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It was well past 11 when Sam Vimes walked in the door, which would not have been unusual in and of itself, were it not for the fact that he was clean. Not clean like he’d been sat behind a desk all day, reading out reports and scribbling biting missives to the Patrician, with just a bit of dust in his hair and ink under his nails and the scent of the night air in the open city streets clinging to him. He was freshly clean, clean with bits of his hair still damp and curling at the edges. Like he’d showered at the watchhouse. Like he’d felt the need to scrub something off himself before she could see it.
This was fine, of course. It was. Sybil didn’t know everything about his days, and he didn’t know everything about hers, and that was fine. Being married was...new, for both of them. Their lives were still separate, for the most part, but she told herself that was natural, given their situations. They were adults, afterall, with complex lives, and responsibilities already, not lovesick teenagers struggling to figure out their place in the world together. And she felt lucky, really, to have finally found someone so like minded, someone so - kind, actually. Under everything.
But she noticed things, all the same. The way he kept his own possessions consolidated in their bedroom, leaving the rest of the house more or less untouched; the careful notes and balance books he seemed to manage, but always ferreted back away somewhere like dirty secrets. The way he would stretch as though he were sore, old aches layered under new cuts and bruises. She tried not to ask, on principle - not to push. But she had been raised to be a keen observer of the needs of others and, right now, all of her caretaker’s instincts were sending up alarm bells that something was Not Okay, and she reacted with the urgency of a person who is used to dealing with creatures who, within moments of being identified as Not Okay, tended to explode. She was up from her seat and halfway across the room - sprung into action, her concern spilling from her - before she’d taken a moment to consider it.
“Sam, what’s… are you…” she caught herself, pulled up short, snatched her hands back in the act of reaching out, clutched them together to hold them in their proper place. “That is...sorry, are you alright?”
“What? Yes, fine, fine.” He’d answered too quickly, hands raised defensively against the assault.
“Oh,” she’d said, and hesitated. “Really, Sam? Are you sure? You seem...” Her eyes darted up and down him looking for justification. Well, she couldn’t very well say clean. There was nothing obviously amiss, was there? And there was only so much their language allowed. Frightened, she wanted to say; wounded, somehow. But these weren’t things Sybil Ramkin said to Sam Vimes. Not yet. Her question was left hanging lamely in the space between them.
“Yes, really,” he said again. “All fine.”
He eyed her cautiously, his lips pressed together tightly in what she assumed was an attempt at a reassuring smile.
It didn’t work. She recognized that smile, because it was the one he used at the fancy dinner parties he had to attend now, as commander of the watch; the one he leveled at members of the peerage when they’d had too much wine and started asking him inane questions, and he needed to be polite and bite his tongue. It was a smile made by a man desperately trying to hold back a flood of words from spilling out where they wouldn’t belong.
That grimace was something he was supposed to use with other people. Not with her.
It wasn’t a lie, not exactly -that was the worst bit. If you were lied to, you got to get angry. You got to fight, to ask for explanations, maybe. At the very least you knew you were allowed to be upset about it. This was just… something she wasn’t given permission to know. The polite click of a door staying resolutely closed, with her on one side and him on the other. A letter of friendship left unanswered.
“...right then,” she said, unable to twist her lips into a smile - not even a false one. “All fine, just as you say.”
He eyed her cautiously, the smile faltering, dropping away.
To say that Sybil wasn’t prone to dramatics would be like saying that she had a tidy little fund tucked away for a rainy day, or a passing interest in dragons - which is to say, a massive understatement.
Sybil had never fainted in the entirety of her natural life. She didn’t get jealous, she didn’t throw fits. She told people to do things, and they did them. If they didn’t, she got new people. That, an infallibly kind and forgiving nature, and a diplomatic approach to awkward social engagements had always been enough to navigate the challenges she’d faced.
This put her in the very unhappy position of knowing exactly how to tell her husband what he needed to do, but having absolutely no idea how to ask for what she wanted. Especially not something like this.
The frustration of it stung, unexpectedly. She suddenly felt her eyes tighten and burn, and she blinked aggressively. Damn it. Damn it.
She saw him freeze, his eyes going wide in panic. He had never seen her cry, not ever. Not when she’d grabbed his hand and stared into the face of certain death, not when he’d showed up bloodied and filthy and several hours late for their wedding. Not ever. She turned away abruptly, so he wouldn’t have to.
“You’re under no obligation, of course,” she said, squaring her shoulders and attempting to sound calm. “To tell me. I mean - if something were the matter. If you want to continue as we have been...” you, a guest in your own house, she didn’t say. You, walking on eggshells, and me… unsure of my place in my own marriage. She took a steadying breath, hoped he couldn’t see her shoulders shaking. “But I can tell, you know, when something is weighing on you. I can tell. So… so it’s not a kindness, this…” she felt her shoulders sag, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “It’s worse, not knowing.”
“Sybil…”
She cut him off, forcing a briskness back into her voice. “Right. I’m going upstairs to have a bath, and then I’m going to bed. You should… do whatever you think best.” She paused. “I’m sure you will.”
She wasn’t sure if he was still standing in the doorway when she walked upstairs. She didn’t look back to check.
----
Sybil watched the water pool around her knees and indulged in a good sulk. It was a rare enough occurence for her, but now she was settled in to the warm bathwater and prepared to make the most of it.
She knew women who could make a better show of this sort of thing. Could cry. Could throw themselves into fainting couches and weep, could make their feelings somebody else's problem. I seemed to work for them.
She wasn’t one of them. If that capability had ever been in her, decades of being responsible for herself had boxed it up and put it aside and at this point, she couldn’t locate it if she wanted to. Crying yourself to sleep on a tear stained pillow was all well and good, but if there wasn't somebody there to witness the high drama of your grief, to start up whispered rumours or to rush to your aide… in the long run, it saved a lot of trouble to just wrap it up early, wash your face, and get a fresh pillow case. There was no point in making life more difficult for yourself if you knew for a fact that you were the one who'd have to clean you up in the morning.
She had been doing this her own way for so long, honestly, she'd be hard pressed to tell you at this point if she was being emotionally mature and forthright or just ruthlessly, uncompromisingly stubborn.
But she still wanted.
She never could choose the easy path. Or, at least, she never did. The dragons were a prime example. It was a rare person who had the patience, the resilience, to see the value in tiny, problematic little beasts that were constantly ill, and prone to unexpectedly exploding before your eyes. Dogs didn't do that, did they? And she loved them, was the problem. That made it hard, and that made it worth doing.
On good days, she was proud of the work she did. On bad days - and there were bad days - she wondered what kind of person would torture themselves with a task like that. What kind of a fool would pour their heart into caring for these creatures that would never be well, into loving things that scarcely lasted long enough to love you back.
They needed her, and she needed that, and she loved them, and her love was twisted up with them, grown into the cracks and crevices. So mostly she just - got on with it.
She wasn't sure what that love would look like if it wasn't tangled up with the need… but she feared it might be worse for it.
She sighed, and sunk deeper into the enamel tub, glaring at the peaks of her knees rising above the soapy water, like mountains out of a fog.
She liked to be needed, and she didn’t like needing.
She was startled back into the present by the rattling sound of the door opening behind her, the creak of the hinges, another presence entering the small, fogged bathroom. She felt her whole body tense, and resisted the impulse to sink entirely into the tub and hide. There was a long moment of quiet, and she knew without looking that Sam was taking in the scene, assessing the damage. He was a professional, after all.
Then came the soft padding of stockinged feet across tile. She didn’t turn around.
The old wooden stool squeaked as he dragged it over behind the tub, and she felt him settle in behind her. She didn’t move. She felt, somehow, that if she did he’d bolt, or vanish. She was reminded of those times when, as a girl, she would sit quietly near the river behind her house and wait with bits of fruit in her palm, hoping that the little birds pecking in the underbrush would overcome their fear and crawl into her hand, if she just held still long enough. She never had the patience. She always reached for them, and they always flew away.
She wondered now if he could hear the mad beating of her heart, if it was sending shockwaves through the water, ripples across the surface. She could hear it pulsing in her ears.
Sam reached across her to pick up a sponge from the side of the tub, and she felt the nearness of his body as he leaned in closer to her, stretching forward to dip it into the warm water. She caught a glimpse of his knuckles near her shoulder, rough and scraped raw in places; saw the tendons of his fingers flex as he gripped the sponge gently. He lifted it up, out of her field of view, and squeezed it slowly in a long line over her shoulders; the warm water fell to her skin, as gentle as a kiss. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, forced herself to relax into the feeling. It wasn't a touch, not really. It was just gravity, pulling this water down, from him to her. She felt herself melt into it anyway.
He cleared his voice gently, and began to speak.
He was telling her a story. It wasn’t a nice one.
He tells her the facts mechanically at first, as though reading off of a report.
There are men in this story, men who hurt people. Men who move through life creating victims as they go. A kind of man that Sybil, for all her worldly experience and top tier education, knows of, but does not know, not really. There is a victim. A call goes out, and there is a chase - there is always a chase, this part she does know - and a confrontation, and there is backup on the way, and there is Sam Vimes with his crossbow raised, but he’s not the first one on the scene; because some wet-behind the ears Lance Constable who’d taken the king’s shilling less than a week ago had got there first, and he’s pale and shaking, and Sam isn’t the only one with his crossbow raised.
His fingers brushed her neck as he spoke, and it was everything she could do to keep from jumping. He must have picked up the soap, at some point - she felt him brushing the rich lather across her shoulders as he continued to speak. In time the sponge vanished back into the bathwater, the pretense falling away, and there was nothing but his hands, his callused fingers, slick with soap, absentmindedly drifting in patterns across her shoulders, up her neck, as she listened. One single point of connection on which her marriage hung, like a lifeline.
"And there was this moment, you know” he said, and the words were fighting their way out of him now, “just a moment where I thought... I thought…"
His fingers went still on her shoulder. She could feel him wrestling this thing down, this things he was not allowed to be, not with her, maybe not with anyone. This holy something in him that was only ever allowed to flicker into existence in the adrenaline-drenched pocket universe of the battle, was only seen by the battle-worn comrade that pulled you away from the rubble.
The silence stretched on, its own conversation between them; words he couldn’t say, words too close to the truth of things. She is patient for him, and she is stubborn, and she is also kind. She let that kindness take the lead.
"...I see," she said, pulling him out of the rubble.
He was quiet for another moment.
"I'm sorry. I didn't... I’m not..." he took a breath, released it in a low huff. "I'm still not used to this."
She knows what he means. She knows because she too knows what it is to walk through life slowly putting on armour, piece by piece, until you’ve finally covered all of the weak parts. To tell yourself you don't need something, don't want it, that you're strong enough to live without it; to tell yourself that until you really, truly believe it, until that story lives in you, until that is the version of yourself that you love. She knows how absolutely terrifying it is to find a place where you’re allowed to strip it off.
To be asked. Asked, by someone you want to care about, to be raw and exposed and incomplete, like a crab out of its shell; awkward and awful; to be some vulnerable thing you don't recognize as yourself. Every day, every day, trying to make this work.
She also knows she wants this. Gods, she wants this more than she's ever wanted anything.
More than dragons.
And here he was... trying.
She leaned her head back, feeling the cool lip of the enamel tub press her damp hair into the nape of her neck. She opened her eyes slowly, looked at him like that, upside down. Her neck was exposed - because she was vulnerable too, here. She had to be. Because there was no other way for them to survive this.
His face was dark, tense, bracing for an attack he was certain was coming. An attack that life has taught him was always coming.
She swallowed down the apology rising in the back of her throat.
"Thank you," she said.
And he made that face, the one she first saw when she was there with him in the heat of the battle, the look that first made her fall in love with him. He looked at her like she was a wonder, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Like the whole world was an awful irredeemable mess and she shouldn't be able to exist in it.
He leaned down, and pressed his forehead into the damp skin of hers, and she closed her eyes and smiled.
They stayed that way for a long time.
“I’ll try… not to prod too much,” she said, opening her eyes again, “But... well. I still may ask, from time to time.”
“That’s fair,” he said, carefully, “I’ll... try to answer.”
“Hmm,” she nodded, thoughtfully. Then she turned to face him, her nose scrunched up in the universal look of distaste. “That said… please don’t shower at the yard again, Sam. Honestly I don’t know what kind of soap you’re using down there, but you smell like one of our treatments for scale rot.”
Vimes reared back a bit in surprise and sniffed at the open collar of his shirt, frowning. Realization dawned on his face, and he scowled in irritation, “Ugh, it’s this new hair tonic of Nobby’s, I’ve told him not to leave it in the showers.” Sybil watched him angrily struggling to shuck off the offending shirt, getting stuck halfway through pulling it over his head. “The new recruits keep getting it mixed up with the shampoo, and now half the damn watchhouse smells like this, Angua is going mental…”
Sybil laughed, half in amusement and half in sheer relief, as Sam furiously balled up the shirt and chucked it unceremoniously into a corner, grabbed the sponge again and began scrubbing at the back of his neck.
She loved him. Had loved him from the beginning, since the first night he’d come to her rescue to face down an angry mob with nothing but a dressing gown and an anxious, dyspeptic dragon. He was the bravest man she’d ever known; but she could be brave also. Maybe he wasn’t there yet, maybe he didn’t know how to be. She could meet him halfway in this. Even if that meant having to admit, occasionally, that she didn’t know what she was doing either. Even if that meant having to reveal the empty, aching corners of her heart, to give him a chance to fill them.
There would be time enough for that, she thought. They had the rest of their lives.