#am i over asher's death four months later? nope

[flowers-of-io]

Shockwave

Read it on AO3 here.

It is thirty-six hours later when the shockwave hits.

The Stranger—Elisabeth—let them stay in her camp out in the frigid nowhere, just a tiny round cabin with a bed and a table. She has driven off into the blizzard for supplies, and Eris quietly notes the subtle sign of trust that was leaving her and the Drifter alone in her personal space. It is cosily warm inside, well-insulated Braytech door keeping the cold out. She can see the snowstorm raging on the other side of the glass, white and blue and violent like the power crackling in her fingertips.

They sit on the opposite sides of the table, an old radio between them fighting through the snow to catch any signal that might slip through. Between the cracks of static and scraps of broadcast, there is silence.

This is the first time Eris has really sat down, stretching her back and legs aching from the hike. Between her mad escape from Io and what happened in the City, and persuading Zavala and the flight to the Jovians, she did not have time for as much as think. Head spinning as she danced from one purpose to the next, time slipping past her, reality squirming and bending. She has not slept in a long time.

The radio hums and Zavala’s voice pierces through, cracking and out of context. “…confirmed that Io, Mars, Titan, and Mercury have disappeared. We don't know why. We have lost contact with Deputy Commander Sloane and Gensym Scribe Asher Mir. We are deploying…”

She cannot hear him anymore.

Realisation hits her like a train at full speed. The assailed planets are gone. Her beloved, sacred Cradle, the Tree of Silver Wings – they are gone.

Sloane is dead. Asher is…

She has known. Since he squeezed her hand goodbye, and his red shadow began to darken her door every night, she has known what choice he would make and struggled to respect it. But it was too calm of a sorrow, she realises now, like leaves falling upon a grave, and she did not wail or claw her fingernails against the sandstone. There was still a thread of stupid hope, one that she hung upon by the little finger and refused to admit it, refused to acknowledge she believed there was still a chance, an unfinality of loss possible to revert. That threat is strangling her now, sharp and merciless, and Eris struggles to suck in a breath.

Drifter moves, his heavy coat rustling as he slouches forward towards the radio. He stares at it intently, silent, until Zavala’s voice is drowned in static again.

“Guess our pals kicked the bucket,” he says with such tremor in his voice Eris is not even angry.

She turns the realisation around like a bitter pill in her mouth, sticking fingers into the wound to get used to the pain. It is best constant, she has learned long ago, rather than the sudden spikes when she would touch the hurting place inadvertently. She digs deep to find some visceral core of horror; she imagines Asher dead in a hundred atrocious ways, his body broken and dismembered, crushed into red pulp, blew apart from the inside in an eruption of sizzling radiolaria. The deeper she reaches now, the safer it will be to sleep – the images familiar and predictable, horrent with spikes she already knows the placement of.

Skittish thoughts propel her to run off into the storm, let the blizzard lash her skin with an icy whip and scream until her larynx bleeds, until she cannot hear the din in her mind anymore. But she will not lose her composure. The days of punching walls and hollering into the night are long past her, shed along with the skin of chitin and blood she had been wearing for too long. She has only just started to bloom again—she will not allow it to trample the gentle scaffolding she has so arduously put up to hold her. She will not break.

Somewhat absently, she can see Drifter staring at her from across the table but her brain is screaming too loud to process it. He must have noticed some change on her face, or maybe how her hands started to shake and fiddle with the beads hanging by her belt, because he keeps his eyes on her—cautious, searching. As if looking for a handhold to grab and drag her out of the pit of horror she is thrusting herself into over and over.

“You saw it coming?” His voice seems to echo from far away.

“I should have,” Eris murmurs, nausea swelling up in her throat. “I should have persuaded them… I should have been there.”

In a desperate attempt to chase off the fuzz of thoughts hurtling through her mind at lightspeed, she stands up and regrets it immediately; the horizontal axis of her vision rotates by thirty degrees and she leans on the table with her full weight for support. Drifter stirs, then reaches out but she waves him off.

She can manage. She has been worse. It’s just another arrow to the same knee—does it make any difference?

She thinks about how her bloodied fingers traced the letters she had never sent to the people she would never see again. Piles of ink-stained paper, trembling sentences seeking comfort and asking forgiveness of the shadows she projected in her mind instead of the real flesh and bone. Real was too frightening, real could judge and shun her, real required a vulnerability she was terrified to reveal. She dreamed of a day when she would be steadier, braver—her hands no longer flinching away from touch, her words bold and sure of themselves—when she would send the letters out, confident of the fearful affection they disclosed. The correspondence she had truly written to herself.

Scrap-sentences circle in her head, squirming into her ears and eyes and mouth slithering between her teeth bitter like poison. Everything she will never tell him, one more thing the paranoia took from her, all the honest words and quivering confessions she feared to account for and how he will never know how she loved loved loved—

Staggering, she slumps onto the cot. Guilt is burning acidic in her chest and she cannot keep from shuddering any longer, burying her face in hands and smearing the ichor all over her cheeks. These eyes cannot cry and oh how she wishes they could, remembering the warm release of tears streaming down and tasting salt on her lips. There is only the black ooze now, seeping into her mouth and ears as she sleeps, drying on her eyelids and sticking them shut with a black wax seal. She is shaking so wildly her back hurts and tries to stifle the wail that creeps upon her lips, threatening to escape instinctively like a held-back breath.

The letters she never sent; alas, the promise had been made. She should have been there.

She had sworn.

The mattress dips down beside her, a movement she hardly registers. Only when an arm wraps itself around her loosely, a tentative loop for her to lean into or move away from, do the floodgates truly break. She curls up against Drifter’s chest and starts sobbing, dry and ugly sobs like frantic gasps for air above water.

He caresses her back, slow and soothing movements of a warm hand against the fabric of her cloak. Eris can hear her own wailing resonating through his ribcage.

“I should’ve been there,” she mumbles, her jaw trembling so hard it is difficult to push the words out.

“I know you were close,” Drifter hums, “but what use would be for you to die there? It’s not like you could’ve done anything.”

“He would comfort me in my darkness… and dying… I could not.”

He shifts and Eris feels his other hand gently press against her head. It is soft and warm and comforting, enclosing her in this tight dark space like in a blanket fort. It helps her slowly calm down until she is not heaving anymore, shivering only from time to time with leftover sobs.

“There was a kid in Eaton. A place I used to live,” Drifter says when her breathing is almost steady, “Taught her to fly a kite. Once it got stuck in a tree, almost at the top, and she climbed all the way up to get it. I asked her if she wasn’t afraid of falling.” There’s gentleness in his voice, one she has never heard there before. “And she said she wasn’t, ‘cause she knew I’d catch her if she did. Knew I’d save her.”

His thumb rubs gentle circles against her temple, lulling her, and Eris struggles to stay focused. She is too exhausted to think, and a terrible headache has begun to settle in, hammering against her sinuses, and Drifter’s tone is deep and calming, as if he was telling a bedtime story.

“When Eaton burned… when she took a bullet and stumbled and fell… I caught her. But I couldn’t save her.”

“At least you were able to offer comfort… One last time.”

“And did it change anything? She’s dead anyway.” Drifter shakes his head, a rustle of cloth sounding so odd with her ear partially covered. “You did what you could, sister. Don’t beat yourself up for it.”

The guilt will not subside until many, many moons later, and it is still gnawing at Eris’ bones in this moment, but the sharp, blinding fear has somewhat subsided into a dull ache. Maybe it is the catharsis of crying, or the initial shock having tumbled past, but an odd haziness overcomes her and her strained muscles begin to ease. The terrible weight of the loss is still dark and grim – she dreads to acknowledge it, fears the moment she will have to look under the cover and face it in all its irrevocable finality, yet for now it sits tucked away somewhere in the corner of her vision, present but bearably distant. For now she is warm and safe and breathing.

They do not speak more, just sit in hazy silence as the storm rages outside.