Chapter Text
They had a system in place when the Watcher slipped into her one of her trances –- the ones that lasted longer than a few seconds, anyway. One of them would keep close, and the others would fan out, either to keep an eye out for danger or to make the scene look as inconspicuous as possible. They fell into the routine as easily as breathing these days, and more often than not, Edér found himself on Watcher duty.
It wasn't something he thought about. He'd just put himself at Kit's side if he wasn't there already, and he'd wait it out with her. Sometimes it was less than pleasant and more like the dreams that left such dark circles under her eyes. She saw terrible things, things that she whispered to him about in the dead of night, things that he couldn't beat back or shoulder for her. Her eyes would dart this way and that, as if the things that left such a devastated look on her face were all around her, and her body would react convulsively, flinching away from the horrors of the past.
This time wasn't like those. Kit froze as they stepped off the pier at Burial Isle, and her eyes remained riveted straight ahead. She didn't move as Edér positioned himself in front of her, so that anything that came at them through the damp mist would have to go through him first. She didn't move as the others spread out, cautiously investigating the grassy courtyard beyond.
When the rest of the party had stepped past, Edér felt comfortable turning his back on Burial Isle so that he could face Kit instead. She still had not moved, but it was Edér's turn to freeze.
She wore no look of horror this time. Instead, her expression was soft, longing, tender in a way that Edér couldn’t rightly remember ever seeing on her face before. He'd had a relationship or two in years past, and one that might have been serious enough to call it something close to love, but he couldn't recall a time when anyone had ever looked at him quite like that.
No, he reminded himself. Not him. Someone else from long ago, a woman whom someone with Kit's soul had loved very much -- loved in the way they wrote stories about. But as he watched, something else flickered through Kit's face, dark and upset.
Sometimes Edér didn’t know how much of what he saw was her and how much was the past, but he thought that the thing slowly twisting across her face might have been guilt and might have been hers.
He froze again when Kit's hand came up to caress his cheek.
It was a ghost of a touch, but Edér didn't dare move, even though his thumping heartbeat was liable to draw all manner of enemies down on them. Kit traced his jaw with a thumb, and Edér nearly leaned into it on instinct, because no one had touched him like that in a long time. But Kit wasn't looking at him. She was looking at that woman of hers with a storybook love and a raging guilt in her eyes, and Edér wanted to pull back so that he wasn't intruding on... whatever it was. It was too private, too much for him.
But he didn’t know what would happen if he moved, because sometimes the visions made Kit jumpy and fit to lash out. So Edér remained motionless, caught between impulses and watching wide-eyed, intensely aware of the curve of her fingers against his face, until at last Kit's gaze cleared.
She blinked in a way that Edér knew was a sign that she was coming back to herself. Her fingers went rigid, a dawning realization settling into her features, and then she snatched her hand away so fast that the skin where they'd rested felt cold in their absence.
Kit rocked backwards, as if she was going to tip over, and Edér reached out to catch her. But Kit shied away from him and steadied herself, and Edér's hands dropped to his sides as his insides twisted. She was just disoriented, he reminded himself. She couldn't think that he'd hurt her. Could she?
Kit's eyes fixed on the wet ground, and the dread on her face was near anguished. She breathed hard and shaky, and it was as if she didn't want to look at Edér. He couldn't help the continued pitching of his stomach, as if he'd done something wrong, as if he'd screwed up monumentally by not pulling away when he should have.
Until Kit murmured, "I think I did something terrible," and Edér got it, then, why she was angled away from him, why she'd put distance between them.
She was afraid that she'd hurt someone else.
"That wasn't you," Edér said at once, and he didn't step any closer, even though he wanted to.
Finally, Kit looked up, and Edér's chest squeezed at the heartache on her face. Her eyes searched him like she was looking for an answer to an unspeakable question, and he didn't know if he was all that qualified to give one.
"How many times do we gotta tell you?" Edér said softly, the only thing he could say. "That wasn't you. Not your fault you got saddled with someone else's choices. No more than it's Aloth or Iselmyr's fault that they got stuck with each other."
It was like Kit didn't want to believe it, or couldn't, because her jaw tightened in that way it did when she was about to stubbornly dig her heels into an issue. In the time that Edér had known her, he had never seen her so rattled as he had in these past few weeks, and had rarely seen her trade in reason for fits of emotion. But something in her had snapped after the riots in Defiance Bay. Had kept unraveling, no matter how much any of them tried to help her told it together.
But then, to Edér's surprise, Kit swallowed and offered a small, accepting nod. For a moment, it looked like she wanted to say something else, one of her hands flexing at her side, but she looked away from him, her eyes settling on the courtyard beyond the pier, and the moment passed.
Instead, her lips curled back into that slip of an unhappy smile of hers, the kind that usually meant bad news for the other guy. "Let's go," Kit said, and she stepped past him, towards the misty courtyard and the rest of the party.
Edér watched her go, something heavy and uncertain in his gut, until he remembered himself and hurried to catch up. As he followed her, a feather-light drizzle began to fall from the sky, and the sensation of her fingers trailing across his face was echoed in the brush of mist and rain against his skin.