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Anna has survived the past few days by telling herself she is made of stone. Nothing can touch her and she cannot touch anybody. She must be a pillar of strength in this ravaged world, and she will not waver. For everyone. For her friends, and her mother and father, and the Enclave. She will not break.
In the Library she sits straight-backed, flipping through books and maps with controlled speed. She can feel Ari’s eyes boring into her shoulder where she glances every so often, worry scalding her skin. She writes out a plan, and separates people out, and everyone seems inexpressibly grateful for having something to do. She is a monument of hope, marble and granite and diamond.
No one sees her when the door to her bedroom closes – folding to the ground on shaky legs, chips flying off her, crumbling. She is a pile of dust on the floor now. She is nothing. This emptiness is the vastest thing she has ever felt, and it is terrifying in its scale. She puts her hand over her mouth so no one can hear her take in ragged, desperate breaths.
Somehow, she always gets back up. Somehow, she always manages to slip into bed. Fully clothed and curled in on herself. She falls asleep each night focusing on taking the quietest breaths possible. Containing herself in the smallest space, compressing. When she leaves her room in the morning, she is standing tall and immovable once more.
--
At the breakfast table, there is silence. Anna sits at the head of the table like some sort of cold monarch, shoulders set. No one is looking at her, everyone is looking at her, and their eyes hold grief to their brims. Her nails bite into her palm under the table, hot pain, to counter the cold fury in her veins.
Everyone’s loss is so acute. So starkly there on their faces, in their silence. Anna wants to scream at them, wants to break the plates they are eating from, wants to let out an animal shriek that will convey what the shreds of her heart have become. That it cannot and will not be the same, ever, for them. That they took away her little brother, her Kit. And she breathes around that emptiness like knives.
Abruptly, she stands up to leave.
No one follows her.
--
She swears she was facing a bookshelf a moment ago but now she is standing by the window, looking out to a bleak sky. The view barely registers. It feels more and more like Anna is seeing the world as though underwater but she can’t bring herself to shake herself from it.
She feels Ari gently holding her elbow and start steering her somewhere. But she does not feel it at the same time, because all she is feeling is Kit is gone, Kit is gone, Kit is gone. The only sharp thing in the world – clear as a bell. All she is feeling is his unruly hair when she used to ruffle it to annoy him, and the scorch marks she used to trace on the lab table while he explained something or other about science, and the way his eyes used to glimmer with mirth when she was telling him a grand old story about her escapades by the fire in the drawing room. It is so well defined in her head, motes of dust and the way the sunlight landed on his face, the smell of acids and smoke on him always. So clear, more real than anything in this room. She is feeling the sound of his laugh and she is thinking that she will never hear it again. She is seeing her brother slowly die in her arms over, and over and over.
--
Christopher only descended into animal panic in his last moments. Sweet, lucid Christopher. He had always wanted to stop the boat from rocking, was always trying to calm the storm. Anna thinks that’s just the way he lived, the way he made sense of things. She often didn’t understand him, and he often didn’t understand her. Her need to close herself off in walls of iron and crystal, his need to understand how things worked to the minute detail, his contentedness with his few friends, her thirst for meeting new people, more people, always.
But she loved him. She always did. And he always loved her. Because even if she stole his clothes and griped at him and he poured unknown substances in her coffee and accidentally burned her scarves, even with all that, they knew each other.
Christopher was there when Anna had been huddled in her room, dagger blade to her hair, inconsolable with tears. An unknown grief that Christopher had helped her wade through even without understanding it, just by being there and holding her hand, steadying the blade, complimenting her outfits each day.
Anna had been there when Christopher had gone mute with exhaustion, thrown beakers at the wall, alone in a dark laboratory. Had sat and heard him, his loneliness, his fear, his dejection, without him actually speaking. Had pulled him up hours later, and gotten lemon tarts delivered to the house by one of the Irregulars. Had made him feel a little less adrift in a world that, to him, seemed too chaotic to understand sometimes.
And because of this, these moments, Anna knew Christopher, and he knew her. She knew what was going through his mind when he felt the poison hit him. It was there in the way he had clenched his jaw, blood already staining his shirt as he staggered back on the steps. Christopher was smart; he had known from the beginning that it was a lost battle. But he still let Anna reach him, had still let her trace endless healing runes on him, runes that are printed on the back of her eyelids now.
Anna still remembers his blood on her hands as she rolled up his sleeve, stele in hand. How the iratzes held for a moment on his pale skin and then faded. The sweat gathering on his forehead and his skewed glasses. The sounds of battle and his friends shouting fading to muted background noise. She remembers how he shook while she gripped his arms, somehow cold already in her memory, restraining himself against uncontrolled fear like he’d been taught so many times during training. Countless iratzes, the panic welling in her and receding; a coldness replacing it so vast it muffled out the entire battle. None of them held enough to heal him. He continued coughing, blood spattering on his lips.
“Anna. Anna, it’s alright”, he rasped, hand falling on her stele mid-stroke.
Christopher had been pale by then, and his strange eyes shone as they darted around the battle, taking in the images of his friends fighting for their lives. The crease on his sweat-slicked forehead deepened momentarily at the same time as his hand gripped hers a little tighter. She could tell that he was fighting with all his might to remain here – hair damp, clothes covered in blood. He had looked at her then with eyes that said too much. That said I love you and I’m sorry, that said I cannot imagine you having to tell this to Mum and Dad, that said I will miss my friends so much, that said I still had so much to see, to create, that said, simply, I’m scared. It was an arrow through her heart, the reality of it.
She had cradled him then, sobbing. The thought of a world without her brother’s presence was freezing her from the inside out, ripping through her heart and stopping her breath. There was nothing that could be done, and so she had rocked her brother gently, his head on her shoulder as his shaking became more violent, more unrestrained; humming a Welsh tune that her mother used to sing just for them while his fingers scratched jerkily and frantically at his wound. A lullaby to settle them for sleep. Even choking with the tears and the smell of blood and the sounds of metal ringing on metal, she sang softly so only he could hear. Just the two of them in that corner of the world.
--
She doesn’t cry after that night.
--
She imagines killing Tatiana herself in the early hours of the morning, before the sun rises. She thinks of violent death and tearing limbs and sinking her teeth into a monster. She wishes she was there to see Cordelia give the killing blow, even though she had returned with haunted eyes, like she had seen something she never should have.
It makes her a monster, she knows.
--
Ari’s presence in the room next to her is a living thing. It breathes on her neck as she curls in her cold bed, alone. She thinks of going in there, sinking into Ari’s arms, smelling her rosewater scent, letting herself be comforted.
But grief has twisted her into an unrecognizable and jagged shape. She does not know if Ari would even know it was her. Maybe she would scream. Anna feels like she has slowly turned into a hunched gargoyle, or a sculpture of knives, solidified by salt. Maybe Ari would scramble back in the sheets the moment she walks in, tense and ready to run. She feels like people should be looking at her with fear. That her thoughts are too visible, too violent, too ugly, her coldness frosting her over so it cuts anyone around her.
She goes through the motions with the others. She plans and nods and looks straight ahead like someone on a mission. She hugs Thomas, because he needs it. And nods to Cordelia. And refuses to look at Grace. But there is a distance to it all. And it feels like she is slashing them with her indifference, wounding them with her unwillingness to sink into their shared grief. She finds it unbearable. She feels the strings holding them together fraying.
She cannot stop her slow morphing, cannot prevent the blades from growing out of her skin. It’s an inevitable process that leaves her lonely, often hunched over with her back against the glass of her bedroom window.
Maybe this is how Tatiana came to be. Alone night after night, a slow movement into something unrecognizable, like a glacier’s inevitable progress. The thought slithers through her, chilling her further, curling around her mind and suffocating it. What if she is bitter forever? What if she cannot escape from this statue she has made of herself? What if the only comfort she will ever feel again is the metal coating her skin?
The questions are unsettling enough to make her stand abruptly from the bed, pacing as if to run away from their creeping dread. It wraps around her shoulders, making her skin crawl, itch. And no matter how much she shakes, she can’t seem to free herself from their grip. Without thinking, she silently swings the room’s connecting door open, an animal part of her brain trying to escape the reality she sees unfolding in front of her like a frozen lake, the reality that is creeping up her throat and choking her. So she does the only thing she knows will drive the dread away, just for a moment, just for a second: she climbs into Ari’s warm bed, and wraps her arms around her, and kisses her.
Ari kisses back like a drowning woman. Strong and desperately at first and then softening into a question, into a gentleness, a balm. This close, Anna can smell her skin: rosewater but also something warmer, something that is just Ari’s; it feels like walking into a house that you haven’t been in for a while and realizing it has a specific scent, familiar and comforting. Their lashes brush each other’s cheekbones in butterfly kisses, and Ari’s hair is in Anna’s hands, thick strands curling around her fingers in well-known patterns. Ari lets out the softest breath and it brushes over Anna’s lips like a prayer, like forgiveness.
She forgets herself in the kiss, in Ari’s hands smoothing down her back. Forgets to put the shield up, forgets to guard herself. The kiss tastes like relief, like shame, like a sorrow so profound it makes Anna’s eyes smart and water. Who does she think she is, to feel so alone?
She feels herself melt like she always does near Ari, although she always desperately tries to conceal it. She does not hide it now, she is too tired. With each tender brush of Ari’s fingers on her collarbone, her neck, her cheek, Anna’s muscles begin to slacken. Something tight in her chest loosens ever so slightly, and the relief is overwhelming, all-encompassing. It is a landslide, to be so human again, to be held, to be warm. And the tidal wave of it washes all restraint away in a rush of breath, turned sob halfway through.
Ari moves her face away for a second, so her honey eyes can regard all of Anna. The furrow in her brow betrays her worry, but her gaze holds nothing but acceptance. And Anna lets herself crumble.
She is so tired of keeping herself distant. The others need her to be fully there, to join their drifting pieces into one final stand. Seeing her so absent must have taken a toll on them, even as she told herself that she was doing this to keep them strong. It’s in Lucie’s lost eyes, and Cordelia’s hunched shoulders, in the way Ari would touch her arm so hesitantly, as if she were afraid Anna would bite back. They can’t be this fractured, this afraid of her. Not right now.
And Thomas, steady Thomas, how he was hurting she could only imagine. It was probably a strange sibling pain, to lose your best friend. To not know where the rest of the Merry Thieves were, to feel that bond dissolve so quickly. He had been a brother to Christopher, and Anna can tell there they hold a kindred pain in the way his eyes met hers across the table every morning, however briefly. He needs her to be there, to show her heart flayed open and say: ‘This is how I feel, this is my pain. It is the same as yours. You are not alone.’
But most of all, Anna needs this for herself. She needs to find her way out of the twisted woods her soul has gotten lost in. Unfamiliar, hiding her from the ones she holds dearest. She misses them. She misses their warmth as she embraces them, their voices rising and falling, responding to hers. She wants to feel like she isn’t underwater every time someone glances her way, blanketing herself so the spikes of her loss do not cut them. In protecting them from her anguish, she has shut them off from her heart, shut herself off from comfort. And it is such a lonely endeavour. And she is so, so tired of it.
As Ari holds Anna, holds her though her tears, through her hoarse screams of rage, her shaking, and later though her steadying breathing as she stills, Anna feels something heavy she has been carrying in her chest lighten. The gaping wound that is Christopher being gone still aches, burns, but it no longer feels rimmed with biting frost. With arms wrapped around her, Anna lets herself release the tight hold she has on herself, lets herself be seen, and comforted. She deserves comfort. She deserves a warm place to land. And even if she cannot yet truly believe it, it starts making a little more sense to her now.
Ari holds her, and the world is still cold, but a crack deep within her begins to thaw.