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There's a tether that binds Ray to Emma.
It's the kind of bond one can only build with someone they've known their whole lives; someone whose life is inextricably woven with your own. It was one they shared with Norman too, worn away as it had been by his “death”, now strengthening again, despite Emma... Well.
No one really liked to bring up what’d happened to Emma. As happy as they were to be all together again -- after the agonising years of running, of hunting and being hunted and two agonising years of searching for their missing piece, when hope trembled in the face of doubt and fear -- they were still afraid of shattering their hard-earned peace.
More than anything, it felt wrong to lament a sacrifice Emma had chosen to make for their sake, as much as what she had done still pained and angered Ray. Two years of stewing in helplessness, of surging onwards on pure desperation alone and lashing out at anyone who dared stand in his path, the sheer relief of their missing puzzle piece slotting back into place had tempered his rage.
His anger had melted into relief the moment he’d laid eyes on Emma, alive and mostly whole, again. What was left in anger’s stead was a quiet sorrow, a sense, one that he was sure their entire family bore, that the mistake was theirs; they had failed Emma. Though no version of her would have ever thought so.
Ray lets his eyes wander to where he knows Emma sits on the sofa, Phil and Jemima squabbling goodnaturedly over the right to her lap. Thoma and Lannion are talking loudly over them to get Emma’s attention. Emma smiles through it all, cheerfully placating them until they’re all grinning in their various perches on or around her.
It’s a familiar scene, a dream turning more solid before his eyes by the day, and Ray can’t quite ignore the tug at his heartstrings.
This is his family.
The Ratri family had built them a large house. It was both like and unlike what Grace Field had been for them. It was home: warmth and laughter. It was safe; a place where they could grow old.
There are others, scattered as they've all become with the whole wide world calling to them with its various pursuits. This house largely comprised of Grace Field children, with a few outliers from Lambda and Goldy Pond -- though these days all were homogenised as one family.
Around him, the kids bicker over their homework. Outside the younger ones are tussling in the grass in the slowly waning sunlight as Gilda does her best to sternly call them to order. It’s a motherly role she seems to be loosening her grasp on with each day that peace reigns, but old habits die hard. Just like Ray sometimes catches himself holding the now growing little ones too close, the way he has to tamp down on the urge to lift them out of harm’s way when they play and let them run and learn on their own. He reminds himself that their games are just play.
It’s something Norman makes fun of him for, for how far he’s come from how he used to be. But there’s a bittersweet marvelling that glints in his eyes too when he gazes at this family of theirs. Sometimes, in that moment, his eyes meet Ray’s and they share a smile, understanding each other without words.
Ray can hear him in the kitchen, helping Anna and Vincent prepare dinner. He closes his eyes to the smell of roasted vegetables and bread.
The tether shifts and Ray knows Emma has seen him before she calls his name. With a smile, he responds to the pull and crosses over the room to her.
~
When they’d left Grace Field, it had changed something.
It was as if Ray was constantly aware of Emma's presence, always a couple feet or mere inches away at all times. They'd always understood each other, shared everything growing up and conspired together in secret the months before the escape, but now they protected each other's backs in combat, working to protect their family almost as an extension of one other.
Which was why he felt her absence so acutely when she was taken. He felt the swoop in his stomach before his eyes registered what had happened, as if he too had been snatched up and ensnared.
Why he’d felt his heart drop into his torso when the demon Lewis' claws pierced through hers, and felt, for a second, as he ran to turn over her prone figure, that his heart would stop in his chest instantly if he found hers not beating.
Why he sensed the sudden inexplicable sense of absence at his side, that familiar panic, a feeling of wrongness while everyone else rejoiced the end of being hunted with relieved, unstrained smiles. It was only after -- after they had stepped into the human world, to Phil's cry for Emma and as Norman collapsed beside him -- that Ray realised the touch of sadness to her own smile.
Those first few months, a new world without Emma, something kept him from giving up. Aside from sheer desperation and the stubborn, foolhardy hope they'd all inherited from her, he knew she was somewhere out there, within their reach. He would have known if she wasn't.
Even with this stubborn certainty leading him forwards, time without Emma passed excruciatingly. With every passing month, the feeling in his gut deepened and twisted. He awoke from dreams of Emma falling through sands, away from his outstretched hand and awoke missing the familiar awareness of her proximity, a once comforting certainty, a sense honed after years of sleeping piled together in hiding.
Then, after two years of nothing, he felt it again. A sense that they were close to Emma. He would have shaken it off as a silly figment of pure wanting but the swoop in his gut propelled him into a run back where they'd come from, a feeling like he was going to miss an urgent train if he didn't move right that second.
He’d never been gladder to have trusted his instincts as they stood before a familiar head of unruly hair, crouched over Mujika’s necklace.
~
Ray admits to himself that when Norman had left the house years ago, something had shifted between the three of them.
Perhaps it was because he had at some point reconciled with his supposed death, or perhaps it was the strangeness of who he came to think of as the new Norman, one with scars they could not see or understand. The two years without Emma had simultaneously added to the alienness and, strangely enough though not quite surprising, brought them together again.
They had always been a family of three -- or rather, three heads of their larger family -- and there was a person-shaped absence between them, a lull between their exchanges where she would undoubtedly have sprung in exuberantly.
Norman hadn't wanted to tell Emma the truth about where they'd come from. The ensuing conversation had reminded Ray oddly, soberingly, of back when they’d planned their first escape, one of their few almost-arguments which had also, of course, been about Emma.
Ray had almost laughed at Norman’s protectiveness, thinking of all the ways Emma had grown and proven to everyone how strong she could be.
"We can't tell her," Norman repeated firmly. His face set into what the kids had begun to call the Minerva face; this stern eyebrows-drawn expression they would never have imagined on younger Norman's face. Ray carefully avoided thinking of an "old Norman" and the current one, knowing that at some level that it hurt his friend even if he put on an unbothered smile in front of their siblings.
"How do we explain everything? Where would we even begin?"
Ray understands what Norman means. How could they share their painful memories with an Emma who had no memory of the suffering? Wouldn’t it be cruel to pass that burden back to her?
But, Ray reminded himself, it wasn’t as if they could leave their past behind. If they never told her, it would be pretending nothing had happened; it would be forever closing her off from something that had shaped all of them into who they were today, of which she was a huge part.
And that was the worst of all: that Emma would never know just how important, how amazing she was to all of them.
After all, if it wasn't for her, they might have given up and never escaped the farm, and even if they had. No one except for her would have had the sheer stubborn determination to find a way to the entirely separate human world, liberating every single "cattle" child along the way, and achieving peace for the demon world before leaving.
It's an oft-recurring argument of theirs that's quick to flame and just as easy to die out, leaving them both conflicted and undecided.
~
One night finds Ray on the porch, humming a lullaby engrained into him since birth. It's just as sorrowful as it is comforting these days.
One of the mamas, as Ray can't help still calling them in his head, had quietly invited him to their next visit to Isabella's honorary grave the coming weekend. Ray had declined but it had left his head swimming with thoughts and feelings he didn't know what to do with.
It's nights like these he feels that old reclusive urge to wallow in the quiet.
But just like so many times before, a familiar figure drags him out of it.
The door creaks as it opens and Emma winces sheepishly as he starts in surprise. "I was wondering who was up this late," she says, half illuminated in the moonlight.
Her voice is loud in the dead of the night and Ray shushes her, finger to his lips. If one of the younger ones stirs, soon they'll all be up like reversed dominoes and then there'll be no getting them back to sleep.
"Oh!" she whispers, mirroring him with her own finger and drops down beside him. Their shoulders knock against each other and Ray holds himself awkwardly, unsure. But Emma relaxes into his side without a hitch, as easily as if she remembers having known him her whole life and not like someone who's been swept into the whirlwind of their lives mere days ago.
The easy trust of the gesture brings a lump to his throat, sensitive bastard that he's become. It's such an intrinsically Emma thing to do.
She doesn't ask him why he's awake. Instead she asks, "what was that song you were humming?"
"Something I learnt as a kid," he evades.
Emma chews her lip, uncharacteristically solemn. "Is it something to do with what you won't tell me about?" she asks and Ray turns to her in surprise.
"I have nightmares sometimes," Emma tells him. She almost feels guilty admitting it.
(She felt fraudulent sometimes. She was so happy here with them -- her family. They were so kind to her, so loving, and so patient even though she sometimes couldn't keep up with them and their references to things that she knew she should have known, little pauses in conversation that left twinges of almosts flashing behind her eyes, too quick to catch.
At night, she shook with terror from unseen things and looming shapes in her dreams. She would jolt upright panting, sometimes with a phantom pain in her ribcage, sometimes reaching inexplicably for the scar that was left of her ear.
She had some faces now to try and match to the dream figures but there was still so much she couldn't understand and it unsettled her, itching under her skin despite her contentment).
Ray takes in Emma's troubled expression with a dawning sense of dismay.
He had his suspicions but it was different to see the confirmation of Emma's distress. It's this realisation, that Emma had felt out of place and perhaps unable to come to them with her troubles, that pushes Ray past his reservations.
And so, for better or for worse, he tells her the truth, feeling only some guilt that he's, albeit unintentionally, going behind Norman's back.
He tells her as much as he can stomach, enough to allow her to make sense of things, without delving too far into old wounds. After all, now that the dam's been opened, other things can be unraveled later.
They'd already told her about how she lost her memories, in as roundabout a way as they could. Now he tells her of everything that came before. He tells her of their escape, of the home they built in the underground bunker, of the friends they made. At the mention of Mujika, Emma's hand hovers above her heart, over the necklace. She's crying by the time he trails off.
Ray has a second to feel absolute, utter panic, and to think, with regret, Norman's going to kill me , before she throws her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder.
As much as it surprises him, it's familiar and he hugs her back immediately on instinct, one hand on the back of her head.
"It's okay," he says. "We're all safe now."
Emma sniffles, pulling back slightly to shake her head at him. Not that .
"What? Then why are you crying?"
"It must have been so hard for you," sniffs Emma, her eyes huge. "Everyone's been so brave but you- you knew for so long and couldn't help."
"Ah," he says, awkward. Of course Emma would focus on that of all things. It was just like her to worry about him, even now. "It's alright. I'm alright now. We all are." And he needs her to believe that, so this conversation becomes an act of closure for her, not the start of more troubles.
If Norman were here he'd probably offer a handkerchief, and be better at words, but Ray has nothing to offer Emma but his shoulder. He simply waits for her to calm as she digests everything that he's revealed.
Somewhere inside the house he hears a faint murmur of movement. They're not the only ones who have trouble sleeping.
"Ray," Emma gets his attention.
"Hm?"
"I know there's a lot of things I don't remember and won't remember-"
He opens his mouth to reassure her but is struck dumb as she meets his eyes, fierce determination kindling in her own. "But from now on I'll remember everything! I won't take a single moment for granted!"
Ray huffs with fond amusement, chest feeling both full and light, the invisible tether taut between them as he leans into her comfort.
"As long as you're happy," he says, and Emma beams.