Work Text:
“How long will we keep doing this, Wulf?” she asks. Her voice rings too loud in the too quiet room, even though her words are barely more than a whisper.
It doesn’t matter how loud she says them, they hang in the still air and cannot be taken back.
They’re standing shoulder to shoulder facing forward, but she doesn’t need to see him to know he looks as tired as she feels; it’s the middle of the night and she’d started her day thirty hours ago on a different continent, she doesn’t even know where he’s been.
“As long as he needs us to,” Eadwulf answers.
She glances sharply at him, and away again, shaking her head. “It’s been years-”
“I know.”
“He isn’t getting better-”
“Not yet.”
“Maybe not ever!” Her voice rises and cracks. “Don’t think I don’t hate myself for even thinking it, but Wulf, perhaps it’s time we accept that he’s gone. That he is… too broken to fix.”
She can feel Eadwulf shift as his muscles flex, a movement of discomfort, but she still doesn’t take her eyes off of the bed, and the slender figure laying on it.
He looks so small in that bed, her sweet Bren, skin faintly flushed and damp with sweat. He’s laying still and quiet now that the drugs have absorbed into his system, but her eyes still catch on the glint of metal secured around his wrists and ankles; metal because he burns through leather.
Asleep, he looks peaceful and calm, such a sharp contrast to the screaming and writhing twenty minutes ago. It happens less and less often now, the fits that take him as though he is burning and he must make the world around him match the conflagration inside; most of the time now he is still, blank and empty, and in a way that’s much worse.
The air in the room is still heavy with the lingering scent of smoke and ash. There’s a spot on her arm that’s throbbing slightly beneath her singed sleeve; she hardly notices, she hardly notices any burns anymore, the pain of them so small in comparison to the one that from that night, the one that still lingers in the form of a faint scar on her neck.
They don’t have to come, they aren’t needed to handle these episodes of his, the staff here at the asylum just as capable of countering and containing his fire as she and Eadwulf are. But the staff has orders to send word to them, and they always come.
Have always come.
But she’s tired. And staring down at that bed, she can’t see the boy she used to love any more.
Slowly, silently, she turns her back on the bed, on the past it contains, on the future that could have been, and walks away.
Eadwulf doesn’t follow her, not yet. He will in time. He could always carry pain longer than she could.
And she has work to do.