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Asha can't immediately place why she's woken up. There's a soft breeze coming from outside through the open window, and next to her, Qarl is snoring with his mouth wide open. She jabs him in the side before turning over, and then sees the bedroom door standing ajar. She doesn't usually keep it closed, but she distinctly remembers doing just that last night, before stradling Qarl on the bed.
She sighs, and slips out of bed, reminding herself to put something on before leaving the room. The house still smells of last night's rain, which is at least slightly better than the lingering smell of sweat, and the smothering heat that didn't seem to pass. The guest room – Theon's room – is empty when she glances inside.
Asha slips downstairs, her footsteps quiet on the way down, muffled by the thick carpet. The hall that leads upstairs lights up momentarily – the television, she guesses. She's not wrong. When she opens the door to the living room, she finds Theon on the couch, staring at the muted TV with an apathetic look on his face. It's a look she's seen far too often for her liking. He doesn't look up when she closes the door behind her, nor when she sits down next to him.
He's lost to the world, as if he's waiting and she wants to tell him it's all right, but she'd be lying. She has lost her brother, and she might never get him back.
For all of his previous arrogance and pompous talk, he had never truly been like them. Not like her, or their brothers, or their father, but Theon had been Theon and now he's not even that. Not the brother who used to get into her face, who smirked, who smiled, who gave her that 'I'm OK' signal underwater that one time they went to Greece to dive. That Theon is overshadowed by this caricature wearing his face, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed. That Theon has slipped between her fingers, like sand, like foam.
“Let's go to bed,” she says, having given up on talking a long time ago. Her questions go unanswered, but the looks he gives her when he thinks she isn't looking say more than any words could explain. Asha turns off the TV before she helps him up, careful not to jolt him too much The pajamas he wears are much looser on his frame than should be natural.
She lets him walk in front of her on the stairs, and he lingers on some of the steps, lost in thought. Patiently, she lets him. She has the time. (Some days, she's afraid he doesn't.) At the top of the stairs, she steers him to her room instead of his own. She can hear him screaming in his sleep at night, plagued by nightmares, by people and voices and old re-opened wounds. It's about time that she stops staring at the ceiling, pretending not to hear it.
Asha closes the bedroom door behind her, and Theon hasn't moved, looking at her from behind long locks of hair she should have cut off weeks ago – if he would even let her come near him with a pair of scissors. It's strange, she thinks when she sits him down on her bed, Qarl still dead to the world. Theon's taller than her by now, but when he stands next to her, she's still the big sister, the strong one. He is twenty-two, but he's still her little brother.
She climbs onto the bed behind him, makes him lie down, and tugs up the covers despite the lingering heat in the room. It's nearly sisterly, the way she brushes her hand through his hair, back and forth, back and forth. He lets his head rest on her shoulder and she pretends she can't feel him shake against her, that she cannot count the bones in his body with her bare hands, that it's normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
(Some days, she can barely look at him.)
But she knows she only has to close her eyes. She only has to turn away her head to forget. Theon can never do that again, not when he can only count to eight on his hands, to seven on his toes. “My name,” he asks her some days, “is it Theon?”
He can pretend, but never long enough to believe the lie.