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She’s so worked up she can’t think. There’s the feeling of Faerie roiling under her skin, a vitality she forgot she could feel, and somewhere across the grove Julien is sitting, staring at her best friend in his own shadow.
Today was terrifying. She nearly died. Teor and Cyd did die, and she’s still got their blood under her fingernails, not quite washed away by river-water. Hannan died. It’s more than half a miracle that any of them made it out of the manor. The grove feels unreal, like stepping out of the blackest darkness of the underworld into all of life’s beauty at once. It’s still night, but here, the moon shines beside Illumi’s Blanket overhead, lighting the trees with the cool, bright glow of a summer night, more than bright enough for her to see as if it were day.
Most of their friends have set up camp: they don’t light a fire, not with the last warmth of summer still in the air and half the city ready to kill. Hal’s already gone home, Tyranny, Wick, Murray and Azune following in his footsteps. Julien’s still sulking, and Mara is sleeping, and the rest of their band is trying to catch what rest they can before they walk the Millers’ Road.
Occtis is sitting, alone, beneath a thick-leaved tree. If it weren’t for the green glow of his eyes, he would blend entirely into the shadows. He’s staring straight forward, still as a corpse.
She doesn’t want to think about her friends being corpses anymore. Thimble flies up to him, flutters in front of his eyes until they go lively and look at her. “Hey,” she says. “Are you okay?” They have to leave in the morning, once the sun’s all the way up, and he said something about a heart attack that everyone else moved past in the furor of planning, and—she saw the look on his face, when she turned back and went into the dark.
He makes a funny sound; she’s not sure if he’s choking, or if his body’s forgotten how to laugh and gotten stuck somewhere in between. Then he clears his throat. “No,” he answers. “I—are any of us?” He pauses. “But… you made it back. You escaped the manor, and you—brought our allies home. So… not okay. But far better than—” he chokes again, the words cutting off somewhere deep in his throat.
She chimes in worry.
“Thimble,” Occtis says, and he won’t look at her. “I can’t—you can’t—please never do that to me again. Please don’t run into danger without me. I don’t think I could—” He looks frail, gleaming eyes darting in his sunken face.
Thimble has the urge to hug him. It’s not the first time, but—she runs her hands over her tapestry armor, the beautiful woven plates. It might be the first time she can do anything about it. She focuses. It’s hard to change herself, here in this place that feels so near to Faerie: her wings want to flutter and leap, not hide away. She feels fey, like the carefully shaped iron and repellent religion in Dol-Majkar can’t touch her, and she wants to feel the joy in it, to fly up and dance revels in the light of the moon.
But Occtis is all scrunched up, his knees nearly to his chest, and she wants to hold him just as much as she wants to fly.
Her toes touch the ground, and her wings fold down, and Thimble’s standing on two feet, big, feeling the living earth beneath the soles of her thin boots.
She kneels down next to him. The grass bends and flattens beneath her, the life of the world giving way. She could break down a door like this: she could slam open a window, instead of slipping through the cracks. She can reach out with broad, big arms, the same arms that carried the limp corpses of her dead friends out of the awful darkness earlier today, and wrap them around one of the few people she loves that she has left.
Occtis makes that choking sound again, and then he uncrosses his arms to circle them around her. He’s wearing several layers, his shirt and jacket and the jabot around his throat, but as he leans into her and wraps his arms tight, the pressure around her ribcage is strong, reassuring. Her ribs feel the strain, but as her arms find their way around his slender frame, the bracers touch, and she isn’t afraid of her bones giving way.
She scoots closer, stretches out her legs, until their chests are pressed together and their legs are a tangle of his dark fabric and her bare skin, the freckled spots shining silver-green under the cool moonlight, arms thrown around each other as if they might be torn apart by a sudden storm.
“You’re big,” he says softly, the gentle exhale of speech rustling her hair against her pointed ear. “I—” he chokes again, and again, and she finally gets it. There’s no relief, no bodily reflex to bring forth water and wash away the fear, but Occtis is crying.
She sniffles.
He strokes her hair, his hand small enough to run through it. It’s funny: she could stand on it, dance in his palm, and now the weight of it against her scalp is light and soft. “I was so scared,” he admits, hushed. “I saw you go, and - before I could come after you—it hurt. I hurt.”
She leans her head into the curve of his neck. “I had to.”
“I came back anyway,” he says. “I—you went back in, and I came after you. We were going to go deeper.” He shivers: Thimble can’t see the tiny motion, but held against him, she can feel it. It doesn’t feel like the earth shaking. It just feels like her friend, flinching in her arms. “Then my father came home.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He killed me,” Occtis says, in that flat way that means he’s terrified even thinking of his family. “He would have killed you.”
“I came back,” she tells him. His jabot’s a little off-center, a little skew, and Thimble could pull back and fix it but she’d have to let go. She doesn’t move a muscle.
Occtis’s grip tightens around her, and Thimble’s not in the least afraid of being crushed. “I was so afraid,” he repeats, that quiet choking back in his throat. “It was so dark. You could have gotten lost.”
She holds him. “I didn’t,” she promises, a vow she’s already been able to keep. “I’m—as okay as any of us are, Occtis. I saved them. I finished it.” She breathes in, out, feels the weight of his arms across her ribs, steady as a swordbelt. She’s never been close to anyone like this, not since she left the Orchard; she’s never been able to do anything but land on anyone big without the primal fear that they could finish her with a careless gesture.
Thimble isn’t scared now.
She holds onto his torso and rolls them, and Occtis squeaks in surprise as she flips him to lay on top of her. He’s really skinny: she never noticed, big as he was, but when she’s like this he’s thin and light, nearly bird-boned, easy to move as a crow’s fallen wing feather.
“Thimble!” he objects, hands on the ground, trying to lift himself off of her, and she pulls him back down until he gives in, lays his whole body weight on top of her robust chest. “Thimble,” much quieter, “what are you doing?”
“It’s nice,” she says simply. “It’s so, so nice, Occtis.” He’s splayed out over her like a particularly worried harvestman, legs gone skew, but the tenseness around his eyes goes smoother, and he sets his left shoulder down on the ground next to her so he can rest. He’s heavy, not like Teor and Cyd were earlier tonight, not something bloody and ragged for her to carry out of danger. He’s heavy like a promise, someone telling her it’s going to be all right, a weight she’s never been able to bear. “This is—I never thought I could have this, you know? I never thought I could give you a real hug.”
Occtis breathes in and lets out a quiet, dry laugh. “I’m sorry this didn’t happen two weeks ago,” he whispers. “I—I think I would have been a much better hugger, then.” He breathes out, lets out the rest of the laugh’s air, and it’s only then Thimble remembers he hasn’t been breathing this whole time, that his cool hands aren’t from staying out too long without gloves on. “I would have really liked it,” he says, and he strokes her hair.
“I still do.” She wants to be closer even than this, so close that they’re inseparable, so she never has to see that devastated look on his face again. “I still really, really do.” She curls into him, lays her head over his chest.
His heart doesn’t beat, and for half a second, Thimble feels the awful darkness closing in on them again, the Tenebral Reaches trying to take yet another person she loves away. But he’s not Thaz: his heart doesn’t beat in his chest, but she can feel it all the same.
“Okay,” Occtis says, and strokes her hair with one hand, his other arm pinned beneath the rise and fall of her chest, and she falls asleep there, still wrapped in his arms.
If this is what being held feels like, she knows, Thimble won’t ever feel small again.