Archive of Our Own

The moment the general's hand left her sternum, Collei felt the world tilt sideways.

It wasn't painful, exactly. Or it was, but pain was something she had learned to catalogue and hide away into the back of her mind the way other children threw away toys they had grown tired of. This was different. This was like someone had reached into the space behind her ribs where something dark and coiling had lived for as long as she could remember, and closed a fist around it.

Then the fist squeezed.

She had not screamed. She was proud of that, in a blurry, distracted sort of way. She had made a sound, something small and raw that she would have preferred not to have made, but she had not screamed. Screaming was dangerous. Screaming meant they came back faster, and sometimes when they came back they were angry about being disturbed, and then things got worse in ways she did not have language for anymore.

The Archon's statue in the plaza had looked down at her with that serene, blank expression, and Collei had stared back at it while General Mahamatra Cyno crouched behind her with his hand pressed to her back, and she had thought, very clearly: if this is a trick, it is the most elaborate one yet.
She had thought that a lot in the weeks since Amber had found her.

She thought it again now, trudging down the road south of Mondstadt with the general walking three paces ahead of her, his headgear catching the pale morning light. Amber had said to trust him. Amber had looked at her with those clear, honest eyes that Collei had studied obsessively for any trace of calculation and found nothing, and she had said: he's a good person, Collei. He's going to take you somewhere safe.

Somewhere safe.

Collei turned the phrase over in her mind the way her tongue found the gap where she'd lost a tooth two years ago. An absence that was its own kind of presence. She did not know what safe felt like. She knew what it felt like to be temporarily undiscovered. She knew what it felt like to be useful enough that no one wanted to damage you further. She knew what it felt like to sleep in the hollow of a dead tree with her knees to her chest and one ear always listening.

She did not know what safe felt like.

The general had not spoken to her since they left the gates of Mondstadt at dawn. She was grateful for this. Most adults who did not speak to her were either ignoring her entirely, which was manageable, or waiting. Waiting for the right moment to say the thing that would make her feel she owed them something. She watched the back of his head and tried to decide which kind of quiet this was.

He had an unusual way of moving. Very deliberate. Like each step was a decision he had made in advance and was simply now carrying out. Nothing wasted. Nothing accidental.

She did not trust people who moved like that. In her experience, people who moved like that had thought carefully about all their options.

The road curved through a copse of birch trees, the leaves still thin and young with the season, and Collei let herself fall a little further behind to crouch beside the path. There were dandelion leaves growing along the roadside, young ones, not yet bitter. She pinched a small handful and straightened before the general could notice she had stopped.

He had noticed. She could tell because his pace adjusted, almost imperceptibly, to give her time to close the distance. But he did not comment, and he did not look back.

She chewed the dandelion leaves slowly as she walked. They tasted of cold earth and something faintly green. She had eaten worse things. She had eaten things she didn't want to think about.

Her stomach felt strange about the leaves. Not bad strange. Just strange. It had been doing that more lately, since the sealing. A prickling numbness in her fingertips that came and went. A heaviness in her joints that she tried to attribute to the long walking. Her skin felt wrong sometimes, like something was happening underneath it that shouldn't be, but when she looked there was nothing there except the pale lines of old scars and the bandaging she kept wound tight around both forearms.

The residue was gone. The general had sealed it.

So the strangeness didn't make sense. She hid it in the back of her mind, with other things she tried not to think of. 

It happened on the second day, somewhere in the hills south of Mondstadt, on a stretch of path that climbed steeply enough that Collei had to watch her footing carefully.

She was watching a loose stone when she stepped sideways to avoid it, miscalculated, and her shoulder collided with the general's arm.

The reaction was instantaneous and completely outside her control.

Her whole body seized. Not a flinch. Not a step back. A full, total locking of every muscle in her body as the memory arrived not as a thought but as a sensation: hands gripping her shoulders, the cold metal of a restraint, the smell of something chemical and clean, a voice saying something in a tone she had learned meant do not move or it will be worse.

The path was still there. The birch trees were still there. Somewhere above the canopy a bird was calling in short, repetitive bursts.

None of this reached her.

What reached her was the memory of a room with white walls, and a table with straps, and the way the overhead light had this particular quality of brightness that left no shadows anywhere, so there was nowhere to look that wasn't equally exposed.

She was making a sound, she realized. A controlled sound, very small and very fast. Not screaming. She was not screaming. Screaming was dangerous. She pressed her lips together and tried to pull the sound back inside her chest where it couldn't be heard.

"Stop." The general's voice came from somewhere to her left, and it was not soft exactly, but it was very deliberate. "You're on the road. You haven't moved. I'm standing here, and I am not touching you."

She heard this distantly, like sound through water.

"I stepped away when you startled. I'm approximately two arm-lengths to your left. There is nothing behind you except the road. You can check if that would help."

She could not check. Her legs were not currently receiving instructions.

"You don't have to answer me," he said. "I'm going to continue standing here. I'm not going anywhere."

She breathed. Or she tried to breathe. Breathing was a mechanical process and she had trained herself to do it on purpose during the bad times, in and then out, and in, because if she didn't remember to do it on purpose then her body would forget, and forgetting made things worse.

In. Out.

The white room faded to the back of her mind, where it lived. Where it will stay. She was going somewhere safe. Somewhere safe. 

The road came back. The birch trees. The bird.

Cyno was standing exactly where he'd said, two arm-lengths to her left, his hands visible at his sides. He was not looking at her directly. He was looking at the middle distance, in the particular way of someone who has decided that direct eye contact would not be helpful.

"I apologize," he said, when her breathing had been steady for long enough that she had lost count of the repetitions. "I should have given you more room on this section of the path. The gradient makes the available space narrower than I had calculated for. It will not happen again."

There was nothing performative in this. No softening of the voice into something saccharine and pitying. No crouching down to her eye level in a way that she had learned to recognize as a prelude to something being required of her. He stated the apology the way he stated everything, like a fact he had assessed and confirmed and was reporting accurately.

She looked at him. Her hands were still shaking, which she hated, so she closed them around the straps of the small bag Amber had packed for her and pressed until the shaking was less visible.

She did not say anything. She had nothing to say.

After a moment, the general turned and continued down the road.

After another moment, she followed.

The harbor was too loud.

Collei had known this the moment they came over the rise and she saw it spread out below them in the late afternoon light, all those buildings stacked against each other, all those boats in the harbor, all those people moving in the streets. She had pressed herself against the nearest surface, which was the stone of the road marker, and studied it the way she studied all new environments.

Exits. Crowds are cover and obstruction both. High ground. Water at the back of the harbor means no escape that direction without swimming. The walls of the city are not walls like a prison, she reminded herself. They are walls like a building. People chose to be inside them.

She had been in Mondstadt for several weeks and still had not stopped doing this in every new room. She suspected she would never stop.

The general had glanced back at her when she'd stopped, and then looked at the city, and then back at her.

"We'll stay one night," he said. "The road from here to Sumeru is long and I need to resupply. You need to rest somewhere with a proper roof."

She did not respond, because she was still cataloguing exits, and because she did not need anyone to make decisions about what she needed. She knew what she needed. She needed people to stop knowing things about her.

The restaurant he chose was called Wanmin Restaurant, tucked into one of the city's broader squares. It smelled of ginger and cooking oil and something sweet she couldn't immediately identify. Round tables, paper lanterns, the sound of a cook's knife working fast against a wooden board somewhere in the back.

Collei stood in the doorway for three full seconds before deciding it was survivable and followed the general to a table in the corner.

He ordered without asking her, which she noted. She noted also that he ordered enough food for two people, which meant he expected her to eat it. He sat with his hands folded on the table and his posture perfectly upright and looked at nothing in particular in the way that she was beginning to understand was simply how his face rested.

The food arrived. There was a bowl of rice and a soup that smelled like ginger and something else, and a plate of braised vegetables, and two cups of water.
Collei looked at the bowl in front of her.

Don't.

The thought arrived immediately, automatic, well-worn from years of use. Don't eat anything you didn't find yourself. Don't eat anything prepared by hands you haven't watched. Don't eat anything that comes from someone who wants something from you.

She had learned this lesson in the earliest days, before she'd even understood what was being done to her. She had learned it from the meals that tasted slightly wrong, from the water that made her sleepy in the wrong way, from the food that arrived after she had done something they wanted and was therefore not a gift but a negotiation.

She stopped falling for it years ago.

She looked at the soup and thought about the last time someone had given her food and what had happened after, and she pushed the bowl very slightly away.

The general watched this without expression.

"You should eat," he said.

"I'm not hungry," she said. It was the first time she had spoken directly to him since leaving Mondstadt. Her voice came out rougher than she expected, scratchy with disuse.

"The road tomorrow will be demanding."

"I'm not hungry."

He was quiet for a moment. She watched his hands, which remained folded and still.

"The food here is not altered in any way," he said, at the same volume. Not loud. Not insistent. Factual, in that way of his. "The cook is a woman named Xiangling. She's fifteen years old and she cooks here with her father. I have eaten here before on assignment. I can't compel you to eat."

She looked at the soup.

She looked at the general.

"I'm not hungry," she said again.

There was a pause, and then he said, "All right," and began eating his own food, and did not say another word about it.

This surprised her more than the apology on the road had. In her experience, adults did not simply accept refusal. They rephrased. They reframed. They found different angles until you understood that refusing was not actually an option, that the illusion of choice had only ever been an illusion. She waited for this to happen.

It did not happen.

The general finished his meal. He left enough money on the table to cover both portions plus something extra, which Collei suspected was intentional, and he stood and she stood and they left.

She ate three small leaves she'd pulled from a plant growing in a crack in the harbor's stone walls on the way to the inn. She chewed them slowly. They tasted like earth and cold. 

The general noticed. She could tell because his pace adjusted again, that almost-imperceptible thing. He said nothing.

She suspected, with a complicated feeling she didn't have a name for yet, that he was not going to say nothing because he didn't care. She suspected he was not saying anything because he had made a decision about what was useful.

She didn't know what to do with that.

The inn room had one window that latched from the inside and a bed with a blanket that was heavier than she was used to. She lay in it for a long time without sleeping, listening to the harbor sounds through the window. Ships. Water. Distant voices.

She was not going to sleep. 

She slept.

They walked for many days.

Collei measured time differently than other people, she thought. She did not measure it in hours or days but in increments of safety: how long since she had last been touched, how long since she had eaten something she trusted, how long since the last time something happened that required her to be very still and very quiet inside herself.

The general was actually very easy to be near, once she accepted that he was not going to try to reach her. He spoke occasionally: informational things, about the terrain, about what they would encounter, about how far they still had to go. He did not ask her questions. He did not try to fill the silences. He walked ahead of her at a pace she could match, and when the terrain changed, he slowed without being asked.

She foraged as they walked. She was good at it. She'd had years of practice during the period after the facility, that gray stretch of time she didn't think about directly, when she had been too small and too sick and too frightened to approach anyone, and the forest had been the only thing that didn't want anything from her. She knew which leaves were safe. She knew what roots could be cleaned and eaten. She knew how to smell the difference between the right mushrooms and the wrong ones.

She picked things as she went. Dandelion. Wood sorrel. Young clover. Once, a stand of something that tasted almost sweet that grew along a creek they stopped beside, and she ate it crouched at the waterside with her fingers in the cold water, washing each piece first the way she always did.

The general was sitting on a rock nearby, reviewing something on a scroll. His eyes moved toward her and then away again in a single continuous motion, and he said nothing, and she ate her creek-grass and felt something that was not quite peace but was adjacent to it.

She gathered things too, not just to eat but to hold. A stone that was particularly smooth on one side. Some pale yellow flowers she found at the edge of a forest that she couldn't name but that made her chest feel strange in a way that wasn't bad, that she could not explain, something about the shape of them. She tucked them into the strap of her bag and forgot about them and then found them a day later, slightly wilted, and pressed them flat between two of the pages of the small notebook Amber had given her.

She did not write in the notebook. She didn't know how.

The flowers she kept anyway.

The day they reached the Chasm, the light changed.

She felt it before she understood it: a shift in the air, something heavier and older-smelling, like stone that had been broken and left exposed for a very long time. The landscape around the path opened up into something vast and scarred, great gouges in the earth that dropped away into darkness she couldn't see the bottom of.

She stopped walking.

The general stopped too, half a step ahead, and turned.

"We'll traverse it on the established paths," he said. "It's passable. I've done it before."

She looked at the darkness at the edges of the path.

She followed him in.

It was not terrible. She had lived in worse places. The paths were narrow in some sections but they held, and the general moved steadily ahead of her and she kept her eyes on his back and did not look at the drops.

But then they came to a section where the path had crumbled away, leaving a gap of perhaps two arm-lengths, and on the other side the path continued at a height that was too far above for her to pull herself up to without help.

The general looked at the gap. Then at the height of the far edge. Then at her.

"I can get up first and pull you over," he said. "But I would need to grip your wrists. May I do that?"

She stared at him.

The question was so unexpected that it took her several seconds to process it. Not I'll help you up or come here, but may I. As if the answer might be no and that would be a real answer that would actually change what happened next.

She thought about the road and his hands at his sides and the apology that was just a fact.

"Yes," she said. Her voice came out small. She hated how small it came out.

He crossed the gap with a kind of easy, economical leap, and reached back, and she held out both wrists, and he gripped them firmly, not roughly, the way you would grip something you wanted to keep safe and not damage, and he pulled her up and over in one smooth motion and the moment she had her feet under her she stepped back and he released her wrists immediately, before she'd even pulled.

"Thank you," she murmured, before she could think better of it.

He made a small sound of acknowledgment, and turned, and they continued.

She stood there for one more second, looking at his back.

May I, she thought. He asked.

She hid this carefully in the part of her mind that collected things she didn't know what to do with yet.

When they crossed out of the Chasm and into Sumeru proper, Collei's first full breath in days came out of her without her deciding to breathe. 

It smelled like nothing she had ever experienced. Green, impossibly green, green in a way that was almost a sound, a humid, living, layered green that had leaves and soil and something floral underneath it all. The trees were enormous, the kind of enormous that made her feel correctly small in a way she didn't hate, the kind that was just true and had nothing to do with her. Ferns brushed the sides of the path. Something moved in the undergrowth and she flinched before she saw it was a small animal, round-faced, watching her with no particular concern before it disappeared.

She stood at the edge of the forest and breathed.

"This is the Avidya Forest," the general said. "Gandharva Ville is further in."

He was walking. She followed.

The path was dense with things to look at. She had never been anywhere like this. She found herself turning her head constantly, taking in the shapes of unfamiliar leaves, the quality of light filtered through canopy, the way sound moved differently here, dampened and layered. There was a flower she almost stopped for but didn't because the general was moving and she didn't want to lose sight of him.

She stayed close, as he'd told her to. People had looked at her in the villages they'd passed through. She knew what she looked like: thin, too thin, thin in a way that told a story on her body without her permission, bandages visible at her wrists and ankles, the particular quality of a child who had not been well for a long time. She had learned to make herself smaller in those looks, to look back with nothing on her face, to give them nothing to latch onto.

A woman on the path through one of the small communities between the Chasm and the deeper forest said something in the language she didn't speak yet, Sumerian, probably, and crouched down and held something out.

Collei stopped.

The woman was smiling. Not the kind of smile that wanted something. Just a smile, warm and uncomplicated, from a woman whose face was kind. In her hand was a small flower, pale gold and three-petaled, shaped a little like a star.

Collei looked at the flower.

Something happened in her chest that she did not immediately understand. A pulling sensation, something that felt like a door she had not known was there opening a crack. The flower was familiar in a way she had no explanation for. Not familiar from anywhere she had been. Familiar from somewhere further back, somewhere she couldn't see clearly, just a warmth and a smell, something like those flowers, and a hand giving something to another hand, and the feeling of being somewhere that was safe in the way she didn't know how to name.

She didn't know whose hands they were. She didn't know whose warmth.

She took the flower. She nodded. The woman smiled more and said something else and stood and continued on.

Collei looked at the flower for a long time. Then she put it carefully between two pages of her notebook, next to the pale yellow flowers from the forest earlier.

The general had stopped walking. He was waiting for her without making it obvious he was waiting for her. She closed the notebook and caught up and they continued.

She didn't look at him. She was thinking about the flower and the warmth she couldn't see the source of, and she was pressing the question flat inside herself because looking at it directly was not something she was ready to do.

When they reached Gandharva Ville, Collei's first impression was of height. The structures were built into the trees themselves in some cases, platforms and rope bridges and small buildings nestled against enormous trunks. People moved through the space with the easy familiarity of a community that had been in one place for a long time.

She watched them from behind the general's shoulder.

A few people looked at her. She looked back with nothing on her face.

The general did not stop to speak to anyone. He moved through the village with the same purposefulness as everything else he did, heading toward the far edge where the dwellings thinned out and the forest pressed closer.

He stopped outside a small hut built partly against the base of a great tree. It had a low door and a window with the shutter propped open. She could see the shapes of bundled plants hanging from the rafters inside.

"Wait here," the general said. He looked at her, and this was one of the rare times he looked at her directly. "I need to speak with him first. This won't take long."

She nodded. Her hands found the straps of her bag.

He knocked twice on the door frame and a voice from inside answered, and he ducked through the low doorway and the hut swallowed him.

Collei stood outside and listened to the forest.

She did not try to hear what was being said inside the hut. She thought about this for a moment, whether she should try to listen, whether she needed to know what was being said about her, and then she thought about the general with his polearm and his economy of movement and his sealed God's remains in her chest, and she thought: if he wanted to punish her for eavesdropping, he would not need to catch her doing it. He would simply know. She didn't understand how. But she believed it.

So she stood outside and let the forest reach her instead.

The smell here was denser than on the path, something ancient and layered underneath the green, something that the earth gave off when it had been undisturbed for long enough. She could hear the birds but she couldn't see most of them, the canopy was too thick, just calls moving through the air above her. Something large moved in the undergrowth to her left and she tracked it with her eyes without moving her head until she saw it: a boar, dark-bristled, enormous, rooting at the base of a tree. It lifted its head and looked at her with small, dark eyes and then went back to its business.

She did not know why this made her feel something she didn't have a name for.

The boar knew she was there and decided she was not important. She was not a threat and she was not prey and she was not anything that required a response. She was just a small thing standing at the edge of the forest, and the boar rooted at the base of the tree, and the birds called in the canopy, and the smell of the earth was green and old and alive.

She breathed.

She was still breathing carefully and watching the boar when the door of the hut opened behind her and the general's voice said, "You can come in, now."

Her whole body changed. It didn't decide to change; it just did, the way it always did, everything tightening into a particular kind of readiness that was not fight and was not flight but was something before both of them: assessment, attention, the total orientation of every sense toward the source of potential danger.

She turned around.

The general was standing in the doorway. His expression was the same as it always was. He gestured inside with a slight tilt of his head.

She looked at the doorway of the hut.

He asked permission before he grabbed your wrists, she thought. He stopped when you pushed the food away. He said all right. 

She walked through the doorway.

The hut was small and densely organized, the kind of organized that took genuine effort and showed it. Every bundle of dried herbs had a place. The papers on the desk were stacked rather than scattered. The instruments on the shelf were arrayed with their handles aligned. Even the clutter had a logic to it.

She took all of this in while simultaneously taking in the exits: the door she'd entered, the window to her left, a second doorway at the back that was curtained.

She found the points she could move to if needed and held them in the back of her mind the way she held anything important, quietly and constantly, a second awareness running underneath the surface.

Then she looked at the man sitting at the desk.

He was younger than she'd expected. Not young like her, but younger than the general. He had a face that was somehow both sharp and soft at the same time, and he was looking at her with an expression that was careful in a way she recognized as deliberate: carefully non-threatening, carefully still, the way you were with something that might bolt.

She did not like being read that accurately.

And then her eyes went to his ears.

They were large. Black-tipped, with a structure that moved slightly as she looked at them, a small adjustment, the way an animal's ears moved. They were not attached to any headpiece or mask. They were just there, rising from his dark green hair as naturally as anything.

She stared. She was aware she was staring and couldn't immediately stop.

The man's mouth curved slightly. Not a smirk. Something quieter.

"Valuka Shuna," he said. His voice was measured, warm in a way that wasn't soft exactly, the warmth of someone who genuinely meant what he said but was not going to perform it. "My kind have been part of Sumeru for a long time. We migrated from the desert to the forests many generations ago. The ears are real." He paused. "And yes, they move when I'm thinking. I can't fully control it."

She looked at the ears. She looked at his face.

He did not ask her anything. He did not say my name is or what's your name or how are you feeling or any of the things adults said when they wanted to establish that they were in charge of the conversation. He just let her look at him and his ears made another small adjustment and he waited.

She decided this was less threatening than most introductions. 

She looked at the room again. The bundles of herbs. The papers.

He was some kind of doctor, she thought. Or something like it. The herbs, the instruments, the smell of the hut which was not quite like a physician's rooms but was adjacent to it. 

Something in her gut turned over, cold and hard.

Don't.

She was being told something by her body that her mind was trying to manage. He was a doctor, something like a doctor, and she knew about doctors, she knew what they looked like when they said they were helping and what they looked like after. She pressed the cold feeling flat and kept her face neutral and watched him with the particular quality of watching she'd developed over years: open enough to seem relaxed, sharp enough to miss nothing.

He had his hands out. Visible. On the desk in front of him, not folded, just resting there with the palms loosely upward. She noticed this. She noticed he had not crossed his arms or put his hands behind him or done any of the things people did when they were deciding things without saying so.

He talked to her. Not at her. He mentioned the forest, he mentioned Gandharva Ville, he mentioned in a very neutral tone that she could stay as long as was needed. He did not say you'll be safe here. She appreciated that specifically. She would have trusted him less if he had.

She said nothing. She wasn't ready to say anything. She answered his occasional gentle questions with nods or small shakes of her head, and he received these as if they were complete answers, which they were, and continued.

She did not realize she had taken two steps further into the room until she noticed she had.

And then the door burst open.

She did not hear what the forest ranger said. She heard the panic in his voice, and panic was a sound her body responded to before her mind could intervene.

She heard Fatui and the world tilted.

Her breathing changed. She felt it change, felt the way it lost its rhythm and became something shallow and fast that wasn't adequate, that wasn't getting enough air in, but she couldn't correct it because correcting it required a quality of control she did not currently have access to.

The Fatui.

The Fatui meant the facility. The facility meant a room she didn't want to think about. A table she didn't want to think about. Hands that were never warm, that were always precise in the way of someone who has learned to work with the fact that the thing in front of them can feel pain and has simply decided that is not a variable worth adjusting for.

She pressed herself against the wall behind her, which she hadn't decided to do, and the rough surface of the wood against her back was the only thing that felt real.

Were they here for her?

Of course they were here for her. She had always known this was possible. She had known since she escaped that escaping was temporary, that she was still useful, that the things they had put inside her were not given and not forgotten. The doctor never forgot anything.

He was coming back.

She knew it with the certainty of a child who has been found before after believing she was hidden, who knows that hiding is not the same as being safe, who knows that eventually the door always opens. 

"Don't worry, leaf. It'll only hurt for a second."

Her chest seized.

She hated that name. She hated the way it sounded in that voice, cheerful, curious, the voice of someone who was genuinely interested in what was happening to her in the same way he was interested in all his specimens. She had never been anything to him except a specimen. She had always known this. She knew it with the part of her brain that processed information clearly and she knew it with every other part of her body in ways that did not require processing.

"Leaf. Don't worry, leaf."

"No," she said. She didn't know she said it.

She was seeing the room with the white walls. She was smelling the chemical smell. She could feel the cold of the table through the thin fabric they'd put on her and she could feel the straps and she could hear the sound of instruments being prepared and she was pressing herself against the wall and the wall was the only thing she trusted right now and she could not breathe.

No no no please no please I won't I'll be good I won't make sounds please

Something was in front of her.

Not the room. Something else. A shape, crouching low, below her eye level, hands visible and visible and visible, no instruments, just hands, open.

She didn't hear anything for several seconds. Then the sounds resolved into words.

"Look at the floor." The voice was measured, warm, not demanding. "Look at the floor right here, just this section, the grain in the wood. There's a knot near your left foot. Can you see it?"

She looked at the floor. There was a knot near her left foot.

"Good." Not effusive. Just true.

"You're in Gandharva Ville. You're in my hut. The wood of this floor is from a tree that was struck by lightning about thirty years ago, from what I can tell from the grain. It's been here longer than I have. It's not going anywhere."

She breathed. The room with white walls was still there, just behind her eyes, but it was quieter.

She breathed.

"The knot near your foot," the voice said. "How many rings can you count in it?"

She counted the rings.

When her eyes came back up, she was looking at Tighnari crouched in front of her, hands visible, expression carefully neutral beneath something that she catalogued, in some distant part of her mind, as genuine. And beside him, a little further back, the general, who was also crouching, who had returned from wherever he'd gone when the ranger came in.

Both of them, she thought, distant and blurred. Both of them here.

Tighnari asked her something. She watched his mouth move. The words arrived late.

She nodded. She did not know if it was the right response to whatever he had asked.

Then the floor moved. Or she did. The light shifted.

She was very tired, she realized, all at once, the way tiredness sometimes arrived not gradually but all at once, like something that had been held back finally coming through. She was very tired and the floor was moving and the knot with its rings was still there and she could feel her back starting to slide down the wall.

She thought: I should not do this. This is dangerous.

Then the light went out entirely.

She dreamed of the white room.

She dreamed it the way she always dreamed it: first the smell, that particular chemical smell that she associated now with the particular quality of dread that existed before pain, dread as its own complete experience, the body anticipating and the mind already trying to leave.

The room was bright. It was always bright. There were no shadows anywhere in the room because shadows were places where things could be different, could be uncertain, and there was no uncertainty in the room. Everything in it was precise.

She was on the table. She was always on the table.

She was small, in the dream. She was always small. She had been seven, the first time, or perhaps eight, time had moved strangely in those years and she had lost track of it somewhere between the facility and the gray period after, when the days blurred into each other and she simply endured them.

The man in the dream did not look like a villain from a story. He looked like a scholar. He looked like someone who spent most of his time thinking about something other than the room he was in, and the room happened to contain her, and she was interesting to him the way problems were interesting: as puzzles to be solved rather than as things that experienced the solving.

"You're going to feel some pressure," he said in the dream, the way he had said it in reality, and pressure was the word he used for things that were not pressure at all, that were the opposite of pressure, that were a particular quality of sensation she did not have adequate language for.

She tried to be somewhere else.

She had always tried to be somewhere else during the table. She had gotten better at it over time, at sending some part of her away to a place that had trees and cold water and no smells she recognized, where she could sit and be temporarily unaffected. But the other part had to stay, and the other part remembered everything, and in the dream she could not send any part of herself away.

She felt everything she had ever felt in that room in sequence and without breaks between them, compressed and total, because dreams did not have the mercy of time.

She felt the first time, when she had not yet learned not to make sounds and had made them anyway, and learned quickly what sounds cost.

She felt the times after, when she was quieter, when she had found the gray place inside herself where she could wait and observe her own pain from somewhere adjacent to it, not feeling but watching herself feel.

She felt the time she had tried to say please and he had looked at her with the same mild expression he always wore and said, "That's interesting. Articulate response under stimulus. Let's see if that persists," and written something down.

She felt the time she had actually managed to be somewhere else entirely, so completely gone that when she came back she did not know immediately where she was or how much time had passed, and she had lain still and stared at the ceiling until the ceiling made sense, and then she had catalogued her body for the latest set of changes.

She felt the last time, which was not actually the last time but was the last time in the facility, the time right before she escaped, when something in the particular quality of her pain had a finality to it and she had thought, very clearly, I am going to leave here or I am going to die here and I prefer the first option but I will accept the second.

In the dream, the man with the scholar's face and the voice that said don't worry, leaf stood over her, and she could not leave, and there was nowhere else to be.

She woke up.

The first thing was breathing. Fast, inadequate, her chest working hard against something that wasn't there. The second thing was the sweat, cold against her skin, the particular cold of something that had been soaking through for a while. The third thing was the sound coming from her own throat, small and controlled, not screaming, she had never screamed, she pressed her lips together and made herself stop.

She was in a room.

She was in a bed.

The room had warm light. Low, the kind that came from something small. And sitting beside the bed, cross-legged on a low chair with his hands in his lap, was Tighnari. His ears were flat against his head in a way she was already learning to read, and his eyes, when he saw hers open, shifted from something that was plainly worry into something more careful.

"Good morning," he said, as if this were a normal conversation and not whatever it was. "How are you feeling?" 

She looked at the ceiling. She looked at her hands. She looked at the wall.

She croaked, "Okay."

Her skin felt wrong. It had been feeling wrong since before they left Mondstadt, since the sealing, this strange tingling numbness that came and went, but right now it felt worse, it felt like all of her skin was asleep in the way a limb fell asleep, pins and needles from her fingertips to her elbows. She looked down at her bandaged arms and the looking made the sensation worse, made her aware of it in a way she couldn't turn off.

She scratched at her left arm. Through the bandaging, without thinking about it, just the pressure of her nails finding the bandage and working against the fabric where the feeling was worst.

"May I see that?"

She looked up.

Tighnari was looking at her arm. His expression was the careful thing, the deliberately non-threatening thing, but underneath it was something she could read now that she'd had a night to learn his face: worry, real worry, the kind that had a physical quality to it.

She pulled her arm back against her chest.

"No," she said firmly. 

He held her gaze for a moment. She waited for the rephrasing, the reframing, the different angle. She was very good at this waiting.

He nodded. He stood up from the low chair, and straightened, and moved toward the other end of the room.

"Your bag is on the chair by the window," he said, without looking at her. "This is your hut. I had it prepared for you before you arrived." He paused. "Cyno left early this morning. He said to tell you he'll be back when his duties allow."

She looked at the window. The bag on the chair, small and familiar, Amber's packing visible in how carefully everything had been arranged inside it.

Cyno was gone.

She sat with this information for a moment. It should have made her feel relieved, she thought. She was frightened of the general in a way she had not been frightened of Tighnari yet, something about the scale of him, the way she felt the power he carried, the memory of the sealing still present in her chest like an echo.

But he had been predictable. He had done what he said he would do and not done things he hadn't said he would do. She had built a partial model of him over the days of travel, a tentative understanding of his patterns.

She did not have a model of this place.

She pressed her lips together and said nothing, and looked at the light coming through the window that opened onto the forest, and tried not to let her face show anything at all.

The days that followed were not good.

Collei had become accustomed to a baseline level of not-good that she considered simply the texture of being alive. There was the hunger, which she managed through foraging. There was the cold that lived in her joints, which she managed by moving when she could. There was the particular quality of vigilance that never fully switched off, that meant she slept lightly and started at sounds, which she managed by accepting as simply how she was.

The pins-and-needles sensation in her skin was not like those things.

It got worse. Then it got worse than that. It settled into her arms first and then moved to her legs, a deep-seated numbness that her body kept trying to scratch and couldn't relieve. She caught herself scratching through the bandaging during the day, stopped when she caught herself, resumed without meaning to. She found that pressing her palms flat against her thighs helped marginally and did that when she thought no one was watching.

She refused Tighnari's attempts to examine her. She refused them in the morning and in the afternoon and in the evening. She refused with the flat, practiced refusal of someone who had learned that the correct response to being asked to let someone look at your body was always no, and that this no needed to be firm enough not to invite negotiation.

He did not negotiate. He received her refusals with a small nod each time and moved on.

She tried not to find this significant.

She foraged, because she trusted the forest in the way she trusted very few things, because the forest had fed her during the gray period and had asked nothing in return. She knew enough of Sumeru's plants by the second day to identify safe things, and she added to this knowledge carefully. She ate things she'd found and watched and confirmed were what she thought they were, and she drank water from a source she'd tracked back to a clear high point, and she did not eat anything that came from the hut's small cooking area even when Tighnari left things there in a way that was so carefully non-pressuring that she noticed the carefulness and found it both suspicious and, somewhere she didn't look at directly, something else.

She was getting worse.

She knew she was getting worse because the numbness had periods now where it sharpened into something that was not quite pain but was adjacent to it, a wrong-feeling that her body registered as damage even though she could see no damage. She knew she was getting worse because she found herself sitting down earlier on her walks than she had the day before, because her legs had started to feel uncertain under her in a way that frightened her more than most things.

Don't show it. They punish you if you show it. 

She didn't show it.

Then she started to bleed.

She had been scratching again, without meaning to, and when she looked down at her arm the bandaging had shifted and she could see where the skin had broken. She looked at the blood the way she looked at most things: with careful attention. She looked at what was underneath the bleeding: the skin itself, which had a quality she did not immediately have a word for. Hard. Darker than it should have been. Like something underneath was changing the texture of her from the inside.

She looked at this for a long moment.

Then she fell off the forest log she'd been sitting on and the darkness was very complete and she was not afraid of it, not exactly, and the thought she had before it entirely took her was something she had thought before during the worst times: this would be fine. It could just stop here and that would be fine.
She did not know if she hoped or didn't hope that it would.

She woke up in the bed again.

She had a moment of complete blankness, which she always did after unconsciousness, a moment where she was just present with no information about where or when or what, and in that moment there was nothing to be afraid of because there was nothing at all.

Then she knew where she was, and the moment ended.

Tighnari was at the small table beside her bed. He was mixing something: herbs, ground and combined with something liquid, and he was doing this with the careful attention of someone who was doing it right, who understood what they were doing. He had not noticed she was awake yet.

She assessed his posture. She assessed his hands. She assessed the items on the table.

Did he inject anything?

The thought arrived with a particular quality of ice in it. She did a rapid inventory of her body, looking for the feeling she knew from needles, that specific localized violation that she had experienced enough times to recognize immediately. She found the pins and needles everywhere still and the ache in her joints and the heaviness, but not the needle feeling.

Did he experiment on her?

She did not know. She had been unconscious. She did not know what had happened while she was unconscious. This was the worst part of unconsciousness, worse than the gray and worse than the return: the gap, the time she hadn't been watching.

You don't know, she thought. You can't know until he tells you something. Watch him first. 

She watched.

He was mixing with care and attention and he was not watching her. He was focused entirely on what he was doing. There were no instruments that she would associate with the facility's table. No restraints visible. No smell of the chemical thing.

She tried to sit up.

Her arms folded underneath her and she barely caught herself.

He turned at the sound.

For a moment they looked at each other across the small hut.

"Did you know that you have Eleazar?" he said immediately. 

She stared at him.

"Eleazar," he said again. His voice was very careful. He had set down the mixing tool and his hands were in his lap, visible. "It's a disease. It's the reason you have these symptoms."

"I don't," she said. Her voice came out wrong, rough and thin. "The residue was sealed. General Mahamatra Cyno sealed it."

"Yes," Tighnari said. "The residue was sealed. The Eleazar is separate from the residue. It may have been... connected to the residue, in some way that suppressed its progression while the residue was active." He paused. "But the disease itself is yours. It's been in your body for some time."

She looked at the ceiling.

She thought: born sickly. The seer had said that. The one her parents had taken her to, who had seen her sickness and said he knew who could help and had brought her to the facility. She had not thought about this in years, had not been able to think about it, had only known that her body was something that happened to her and that other people found useful rather than something that was simply hers.

She had a disease. The disease had been there the whole time. While she was in the facility, while she was escaping, while she was in Mondstadt, while she was on the road.

All that time. 

She did not say anything for a while.

"What is it?" she said finally. "What does it do?"

He told her. He told her in the measured, careful way of someone who had decided that the truth was the right thing to give her even if it was difficult, and he watched her face while he did, and she let him watch because she was too busy processing to manage her expression.

The scales. The numbness. The progression. The final stages.

She thought: of course.

She thought: of course there is one more thing.

She thought, somewhere underneath that, with the specific dark clarity that she had carried for a long time now, the thought she had learned to live with as a fact about herself: it would be fine if it stopped. At some point it would simply be fine if all of this stopped.

"There's treatment," Tighnari said.

She came back. She looked at him.

"Topical ointment for the areas where the scales are active. It helps manage the progression and relieves some of the discomfort." He paused. "And an oral medication that works systemically. It's a compound I've developed here. It's not a cure, but it makes the disease manageable. People have lived good lives with Eleazar properly managed."

She heard topical ointment and her whole body said no before she had a chance to process the information. Something being put on her skin meant hands on her skin, meant being touched in the way the facility had touched her, meant her body as something being administered to rather than something she lived in.

"No," she said, her gaze cold on the bottle of topical ointment. 

He accepted this too. He did not argue.

"The oral medication," he said. "If you were willing to try that."

She looked at the small cup he indicated on the table. She looked at him.

She thought about the pins and needles. She thought about the bleeding. She thought about the thought she'd had before she passed out.

She thought: even if this kills me, at least the current thing is very bad.

"Yes," she said.

He brought the cup to the table beside her bed, not too close to her, and stepped back, and let her reach for it herself.

She drank it.

It tasted of something bitter and then something almost green, not unpleasant, just strange. She held the cup afterward and turned it in her hands.
Something was already happening, in the places where the sensation had been worst. Not gone, not improved exactly, but different. Like whatever was happening underneath her skin had registered something.

"The ointment," he said, from his careful distance. "I understand you don't want me to apply it. But I want to wrap the areas that are breaking open. Not to examine them. Only to protect them from infection." He paused. "I would not touch the skin directly. The wrapping only."

She looked at her arm.

She thought about infection, which she understood, which she had managed badly on her own for years, which had been dangerous during the gray period when she'd had no resources.

"Okay," she said. It came out barely audible.

He worked with the specific careful economy of someone who understood exactly what they were being permitted to do and was determined not to exceed it. He did not touch her skin. He did not comment on what he saw. He wrapped the areas that needed wrapping with the same precise attention he'd given to the herbs, and tied each end off with a small, exact knot.

He did not say anything that was in the shape of pity.

When he finished he stepped back.

"Are you hungry?" he said.

She was, in fact, so hungry that her vision had a slight blur at the edges that she had been managing for two days by not acknowledging it.

She shook her head.

He nodded. "There's water there if you want it."

He went back to his table and his herbs, and she lay in the bed and looked at the ceiling, and the medication moved through her in the strange green way, and she thought about diseases and facilities and the gaps between things and outside the window the Avidya Forest made the sounds it made, full and layered and completely indifferent to all of it.

She found this comforting in a way she didn't understand.

She slept.

She was rude to him on the fourth day. She was going to die from her disease anyway. It was better to make sure he knew she was not weak. 

She was not weak. 

He had come to change her wrappings, which he did every morning, and she had said, "I didn't say you could come in," and he had paused in the doorway with the supplies in his hands and said, simply, "You're right. May I?"

She had glared at him for a full ten seconds. He had waited.

"Fine," she said.

He came in and changed the wrappings and said nothing about the fact that the previous ones were slightly darker than they should have been, and left.
She was rude to him on the sixth day about the food. He had left something on the small table near her window, a bowl of rice congee that he'd let her see him make from start to finish without commenting, not for her benefit that she could tell, simply because he was cooking and that was where the cooking happened.

She had looked at the bowl for a long time.

She had not eaten it.

"I saw you watching me cook," he said in the evening, neither accusatory nor expectant. Just noting.

"I wasn't watching you," she said.

"My ears work quite well."

She looked at his ears, which she had not stopped finding unexpectedly fascinating. They adjusted now toward her, and then away, which she had started to think of as him being both attentive and trying not to make her feel watched.

She said nothing.

He said nothing.

She ate the congee two hours later, cold, when she was reasonably certain he was occupied with his papers. It tasted of something simple and warm and not of anything she needed to be afraid of, and she sat on the edge of her bed and ate it slowly and did not think about whether this was something she should have done.

She told him it was cold when she gave him back the bowl.

He said, "I can make it hot."

"I didn't say I wanted it hot."

"All right."

She looked at him. "Why don't you ever argue back?" her eyebrows furrowed slightly. Adults always argue back. They always win the argument. Something was wrong if he doesn't. He must be planning something else.

He looked up from his papers. His ears made an adjustment. "Would it help?"

She stared at him.

"I've found," he said, in the tone he used for facts, "that when someone says something difficult, the reason it's difficult usually isn't made clearer by argument. Arguing is often about the argument and not about what's underneath it." He looked back at his papers. "I could argue with you. I'm quite capable of it. But I don't think it would help either of us."

She put the bowl down on his desk with slightly more force than was strictly necessary.

She went back to her hut.

She sat on the edge of her bed and thought about the congee and the knot in the wood and the permission asked before her wrists were held, and all of these things were accumulating in a part of her mind that she kept trying to close but kept finding open when she wasn't paying attention.

She hated this.

She was outside on the ninth day, crouched at the edge of a path that ran behind the huts, collecting wood sorrel. She knew this wood sorrel was fine. She'd been eating this particular plant in this particular spot for three days and had experienced no ill effects.

She heard a voice.

A woman, older than her but not by more than a few years, sitting on the steps of the neighboring hut with yarn in her hands. Collei looked at the yarn. She looked at what the woman was doing with it: some kind of looping motion with her fingers, a needle, something being created from the loops.

The woman looked up and noticed Collei noticing.

She said something in Sumerian that Collei didn't understand yet, and then, in slower, more careful words that landed close enough to the trade language that she could follow: "Plushie. I am making a plushie."

Collei looked at the growing shape of the thing in her hands. Round, with the beginnings of features. Something animal, maybe.

The woman held it toward her and said something with a questioning lift at the end.

Collei looked at her own hands. They were not steady. They shook slightly, especially in the mornings, a symptom she had catalogued without knowing it was a symptom. She could not trust them for something precise. She would drop it or do it wrong and that was worse, somehow, than not doing it at all.

She shook her head.

She went back to the hut.

He was different that afternoon.

She knew it the moment she stepped inside: a quality in the air, a tension in how he was standing at his desk. Not frightening tension, not the tension of someone preparing to do something, just the tension of someone who was irritated and was managing it.

She stopped at the far edge of the room and pressed her back against the wall with the window at her left, the door at her right, two clear paths.

Through the front door she could hear, slightly muffled, voices. Tighnari's, calm but with an edge in it, and another voice, male, younger, defensive. An adventurer, she thought, from the particular quality of the defense, the kind that came from someone who had made a mistake and was hoping the extent of it would not be assessed clearly.

Ate a poisonous mushroom, she thought distantly, from context. Or something like that.

She stood against the wall and listened to the volume of the voices and tried to manage the way her body was responding to them.

She knew he was not angry at her. She knew, in the part of her that processed information, that there was no reason for the general pitch of alarm she was running at right now. She knew that adults had arguments about things that did not involve her, that not every raised voice was a raised voice toward her.

She knew this.

Her hands were cold and her breathing had changed and the back of her neck was doing the thing it did before something bad happened, the thing where all the small hairs stood up like her body was trying to give itself extra surface area to detect threats with.

She was pressing herself against the wall, she realized. She had been doing it so gradually that she hadn't noticed until it was complete.

Stop.

She could not stop. She could catalogue the stopping as something that needed to happen and find the stopping completely outside her ability to initiate.
She made it to her room. She sat down on the floor with her back against the bed, which was at her back and was not the wall, which was slightly different in the way her body's accounting worked, and she pressed her hands flat against her thighs and breathed.

The voices continued outside. Not yelling. Not the sound of anything breaking. Just adult voices in disagreement, the kind that happened constantly in the world she had been trying to learn to live in since Mondstadt, the kind she would have to learn to not hear as danger.

She cried.

She hated herself for it. She cried with the specific quality she had developed early: as quiet as possible, pressed close to silent, because crying loudly meant someone heard it and then things happened that were worse than the crying. She pressed her face against her knees and felt the wetness and hated it and could not stop.

She heard a knock.

She stopped breathing.

Nothing. No sound from her. That was the rule.

She heard nothing from outside her door for a moment. Then a sound: someone sitting down. Not in the room. Just outside the door.

She waited.

She heard Tighnari's voice, quiet, through the wood: "I'm going to sit here. You don't have to open the door. I'm not going to open it unless you ask me to."

She looked at the door.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she said, muffled against her knees, "You can come in."

He came in.

He took in the floor-sitting and the state of her face and the pressing of her hands against her thighs, and he did not say anything about any of it. He sat down on the floor against the opposite wall, which was not close, which was far enough that she could see the full space between them.

They sat there.

She was still crying a little, more quietly than before, and she was furious at herself for it, and she couldn't make it stop entirely.

"I know adults are dangerous when they're angry," she said. This came out before she had decided to say it, and it sounded, even to her own ears, like a child. She hated that. She was not supposed to be just a child anymore. She had learned not to be just a child.

Tighnari said, "Yes. That makes sense."

She wiped her face against her knees.

"My ears," he said. "My ears. Do you want to touch them?"

She looked up.

He was looking at her with that measured expression, the one she was learning, and his ears were tilted slightly toward her in the way she had noticed they did when he was paying attention.

She asked "Are you serious?"

"I don't ask things I'm not serious about."

She looked at his ears. They were, objectively, the most interesting thing she had seen since coming to Sumeru, and she had found many things interesting here because the forest was full of things worth looking at. But his ears were different because they were his and they moved and she had spent more of her attention than she wanted to admit trying to read their adjustments.

"Okay," she mumbled. 

He didn't move toward her. He just sat there with his ears tilted in her direction and let her come to him at whatever speed she chose.

She scooted across the floor on her knees, which was undignified and she was aware of this, and she reached up and very carefully touched the base of his left ear with two fingers.

It was warm. Warmer than she expected. The fur was very soft and when she touched it, the ear shifted, adjusting toward the pressure the way a cat did, which was so immediately disarming that something in her chest cracked open just slightly.

She pulled her hand back.

She looked at the floor.

She was aware that her sniffling had stopped and she was biting the inside of her cheek to prevent whatever was threatening to replace it, which was something she did not have a name for and was not going to have a name for if she could help it.

"They're very soft," she said, to have something to say.

"So I've been told," Tighnari said, as if this were a perfectly ordinary conversation.

She sat back on the floor and pressed her hands against her thighs again and looked at the grain of the wood, and the hut was quiet around them, and outside the forest continued to be exactly itself, full and old and completely indifferent and therefore safe.

After that, things were different.

Not suddenly. Not completely. But different in the particular way that trust was different from distrust: not the absence of fear exactly, but the presence of something that ran alongside the fear and made it smaller.

She ate at the hut. Not every meal. Not without watching. She still preferred to know what was in things and she still preferred things she had watched being made, and sometimes she still needed to eat things from the forest afterward to balance the feeling of uncertainty. But she ate there. She ate the congee and the rice dishes and the things that were simple enough that she could identify each component.

She drank the water from the kitchen without checking the source each time.

She still did not let him touch her. She had made this clear in the specific way she made things clear, not with words exactly but with the quality of her stillness when contact became possible, a stillness that meant this far and not further and that she was relieved to find he read accurately each time.

No touch. She could not do touch. She suspected she could not do touch for a very long time.

But she sat in the same room with him. And this was more than she had been able to say about anyone except Amber.

She watched him work. She sat on the floor near the door, close enough to the exit to feel safe, and she watched him write his research papers in that precise, organized handwriting and she watched his face when he was thinking, which did something particular: he looked more uncertain, more genuinely engaged, less like an authority and more like someone trying to figure something out.

She liked this.

She was not going to say she liked this.

One afternoon he looked up and found her watching and said, without preamble: "Do you want to learn to write?"

She looked at the papers and then at him.

"I know how to write some things," she said. Amber had taught her the basic shapes of the alphabet, the simple ones, enough to write her own name and a few other words. She was not going to tell him how recently she had learned these things.

"Basic literacy is different from writing well," he said. "I can teach you if you want. It would help with the medical training, eventually."

Medical training. He had mentioned this once before, briefly, in the tone of someone planting a thought without expecting an immediate harvest. She had not responded to it then.

She looked at the papers. She looked at her hands, which were steadier than they had been at the beginning, the medication doing its slow work, the pins-and-needles reduced to something she could live with.

"Okay," she said.

He was a patient teacher, which she had expected, but he was also a rigorous one, which she had also expected, and the combination was more useful than either quality alone would have been. He did not praise her for things that were acceptable when they were not yet good. He did not accept less than her best effort. When she made an error he pointed at the error and told her specifically what made it an error and what she could do differently.

She found this, unexpectedly, the most comfortable way anyone had ever taught her anything. There was no gap between what he said and what he meant. There was no reading between lines.

She improved faster than he said he expected. She didn't tell him that she had been practicing late at night, sitting near the window with the notebook he'd given her for her thoughts, filling it with the same characters over and over until they looked right.

She had also been writing in it in the other way, the way he'd suggested when he gave it to her: writing feelings will help, he'd said, and she'd thought that was the most absurd thing she'd ever heard, but she'd tried it, and found that something did happen when she wrote the things she was not going to say out loud, that the writing made them slightly more manageable in a way she couldn't fully explain.

She had not told him about this either.

He gave her a diary of her own, a proper one with a clasp, separate from the notebook. He said it was because she'd filled the notebook faster than he'd anticipated and he'd needed somewhere to put his research notes.

She understood that this was at least partially untrue.

"Thank you," she said, holding the diary. And then, because she had said it and meant it, and because she had started to learn that there was a kind of courage in saying things that were true even when saying them left you exposed: "This helps."

His ears adjusted. "Good," he said.

She screamed in her sleep on the forty-third day.

She did not know she was going to do it. She never did. The dream had been the white room again, and in the white room he had been different, had done something different, and she had made a sound in the dream that was not controlled, that was not small, and the sound had carried through the wall.

She woke up swinging.

Her hands met empty air and she was on her feet before she knew she was moving, back against the wall, breathing in the fast broken way, and the room was dark and the room was the forest hut and the room was not the white room.

She knew this. She knew this.

She pressed her palms against the wall behind her and breathed.

She heard footsteps outside, quick, and then the door of her room opening.

Tighnari in the doorway. His ears were flat. His eyes were trying to find her in the dark, and when they did she watched his expression go through something complex and settle into the careful thing.

"I'm fine," she said immediately. Her voice was wrong. It was too rough and too small and she hated it.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he took a step back, out of the doorway, and sat down on the floor in the corridor just outside her room. She could see him through the open door. His back against the wall across from her doorway, knees up, hands in his lap.

"All right," he said.

She looked at him sitting in the corridor.

"You don't have to stay there," she whispered.

"I know,"

She looked at the floor. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the window where the Avidya Forest was a dense darkness broken by small sounds, animals and leaves and something calling far away.

"He used to call me a name," she said. She had not planned to say this.

Tighnari said nothing. She heard him listening.

"Not my name." She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, which put her at the same height as him, both of them on the floor with the doorway between them. "Leaf. He called me leaf. I don't know why." She pressed her hands flat on the floor. "I hate it. I hate that I remember the sound of it."

Tighnari said, "Yes." Not I understand or I'm sorry. Just the acknowledgment.

She breathed.

She said, "There was a table."

She had never said this to anyone. Not to Amber, not in this detail. Not to anyone. The things she had written in the diary were close to this, but closer to a record than a telling, closer to the neutral statement of facts than to the actual giving of the fact to another person.

She said it again: "There was a table. And they would put me on it." She looked at her hands. "I learned to go somewhere else in my head. So the part of me that was still there could just... observe. The observing part didn't feel things the same way. It just watched."

"That was very wise of you," Tighnari said. Not with pity. With the assessment of someone who recognized a practical strategy and was saying so.
She had not thought of it as wise before. She had thought of it as something she had simply done because the alternative was unbearable.

"The man who did it," she said. "He had a title. Il Dottore. Doctor." She said this and then waited for something, some reaction, and there was nothing except the quality of his listening, which was total and completely without judgment. "He said he was helping. He said it was necessary for the residue and that it was important research and that the results would be useful." She heard her own voice, flat and factual, the observing part doing the reporting. "I stopped believing he was helping pretty quickly. But I couldn't stop him."

"No," Tighnari said quietly. "You couldn't."

"I was small." She looked at the window. "I'm still small."

"You're twelve," he said. "That's not the same thing."

She thought about this.

"He experimented on me," she said. "For a long time. I don't know how long. I lost track of time in there. And then I left." She did not say how. She was not ready to say how. "And then there was a time after that. When I was alone."

"Yes," he said.

"I ate plants," she mumbled. "Because I didn't trust anything else. I still don't trust anything else, mostly. Except here." She looked at the floor. "The plants here are good."

"The Avidya Forest has excellent foraging resources," he said, in the tone of someone who genuinely meant this, who had thought about it and confirmed it.

She made a sound that was almost, and for the first time in a very long time, something adjacent to a laugh.

She put her head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling.

"I was in Mondstadt after that," she said. "And I almost killed people. The residue. There was a fire." She felt the weight of it, which she always felt, which she would always feel. "I didn't mean to."

"No," he said.

"But I did."

"Yes," he nodded, his ears tilting towards her slightly. "And you carry that. I can see that you do." A pause. "Carrying something honestly is different from being responsible for it in the way you seem to believe."

She thought about this for a long time.

"Amber found me," she said. "At the statue. She was just..." She trailed off. She pressed her lips together against something she was not going to do, and then breathed through it. "She was just kind. No reason. She didn't know anything about me and she was just kind."

"Yes," Tighnari said. "She was."

She looked at the corridor where he was sitting with his back against the wall and his knees up and his ears making small adjustments in the dark.
She said, "Why are you on the floor?"

"It seemed like the appropriate distance," he said.

She thought about this.

"You can come in," she said. "You don't have to stay on the floor."

He came in and sat cross-legged near the wall with the window, which was closer but still across the room from her, and she looked at him and looked at the window and looked at her hands.

"She said to trust Cyno," Collei said. "And then Cyno said to trust you." She looked at her hands. "I don't actually know how to trust people. I don't know what it feels like."

"I think," Tighnari said, "that it might feel something like this."

She looked at him. He was looking at the window. His ears were tilted slightly toward her.

She looked at the window too.

She told him the rest of it.

All of it. Everything. The seer and her parents and the facility and the table and the room with white walls and what it smelled like and what his voice sounded like and the gray period in the forest after and Mondstadt and the fire and Amber and the general and the sealing and the road and all the things she had been carrying in the part of herself she kept locked and dark and very small.

She told him with her back against the wall and her knees to her chest and her voice going rough and then recovering and then rough again, and Tighnari sat across the room and listened with the total attention of someone for whom listening was not passive, who was receiving every word with his whole self.

He did not interrupt once.

When she was finished, she was very tired. The kind of tired that came after something that had been held for too long was finally set down. She was wrung out and light and exhausted and she was, she realized, still in the room, still herself, and nothing had happened as a result of the telling except that she was tired and the room was quiet and someone else knew.

She said, "It's a lot."

"Yes," Tighnari whispered. "It is."

"I don't want you to pity me."

"I don't," he said. "I have significant respect for you. Those are different things."

She looked at him.

"I mean it," he insisted. "What you have survived, and how you have survived it, is extraordinary. Not because suffering is valuable. It isn't. But because you haven't let it make you less than you are." He looked at the window. "You're very perceptive. You're more careful and more thoughtful than most adults I know. You're learning faster than any student I've taught. And you're still here, still trying, which is not a small thing given what you've described."

She looked at the floor.

She said, "I thought about not being here. Sometimes." She said this quietly, carefully. "During the gray period. And sometimes since." She looked at her hands. "I still sometimes think it would be fine if things just stopped."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Thank you for telling me that," he said. "I want you to tell me when you think that. Not because I will lecture you about it. Because I want to know. Because you matter to me, and I want to know when you're in pain."

She looked at him.

You matter to me was such a simple statement. She had not known how to receive it. She had spent so long being matter-of in the way that useful things were matter-of, objects of interest and utility, and this was different. This was a different kind of mattering.

She pressed her lips together very hard.

"Okay," she said.

The Avidya Forest was making its sounds outside the window, the layered, living sounds of a forest that had been in this place for a very long time and intended to be here for very much longer, that would outlast everything she had experienced and everything she feared by centuries, that did not know or care about white rooms or chemical smells or names that were not her name.

She breathed.

"Tighnari," she said.

"Yes."

"I think I'm glad I'm still here."

She felt rather than saw his ears adjust.

"I am too," he said. "Very."

Outside, the forest continued, full of sounds and smells and the living complexity of ten thousand things going on at once, and Collei sat with her back against the wall of the hut that was her hut, in the village that was slowly, incrementally, becoming something she would allow herself to call home, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, she did not watch the door.