Chapter Text
The chaos was over—but what followed felt even more unmooring.
Ever since returning from Marseille, Amicia had spent most of her days bedridden—her injuries needed that much, and the weather growing colder by the day. While there wasn't much to do awake, sleep offered no refuge—though the nightmares had eased since those first few weeks, dreams still came every night. In them, she walked Hugo from Marseille to the island, then back to the Red City—barren, no crossroads, no detours, not a single soul remained. Eventually she found herself back in Guyenne, at the old de Rune estate. The horrors of the plague were gone now, but the place was bleak in a way that scraped the last hope from her ribs. She always knew what waited behind the great hall doors: Father, Mother—faces blurred with time—and Hugo, who at some point had slipped away from her hand and ended up here. Had she failed to watch over him again? Or maybe... maybe she had always been walking this path alone.
She longed, desperately, to join them—to be part of that faded, ghostly family portrait. Even if to others, they looked like a cursed, grief-shadowed bunch. But they were fading. Home was fading. And she—she alone—was the one left awake in the world, realizing she had become the last lingering soul of the de Rune line.
The attic was silent. The bed across from hers sat empty, even the blanket gone. Half-awake, for a moment, she wondered if she'd finally died too—unsure if this was heaven or hell—until her eyes caught something new: a small basket of dried lavender on the nightstand.
Lucas. He'd been trying so many things to help her sleep better.
Amicia sighed. If it were up to her, she might've preferred to stay dead—anything not to deal with dragging her body from under the covers again. But that wouldn't be fair to Lucas. Over these past weeks, he had shown incredible patience—gathering every broken piece of her and carefully putting them back together. Even the parts that had died beyond repair weren't his fault.
And he hadn't been the same person either.
From downstairs came the clinking of pots and pans, and the faint smell of bread. She'd overslept again. Lucas must be preparing lunch. He cooked better now than he used to—but even the best food rarely sparked her appetite.
You can't keep living like this.
It's still early. The weather's getting warmer.
Get up. Do something. For both of you.
Amicia splashed her face with water from the basin beside her bed. The icy overnight stream water made her wince. She glanced in the mirror and hesitantly touched the fading scar near her temple. It didn't hurt anymore, but it probably wouldn't fade either. Her hair was giving her trouble too—grown long and unkempt over the winter. The thought of braiding it again, the way her mother used to... was unbearable.
She turned away from the mirror. Got dressed. Went downstairs.
The st aircase was narrow, flanked by hanging ropes of dried herbs—like a handrail that couldn't be held. At the base of the stairs sat the alchemist's table, pressed awkwardly against the wall. Amicia had no idea what it looked like when her mother used it alone, but in Lucas's care, it was clearly too small.
Bottles and flasks of all shapes and colors cluttered the surface in precarious little towers, like a glass metropolis constantly on the verge of collapse. Books had nowhere to go—he always had to shove things aside just to reveal a corner of the table for reading. And the books just kept coming: the ones his mother left behind, the ones he'd carried with him all this time, the ones he picked up wherever he could. They formed a small mountain beside the desk, balanced on a squat stool, half his height and still growing.
On the floor next to the table was a straw bed—Lucas's bedding had migrated down here. He'd slept there for most of the winter, curled up beside his work. He claimed it was practical: close to the hearth, warm enough, no need to burn extra candles while night-reading. He said he liked it.
Amicia didn't.
He needed a real study. She could give him the whole attic and take the downstairs herself. Or once the weather warmed, they could build a shed out back—something small, but private.
She remembered, back when the four of them had first moved into this little house, they'd made the attic into a shared sleeping space. Now, with Mother and Hugo gone, it should have felt roomy. But then, one cold morning not long after, she woke to find the opposite bed empty. Panic seized her. She rushed downstairs—found Lucas dozing on the alchemist's stool, wrapped in a blanket, head tilted awkwardly back.
She had blurted out, “What happened? Bandits?”
The panic had startled him , but he'd recovered quickly, as if understanding her too well. “No, no—it's nothing,” he'd reassured her. “I just… thought of a formula in the middle of the night. Wanted to try it. And, well… by the time I looked up, the sun was rising. Thought I'd just stay.”
It was plausible. The dark circles under his eyes, the red veins in his irises—it all fit. Amicia had believed him.
Until he did it again.
And again.
Eventually, he brought his whole bedding down and made that corner his permanent nest.
Amicia had protested: “I know your work matters, but you still need sleep, Lucas.”
He'd grinned, half-awake, hair a mess. “But I do sleep. Right here. It's perfect.”
He wasn't lying, not really. But Amicia knew him too well. If Lucas truly had nothing to hide, he would have looked her in the eyes. So she crossed her arms and stared him down: “You're not telling me everything. Spill it.”
Lucas crumbled almost immediately, rubbing his eyebrows like he wished he could disappear. He rarely looked that disoriented. He raised a hand in surrender and blurted, “Fine! I just… I'm not a kid anymore, Amicia.”
And then his ears turned red.
She got it. She really did.
He wasn't a kid anymore. Last summer, she could still ruffle the top of his head easily. Now he was nearly her height. After Marseille, he'd even asked her to train him—to teach him how to defend himself, how to fight back. She wasn't a proper knight or anything close to a real teacher, but she'd passed on what she could. And that was enough. Enough to turn the scrawny stick of a boy into someone she could spar evenly in snowball fights. She could still see the memory of him in the courtyard, hollering like a madman while lobbing a slushy projectile at her face.
Back then, in the woods, freezing and hunted, they'd all slept together, huddled tight, Hugo between them. But now… even sleeping in the same room was too much.
Honestly, she had thought about it too. She just hadn't expected him to be the one to bring it up.
So she snapped. “Wow. I didn't know you were such a delicate flower. You think I like not having a room to myself? But look around—we've only got this house!”
Lucas turned crimson. “It's not that! You don't understand—” He glanced away, voice dropping to a whisper. “When I wake up… sometimes things happen…”
That word— “things” —finally clicked.
Of course.
Just like girls bleed once a month, boys had their own things . She'd heard the housemaids whisper about it when she was thirteen, huddled in the back halls of the estate.
Suddenly she was the one embarrassed—for her bluntness, for his honesty, for making him say it out loud. “Oh… oh. Um.”
Lucas groaned and covered his face. “I know it's natural, but it's still humiliating . You made me say it!”
“I'm sorry… Lucas…” she muttered. She really was. And if he was afraid she'd be disgusted by him, he was wrong. That didn't even cross her mind.
But she did wonder—just for a second— was it because of her, sleeping next to him?
That thought landed like a butterfly flapping inside her stomach, delicate and chaotic.
She didn't ask. Of course she didn't. She just silently accepted that he would keep sleeping downstairs. Neither of them brought it up again.
But when the coldest nights came, she often worried. His makeshift bedding seemed far too thin. The fire might be close, but the floor was stone. He never complained. She never asked. And now winter was nearly over, and she found herself regretting that s ilence.
She should've asked, even just once, if he was sleeping well.