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It was interesting, watching people sleep.
Maybe that was creepy. Maybe Vaelus should respect her roommate’s privacy, slip into her own trance and leave him be, undisturbed by her watching. But somehow her eyes kept creeping back to him, curious, searching.
She wouldn’t call Julien a heavy sleeper, but then she wasn’t sure she knew what that looked like anyway. She’d spent so many centuries alone with her own people—all they ever did was meditate. It was different, the way Julien lay in the bed, haphazard, limbs splayed wantonly over the slim mattress in his assurance that she would not be in there with him. He was bare-chested, breathing deep and slow, thick eyelashes casting shadows on his sharp cheekbones.
It was strange. Disturbing, almost, how vulnerable he was like this. At least she could trance with one eye open, so to speak, if she felt she needed to—to sleep, it seemed, was to be wholly unaware.
She hated the idea of it. She was also strangely jealous of it. What would it be like to not be here, even for just a few hours? To close your eyes and go to the darkness instead of to your dead? Even though her memories were of halcyon days, they felt…different now. Tainted, somehow, by the realizations she’d had at Hannan’s side.
Flower dolls. It was hard to unsee once she finally allowed herself to. The comforting paradise of her memories turned into a thing with bars. It was hard to relax when all you could see were the gilded edges of your cage.
Julien stirred slightly, drawing Vaelus’ attention back to him. His breath caught in his throat, pulse racing in his neck. He made a low, keening noise, like he might have been in pain.
She hesitated. Was it right for her to intervene? Is that what he would have wanted? Something in her said he might prefer if she turned her back and pretended not to notice his distress.
Neither of them got the comfort of that choice, though. With a gasp, Julien’s eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright, chest heaving with memories. Or dreams, she supposed.
She stayed quiet while he caught his breath, waiting until he slowly looked up at her to speak. “Are you all right?” She asked.
“Fine,” he said, the word rough on his tongue. He’d had terror in his eyes when he first woke—in just a few short moments, it had flared into anger.
“Were you having a nightmare?” She asked, calm, steady. She understood anger, had decades of experience in it. Sometimes it even felt more comfortable to her than kindness; she wasn’t going to shy away from his.
“No,” he said immediately, petulant. He hung his head, hands clenched in the thin fabric of the sheets. He breathed deeply for a few moments, and she let the time pass in silence. Vaelus was good at waiting. “Yes,” he eventually admitted.
“Do you…want to talk about it?” She asked haltingly, trying not to seem awkward and probably failing.
“What’s there to talk about?” He asked hollowly. “Everything is just…gone. There’s nothing to say about that.”
“I find there’s quite a lot to say about absence,” Vaelus replied. Gingerly, she approached the bed, moving slowly so as not to startle him. He didn’t look up at her as she moved, but she could see the tension in his shoulders, the subtle shifting of his body that said he was tracking where she went. There was a reason Julien Davinos was an exceptional fighter.
“It doesn’t feel like an absence,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Not when I see them every night.”
Vaelus let out a sharp breath, a lance of pain running her through just as it has every day for the last seventy years. Once, she thought she might become numb to the pain if enough time passed. But the truth was that it never hurt any less, just less frequently. “I know what that’s like, Julien.”
“Then how do you live with it?” He asked. He snapped his mouth shut after, like he hadn’t meant to let the question slip out.
“I…I remember the good,” she said, shrugging weakly. “It makes the ache go away, at least while I’m meditating.”
“Meditation sounds pleasant,” Julien said bitterly. “Better than sleeping, certainly. I don’t exactly get to choose what I see whenever I close my eyes.”
“I don’t know much about the way you dream, honestly.” Vaelus settled on the edge of the bed, making sure to put plenty distance between the two of them. He didn’t seem like he would accept comfort right now, even if she offered it. “I know when I trance, my thoughts can get away from me and I may remember things I wish I hadn’t. Is that what your nightmares are like?”
“Yes,” he said, then tipped his head to the side. “And no. You relive your own memories when you meditate, yes? Our dreams are not the same. Half the time they make no sense; they are just a mirrored-refraction of what you’ve experienced, mixed together with nonsense. A nightmare could be nothing more than darkness and a sense of foreboding. Other times…” He cut himself off, scowling down at the bed sheets. “You lose someone. Every single night. And your mind can think up tricks to make it worse all the while.”
“What do you see when you dream?” Vaelus asked, wondering if now was the moment he would give her a real answer.
Julien was an enigma to some, but to her, he was utterly familiar. Under his bluster and bravado, beneath the attitude he used to push everybody away, he wasn’t all that terribly different from her, now was he? A fighter. Angry. Broken by a grief Vaelus still struggled to find words to describe nearly a century later. How many nights had she remembered her family’s deaths, eyes wide, hoping someone would ask how she was feeling? Hoping she’d be able to say any of it out loud? But she had never been able to admit that she missed her siblings more than she did her god. There was not a place for that in the Mournvale.
“My…father,” Julien said. He had to stop and start, like carriage led by a spooked horse. “I see him fall, and the state that his body was in, and I cannot help but imagine what monstrous thing the Tachonis did to him after. It is different every time.”
“Thimble knows,” Vaelus said. “She would tell you, if you asked.”
Julien snorted. “Why would she be honest with me? We do not exactly have a pleasant history between us.”
“Because she respects you,” Vaelus said. Bad blood or not, they were both soldiers dedicated to House Royce. And that bond was not one to scoff at, especially in their current circumstances.
Julien shook his head. “I don’t honestly know if that would be better. I fear the Tachonis to be capable of far more terrible things than I could imagine. The truth is likely to be worse.”
“But it would be the truth,” she said.
He looked up at her then, meeting her eyes for the first time. “Why do you care?” He asked, the edge returning to him. “What is your stake in this? In any of us?” In me. She heard the words, even if he didn’t say them.
“Does there need to be a specific reason?”
“Everybody is motivated by something,” he said. “I won’t pretend I haven’t been grateful to have you along. I have. But I don’t believe in or trust altruism, nor do I truly think you wish your god to be revived. Not after what you did with the Stone. And yet here you are anyway, consoling me after a nightmare.”
“You make it sound like I shouldn’t be,” Vaelus replied.
“I would just like to know where we stand, you and I, at this juncture in our journey. Especially if I am to sleep and dream in front of you any longer,” Julien said, an odd lilt to his words.
Vaelus raised an eyebrow. He was a flirt—worse, actually: a rake—but she couldn’t quite figure out if he’d meant that to sound quite the way it did. Then again, perhaps she was simply daft. It wasn’t like she had spent enough time around humans to know.
“You lost your family, Julien,” she said. “Many years ago, I lost mine. Am I meant to rest until I know I’ve done all that I can for them? Whether that means building them a bridge to their afterlife or seeing if Occtis can do more than bring a fox back from the dead. Why would I walk away from the only chance I’ve had in seventy years?”
Julien took that in, and nodded. He knew truth when he heard it. “Can I ask you one more thing?”
“Why not?” She said with a sigh.
“It doesn’t get better, does it?” He asked, voice dropping low. “Seventy years later and they’re still all you can think about. Have you found your vengeance yet? Does anything lie beyond it?”
Vaelus was grateful for the veil that hid her face. She didn’t want him to see the way her face twisted, the way her nose wrinkled and her lip curled as something like shame or guilt flooded through her. She had not found her vengeance. She did not think there was enough vengeance in this world to sate her, and certainly there was none to be had from the people who had once killed her family. They had either died in battle themselves, or now occupied a precarious place in her mind that was not quite “enemy.” Oh, she wished Hannan was here. Someone she could talk to about that, someone who could convince her she had not failed in her duty because she had begun to see allies where once there were villains.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Sometimes I think I can finally breathe again and other times I wonder if…if loss is all that I am now. I just know I haven’t rested soundly since my family was alive.”
Julien laughed once, bitterly. “That’s not very comforting,” he said. “But at least I know what I have to look forward to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it. There was little she was more sorry for. “If there was a comfort I could offer you, I would.”
He hesitated, glancing up at her from under his lashes. “If it would not trouble you overmuch…” He began and then sighed, frustrated, and shook his head. “No. Never mind. There is nothing. Though I thank you for the offer.”
“There is something,” she said, not letting him back away. “And I am many things, but I am not a liar. If I can help, I would like to.”
His voice was small when he finally spoke. “I do not know how elven trances work, but would you mind sharing the bed tonight? I find…sleep comes to me more easily when I am not alone.”
Vaelus placed a hand on his bare shoulder. “I’m not having sex with you tonight, Julien,” she said, deadpan. “Not that you’re not an attractive man, but this really doesn’t feel like the time.”
He groaned. “For once, I didn’t mean that.”
Behind the veil, her lips turned up in a smile. “I know. I’m fucking with you.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, so you are funny.”
“I am,” she said, and then sobered. “And I’ll be here as long as you need someone, Julien. Of course I will share the bed with you tonight.”
She was unused to lying in beds, honestly, and keenly aware of Julien as she moved to slip beneath the covers beside him. For all that he’d splayed before, he scooted to the side to make plenty of room for her now. Gratefulness, it seemed, made him an unobtrusive bed partner.
He curled up on his side, facing away from her, and she stared at the muscle and scar tissues of his naked back, the tumble of tangled black hair over his should, and she pressed her hand between his shoulder blades. Nothing much, just a presence. Something to remind him that he wasn’t there alone. He shivered at her touch, but voiced no complaint.
“Go back to sleep,” Vealus said. “I will be right here with you when you wake.”