Work Text:
i. Suspension
She’s gotten through before, but never like this. It was easier to hide in the grass or behind crates heavy with who knew what when she was smaller. She’d gotten through by running as fast as her legs would carry her and as quietly as her lungs would allow as soon as the right guard turned the wrong way. She’d gotten away from the Iron Coast and through the Velkroy like that, checkpoint to checkpoint, wherever there was shade.
There is shade and scraggly grass and countless wagons and crates surrounding the gate closing the way to Twinside, but there is no sneaking through like she had before. She’s gotten too tall, and the guards are too vigilant. There isn’t even a way to go wide around them, not without a boat.
She never thought she’d actually get in. She’d thought that maybe when the Dominion’s guards started preparing to chase them all off, she would sneak away again. Kanver isn’t supposed to be far. That’s what she’s heard from disgruntled refugees who didn’t find what they were hoping for when they staggered here from the north.
Instead, here she is in a wagon that is more crowded by the second. The old man who told her warmly that she could call him Grandpa Tomes sits at the far end with Terence. He is the only one of them that looks at peace as he shuffles through the papers he brought from Northreach. Fake letters from his fake niece, fake proof of relations, fake proof of everything that he believes wholeheartedly the guards will swallow.
Across from him, Terence looks every bit the part of a weary husband hoping to finally set down his vigilance, having finally brought his family by marriage to reunite with their cousins. There’s a tightness in his jaw, though, worse than the tension that Kihel has come to know as something engraved in his bearing. Beside him, his arms full of two wriggling babies, Dion is like a statue staring straight ahead. His lips twitch, rehearsing something that only falters when their wagon inches forward and shudders over a rock. Olivier and René are mostly calm in his lap, but red spots are starting to spread over Olivier’s cheeks.
Stiffness, Dion always says. Olivier doesn’t remember what started their long journey from Oriflamme. He just knows it was difficult. He has a heightened sense for anxiety and fear, and the stiffness these things present as bothers him. It’s bothering him now, even though Dion is working hard to convince all of them that he thinks this is going to work, too. Kihel almost offers to play with him for a bit, but her mouth won’t open and her hands won’t move from her lap. Terence moves first, and with a few even whispers, he takes René so that Dion can focus less on everything and more on Olivier.
Except, that isn’t exactly what he does. Kihel sits at the other end of their line, crammed in between all their luggage and Dion. She can feel Dion forcing himself to relax where she and him are pressed together. She can feel the breaths he takes, each one helping to soothe Olivier before he can wind all the way up. She has to lean away slightly so that he can lift the arm pinned against her—and then they are even closer as that arm settles around her shoulders.
Dion grips her shoulder with a thin, tired hand. It hurts a little. They’re all too stiff. They’re hardly even breathing. Or maybe it’s just her under the canopy, where there is shade but it presses in too heavy and there is nothing to help them all sweating. Their bodies are all too crowded among their belongings. There’s no way they travelled all the way from Northreach like this. She doesn’t even know where Northreach is. She didn’t go to school there, she didn’t leave anybody there.
She doesn’t know anyone who died, except a woman called Miss Lisse, and she doesn’t exist anymore. She can’t, because her baby has to be Dion’s now. They have to pretend, and somehow they have to fool everyone—
Dion rubs her arm up and down, a little softer now. He leans close and whispers to her, “Watch Harpocrates.”
Or, Grandpa Tomes. His eyes are closed now, resting a little bit more until they reach the gates. The fake papers are folded in his hand, and over that his other hand rests without digging in at all. He wears a small smile even though they’d surreptitiously smeared dust on him so he’d look as ragged as the rest of them. Even though he knows nothing about her except that she was helpful once, and she knows nothing about him except that he was a teacher once, and they have to pretend there’s more than that.
Getting through the Velkroy was hard. She’s heard getting past imperial blockades in the north was hard, too. She’s not sure how a hunched old man made it all on his own. Luck, some of it, with just the right moments of kindness serving the rest, he’d said. Friends helped him. Now he’s helping friends.
The wagon rattles forward, forward. Tomes sways with it, the most alive out of all of them as the voices of the guards get louder. They’re all covered in dust. Olivier sneezes, and Dion pulls his hand away to help him wipe his nose. Kihel is still crammed into the same seat, yet she is untethered without the weight on her shoulder. She wonders if—since they’re pretending—
Her mouth still won’t open, but it doesn’t need to yet. Dion doesn’t put his arm around her again; this time, he sets his hand over hers in her lap and squeezes. It’s a little too hard again, her nails dig into her palms, but it’s better again, too. Anchored in the shade, carried through without moving her legs an inch, she’s never gotten through like this.
ii. Stillness
Aunt Vivian’s house is crowded. She hadn’t been expecting a wagon full of people, and yet at the same time she had been. A scholar well acquainted with Tomes, she is familiar enough with his ways, she says. She’d known that if their mutual friends didn’t stay with him for the entire journey, he’d find more company on his own. That’s exactly what he’d done, and now Kihel has a paper and a stamp that says she has a grandfather and an aunt and cousins that she can’t remember all the names of so quickly, and…
They all sleep in Vivian’s guest room for a bit. This part, at least, she hadn’t been exactly prepared for. Tomes gets the bed; even Kihel refuses to let him give it up for someone else. She’s always slept on hard things, and the babies will just crawl off the side and bump their heads anyway. Everyone else sleeps on blankets on the floor. And then, even though the house is crowded and everything is strange and different, all the air in Kihel’s lungs is electric.
The guards let them past the gate, let them on the ferry, let them in the city. Twinside, that bastion of neutrality that the whole camp talked about, and all the camps she’d been to before that. They close all the curtains at night and the Mothercrystal still shines through. Safety, water, food. People, papers, fake everything and yet—
There’s a lot of food. More food than the camp had, at any rate. Kihel eats one, two, three meals and then sits in her seat feeling too full. Vivian talks over the table about getting Tomes settled in a library somewhere; Kihel admits to herself that she doesn’t listen as well to that part. Her thoughts hang up on the promises that it will take longer to find something for the rest of them on account of less foresight, but Vivian and her friends will find something, some place, some corner of the city for Tomes’ supposed grandchildren. The words come so easily, and Vivian says it all without smacking anyone’s hands away from the food.
She gives Kihel a butter tart for dessert. Kihel goes to bed feeling like her stomach will burst. It tastes good, but doesn’t help her queasiness at night. What next? Where will they go?
When they’re gone, where will she go?
The electricity dies after a few days. They all become like driftwood and frayed, wrung out rags as exhaustion finally sets in. Vivian comes and goes, her eyes always darting around outside as she works on securing more convincing documentation for her family. It’s more than just the ragged group taking up space in her house; her family has been steadily growing across the city ever since Waloed took up arms. She’s got more cousins removed more times than Kihel’s ever heard of, and most of them are complete strangers to her.
But they were friends of someone she knows, and so now they’re family.
Tomes spends a lot of time sitting in a well-worn chair in front of the hearth in the sitting room at night. Old men shouldn’t be making such journeys, he says. He’s just glad to be among those that succeeded. He falls asleep in that chair with a different book in his lap most evenings. Vivian has to wake him up and scold him for mistreating his back before he’ll go to bed.
Terence doesn’t relax at all. If anything, the tension in his whole body only winds up worse after the first few days. The silence at night does odd things in his mind. The few times Kihel saw him like this in the camp, she wouldn’t see him again for a few days. He’d go off hunting, or just walking in the dark for a while. At best, she’d only see him at a distance as she foraged for herself. He wouldn’t have any meat or herbs on him; he’d just wander around looking like he’d forgotten where he was going. Then he’d come back and pretend that the rotten egg flying by his head was tossed from the unknowing hand of a frustrated game keeper.
There’s nowhere to wander around in Twinside. Not yet. The city is too vigilant even on the inside. Kihel hears him go to the kitchen at night, but doesn’t hear him come back before she falls asleep. She doesn’t hear him do anything there, either.
Dion is just as bad, though he pretends not to be. After a week in Vivian’s house, after days have gone by and no one has come pounding on the door with proof that their identities are wrong, and no one has dragged them away from this strange emptiness that everyone calls new, he goes to sleep for the night with a long sigh. It sounds like weeks and months of stress bleeding away.
Except then he wakes up in the morning to feed the babies and play with them a bit, and when they go back to sleep, so does he, and he only wakes up again for the next meal. The cycle repeats until the day is over. Then, it’s the same the next day, and the next, and for days after that. When he doesn’t have to watch over Olivier and René, and when Terence isn’t making sure he’s eaten, Dion just sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps without looking any more rested.
The only time he stays up on his own is at night, when Kihel is trying harder and harder to pretend to be asleep until her body finally believes it and drops off. He doesn’t get out of bed; she just feels his eyes on her from time to time. He spends all night staring at them all, she’s pretty sure. At his fake husband beside him, his fake grandfather up on the bed, his fake son lying next to his real son, and his fake daughter.
After a few days and nights like that, she knows what’s come down again without having to read through the pointed looks the other adults share over his head. It isn’t just the bone deep weariness of too long without comfort, which enough rest and good food will fix. She doesn’t mean to eavesdrop. She just can’t fall asleep at night until even her mind is exhausted to its limits. She keeps her eyes tightly shut as the blankets nearby shift and the floorboards underneath them give a muffled creak. The sound is just too far away to be from Dion.
“You should sleep,” Terence whispers, ignoring the fact that Dion slept almost all day already. “I could make a warm drink.”
For a long time, nothing. Dion hasn’t been talking much except to the babies. Kihel doesn’t expect to hear anything this time, either, until there comes the smallest whisper. Flat and dull, nearly nothing behind it and too much at the same time.
“She should be here.”
It’s the sort of confirmation that makes Kihel’s ribs grow too tight in her chest. Miss Lisse is in the house, too, even though she can’t exist anymore. Everything is just… unfair. That’s what it all comes down to. It’s up to old men and strangers who barely have anything but their books and their know-how to be kind, because everything else is so unfair.
More shifting, a long breath from Terence.
Dion says quietly, “I know you had no cause to…”
“Wish more kindness on her?” Terence finishes. There’s a small edge in his words, but Kihel misunderstands it at first. It isn’t enmity. “She did nothing to me except… grieve. Badly, yes, but…”
Silence as Dion breathes slowly and carefully. Waking all of them up probably isn’t on his mind, only Olivier right next to him with his heightened sense for anxiety, fear, and everything else that makes people walk around like their bones are made of stone.
“She never wanted to marry so soon,” Dion murmurs, sounding far away. “She only wanted to chatter over embroidery with her mother for a few more years. I ought not have been so unkind about all the gossiping; when I no longer had your letters, I listened closely for anything that might reveal how you were faring.”
Kihel can hear how badly Terence wants to find a chink in this wall that has come up around Dion since Lisse’s passing. “Did they at least choose a kind man for her?”
Dion makes a noise almost like a chuckle, but with too little air. “They did, if you’ll believe it. I’d wager he could have matched any commander for stiffness, but there was something to him behind closed doors, so I was told. Certainly a fairer man than Michel.”
Kihel has never heard that name before, and she finds it unlikely that she ever will again. There is a past behind Dion more tangled than she’ll ever dare prod, one filled with people who would have seen how he nursed his son and then never listened when he said he was Olivier’s papa. She has never seen him mourn whoever Olivier’s other father was. Not like this, at least.
Dion goes on to describe a Laurence instead. A man ten years his wife’s senior who was nonetheless able to assuage her fears and melt her heart. He gave her gifts and let her visit her friends whenever she wanted, even when she was only days away from giving birth. He’d let her parents move into his estate, too, and had supposedly gotten on well with them. He wasn’t a jealous man who suspected his wife of wanting to run off and whore herself to soldiers.
Kihel cringes silently at the bitterness in those words.
Terence snorts. “I knew I was right in never liking that man,” he says, talking again about that awful Michel.
“I wholeheartedly believe she wasn’t thinking only of her own safety when she tried to save him,” Dion says. “I did try to find… mine. He’d gone to assure his mother’s safety, but I never saw him again, and with Olivier to look after…”
“But you weren’t defenseless,” Terence says. “The Chapelles, wasn’t it? And… she looked after you quite well, even with her own son to see to. That, at least, always spoke to her character.”
“She saw the duties before her and rose to meet them, always.” Dion sighs deeply, only just controlling it. The sound unravels in his chest. There is the smallest shift next to Kihel, his hand settling over René. “She loved him. She should be here.”
Instead, she’s just a ghost that he is trying to sleep away.
Kihel squeezes her eyes shut tighter and wills her mind to drift away so that no one else has to hear the muffled sounds that come out of Dion’s throat from between his teeth, unwanted and yet impossible to contain. She reminds herself that he forgave her already, that Lisse had been so sick that trading the ruby ring wouldn’t have mattered anyway, that he’d still risked the secret of his magic for her after it all. It doesn’t really work.
iii. Space
Tomes is going to stay with Vivian, such is the plan. He’s too old to want to live on his own, and it’s looking to be harder to find a house for him and all his grandchildren instead of just for his grandchildren. Vivian says she has a lead on a spot with two bedrooms that used to belong to some Rosarians before they got scared of the troubles surrounding the Dominion. One for the papas, one for the babies. Kihel is glad for them.
The air is electric again, stretched thin to sparks. She wakes one morning sick with it. It’s gone low from her chest to her stomach, making her woozy when she stands. Despite it, she’s quick to leave the dim guest room before anyone else wakes. She doesn’t want to get Olivier and René sick, too.
There is a tiny room crammed behind the staircase only big enough for a little round window, a chamber pot, and a basin to rinse their hands. It’s there that she stands frozen as the morning light gets brighter, staring first at the red spots on her underclothes, then the back of her shift, then faintly in the pot. Her stomach cramps worse at the stink of blood, and the tightness goes all the way back up to her lungs.
It’s only a bit, but it still went all the way through. It probably got on her bedding, too, made the borrowed sheets dirty. They just washed everything, dumped all the brown water into the alley where the cobblestones tilt toward little metal grates. Twinside washes all its filth to its underbelly so no one has to see it. All the road dust went down, all the waste. They’re clean, just like everybody else who’s allowed to be here. They just washed everything. Being so clean makes up for being so thin, looking like the dirt is a part of them—
There’s a knock on the door. There’s another pot upstairs, but it’s Vivian’s, her last shred of privacy while her house is so crowded. Kihel glances at the light squeezing through the window, brighter still. The whole house is waking up and she’s still here, hands dirty.
“Are you alright?” Terence asks through the door with an awkwardness Kihel shares under everything else. “Do you need anything?”
Kihel’s face burns. It’s embarrassing enough to ask if someone’s sick when they’ve already locked themselves in the room, even more so to admit it with an answer. She manages to spit out a word, then just enough after that. “Uh—no! I won’t be long!”
She doesn’t need medicine. There is medicine, but only for people who want better luck having a baby next time, or for people who don’t want a baby at all. She’s not sick. She’s just made a mess.
Terence tells her all is well and leaves in that way she’s seen men do around ladies they don’t want to embarrass any more, even though she doesn’t feel like a lady at all. She’s more stupid than anything, stuck in the closet behind the stairs as she weighs whether the water left in the pitcher beside the basin will be enough to rinse the blood out. It’s barely anything, and she still has to get the bedding—
Another knock. Dion calls through the door, quieter than Terence had, and Kihel bites her lip. He’s still tired and he doesn’t have much time to spare whenever Olivier and René are awake.
“I’m okay,” Kihel says as evenly as she can.
The blood on her clothes is darker. It’ll stain for sure. It won’t come out of her only shift. Its ratty hem is already covered in mud stains. Everything went down under the city except this, and now it’s even worse. It’s all she has to wear at night except for her two dresses, and if she ruins them next—
A mess. It’s on her legs now, too, but she can’t decide what to do, can’t move from where she is stuck between the chamber pot and the basin, staring at red in the morning light. There’s no medicine to stop moon blood, nothing to make her invisible, less of a dirty stone taking up too much space in a crowded house.
She should have gone as soon as the ferry bumped against the dock. Her grandmother left her all the know-how she needed, if none of the common sense to know when to have it on hand. She would have found her way just like every day before without dirtying Vivian’s fine, clean sheets.
Another knock, softer yet again with a murmur, “I’m opening the door.”
Kihel’s heart goes into her throat and she swallows her tongue around it as the door creaks open. It doesn’t open all the way, though. It stops when the crack is wide enough for a pale hand to reach in with something folded in a frilly white shift. Dion’s body blocks the corridor from sight.
“I’ve already seen the bedding, Kihel,” he says gently. “It’s alright. Take this.”
She doesn’t have much of a choice. The heat is behind her eyes now. She drops her dirty clothes and takes the quiet offering. She’s seen Vivian wearing this shift under her dressing robe some nights. That it will be too big on her is barely an afterthought as she unravels it and nearly drops a handful of small grey linens and a supple leather belt.
Her mother had one like this. Kihel only remembers those days faintly now, but she’s sure of it. It was just like this. It was lying around in the bedroom they shared with her grandmother. Between two women and a little girl, there was no one to really hide it from.
“Has anyone taught you these things?” Dion asks after shutting the door but for a sliver. “Putting it on should be fairly straightforward.”
Kihel swallows the lump in her throat. “I know. I—um—I just—”
“It’s alright,” Dion says again. “None of us are truly prepared for it. Not at your age.”
The thought strikes her that this might be Dion’s own belt. The leather certainly feels soft against her fingers in that way only use can bring. The thought that follows feels out of place, yet it comes as easily as the light through the window, and the small sounds of the kitchen that finally reach her ears through the faded buzzing. The blood only gets messier from here, darker, heavier, smellier. His might even be worse now that he’s had Olivier; she’d heard from her grandmother that it can happen to some. He must be confident that he won’t need his belt for a few days despite it.
“Bring the laundry out when you’ve finished,” Dion says before clicking the door shut again and returning to the guest room.
Kihel’s hands tremble as she folds the linens and works them into the clasps on the belt, as she rinses her skin and dresses like nothing happened, as she bundles up the dirty clothes from the floor. The spots aren’t any darker than they were before. They’re just red and pink dots, some of them turning brown where they meet the stains on her shift. She uses the edge of Vivian’s borrowed sleeve to wipe her eyes and hopes the blood leaving her cheeks doesn’t make her look any more sick than she already feels.
Tomes and Vivian are chatting in the kitchen, their voices carrying down the corridor when she finally steps out again. One of them has René. His babbling isn’t quite loud enough to cover the murmurs in the guest room when she approaches the half-open door.
“By the door is fine,” Dion says, answering a question Kihel hadn’t caught.
“Are you sure?” Terence asks. “You could say I’m an old hand at washing blood out.”
Dion hums. It’s almost something light. “Vivian and I will see to it.”
“It’s good that she has one lady around, at least,” Terence says goodnaturedly. His footsteps approach the door. Kihel skirts back a few steps so that when he steps out, she isn’t approaching from near enough to have overheard. He smiles warmly at her, either none the wiser or simply letting her have a moment of peace. “Good morning, Kihel. There’s a bowl set aside for you, be sure not to let it go cold.”
They go on like nothing’s happened, nothing’s changed, and nothing more is going to. The sparks are back.
It’s only Dion and Olivier in the guest room. Dion sits on his bedding with his son nursing in his lap, and Kihel’s blankets folded up beside him. The dirty sheet is by the door where Terence had left it, and Dion bids her to put her clothes on top.
“The stains will come out,” he says easily. He lifts his hand from Olivier’s back briefly to beckon her over. “Do you feel ill at all? Pain, nausea, lightheadedness.”
None of it is as bad as before, but all three are there making her torso too heavy and her limbs too light. She sits carefully, awkwardly. The belt is strange, but it doesn’t cut into her anywhere. It’s only something new against her skin.
“There are a few things we can try,” Dion says. His nose twitches, scrunching a little, but it’s not because of a smell. At least, Kihel hopes it isn’t. “Ginger is common, but it stopped agreeing with me when I got my son. Of course, most things stopped agreeing with me until relatively recently. It ought to do just fine. Vivian has something else for you after dinner as well. The sickness should settle out by then, though you will say so if it doesn’t.”
It’s like being mothered, if a little sternly, and if not for how she wouldn’t call Dion mother. Like being fathered, then. Kihel is nauseous, relieved, and curious all at once. Is there a medicine that her grandmother hadn’t made? One best taken before lying down to sleep, while dinner is still warm in the belly?
She’s embarrassed again, too. Dion seems more awake than before as he takes stock of the colour in her cheeks and then tells her without room for dissent that she ought to go have a bite or two of breakfast. It should have been something like Olivier’s first steps that woke him up. Instead, it was her losing all sense of time staring at blood over the chamber pot.
If only for that reason, she goes to the kitchen to try and stomach porridge. She doesn’t get through the whole bowl, but Vivian hands her a teacup with ginger in it, and that does help some. It helps to watch Tomes tell a story to a starry eyed René, too. To pretend that nothing is changing.
Later in the day, she sits with Vivian and Dion around the laundry basin in the back of the house, the room full of steam and lavender and talk as they tell her that the only thing that’s changed is the same thing that’s always changed for generations. If she were rich, her family would start contemplating her dowry price right about now. Dion leans close and says it’s a good thing she isn’t rich like that, because this thing that has made her a lady is really just one big inconvenience.
“You know why I wear tailed coats?” Vivian says conspiratorially. “Firstly, I look good, of course, but there was a time I went straight through all the damn linens, and if it hadn’t been late enough in the dark when I realized, I think I would have leapt into the canal. One of my girls—I’ll have Tarja for dinner when we get that address sorted, you’ll get on just fine with her, Kihel, I know it—she lent me her cloak so I could get home, and I said to myself never again. There’s nothing wrong with looking your best for any occasion, anyway.”
The washing proceeds far slower than normal as they go on, as Kihel mostly listens. Muddled and faint in the steam, she sees her mother with her darning, her grandmother with the pipe she knew she wasn’t supposed to have. It wasn’t even bad lungs that took them and the conversations that Kihel drank up every lesson from, even when they stopped being about lessons. The lesson here is that she needs to keep a close eye on any cramps she feels until her cycle settles in, and even then she needs to keep it as an afterthought because stress can make her cycle change. She’d already known that, more or less, so the talk quickly stops being a lesson here, too.
It’s about inconveniences with the occasional side of convenience. It’s a great big mess for days. Dion got out of a few parties he didn’t want to go to by lying in bed being bloody. Vivian threw a filthy linen at a drunk man trying to follow her home and scared him so bad he nearly went shrieking into the water. It’s made them sick. It’s made them miss out on favourite foods and occasions they would have attended if the mere sight of a dinner table hadn’t put them off. It’s been something of a backwards relief.
If they bleed, there isn’t a baby. If it comes on time, there’s less reason to think they might be deeply ill. One less worry.
Vivian has lived here nearly all her life except for some sabbaticals westward. Dion came from the north where the roads were choked with soldiers and bandits. Kihel doesn’t ask if there were terrible days on those journeys, the sort she heard about during her own travels, the sort she’d hoped as much as anyone to avoid. She already knows Dion would have gone as long as possible without having Olivier if he could have, even though he loves his son and is trying hard to love René, too.
They don’t speak of any such dark spots themselves, either. They just go on, assuring Kihel through anecdotes—stories that are nearly the same even though Vivian’s are from Twinside and Dion’s are from Oriflamme—that only her body is changing. The rest of her is still the same.
“Although,” Dion adds, leaning close again, “if you feel a greater conflict than that, you ought to say so. You’d hardly be alone.”
A greater conflict. A mismatch, Dion described it as when he caught her curiously watching the babies nurse from their papa. It’s how he knows with absolute certainty that the body and soul really are separate. If they were the same, Olivier wouldn’t exist at all.
If they were the same, he probably would have been a soldier like Terence. He might have come back lost half the time like Terence, too, or he might not have come back at all.
Kihel wipes those thoughts away. Terence doesn’t need any more reasons to think about death, and the smile on Dion’s face as they wring out the laundry isn’t one of the practiced ones he puts on for Olivier and René. He really is waking up again, happy to impart the knowledge gathered from a life lived.
After they hang the laundry up, Vivian reveals her secret gift. She tells Kihel with a wink that she’s only to have it after dinner as she presses something small folded in wax paper in her hand. When Kihel takes a peek, she finds a piece of dark chocolate.
“That’s the quality stuff, too, I don’t skimp on it,” Vivian says nearly in a whisper. “That being the case, there’s only so much of it. A little treat for all our long days. Don’t tell those men out there.”
Kihel has the feeling that those men out there already know, but it’s… fun to have a secret. To have someone to share it with. To have…
She wipes her eyes again. When she rubs with the fist holding her chocolate, she can smell it, the smallest sweetness with a sharp tinge.
“Thank you,” she says from under her hands. “I won’t let it melt. I’ll keep it secret.”
They lead her to dinner, sharing this thing between them all the while. By the time Terence takes the empty dishes away, the sickness has settled out as Dion said it would. There’s just the cramping left, but it’s easier to ignore with the smooth, rich taste of chocolate on her tongue. She’s never had anything that tasted so expensive, except maybe the perfectly ripe cactus fruits that Dion had shared with her even though Terence had only picked them for him.
Despite the small cramps that come and go, it’s a little easier to fall asleep that night.
iv. Taut
Kihel is awake a few nights later to hear Terence wake from a nightmare for the first time. He makes an awful sound in his throat as he sits up, something thin and high and broken. He sounds injured, and like he’s choking, and like he’s trying to swallow down a scream. Whether it’s because soldiers aren’t supposed to scream or because he’s aware enough to know anything too loud will wake the babies up, she doesn’t know. He’s gone too quickly.
Dion is awake, too. His whispers go completely ignored as Terence flees the room, leaving the door swinging in his wake. Dion, thinking that no one else is awake, especially not his sons, curses under his breath and quietly goes after him.
Kihel lies frozen with indecision in her bed as the door out of the laundry room is thrown open. Terence hadn’t even stopped to put anything on. Not his wooden hand, not his boots, not even his coat over his nightshirt. She can just hear him in the alley. Though she can’t make out his words, even in the distance she can tell he doesn’t sound like himself.
Maybe he’s not. This might be the Terence from months or even years ago, the one who lost his hand and then watched everyone get burned up. Kihel rolls over to check on Olivier and René as Tomes continues to snore. Snuggled around each other, they’re still peacefully asleep. They usually sleep all the way through the night these days; they probably won’t wake up unless Terence gets really loud.
Silently, Kihel tip-toes to the kitchen, closing the bedroom door behind her as she shivers in the draft. Nights ashore are cold. In the city, the dark is only a little warmer. Something hot will be appreciated. A favour, a kindness. Of all her mother and grandmother’s know-how, this is what she knows best.
Terence gets loud as she lights a small fire in the stove for the kettle. He only raises his voice for a few heavy, ragged, broken words, but they spur her on with a needling pain in her chest nonetheless.
“I should be with them!”
Ghosts. The ones he couldn’t find his way to in the desert. The ones still on him and around him as Dion urges him to come back inside, to breathe, to look and see there is no battlefield. Kihel boils water on the stove and wishes there was real medicine for ghosts. In Vivian’s tea collection, there’s only a pinch of valerian left.
Something topples in the alley as she pours steaming water into a cup at the breakfast table. Then, quiet, and a faint creaking down the hall. No babies crying, though. Before Kihel can decide whether or not to leave the tea where it will soon be found and return to bed, Dion leads Terence into the kitchen. They are both tired, pale, and cold. Terence, limping heavily with his fingers digging into his stump, doesn’t have any colour in him, and though he looks in her direction, he mostly only looks past her.
Dion presses his lips together as if they’re the ones who’ve been caught. “Did we wake you?”
Kihel shakes her head quickly. There’s no lie in it, and yet he doesn’t entirely believe her. She sets the kettle aside and gestures toward the cup, where a comforting scent is beginning to rise. “This should help.”
To her, at least, the familiar relief that flickers across Dion’s face is comforting. He nudges Terence to sit at the table, then squeezes her shoulder. “Kind as ever,” he murmurs. “Go back to sleep; all will be well.”
Part of her wants to stay. This know-how is all she has. But Terence never wanted even Dion to see him lost, and she doesn’t truly know how to lead him back, anyway. The only course she can think of taking is to look after Olivier and René in case they wake up before Dion comes back to them.
It’s decided, then.
“Good night,” she whispers, hoping Terence can hear that much even if he can’t see her.
She returns to the guest room, where Tomes had rolled over to watch Olivier and René while everyone else had gone. He only asks whether Terence had returned safely, to which she gladly nods, pushing away the worry in her gut over what might have happened if Terence had fled without notice. He’d always made his way safely back to his tent on the hill before, but Twinside is different, huge and crowded and full of possibilities good and bad.
Dion hadn’t let him get very far at all. Just this once, it is good that he’d been awake half the night yet again.
Kihel crawls back under her blankets next to the babies. Only René had moved while she was gone to stretch his arms over his head. She curls up beside him, her thoughts lingering on the cool pressure of Dion’s hand on her shoulder.
v. Release
Dion thanks her in the morning as they sit on the bedroom floor getting the boys dressed, quietly while Terence is in the kitchen helping with breakfast as he usually does, as if he wasn’t awake all night. He’s warm again, a little more awake day by day. He’s almost as he was in the camp, always troubled by something but always determined to face it, too. He tells her she hadn’t needed to do anything.
Kihel shakes her head at that. “I want to help.”
It’s all she has. If she doesn’t—if she lets pain go untreated, if she lets her hands hang at her sides—
It’s simple, so she says it simply. She wants to help.
But Dion looks at her strangely. At first glance, Kihel looks down to make sure she hasn’t accidentally pinched René while getting his shirt on, or tugged his hair or hurt him at all, but René isn’t even complaining. He’s perfectly fine as he crawls away without his socks to get his stuffed chocobo. It’s getting ratty. Maybe Dion agrees.
But no, he’s looking strangely at her, not his sons as they tug the chocobo between them. He’s far away for a moment, but not in the lost way. His brow furrows as he leans closer to her, leaving no room for doubt or escape.
“Kihel, do you believe our intention is to leave you behind once we find our way?”
In a blink, she can’t open her mouth to breathe enough, even though the answer is obvious. She’s only family because Vivian lied well enough. She’s only here because she was in Terence’s tent when Dion flew back wild and breathless with a chance to get past the gate. She was only there because she couldn’t do anything at all when it mattered. But if she can do little things now, Vivian might at least let her stay here like Tomes when everyone else is gone.
She can’t say these things. Her mouth won’t open. The heat in her face rises too quickly and makes her muscles too heavy. Every passing day is a day she should have gone, and every passing day is one she doesn’t want to go.
She looks away from the twitch in Dion’s jaw, and the small sigh that follows. She doesn’t want to go—
The heat is all around her. Dion is warmer than his thinness suggests. That thinness is less than it was, too. Countless days of scarcity are behind them all. He’s more than skin and bones and yet it isn’t enough to muffle the sound that cuts out from the back of Kihel’s throat against his shoulder.
“No, that is not our intention,” he says firmly, his words vibrating all around and in her. His hand moves across her back, up and down, up and down. “Not in the least. You have nothing to convince anyone of.” Another long sigh, but his arms aren’t any looser around her as his voice softens. “All haste was necessary that day, but there has been plenty of time to slow down since. We ought to have made it plain.”
When would he have made anything plain when he was sleeping? They all needed the rest.
She chokes the words out, “You were…”
But Dion hushes her. “No, no, otherwise I would not have to say so now. I wondered briefly if we had spirited you away against your wishes—”
Every passing day has been—
“—but that is evidently not so. The opportunity arose to repay kindness with kindness, and it is for that reason the Dominion believes I have a daughter. They’ll believe I am older than I am and you are younger, but that is hardly a price to pay. You are not a mere prop, Kihel. One of those bedrooms is yours; the boys will be sleeping with me.”
One of those bedrooms—the whole room?
Sounds are leaking out of her from deeper down than her chest, ones she hasn’t made in a long time. There hasn’t been anyone to hear them, or anyone she wanted to allow to. Dion doesn’t tell her to stop making them, not with sharp words, not with a stinging hand, not with a boot. He holds her tighter and even though it’s harder to breathe, the crying just gets louder. She sounds like the babies when they get upset, but she’s older than that, she’s grown, she’s—
It’s uncontrollable. There’s no saving what broke deep down anymore. She feels the vibrations more than she hears the words woven under her tears.
“You’re not alone. You won’t be left alone.”
She wants her mother.
Small limbs try to wriggle between them and smaller hands tug at her arms as she holds on to Dion. The boys are coming on a year old now, he said not long ago. They know so much even if they don’t have the words for it all. They know when they cry, Papa hugs them. When people cry, someone hugs them.
Time and sense spiral away. Kihel forgets to care that the whole crowded house can hear the noises she hadn’t even known she could still make. Dion’s shoulder, made a mess with tears and snot, does less than nothing to muffle her. She keeps sobbing into the mess until there’s nothing left in her to come out, and she’s wrung out in the between, stuck with nothing to do but cry while there are no more tears left. Her head pounds, and she doesn’t have any more strength to do anything about it.
She wants her mother to do something about it. A warm drink, a candy. A gentle hand telling her to lie down.
Dion only leaves her to get a cup of water, taking the boys with him. He lingers out there, though, long enough for her to wake up again. The gentle weight on her chest isn’t the hand of a ghost. René’s chocobo and Olivier’s button-eyed doll are lying there. They must not have known what else to do. She wants to cry again, seeing them there. She gathers the toys and stands instead, lightheaded and heavy and raw. She’ll return them. The whole house already heard her, anyway.
In the kitchen, she doesn’t get through so much as a good morning before Vivian is on her. “Come here, you,” she says before wrapping Kihel up in a hug, in soft velvet and perfume and warmth.
She does it like she’d been waiting. Tomes, too, and Terence, careful with his wooden hand around her back. Dion, holding a cup and a small plate of eggs, doesn’t hug her again. He sets the dishes in the same place she’s eaten at before since they arrived here instead, bids her to come sit in the same place, too. Seated on the bench that runs the length of one side of the table with Dion and the boys, she tries to return the dolls, but René pushes his chocobo back at her. He speaks gibberish, but his meaning is clear. The others around the table chuckle at how resolute he is.
The electricity is back, only made more apparent under her skin as she gulps down the cool water with the stuffed chocobo tucked in the crook of her elbow. The static hums there, certain uncertainty. She’d shared campfires and paring knives, shade and wagon benches, but before arriving at Vivian’s house, it had been a long, long time since she shared a real table.
There are ghosts around it, just for a moment. She can’t remember their faces anymore. There’s only the lilt of their voices, the far away scents of earth and smoke. They’re there and gone again as Kihel chases the red from her eyes and Vivian shares good news. A friend of a friend—friend of the family—at the district notary office has settled the deed they’ve been after.
Somewhere not far away, two bedrooms await. One for the papas and the babies, and one for…
vi. Sleep
In the upstairs apartment above a small bookshop, signs of the Rosarians who fled back home still remain. They’d taken the valuable furniture, leaving only a few of the necessities and the drapery. They’d left a space in the shop that Terence will fill some days, too. Other days, Dion will go down, but Kihel isn’t sure for how long. He’s spoken about work elsewhere with Tomes already. The shop is just the greatest convenience Vivian and her friends could find for them as they got their bearings; once Olivier and René are grown, the possibilities will open up.
But that’s some time from now as the soft night falls, and silence settles down to the floorboards, and Kihel struggles to fall asleep again. The Rosarian family had left their beds, if not all their covers, and the chill of Twinside’s night weighs on the edge of her awareness as she lies under her blanket, watching a faint beam of silvery light dance through the gap between the curtains.
Her curtains, parted just enough to let the light of the Mothercrystal through. It seems brighter than it was even though she isn’t much closer to the crystal now than she was in Vivian’s guest room. That room is even more crowded in her memory as this one yawns around her, nearly empty but for the bed, the empty desk, the wardrobe, and her few belongings.
Her bed, her desk, and her wardrobe.
In the light of the Mothercrystal, the ghosts are washed out near to nothing. She’s never had her own room before. In her earliest memories occupied by warm hands and voices, she’d shared with her mother and grandmother. They didn’t have much space, so they shared mostly everything, all down to know-how. And now…
Creaking from the master bedroom. It had taken some time to tire out the curious boys. The sounds are too steady to be from either of them as footsteps leave the room and approach hers. After a quiet knock, Dion pokes his head past the door with a candle. He doesn’t appear surprised to find her awake.
“Are you comfortable?” he asks, stepping inside and crossing to the bedside to look over her.
Kihel tugs her blanket to her chin and nods. There’s a faint indent where its last occupant slept, but the mattress is still soft. Wool, maybe. She’s not cold underneath, at least. She’s floating on a soft woollen cloud.
Dion must have been born keen, though. She doesn’t know what he sees in the dimness, only that he sees it. He sets the candle on the desk, leaves the room, and returns again from the master bedroom with another blanket in his hands. He unfolds it with a flap and drapes it over her bed in one motion, then tucks it close to her.
The chill is gone in an instant. The warmth surges to a flash of heat behind her eyes again, but Kihel blinks it away as she shifts under the blankets—her blankets—and curls up on her side. Dion says nothing of it as he adjusts the top blanket again and then pats her shoulder just firm enough to be felt under the layers.
Or, almost nothing of it.
“That ought to do,” Dion says, satisfied as he takes up his candle again. He holds her gaze. “Come and knock if you need something, no matter how small.”
“I’m okay now,” Kihel murmurs. If she were to raise her voice any more, it would echo in the emptiness yet to be filled. The newness.
Dion is satisfied by that, too. He nods once, an unspoken that’s that, and turns out of the room again. Her room. “Rest well, Kihel,” he says softly before pulling the door shut. “Good night.”
A click, a creak, then quiet and darkness. Kihel blinks away wetness again. She very badly wants something she can no longer have in the silence. The ghosts are nothing more under the blankets. When she keeps her eyes closed tight, there are new faces, new voices, more than before.
It had just been the three of them, then. She was too little for her mother to talk about what happened to her father—if such a man was worth talking about at all, like Laurence was and Michel wasn’t—and now she’ll never know. Having even one papa is something new, something unknown. If she opens her eyes too soon, she might wake from this bizarre reality of having two, of having more than that, of having…
Safe in the quiet warmth, Kihel falls asleep and dreams of ghosts, family, and newness.