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brightblook · 6 years ago

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Everything is gone hazy and dark when she wakes up, and it is disorienting and terrifying and has her cluttering back against the wall, mind reeling.

She knew, on some intrinsic level, that her memories weren’t all there. It’s easy to figure out, when she has month long gaps in between missions, impressions that don’t line up and slide away when she tries to focus on them.

It’s different, though, knowing that and facing it. When divine light rips through her mind and tears the walls away, and she’s left shaking on the floor of this stupid house, in this stupid country, forcibly confronted with the fact that she hasn’t been herself in sixteen years.

She killed her parents.

She’s killed so many people, since then, but they were the only people she knew and loved and poisoned anyways.

She fed them their deaths, and watched them die.

Poison drips from her hands.

She clenches her fist a little tighter in her hair, pulling at the strands, and scrambles back against the wall as she hears the sound of footsteps outside.

They pass without opening the door.

She isn’t sure why she’s in here, or where here even is. She had been –

Somewhere else. Not here, in a cave, not here, at Ikithon’s cottage –

She rocks back, and her spine hits the wall and sends a shock through her body that feels like clarity, almost, so she does it again, and again, and then stops when she hears the footsteps returning outside.

There’s – someone outside the door, and she doesn’t know who it is, and if she tried to speak right now Common is out of her grasp, and there is someone there –

“Astrid?”

It’s Bren’s voice.

Fuck.

She hums, and scoots away from the wall, closer to the door.

She doesn’t trust new Bren. Doesn’t trust that this isn’t – some test, by Master Ikithon, some strain at her loyalties while she’s really asleep at the cottage. It would explain – a lot.

Explain how nothing feels real, even the pain from her hands scratching at her arms.

Explain how she feels like she’s wrapped in blankets too tight, too sweltering, wrapped up and slowly boiling alive.

But she trusts him enough.

“It’s Bren. Are you alright? Eodwulf said that you ran.”

Zemnian.

Ikithon doesn’t –

He doesn’t like it when they speak it, because it ties them to their past and they need to be free for their futures.

She still speaks it alone, with Wulf, but –

A point in this being real, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Ja,” she gets out, and winces at the ripples of pain that sends through her throat.

She must make a noise then, some exhalation of pain that clues him in to something being wrong, because his voice responds, “Astrid? I’m going to open the door, okay?”

She flinches back, as the door swings open, and then peels her eyes open despite the pain that the light makes in her head to glare, wordless, at Bren’s – stupid face.

Stupid, stupid, face.

He kneels down, next to her, and shuts the door slightly, just enough so that it’s darker and she’s not still squinting.

He holds his hand out, not touching her, not yet – he keeps talking to her about how she’s allowed to say no to things she doesn’t want. How nobody will touch her unless she wants it. How –

They aren’t keeping her here.

If she wanted to leave, she could.

Part of her does.

Part of her wants to run, and hide, and ignore how she’s shattering in slow motion.

The larger part of her wants to stay here forever and break.

She nods, at Bren’s questioning look, and his hand ghosts over her own before coming up, palm out, to rest against her forehead.

He hisses, and pulls his hand back before reaching down to feel at her wrist, two fingers over her pulse point as she stares at him, heart rabbit-quick from whatever anxiety forced her into this room, back into the dark.

“Scheisse. Alright, let’s – are you okay to move? You have a fever again.”

Oh.

That would explain why she feels like she’s burning.

His hands take hers as she silently asks for help up, and as she blinks – she’s vertical, vision greying out at a pang of dizziness washes through her, and then she’s swaying and falling and with another blink she’s on the ground again, head between her knees as she tries to breathe.

Fuck.

No, seriously, fuck.

She doesn’t look up, but she can hear the dull clink of copper wire as Bren twists it around his hands and casts message.

“Wulf, can you – the closet nearest to the door. I can come and get you, if you need me to, but the others are not home right now.”

There’s a pause, and then he whispers, “Ah.”

It’s not a good sound, she feels.

There’s the soft pad of footsteps, the sound grating against her ears, and she flinches back, hands digging in a little tighter against her scalp, eyes still closed.

But, a moment later, she relaxes, because she knows the pattern of Wulf’s footsteps.

There’s a tap against her knuckles, Bren’s fingers, smooth where there should be roughness because she remembers when he managed to burn his fingertips badly enough that they scarred over smooth, at the cottage, before.

She blinks her eyes open, and the light is dim again.

It’s too warm in here.

She’s burning.

But Bren’s hands, when she blinks at him, feel like ice against her forehead, and she leans into it.

It’s too dark in here, for a second, and she forces her eyes open, staring at the glowing eyes of Frumpkin, Bren’s weird magic cat.

The cat’s magic feels fey.

Comforting, in a sense. Reminds her of the forests surrounding Blumenthal.

Reminds her of –

Tiny, buried crescent moon pendants that She and Wulf and Bren had dug up in the woods, on Midsummer, that had turned to dust and decay in her hands when she tried to wear them, old and corrupted from years of hiding in the dirt.

Where’s –

Wulf. She needs –

She forces her eyes open, again, from where they had fallen closed, and stares up at Bren and Eodwulf, talking about something she doesn’t care to pay attention to because it’s in Common and if it’s in Common it’s probably not important.

Tries to get words, to form actual coherency, in her mouth, and feels as they die in her throat.

It’s not usually her issue, not-talking, because she’s good at talking, good at twisting her words to spin confessions out of traitors, good at using them like the poison the swims through her veins, good at using them to whisper apologies to people she’s killed late at night when she knows no one’s listening except their ghosts.

But now – she’s exhausted, and her throat hurts, and her head hurts, and everything hurts, and it’s too dark and too bright and she’s hot, burning, and words are ashes.

She lifts her aching hands, instead, bright sparks of pain drifting where Ikithon had broken them years and years and years ago and they had healed wrong, that she’s been ignoring for sixteen years but seems overwhelmingly present now. Her arms ache.

Deep, and unpleasant, and sending shooting lines of fire down her arms.

She taps Bren’s foot, and he glances down.

“Help,” she signs, clumsy and with pain radiating from every motion.

Then, “Bed. Safe.”

Bren’s eyes, in the dim light of this closet, are too unlit for her to read the expressions that don’t cross his features, but she knows he understands.

“We can get you to bed. Will you let me help you?”

Oh.

The hallway feels like both an eternity and a split second.

Eodwulf half-carries her, Bren’s arms on around her shoulders, and they make a slow shuffle through the hall and back into the library.

Bren glances, then, between the nest of blankets in the corner of the room and the secret entrance to his room, and she watches with muddled understanding as he creaks open the bookcase and starts to drag blankets and pillows into the room.

A few blinks later, and she’s being laid down on a pair of mattresses shoved against the wall in Bren’s room, a mound of blankets strewn across them.

It’s soft.

Comfortable.

She hasn’t slept consistently on a bed in years.

(Weapons don’t need comfort.)

So even just this, the pair of mattresses that she and Wulf now sleep curled up together on, with blankets and pillows that are softer than anything she’s touched in years –

That is one of the things that make her more certain that this is reality.

Because if this was a test – Ikithon wouldn’t give her comfort.

Or maybe he would.

She doesn’t really know him. Never really did.

Eodwulf lies down next to her, pressed against her sternum, and starts up a low hum in the back of his throat, something familiar and just out of her grasp to name.

She loses time.

She never was the one with a head for numbers and constants.

That had always been Bren. She’s more likely to focus on something while time drifts out of her reach, minutes passing into hours without her notice.

Working without him, after he had broken, had for the few months until Eodwulf managed to keep time, been – stressful, to say the least.

Showing up late to briefings because she didn’t know what time it was wasn’t an excuse.

(There are scars, alongside her broken fingers, that remind her of that.)

When she –

She blinks, and there’s a damp cloth over her eyes, cold and soft and dark, and it feels nice, overwhelmingly so, and it’s another point in favor of this being reality, however terrified that makes her feel, because Ikithon doesn’t know nice.

He is not kind, not good, not right.

She sleeps.

And when she sleeps –

She dreams.

Light shines through dark canopies and sends shadow shapes streaming against leaf-ridden ground.

She’s running.

Not out of fear, or to escape, but she’s running towards something, bright and brilliant in the distance.

Her feet skid to a stop as she stares up as a tree, massive and scraping its way towards the sky.

There are flames licking at her feet, but she doesn’t feel them as she starts to climb.

The stars are beautiful.

And then, as she blinks, they’re gone.

Bren makes her cookies, burnt but still edible, in the kitchen of this place that he lives, now, and she eats them, and watches as they crumble to mold and mushrooms and rot in her hands.

She makes bread with unsteady hands, and watches as the tiefling from before eats it, and grins at her, and grins wider as blood starts to weep from her eyes and she falls seizing and dying to the floor.

Caduceus makes her food, and she doesn’t eat it, because she didn’t make it which means she can’t trust it, but she touches the spoon, anyway, when he offers her a taste, and she watches as her poison spreads out and contaminates everything and she lives weeks in a house of dead bodies.

She feels –

Not better, when she wakes up.

Less sick, she thinks, but more unsettled, memories creeping in at the edges of the shreds she’s stitched together to create a self.

Sitting up takes more effort than it should, but it’s accomplished with only the faintest nausea pulling at her stomach, and that’s good enough for her.

It’s dark outside. Well –

It’s always dark, here.

Not a good indicator of anything.

Wulf is still here, in between her and the wall, still sleeping, brow relaxed.

Bren isn’t, though, and that – she wants him to be here.

Wants him to be safe.

She doesn’t trust this here, this place, but she –

But he’s not here.

She’d switched over from components to a focus years ago, after half of her components had burned away in an explosion that had left her just barely alive and she’d had to fight off waves of guards with only cantrips. Now, she uses the gem inset in the bracelet she wears on her left wrist.

It’s just quartz. Not – anything rarer, she would have given over to Ikithon, for experiments and components and for the crystals that he was still trying to force work in their arms, before.

She hates having a crystal that close to her skin, but the alternative, of not having her magic, is worse.

She’s already spent years with shards within her. Having one just close is an improvement.

If she thinks, harder than just a passing perusal, she gets flashes of memory of the last few hours-days, snippets of her screaming in hoarse Zemnian while Bren holds her and burns her – that isn’t really. Furred and clawed hands on her arms, and blood.

She knows – that isn’t real. At least not entirely. Shouldn’t mention that.

There’s another, that’s calmer, where she’s burning but there’s ice, too, pressing into her and being carefully fed to her by soft unscarred hands. Another memory, where she’s bleary and half awake and shaking with something, fever and memories alike, while Bren’s hands hold onto her wrist and a wave of divine energy washes through her without fixing anything.

Another, where she chokes on the poison that spills from her like a wave.

That one probably isn’t real.

Hopefully, at least. She doesn’t want to kill Bren’s friends.

She raises her wrist, weakly, and musters enough magic to cast message, pointing her fist towards the direction of the kitchen.

“Where are you,” she half-whispers, half-thinks, and then lets the magic subside as she blinks darkness out of her vision.

She doesn’t get a response.

Grits her teeth.

Tries again, this time towards the garden, and is rewarded with a panicky sounding, “Scheisse – One moment.”

He must run down the stairs, because he enters the door less than a minute later, breath wheezing on the exhale.

She frowns, and points at him and then the bed.

He rolls his eyes and sinks down onto the edge of the mattress, and she carefully moves aching limbs over to sit next to him.

She leans her head against his shoulder, carefully – (poison, poison, poison, her mind whispers. You’ll kill him, he’ll die just like your parents, you’ll watch him bleed and fall – shut up.) and hums, something sweet and lilting from a lifetime ago.

He hums back, only slightly off-pitch.

“How long –“ she gets out, and then stops.

Good enough.

Her arms ache. There’s new bandages, there, and she can smell blood, almost.

They still ache less than they did – before.

“A couple of days. You were – the crystals were reacting. Caduceus and Jester helped to get them out, but you were –“

Bren’s voice cuts off in a cross between a sob and a sigh, and she leans in a little harder into his shoulder, humming increasing in volume.

“Ah,” she mouths, and leans a little harder against Bren’s shoulder.

Listens to him breathe, for a long silent moment.

She’s glad he didn’t get sick, when his crystals came out.

All three of them are too skinny, but he –

She worries.

She missed him, for so many years, when he had been broken and then had just been lost.

His hand finds hers.

“How about we get you some food, ja? And some for Wulf, once he wakes up.”

She – hesitates.

Taps him three times, across the knuckles, and he nods.

“I’ll let Caduceus know. We can probably move a chair into the kitchen, so that you can watch.”

Hums, again.

Okay.

That’s –

Okay.

“Caduceus is – the firbolg?”

Bren nods. “Ja. He is a – a good egg.”

The food, that Caduceus lets her watch him make, is good.

Eodwulf wakes up, halfway through eating, and devours an entire bowl of oatmeal while Bren watches in half-awe, half-disgust.

She falls firmly on the side of disgust. Oatmeal is bad.

She has a nightmare, that night, about burning, but when she wakes up, the room is chilled, and Eodwulf is next to her, and Bren is asleep against her thigh after she had practically forced him into the bed nest.

She falls asleep again, shortly after, and dreams of trees.

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