Chapter 235 : Someone Has to Stay Awake When Grief Drowns
Chapter 235 : Someone Has to Stay Awake When Grief Drowns
POV: Lyra
Someone has to stay awake when grief drowns.
I refuse to leave.
The refusal of someone who has been beside Aphrodite through every version of this journey since before the ruins and who has made a promise that was not formally stated but was enacted through every moment of the being-beside, and the enacting has made the promise real in the way that promises become real through the doing rather than through the saying.
I sit beside her all night.
Not speaking. Not offering the comfort sounds that are available in grief. The versions of it's okay and you'll be okay and he's at peace now and all of the other things that people say when they are in the presence of grief and are attempting to do something with the grief that makes the presence feel more useful.
I don't say any of them.
I know, from the experience of being the person who has been beside Aphrodite through every breaking and every unmanaging, that what the presence is for in grief is not the offering of comfort sounds. It's the offering of another person's aliveness in the same space as the grief. The anchor quality running at the full level of what it is, which is not the solution to the grief but the reminder that the grief doesn't have to be alone.
Wolves approach through the night.
Coming from the battlefield's edges, from the positions they held or retreated to or found themselves in when the divine channels collapsed and the compulsion dropped and the disorientation of coming back to themselves resolved into the need to move toward the center.
I turn them away.
"Not yet," I say, each time. The two words that carry the information they need. Not a permanent refusal, not a rejection of the impulse to come, but the timing information that the impulse doesn't have access to from its position.
The twins try to move Aphrodite.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, when the position Aphrodite collapsed into has been the position for long enough that the practical concern of whether she can stay in it runs through the practical side of the twin bonds, Draco and Lucen both reach toward her at the same time.
I stop them.
"Let her stay," I say.
The authority of someone who knows the person in question better than anyone in the immediate vicinity and who has the knowledge that what the person needs is not to be moved.
She stays.
Dawn arrives without the moon preceding it.
The first dawn in the history of this territory without the moon's light presaging the sun's arrival. The sky going from the honest dark to the honest light of the sun coming up without the transition that the moon's setting usually marks. The Moon Goddess's domain severed from the mortal world means the moon does not set here in the way it set before, because the setting was always the domain's movement rather than the physical object's movement.
He would have noticed.
The thought arriving in the vigil quality of thoughts that arrive when you've been awake through the night beside someone you love who is not awake. Kai would have noticed the absence of the moon's light. He would have noted it in the shorthand of his tactical notation system. He would have run the implications through the assessment that had been running continuously since before the first battle.
He noticed everything.
Even the sky mourns him.
Days pass in the way that days pass when the person at the center of things is not conscious for them and the people around her are managing the things that need managing in her absence. Three days, to be precise. Three days of Lyra sitting the vigil and the twins taking perimeter shifts so that Lyra can sleep briefly without Aphrodite being alone and Cassian and Bastien running the practical logistics of the position with the specific efficiency of people who have been doing this long enough to do it without direction.
Three days.
Aphrodite's body finds the edge of the position it's been in and passes it, the physical consequence of the length and the grief and the day and the nights without the resources of sleep or food or the replenishment that the Direwolf blood requires when it's been at full expression and beyond.
She starts to go down.
I'm already where she's going. Both arms finding her in the position of the person who catches the person who falls, the catching being the automatic enactment of the being-beside running at full force.
"I've got you," I whisper.
The two words. The same two words I said in the prison corridor when the bond was slamming and she was on her knees. The same quality of what the words are for. Not comfort. Presence. The anchor running at full force.
She's out before the whisper finishes.
Days later, she wakes.
The first thing she asks is the question of someone who has been in the grief-sleep of utter depletion and has woken to the hope that the thing they remember might not be the thing that happened.
"Is he really gone?"