she knows the sound of her father’s voice.

Instead she will watch him. And she will meet Lee’s tired eyes. And she will nod to him, and he will nod back, and they will both look at Will, exhaling.

———

The first time she sees him she is hallucinating.

Genuinely. Medically diagnosed and everything.

“Kayla,” Will whispers, and there is a strain in his voice, as there always is when one of them is sick. “Kayla, dolly, the cloth needs to stay on your head.”

“Cold,” she sobs, “please, Will, I’m so cold.” Dolly. Dolly. He calls her dolly when she’s crying, when the tips of her fingers are bleeding and her knees are scraped raw and she screams if he gets too close to her. “‘M so —”

Her teeth clack hard together so hard her mouth glues shut. And the ice in her finger and toenails fires up her veins and pricks through all of her capillaries, turning her solid, and it burns, and it aches, and she bawls enough that acid burns up her throat and dribbles down her chin, down her shirt, in her bed. And over the heart pounding in her ears she hears her older brother exhale a soft little broken moan and choke it back just as fast and his always-warm hands brush over her cheeks, and she groans and squirms away from it and cries harder, and he whispers “Hold on, dolly, the fever’s almost broken, I can feel it,” and she opens her eyes and he is there, hair longer, hair neater, lab coat starched and collar covered in old Star Wars stickers, bulky glasses barely clinging to his face, tears soaking his long, angular face.

And Kayla squints, and the freezing ice recedes ever so slightly, sparking just under her skin, and she tilts her head, and she stares at him, at his freckle-free face, and whispers, “…Will?”

And he squeezes his eyes tighter and begs, “One more time, kiddo, I’m so sorry. One more time. I can’t help you if I can’t touch you. Pull back the light, baby, I can’t see, you have to control it just a little more. Just enough so it doesn’t burn. Please.”

And she squints again and Will-not-Will wavers, and the infirmary lights blink off his tears, off the lens of his glasses, and the. she squints again and the lights are dimmer, and the lab coat is gone, and his hair is frizzier.

“What,” she croaks, and Will pats her hair, and his hands are rough like she’s used to, and his round face is wet, and his scrubs are barf-stained, again, and he is smiling, tears dripping into his mouth, bright blue eyes clear, and he laughs and touches his forehead to hers.

“One-oh-one,” he whispers, shoulders shaking. “You’re safe, dolly. Your brain is out of the oven. Gods. Holy shit. Holy shit, Holy God, Holy Hera.” And he starts to pray.

She exhales hard, exhales, and forgets about it.

———

The next time her brain is not cooking hard enough her proteins are denaturing.

The next time she is sleep deprived, which does not help her determine reality.

She is lucid enough to notice the change, though.

She should not be awake. This much she knows. Will had sent her to bed hours ago, a half-hour after Austin and a full hour after the kids — as is her right; she is a full 13 years old — and she went, not without grumbling. And she meant to sleep. She usually does. But the moon was bright, and unusually warm. And the fairy lights twinkled with twice as much laughter than usual. And the audiobook her daddy sent her was just so enticing, just so flowery and beautiful, and as she listened to the gravel-low voice of the woman narrating and stared out the window she could see it playing out, plain as day, over the silver-washed hill of Thalia’s tree and the gentle giggling of the Atlantic waves.

She’s not supposed to be up late enough to watch Will creep in.

But she is, and that’s that. She hears the creak of the rickety screen door, slow like he’s trying to keep it quiet, and holds her breath, careful to make all her muscles react to keep her from being seen. The cabin is big but not that big and she sees him quickly, out of the corner of her half-closed eyes, tiptoe careful across the wooden floorboards, hopping over the noisiest ones, resting at the side of each of their beds and waiting, watching at the ends of them, shoulders dropping, eyes blackened and eyebags heavy. After a moment at each he reaches out his burned hands, resting gently on her siblings’ foreheads, and closes his eyes, exhaling, letting the fiery warmth from his palms spread slowly through their veins, wrapping strands of sunlight neatly around them like spider silk. As it recedes he sighs, in exhaustion or relief, and holds his hand, for a second, breathing in, breathing out, and moving on.

He comes to her last.

She has relaxed her breathing by then. She is thirteen years old and remembers every day of it; knows how to twitch her muscles and murmur in gentle sleepiness, knows how to breathe til her heart goes slow and flicker her eyelids so her face shows its dreaming. Daddy checks on her too, when she’s home, and she likes to stay up for him, likes to wait, likes to savour the feel of his string-callused fingertips and soft cool palms.

“I know you’re not sleeping, you little twerp.“

He flickers again — she sees it this time — and the heat of his hands fade a bit. His face gets a little longer, chin a little pointier, and the wild curls around his head mellow into something wavier, something gentler and more tamed. The glasses balancing on his wide nose are unbelievably thick, thicker than Julia’s whose prescription is a joke, and make his blue eyes look buggy, beetle-shaped. He’s got half as many freckles but that could be the moonlight. His smile is the same.

“I know what REM feels like, you know.”

She says nothing and keeps breathing. He sighs. He strokes a thumb against her forehead and it is familiar, and she knows, immediately then, that it is her brother who strokes her, who guards the foot of her bed.

“I’m gonna go get ready for bed. If you’re not asleep by then I’m gonna smother you, ya pain in the ass.”

He pulls away and she watches, follows the thwack of his falling-apart Converse, the rise of his gentle humming. He pulls tiny bathroom’s door shut and the humming swells along with the fireflies, echoing soft and melodic in the kind-of-big cabin, and she means to stay awake, really. She wants to watch him transform again, wants to watch his shoulders grow back and his spine stretch straighter. Wants to see the familiar roundness of his cheeks.

But his voice is so beautiful, and the scrape of his toothbrush is as rhythmic as ever, and the moon is so high in the sky. Her audiobook fades to silence as she slips away, warmed, into the cradle of her bed.

———

The third time she sees him there is no excuse.

It is the dead middle of summer and he is exhausted. The camp swells with the sum of them all, with the drum of running footsteps and crashing swords and crowing laughter. Her brother lives in the infirmary, practically; no matter how many times he is dragged out he keeps sneaking back, keeps slipping out of his friends’ sight and falling right back into his scrubs, hair pulled back.

“You are not supposed to be here,” Kayla says crossly. “Your shifts are done for the week.”

He smiles guiltily and the change is immediate. The slant of his shoulders is identical, the curve of his grin is unchanged, but the glossiness of his eyes fades away, and the strange ghost of her brother takes full shape. He is different, in the clear sunlight. A familiar stranger. He grins at her widely and turns on his heel, strolling to the mortal medicine cabinet.

“And who died and made you head honcho, Sunshine?” She blinks in surprise, glancing down at her hands. That is a new one. Sunshine.“It’s the busy season. I’m only keeping up with demand.”

“You’re gonna wear yourself right out,” she hears herself say. “Right out, and then what?”

“And then the sun will keep shining,” her brother says. “Besides, you’ll be taking over in no time. You’re already better than me, squirt.”

It’s an odd thing to say — she isn’t. By virtue of her parentage she can heal, and she can sing the hymns. But her strength is in her bow and her violin; her strings, not the stretch of bandages or shine of the suture. Will knows it. This brother, though, the one who stands in his place, is not speaking to her.

“I am?”

“‘Course. You know anyone else who can drag an errant soul right back into a body?”

Yes. She’s seen Will do it on more than one occasion, on more than one justification. She’s seen how it makes Chiron’s lips tighten and the atmosphere go dark. There is healing, and then there is blasphemy and challenge. Will walks the line like no one has since Zeus struck the challenger clean off the Earth.

This brother is not talking to her.

“Am I really going to take over, Lee?”

She says it carefully, because she isn’t sure. There are no pictures and Will tells no stories. But she hears whispers, sometimes, from the scattered few who knew them both, who watch Will corral the lot of them to breakfast or take the reigns of the chariot or calm hysterics with a touch, who whisper: “Sometimes I look at him and it’s like seeing a ghost.”

Her brother smiles a wide thing at her. It is as soft as she remembers. “Course, baby. No doubt in my mind.”

———

The fourth time she sees Lee Fletcher, she makes him come.

She waits very carefully. He comes when Will’s tired, she hypothizes. When his own strength won’t stand. So she waits, for the second wave of camp flu, for his lead on the climbing wall, for the rare nights when Gracie gets cranky and homesick and stomps around the cabin, throwing things and yelling. She waits for the look in his eyes, for the glassiness to smooth into something soft and reverent, something timeless.

It does not come when she expects.

The fourth time they are sitting together. Or, Will is sitting, legs tucked under him on the side bench, and Kayla stands, breathing careful, arms pulling elastic taut.

Her third missed shot, he is behind her.

“Relax you jaw,” he suggests. “Your tension is throwing you off. Let yourself hit the edge — it’s a new challenge, kid. No need for a bullseye.”

“I always get a bullseye,” she argues.

Lee smiles. His eyes are different, she realizes. They’re — constant. Blue. Like hydrangeas.

Will’s change with the sky.

“Bullseyes are a process.” He puts a steady hand on her elbow, tilting it slightly. “You gotta aim for the bigger picture before you focus on the details. The bullseye will come. Start with hitting the target.”

She huffs, scowling, but he’s right, and on her fourth shot the arrow lodges, just on the edge of the compacted wood.

Lee cheers. That, she sees clear as day, is identical, from the strain of his arms to the crow of his whooping laughter. He even does the same clumsy, dorky dance that sends him sprawling.

Kayla smiles past the lump in her throat.

———

The fifth, sixth, and seventh times pass without her counting, as does everyone one beyond. They happen in stretches and in the blink of an eye — the shapes of his mouth when he yawns, the drawl of his fed-up sarcasm. The weight of his elbow on the top of her head, grinning as she shoves him off, the shake of his deep, bone-rooted sigh when he thinks she’s asleep and his entire body strains, curled up under his favourite quilt. The weight of his ‘v’ in I love you.

She almost stops looking.

“What did he look like?” she blurts, one evening when he takes them to the beach. The rest of them are up ahead, Austin chasing the younger ones up the muddy sand.

Will freezes, just barely, then walks on with a forced lightness, swinging his loose arms between them.

“Who?” he asks, voice light.

Kayla gnaws the inside of her cheek.

“Your older brother.”

“I had four, at one point.”

He says it quiet like he does at the campfire, when it’s only the older kids left but she’s managed to stick around, holding her breath so they won’t notice and send her away. When Will lies back on a log and matches his breathing to the flames, eyes unseeing, and Annabeth watches him carefully and whispers, “Play us something, Will.” And he picks up the guitar he keeps dusty under his bed and sings something soft like there’s no hardness left inside him. No bowstring.

“When he laughed, you could hear it across camp,” he says quietly.

Kayla had not specified which brother but he knows anyway, had been waiting for her ask, and she strains to hear, now, leans in over the turn of the waves and shifts of the sands and strives for every note, every chord of his voice. “He invented a full name for me so he could holler it when I got in trouble. William Andrew.”

“I didn’t know he made that up.”

A ghost of a smile turns Will’s lips. “Yeah, it stuck real good. Even Chiron forgets I wasn’t born with it, actually. He yells it, too.”

He tilts his heart to the sky and stares at the clouds, exhaling, hands still by his sides.

“I was his favourite,” he says finally. “He wasn’t supposed to have anybody, but he loved me. He watched me real careful. He was —” he swallows — “I loved my brother, you know. To the sun and beyond it.”

He stops, turning to the waves. She lets him and watches his back, watches the shape of his scapulae under his camp shirt.

“I wish I still had him.”

The air shifts beside him, then. She sees Lee next to him, this time, not in place of him, with a broad hand on his shaking shoulder, a tanned forehead pressed to his temple. He turns to her, when Will breathes normally again, and winks, blinking back away as the clouds move from the sun.

“I think he’d be real proud of you.”

“Yeah?”

Kayla hesitates. “I mean — yeah. You’re like him, you know? You stand like he does.”

Will is smiling, softly, eyes red.

“I’ll have to show you a picture of him, sometime.”

“Yeah.” Kayla smiles, exhaling deeply. “Yeah, I’d like to see him.”

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magnus-is-swagness · 4 months ago

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In the infirmary the air is always still.

The heat-swollen wooden door creaks as Nico opens it, and creaks louder as he shuts it, shoving against the laughing summer winds. The difference is immediate and startling – there are souls here, anguished ones, flickering at the edge of his vision, screaming in the very back of his mind. Sobbing. They sit by the wide, rarely-closed windows and watch the left-behind, and they are miserable, and they are angry, and they are grieving, and they are grateful. They linger like the smell of antiseptic under the powerful eucalyptus, like the faint sting of copper under the lavender. There is no forgetting the fallen even in the softest of nights, where the lights are low to let the injured sleep, where the moon pours gently and warmly onto restless cots, where Will hums, deep and slow, around the rhythmic shift of his pestle and the crush of something in his mortar.

Nico taps the counter as he approaches, not sure if he’s wearing his hearing aids under his hair. Will’s lips turn up, head dipping in greeting. Nico climbs up on the counter next to him, careful not to knock anything over – and, at the last minute, making a show to check for mud on his shoes, grinning at Will’s rolled eyes – and settling his elbows on his knees.

There is lots to watch – Will’s work is methodic. Less so when he is following injured Ares campers, badly strumming his guitar and screaming medical instructions as lyrics, but as he grinds white powder against stone, shifting his body with every movement, he slips into the same kind of trance his siblings do when they play, when they shoot; the same seriousness Annabeth gets when she is in charge; the same intensity Percy gets when he swordfights, the same focus Rachel gets when she paints. A connection with his body that his clumsiness usually does not allow. When Will works the bandages around his wrists lay forgotten. His hair curtains his face, his nose twitches. His tremoring fingers hold steady.

Usually.

Tonight he grips his tools tightly; force enough that tiny spasms flicker his muscles and drain the blood from his tendons. The worry line in his bottom lip is well over-worked and cracked, blood spilling into his teeth. His shift began at ten o’clock that morning – he has been standing in place long enough for the creases between his brows to become tanlines. The infirmary ghosts steer clear of him, even, loitering by the door and cupboards. Nico can hardly even feel the accidental weight of their gazes. Instead surrounding them, as its own maple-thick presence, is Will; Will and the buzzing, chittering something under his skin, Will and the tension on his face, Will and the pulverized white in front of him.

“I’m prepping,” he murmurs, when Nico doesn’t ask. “For tomorrow.”

To his left is Chiron’s leather medical bag, full almost to bursting with wrapped squares of ambrosia, bottles of nectar, rolls of bandages, salves, poultices, Tylenol, and more Nico can’t name. Pill bottles and surgical thread, scissors and IV bags. If Nico leaps off the counter and stomps on the floor the over-weighed shelves lining the walls will clatter to the ground. They were three times emptier this morning.

“...Is tomorrow the apocalypse?”

Will looks at him flatly. Nico holds up his hands.

“I’m just saying!” He peers behind the nurse’s station, where more unicorn draught than he has maybe ever seen in his life lines the already-overflowing shelves. “I’m pretty sure we were less prepared for actual war.”

Will’s teeth sink further into his poor torn lip. This is the wrong thing to say.

“We were.”

Nico tongues the edges of his teeth. Will avoids his eyes, digging his pestle harder into the stone edge, powdered grind popping and spritzing through the thick air. A small bead of red grows on the edge of his chapped bottom lip, challenging him until he curses under his breath and reaches for something to wipe it away.

“You’re stressing,” Nico observes.

“Stress is normal,” Will says sharply.

Nico raises an eyebrow. Will deflates.

He flexes his hands like he’s just realizing how much they hurt, stepping back and stretching. The stone pestle thuds gently on the wooden counter, white powder clouding off it. Will follows his curious look and slides the thick bowl over, checking his hands for dirt or polishing grease before relinquishing him. Immediately Nico pokes at the tiny little mountain, wrinkling his nose at its chalkiness.

“Gracie and Yan spent the morning with the naiads,” WIll explains, smiling slightly. The crease between his eyebrows smooths as his eyes scrunch. “I needed good shells. The naiads needed company.”

“I saw them playing,” Nico says. He snorts. “I was not aware they were doing any kind of organized task.”

Will’s smile grows, dimple winking on his left cheek. “Organized might not be the word for it.” He takes the powder gently back from Nico, brushing his fingertips through it to check and nodding. “But they had fun, and that’s all that matters.”

He tips half the powder on a piece of paper, careful that nothing spills. Nico slides off the counter without a second thought, digging around the cupboards for the right size jars and a marker. He pauses before (badly) scrawling on a label, hoisting himself back up on the counter and handing the jar off.

“I didn’t know what to write,” he explains.

Will nods without looking, accepting the jars and carefully picking up the paper so the powder is tucked in the little valley. “Figured.” He pours the powder into the first jar, tapping the sides to even it out, then ties on a cloth cover and passes the jar back. “It’s crushed shells. Calcium Carbonate.”

Nico shakes the marker and dutifully records as such on the label, sure there is most definitely not an ‘s’ in calcium nor as many letters as he crammed in there but not bothering to double check. It’s not like Will won’t be able to puzzle it out.

“What for?”

“Healing, generally.”

“I got that far, dickhead,” Nico says, kicking a snorting Will in the hip. “I was more wondering what the use of pulverized calcium-whatever might be in combat medicine. If you can find the time in prepping for the apocalypse to tell me.”

The dig makes Will’s expression sour, slightly, and his hands clench against the edge of the countertop. But Nico keeps a careful distance between them; leg still half-extended, resting nearish enough to Will that he can feel the heat of him on his ankles. He hums, quietly, letting his voice force its way through the rigored air and bounce off the huffing, whining ghosts, resting finally on Will’s shoulders. On the ends of his curls, the bends of his elbows. The sharp edge of his many calluses.

He exhales, long and low, and slides the bowl, jars, and paper over to Nico. Nico takes them, and Will slumps, resting his head on the cool countertop, arms tucked under his torso so he can feel the pressure.

“Calcium carbonate is good for dyspepsia,” he murmurs. His light eyelashes catch the flicker of his favourite desk lamp as they flutter closed. “And caustic burns. Dyspepsia won’t be an issue tomorrow, but I’ve treated enough people on the other end of Connor’s bombs to assume the risk.”

“Bombs fall under maiming, I’m pretty sure,” Nico points out. “Like, almost totally positive.”

Will sighs. “And yet.”

“...Okay, yeah, and yet.”

Nico’s not as careful as Will is. Or as practiced, rather; it takes him three times as long to fill the jars and he still spills at least a quarter of it on the table and himself. He sweeps it quickly on the floor so Will doesn’t notice. The raised eyebrows assure him his folly is not missed. The slight smile promises that Will doesn’t really mind.

“Have you always prepped this much for Capture the Flag? Or just ‘cause the Hunters are visiting?”

Nico is careful to keep his own bitterness out of his voice. Will squeezes his ankle, anyway, brushing the thin skin over the bone until he exhales, until tense shoulders relax, until the heat under his chest wanes and cools. He keeps his hold until after still, pad of his thumb scratching gently as Nico inhales, exhales, inhales.

“No.”

Nico blinks.

“No what?”

“No, it’s not just because of the Hunters.” His hand slips away as he stands, reaching for the newly-packaged jars. Nico shivers against the sudden cold. “And no, we were not always so prepared.”

All at once, the ghosts go still. From every angle of the infirmary, they stop, pause, freeze; the still air gets thicker, sharper. Nico holds his breath. He pinches the inside of his lip between his teeth, inhales, and pushes himself off the counter. Will looks straight ahead.

He is struggling with the calcium. There are too many jars. He moves them around, as Nico watches, sliding one onto the shelf, taking one off, reorganizing, sliding it back on. Staring, hands full. Bleeding lip straining underneath his canines. Nico watches. And watches.

The ghosts watch, too.

“We’ve gotten very soft,” he says finally, quietly. His fingers twitch. He withdraws his hand quickly, wrapping it tightly around the bandages on his wrists and pulling, breathing, pulling. “In the last couple years.” He blows out a breath. His voice is so thin Nico has to lean forward to hear it. “We didn’t used to be.”

The worn cotton slides against spatter burn scars, scrape, scrape, scrape.

“We lost to more than just wars.”

Vaguely, Nico knows this. The cleaning harpies, the lava wall. Dionysus’ threats. No maiming or no dessert. The hundreds and hundreds of ghosts, hungry eyes, watching him and wailing.

But the dead so easily become background noise.

“I remember,” Will admits. “Even before, when we had a fully staffed – infirmary –” he swallows – “I remember. I remember them all.” His breath stutters. His hands clench. He breathes in. He yanks, so hard the skin of his wrists go stark white. He breathes out. “They had families.”

Nico swallows. Of course they did, of course they do. Mothers in Manhattan apartments, wringing their hands at every strike of lightning. Making sandwiches for sons who will never come home. Sobbing in the park, hating themselves. Hating the skies.

More than anything in the world, he wants to ask who. There is a haunted look in Will’s eyes he never sees in full, and he wants – he wants – to pull on his shoulder, to turn him around, to stare into the glass-blue eyes and watch as they well with tears, as he gasps, as he breaks, finally. There is a part of him that longs for paper and a pen and endless frozen hours to document the tiniest shifts in his expression, to map out every twitch of his mouth and preserve the widening abyss of his pupils forever. To immortalise the flashes he knows he sees, gone before he can check, of pain and rage and hurt and fear. The split-second of hate that he knows Will gets, sometimes, when someone complains the infirmary is too slow or too little or too late, when someone rolls their eyes and mutters why do they get that stupid chariot, anyway, what did they ever do to deserve it. When there is the briefest of snaps to Will’s spine, clench to his fists. When he remembers who is and what he has lost and what he wants to do with it. When he stares into corners like he can see the ghosts hovering there, too.

For once, Nico sees it in full. And he is drunk on it, the proof of it, the sick vindication of oh you are just like me. The pleasure in that dark, thoughtless fury, bubbling and broiling behind eyes darker than blue-black midnight.

“When they said halfbloods didn’t make it past sixteen, they fucking meant it,” Will murmurs. There is a crack under his clenched hands, and he glances down, and watches, for one second, two; broken shards of the glass jar cling to his twitching fingers, red pooling and pools and spills down the creases of his hands, down the piles of powdered white. He blinks. He leans back.

Nico wants to ask who. He wants to know so badly, wants Will to list them from beginning to end, the people he lost, the people he misses, the thick cloud of grieving screaming dead that follow him at a distance. He wants to put a name to every last haunted pair of eyes.

“Anyways.” He pushes Nico back when he stands, nudging him clear of the mess with his foot, plucking the shards from his skin without flinching. “It’s better now. Safer. ‘Cause I’m prepared.”

Prepared, indeed. He cleans his hands quickly and methodically, wrapping them easily and sweeping the mess away. He walks straight into a ghost on his way to the biohazard bin and shivers.

“What time is it?”

Nico snorts. He gets to his feet, tucking his shaking hands into his pockets. “What, like you’re tired or something, Solace? Some robot you are.”

Will laughs, and it is sharp and dark and Nico relishes in it, shivering as it travels down his spine and zaps through every single one of his systems. It is the darkest hour of the night and he can feel it, can taste it.

“You fuckin’ got me there.”

He spins around the room, hands on his hips, eyes lingering on the younger girl snoring upside down on the cot, on the boy slumped in the chair next to her. His ring finger taps, taps, taps against his legs.

“I should get to bed.”

“Probably,” Nico agrees.

Will doesn’t move.

“I didn’t –”

He stops.

He breathes. He closes his eyes.

In.

Out.

“I need you to tell me I got everything.”

He opens his eyes and stares at Nico, and there it is, the second time in one night, the glassiness, the pain. The anger. Nico shivers.

“You got it,” he says lowly. He stares straight back, eyes wide, breath still and silent. “Go to bed.”

Will stares. Slowly the clarity in his eyes clouds, and his pupils shrink to pinpricks as he fades, as he goes somewhere else. His breathing slows. His hands go still, fingers limp. The bandages hang unravelled down to his knees.

“Yeah,” he says. He nods. “Yeah, it’s time to go.”

He turns quickly like he has to convince himself and strides out of the infirmary too quickly for Nico to catch up, even if he tried. Nico watches him instead, traces the slump of his shoulders as he trudges the ten yards to the glowing Apollo cabin, standing on the porch for one second, two, hand on the doorknob, back straightening before his slips in. Nico watches as his shadow grows and shrinks through the half-open windows, stops, stops. He watches as the light shifts, as the moon climbs higher, as the cabin grows silver, and he can hear, if he strains, the slightest rumble of Will’s easy exhales.

He pushes to his feet and slinks back to his cabin.

— — —

Two hours later Will wakes, barely muffling a scream into his picked-bloody fingers, and stumbles back to the nurse’s station.

— — —

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