Chapter Text
Her fingers shake when they interlace with his, but there is nothing of fear in her as she watches him with large, worried eyes. Not fear for herself, in any case, although she knows the emotion enough to recognize its bloom in her chest along with the heavy weight of her own guilt, her own grief.
His eyes are more wild than not when he looks up at her, his struggles ceasing at the feel of her hand over his. How much of what is happening he can understand, she does not know, the black of his pupils were blown too wide for her to imagine there was not more to the situation she cannot immediate see. For her to imagine that were she to turn his forearm in her hands she would find anything but the angry red marks of a needle's work on the inside of his elbow.
Still, she shushes him, allows him to tighten his grip on her fingers until the action hurts, his knuckles white in the desperate scrabble to hold onto her as he stares up at her, throat exposed by the sharp angle of his tilted jaw. With her hand that is free of his grip she fumbles for the latch at his throat and, once the worn leather has finally slipped free beneath her too clumsy fingers, tosses the metal contraption aside. She replaces it with her hand, splaying her fingers out across his jaw and cheek in a caress that is as worried and careful as her eyes.
She feels the weight of Illya's eyes on her as he looks up from his work at her side, but cannot then bear to look away from the too-sharp, too wild expression their partner wears in looking at her.
Whatever pumps through his blood is not entirely to blame, she can see it there for herself. Memory works too to leave the bitter edge of panic to every one of his movements, to add a strain in his voice when he murmurs her name around the swollen, dry state of his mouth. She would give him a drink of water in a heartbeat if not for the need to pull away to do so, so stays where she is and tries to infuse reassurance in the broken note she hums in an attempt to settle him. All she wishes to say stays lodged in her throat with the knowledge that they must not be overheard. That they must stay quiet if they are to escape.
The acrid smell of smoke and copper and blood is an affront to every breath and still she keeps her breaths shallow and even as she pushes back the rise of bile in her throat at the thought of what has been done to him. This time, the time before. The monstrosity she unleashed on him once.
It is only later when she sits with her back against the side of the car, his weight heavy and lax where he has half collapsed across her and her fingers card through his hair in an attempt to soothe away the nightmares she knows are to come, that she breathes her apologies. To the stifling air within the car. To the man who sits in the seat in front of her and whitens his knuckles around the steering wheel. Against the temple of the man who had not already heard her regret and deserved so much better than the words she struggles to get out for the memories she and the man who was her mother's brother have burned into him.
A hundred years and she might never absolve herself of that weight, but it is not for herself that she repeats the words again and again, her lips pressing tight against the temple of the man who breathes too raggedly in her arms.