Chapter Text
It took a long time for them to recover from the fire. For Daja, things only got worse after they were all up and moving again, after she’d shaken off the shock and the exhaustion and things went pretty much back to normal. By that time it was just about Christmas, and there was nothing normal at all about a Christmas without Uneny and her mum and her dad. There was nothing comforting, nothing reassuring about her first Christmas as an orphan.
The whole thing had been strange and foreign, and deeply upsetting despite the best efforts of Frostpine and Lark, Rosethorn and even Niko to cheer her up. Daja and the other three kids hadn’t really worked out their connection yet either, and Sandry’s own mourning and Tris’s old resentments had been all blended in with everything burning inside of Daja. Even Briar, who seemed to have spent every Christmas of his life up till now gleefully stealing everything he could get his hands on, had been fairly glum, brought down by the collective bad moods of his three housemates.
New Years was its own kind of awful, but it wasn’t as bad as Christmas had been, and it was in the first week of January that Daja finally forced herself to come to terms with the fact that this was her home now, for better or worse. She’d be going to school soon enough, with new classes, classmates, teachers. She’d be settling into a new routine, and her old life would fade further and further away from her. Each year, it would hurt less and less, until she would finally be at peace with it.
Or so she hoped.
At least she had friends here, real friends. If she reached out now she could feel them, their minds nearly as familiar to Daja as her own. Daja didn’t like to think too much about what it meant for them to all be so closely bound up together, sharing their thoughts and their senses and sometimes even dreams. She didn’t want to kill the beauty of it, and the comfort it brought her. Daja liked to be alone, but there was a much bigger, scarier kind of alone that had hit her when her family had died, and Daja never wanted to meet with it again. Sandry had done a miracle in that old tin shed, and Daja would owe her for it forever.
Sometimes Daja felt like she should be more surprised at the state of her life these days. She felt like it was the kind of thing that as a sensible person, she should have far more trouble accepting. Sometimes, late at night, she tried to think of how she would explain it to Mum or Dad or Uneny, if she got the chance. Daja was a terrible storyteller, though, and all she could ever come up with was to tell them that she was safe and well and looked after, and that her prayers had been answered. When it came down to it, that was what mattered.
On Christmas Day, a low wooden bookshelf found its way into Tris’s room while she was down at breakfast. It had three shelves, the bottom one the tallest. That one would fit her new atlas and some of the nicer reference books she’d borrowed from Niko, as well as folders and exercise books. She looked at the other two shelves and wondered what the best way to arrange her books would be: purely alphabetically or set out initially by subject matter and then alphabetically within that.
She didn’t know if one of the others had dropped the hint to Lark and Rosethorn, or if the two women had just worked out that Tris was ready to move in for good. It had been getting very annoying having to fish around in her bag all the time for the books she wanted, but she just hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask for a shelf. She knew that this was her home now – and apparently everyone else could tell as well – but there was still a big difference between knowing a thing was true and saying it out loud to another person, and Tris didn’t yet have it in her to breach that gap. About wanting to move her books onto a shelf, about finally knowing what it was to feel at home, and about … other things.
Never in a thousand years would Tris have imagined there’d be a shortcut available to her, a way to skip over the hassle that was face-to-face conversation and just to purely and simply communicate. If you had told her a few months ago that soon she would be intimately connected with three strange children, able to read their thoughts and feelings and have them read hers in return, she would have said it sounded like the worst thing she could possibly imagine happening, which when it came to Tris was saying an awful lot.
But it wasn’t.
Tris felt like she had always known the other three, and that she always would know them. It was odd now to look at Daja and think not so long ago Tris had been completely unable to understand her. Not that Tris always understood Daja, or either of the others for that matter, but to not know her at all, to doubt her, distrust her – it was ancient history, getting harder and harder to remember with each day that went by. The world had shifted under Tris’s feet and built itself up from whole new foundations, and this one offered her a much firmer footing.
She got Briar to help her set her books out. Alphabetical order was something he’d need to be able to do in school soon enough, so he needed all the practice he could get. When Sandry knocked on the door and offered to help, Tris knew where the impulse came from, and though she didn’t need any more help, she didn’t turn her friend away. And when Daja came by as well, and just sat on Tris’s bed and watched them without a word, Tris had no complaint to make. She was getting used to company.
It was nice to have a gang again, a real proper gang. Briar had had a few in his time, and it was by far the best way to live. Him and Turtle and Nasri and Tejas had been tight, and before that there was when him and like ten other boys had banded together and called themselves the Lightnings, little kid armbands and gang signs and all.
This time around was weird because there was just a shit-ton of girls around. Well, girls and women, if you included Rosethorn and Lark, which, when Briar thought about it, you kind of had to. They bankrolled the whole operation, it was their house that they all lived in. So two girls, two women, one boy and Tris.
Thank fuck there was Tris, who even if she didn’t speak boy, at least didn’t speak much girl either. Briar had nothing against girls, but he wasn’t exactly jumping out of his skin to join a girl gang. With both him and Tris in it, you couldn’t call it a girl gang, Briar was pretty sure. That was like one full third of the gang. And then there was Frostpine and Niko too, who maybe weren’t full members but hung around plenty all the same.
So yeah, it all suited Briar just fine. He was in a good place and it had a hell of a lot of perks. He wouldn’t have chosen being housed up with a couple of actual legit adults who got to always be telling him what to do and when to do it, who made rules and made you follow them, but it wasn’t like he’d never lived like that before. And compared with the kinds of rules he’d had to live by before, these ones were barely rules at all. Gentle requests, really. Casual suggestions. A word of advice here and there. The only knives Briar had seen out were in the kitchen and in his own room, and he was the one who’d put them there.
Which he really should be putting them back before anyone finds them.
The thing that was new here, that made his insides twist and his eyes prickle, was that after the fire, after they’d gotten home, he’d slept on and off for what felt like days and days and days and days, and in all that time, everything was soft around him. He was never hungry and he wasn’t scared. When he wanted to get up, somebody helped him. When he went back to bed, somebody tucked him in. Lark’s hands were kind and Rosethorn’s eyes were steady, and sometimes it made him just want to bawl his eyes out.
And once he was up and about again, things felt different. Now he had to be careful about how loud his thoughts were and learn to tune out the others gabbling away in their heads about random shit Briar had no interest in, sure, but even apart from that, things were different. He didn’t feel like a drop-in, like a flyaway. It was like he’d passed some kind of initiation without even knowing it, while he was asleep. They were a real gang now, forged by fire, and this was their turf. All of theirs.
Sandry lived her life with a new responsibility now. Tris, Briar, Daja and her were a circle that she had made and a circle that she was determined to protect. When she’d joined them together, she’d expected the connection would wear off once they stopped doing the big magic in the fire, or just fade away over time afterwards, but it hadn’t stopped once the fire was gone, and it hadn’t gone away after they’d slept the night in that horse university, and then she’d found that perfect, unbroken circle in her pocket and she knew it was forever. She’d made it so.
She wondered sometimes whether the others would still have offered their magic to her if they’d known what it would mean. She wondered if she’d have dared to ask them to, if she had known. They had all fought so hard against Sandry when she’d simply been trying to build friendships, to get along and to live together happily, and then the space of a few terrible, terrible hours, they had become soulmates. The others might laugh at Sandry for calling it that, but there was no better word Sandry knew.
In the beginning, Sandry had still felt ashamed about being afraid of the dark. They had all been scared in the fire, yes, and shared each others’ fear, but that was something different. That was something really to be afraid of. It had been justified. Sandry hated the thought that now if she had a bad dream, one or all of the others might share it with her and they would know how little it took to freak her out in the safety of her own bed, in her own home. They would know how much she pretended to be okay when she wasn’t. They would know.
But over time, that feeling faded. Every time she felt Briar’s heart jump out of his chest when Little Bear barked suddenly nearby, it faded. As she slowly grew familiar with the self-loathing spiral of Tris’s thoughts when something reminded her of home, it faded. As she struggled to come to terms with Daja’s bitterness that she’d found the people she belonged with in a place she could never belong in at all, it faded. They all had things they weren’t proud of; Sandry wasn’t any different.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of family Sandry had always dreamed of, but then, she’d never quite known what it was a family was supposed to be. She had two parents, who had loved her very much, and she had Pirisi, who had been her nurse and nanny and tutor and, as far as Sandry was concerned, her friend. It was the four of them, and they travelled together around the world, with assistants, publicists and a lot of other people who Sandry never got to meet or knew who they were.
So if this was an odd kind of family, Sandry didn’t care. So had her old one been. As a girl who had spent all her childhood moving from place to place, never allowed to settle, she had never quite come to grips with the concept of home, until now. Now she had a home, and all that was left was to live in it, and she couldn't wait.