Chapter Text
Ryland was in the back of a car.
There were two people arguing about the steering wheel—dad was driving, mom kept playing with the GPS and trying to wrench control from his grasp, turn them off the road they were on. It was bright outside, the sun streamed aggressively through the window, concentrated rays that had no mercy and granted him no respite. He felt nauseous. The road was bumpy, and the constant back and forth turns of the wheel alongside the overwhelming, inescapable heat and brightness only served to make his motion sickness worse. He pressed his cheek to the window, begging for the glass to cool his feverish skin.
He wasn’t sure where they were going. There were bags, on the seat next to him, but they were filled with what looked to be garbage, with tin cans, scratched glass jars, torn newspapers and old, yellow books. There was a photo album peeking out of one, and a set of drinking glasses from another. There was a dry-cleaning bag laid across the seats, translucent, with a long, sleeveless black dress, full of sequins like the night sky, scattered along the length until the trench, inside the plastic. It wasn’t one of mom’s dresses. Ryland didn’t understand how it fit in the car, so long and layered it was, but it did. He reached out a hand to touch it but couldn’t.
The sun was too bright. Ryland felt his eyes water, could not be rid himself of bright spots dancing in his vision even with eyes closed. A familiar aching headache was beginning to spread through his forehead, to his temples, sharp and unrelating pain as if a glacier was making its way along his sinuses, digging a river along the blood-brain barrier.
He stared forward, away from the window, tried to find something to distract himself with.
Dad was wearing his work-pants, familiar maroon slacks, and a black T-shirt. He had a tie shoved into his pocket, the paisley pattern of snaking vines sewn with gleaming thread visible in the light. His eyes were transfixed on the road, hands relaxed around the wheel even as mom futilely battled him for it.
Ryland looked down at his feet, clad in old sneakers that looked to be too small, though he couldn’t feel the pain of it, strangely. He had plain blue jeans on, otherwise, and a spiderman hoodie, stained with something dark brown on the front; chocolate, perhaps, but the very first thing that came to his mind was dried blood.
He stared out the window, again, squinting, fighting against the pain. Beneath the rays of sun there was a blurry landscape of desert, orange sand that stretched for miles, brown in spots and yellow in others like the caramelised sugar atop Creme Brûlée. Amid the sand stuck out trees, green and brown apparitions that vanished in a blur too quickly for Ryland to get a good look. They seemed infinitely tall, reaching up and up with their branches as if trying to steal something from the sky. Between the car and the trees with their desert there were three free lanes of concrete, long grey and empty, endless as everything in this landscape. They didn’t twist or turn, only stretched backward and forward, too far for Ryland to see the edge, farther than the horizon allowed.
The car jerked again. He didn’t understand why his parents were arguing, since the road only lead ahead. There wasn’t any turn that could be taken. There was only forward. But still mom pressed desperately at the keyboard on her phone, tried to steer them left, across the free lanes.
Ryland wanted to tell them to stop, that there was no point, that there was no alternate path to the one they were on. He wanted to ask where they were going in the first place. He opened his mouth.
“I’m gonna be sick,” was all he managed. He pressed his hands to his eyes, tried to keep the dizziness at bay. He felt air whoosh all around, and there was screaming, but nothing happened, not that he could physically feel. Save for the momentary whistle of wind, his surroundings had remained steady, same; he was still in the car, still intact.
When he opened his eyes, everything was dimmer. His headache held strong, but the sun was all but gone, the sky overcast with thick dark clouds. Nimbostratus and cumulonimbus. No rain, and it was still too warm, the sweat making him shiver. The darkness continued to deepen, faster and faster, as more clouds concentrated above. And they continued to drive, onward, into the horizon, on the lane that was like the tongue of the sky. Perhaps whatever awaited at the end was going to consume them, swallow them whole.
That thought should have feel scarier than it did.
The dry-cleaning bag was gone. There was more garbage on the side, old CDs mom listened to a lot, a spatula, a shattered plate, a handmade ceramic mug; his old stuffed animal, a fox well-loved. The car was quiet, except that faintly, in the very background, there were drums and guitars as blink-128 made their way through the chorus to First Date. Hannah sat in the driver’s seat, wearing the dress. It didn’t fit her, and it tangled in the gas pedal, made them speed faster, faster, faster, the world outside a steady blur until it was nothing more than a streak of gloomy orange and grey, a line of paint made with a dirty brush. Grace looked down at his too-small shoes, clutched at the door handle. He focused his eyes on the outside, again, on the storm clouds that gathered, obscured the sun, made everything gloomy. The caramel-desert was as grey as concrete, now, a vast ocean of monotony.
Hannah took her hands off the steering wheel, begun to adjust her mascara. James was riding shotgun, and he half-heartedly grabbed at the wheel, which kept stubbornly turning left.
“What are you doing!?” Ryland couldn’t help it, he stared at Hannah when she craned her head to see herself in the rearview mirror and passed a brush over her eyelashes, not paying attention to the road in the slightest.
“Stretching,” she said, matter-of-fact. It sounded wrong.
The car swerved sharply right when James tugged on the wheel. Ryland closed his eyes, felt something burn in his elbow, and waited for it to pass again.
His dad was back, this time. The dress was in a heap, laid across his dad’s lap. A quiet rain had begun, and the droplets slammed into the windows, made the wheels of the car slide on the road precariously.
Ryland kept his eyes closed. He heard dad mutter, unintelligible words in a voice that wasn’t his, and the radio played whistling melodies, close to inaudible in the blooming storm.
He was not in the car anymore.
It was dark outside. The air was cold, Grace shivered, sitting across from his mother at a plastic table, on the side of the road, next to an abandoned gas station. She was holding his hand in hers, gently, carefully. Her tired eyes bore into his.
“Why did you leave?” he found himself asking, even though he knew the answer. Around them, crickets buzzed, in tall grass that swayed tentatively in the breeze.
“I’m right here.” She smiled at him. She looked young, despite the exhaustion. She was only in a halter top, unsuited for the weather, and her thin arms shook visibly, the fair hair on them standing. Moonlight framed her face kindly, added a shine to her eyes, lit the right side of her face with pale white.
“But you’re leaving.”
“I have to.”
He wasn’t crying. He felt like he should have been. Her hand in his was barely tangible, weightless as that of a ghost. He tried to grip it better, could not.
“Why don’t you say goodbye?” he asked.
She stood up. Her skirt was that of the dress, a long trench that dragged in the mud, in the leaves; glittering, plastic stars in the sea of dirt. There were less of them than Grace recalled.
“If I say it, then that makes it real. Then I’m not coming back,” she shrugged.
“But you’re not coming back.”
She was crying. The moonlight caught on the liquid, and for a frozen second, she was a painting, ethereal, vulnerable. The second passed, and she was Shannon Grace again, younger, more honest, but herself. Her ghost-fingers slipped out from Grace’s. He didn’t stop her as she walked away, disappeared into the hungry, dark horizon.
The night was peaceful, here, at the plastic seat. The gas station was run-down; the fuel feed lines were untucked from the dispensers and instead lay hanging to the ground like dead snakes. Above them, the roof of the station had wires that crept out from under it; there was scratched paint all over its surface, and a few letters clung onto it, last soldiers in a battle against time, but it wasn’t enough for Grace to figure out what it once had been. It was too dark. The building proper, directly to the left of his table, was a dark maze of half-full shelves, visible through a dusty, dirty window, like a portal to another world. Some kind of still-active light blinked red on what was once perhaps the coffee machine.
Something whistled in the night. Grace thought to old myths and legends, felt himself shiver, but there was nothing around. Only the moonlight, and the light of a pair of still-functional lamps close to the table. He felt himself stick to the plastic, moist with sweat and rainwater.
The rain slowly picked up again. Cool water dripped upon his head, though he could hardly feel it as it ran down. He closed his eyes and felt, strangely, as if somebody was talking to him, like there were words just behind the barrier of running water, of whistling rain and rumbling lightning. But that made no sense—he was alone, here. Him and the station, an empty resource, stranded next to a vast street. The horizon loomed on all sides, unreachable. The desert and the street were eternal obstacles, keeping Grace in place, at his table, where he was at least safe.
He was on a beach. The plastic had vanished; there was sand beneath his hands. It was rough, and something in him twisted, yearned at the texture, as he tried to grab fistfuls, to feel the passing of grains between fingers. Waves lapped at the shore, not lazy but neither were they angry, forceful. The sky remained overcast.
Grace lay his back on the sand, watched the grumbling clouds. His limbs were heavy. He was tired, though he had scarcely moved since all this begun—and it had been a long journey to this beach, he thought, through an eternal stretching road and its companion, the desert.
He watched the sand on his side, waiting. Eva was meant to appear there, that was her place, but she did not, and it was only him and the sand, and the bright daylight that fought its way out from beneath the layer of clouds. He yawned. The sand was warm, and the sun caressed his face. It would have been so easy to simply slip into it, to let the grains cover him, bury him in that painless false reality, with waves that would forever attack his grave.
Her hand squeezed his, sharply. He startled, opened his eyes, and there she was, in that same sweater in which she’d told him he was to die to save the world.
“Eva,” he breathed. The sand must have gotten in his mouth, because his throat felt raw, gritty. He was so tired, but her hand on his was a steady pressure keeping him awake. He blinked and pulled on her palm, used it as leverage to heave himself forward.
He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, second nature. She was like the sand, like his mother’s hand, a fleeting impression, air formed into a shape that would dispel if he gave it too much attention. He buried his face in her neck nonetheless, in the false image of her sweater. Perhaps he was in that desert, still, and this was a mirage created by his tired mind once he wandered away from the plastic table.
“Eva,” he said again.
“Ryland,” she said, and he shook his head, pushed her hand onto his back, so that they could pretend it was the two of them together, again, truly.
The water lapped at his feet. The wind whistled among the rocks that scattered on the beach, boulders with sharp edges and ones smooth, sanded down by the sea and age.
“I hate you,” he told her. His voice did not waver, though he’d expected it to. “I missed you.”
“I’m sorry.”
He pushed away and the image flickered, incorporeal in a sudden flash, but then once more present before him. His own imagination, but even then, it was better than the solitude.
“You’re not,” he shrugged. “But that’s okay. I’ve made my peace with it.”
He breathed in the crisp air, tilted his head back, felt an ache in his throat. He was parched, but the only water available was full of salt.
“You were right.”
She shook her head, her hand pressing harder into his, something desperate about it all, uncharacteristically. This wasn’t his Eva, this wasn’t the person he knew and wished to see again and loved—and yet, he could not look away.
“I hurt you—”
“But you were right. I hate you for it,” and he figured, she wasn’t real anyway. This was some sort of a dream, some last-moments-alive sort of hallucination. He could be honest, for once, couldn’t he?
He could say the words. He could name it, this feeling, he could name the ghost that haunted him.
“I love you in spite of it.”
She morphed back into the Eva he remembered all too often, the weeping one that pressed him to her chest with a fervent push, knowing what she needed to do. Knowing she was going to betray him—knowing she would have to put all her trust in him, and ready to do so.
“I love you,” this time, she said it, didn’t swallow the words. “And I have to kill you.”
There was a dry note to the way she said it. Familiar. His Eva, flickering like a dying flame in the mirage. He grabbed onto that impression, that person he knew, tried to capture her before she left once more.
He squeezed her hand. He stared at the horizon again. His favourite image, a hazy line between the sea and the sky, a constant, unachievable goal. It could be relied upon, always there, forever out of reach.
“You know, it’s funny. If you asked me now, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have handed you the knife myself. I’ve had time, and I—I know I can do it. I’m a longshot that works,” he laughed, breathless and quiet. Her fingers were almost tangible, then ghostly again. She didn’t respond. “But I don’t know if it really would’ve been easier for you, if I was willing. Sacrificial lamb and all that. You told me once that you weren’t sure it was wise of me to trust you.”
“I don’t know, really. You kind of broke me, Eva,” he shook his head. “All this time, and if I see you again, I still don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“You’re seeing me right now.”
He looked at her again, at the hair gently whipping in the wind, at the sweater from years past.
“Come on, we both know it’s not true. And, well, I’m not going to see you again. I’m dying. I kind of failed at the last stage.”
She dispelled into the wind, her mouth halfway to a contradictory argument that would never leave her throat because she wasn’t real. She simply vanished with a gust of air that sent shivers up and down Grace’s back.
And, well. He was dying, wasn’t he? He had been starving, there was pain, and his endless road trip was coming to an end, or something equally poetic.
It wasn’t great, or glamorous. If he had been a Greek hero, he would have perished at Adrian, or while turning back for Rocky. There would have been a battle, or at the very least high stakes, something unbeatable and physical and monstrous that stopped Grace in his tracks and made him pay with his life for ever daring to cross it. But this was life, and his end wasn’t beautiful. There was no dignity in it. Only pain and hunger, holes in his gums where there had been teeth, hair that fell out in clumps. Only reopened scar tissue and nothing for him to cry, as even tears had been stolen away from him.
He wanted to see Rocky again. To tell him it would all be okay, to hear him protest, say no, no, no and Grace stupid. He wanted to hold his hand, not through the xenonite suit but purely, to burn himself on his friend before he departed from the world. He just wanted something to happen, not this peaceful beach and ocean.
His whole life, he’d been alone. He had only just began to come to terms with the fact that at least in death, he had a friend closer than he’d have imagined possible. But then again, solitude snuck up on him, familiar like an unwanted child. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, he considered, laying again with his back flat on the sand. Perhaps it was the fatigue, or perhaps it had simply been long enough, and without conscious input, without any effort at all, in between one thought and the next, he’d accepted it. Come to peace with it.
He closed his eyes and listened to the tranquil waves, waiting for death to bury him in the sand.
He heard voices arguing, the first time he almost touched surface for air. He couldn’t get through it, not properly, but the noise of complaint, the demand from somebody, the high chirping of Rocky whom he wished he could calm down but could not, not from beneath the waves, slipped through to him.
It was warm, beneath the surface of the water. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there. It was dark, too, though some faint rays of sunlight permeated in, lit up the darkness with speckles of gold and clear blue. Grace couldn’t breathe, not underwater, but he found he didn’t truly need to.
The arguing was pointless, he thought. He was there, floating, in-between. Why were people yelling? There wasn’t anything they could do for him, not at this point. His body was a gamble, all that could be done was sit and wait, hope for the best.
The water darkened around him. The sun didn’t reach this deep ad Grace sunk, until his feet touched the sand at the very depths of the ocean. Tiny fish and then bigger, scarier, surreal marvels of biology passed him by, swam at a leisurely pace, unconcerned. They did not know of his predicament.
Grace floated among them, watched their unrushed motions. It was too dark to see, but dreams never did like laws of reality too much.
And, well. If he was stuck there anyway, waiting for a solution, a miracle or the end, then perhaps. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, to be one of the fish, for a moment.
Almost a breath of air and—he knew that song. Those notes, they had been with him, before, they had held his hand. Like bubbles in the water, they escaped to the surface, but Grace reached out to the, with clumsy fingers, those that had been fins mere seconds earlier. Uncoordinated, ungraceful, too slow to capture the sounds, and already he was slipping down into it again, into the darker parts of his water-home.
For a few peaceful eternities, awareness was a wave, ebbing and flowing on the shores of his mind. A gentle wind that whispered in his weary bones. No longer one of the fish, no longer in the sea, but still he drifted, only there in episodes of confusion.
He didn’t think the people with him knew he was awake. He couldn’t open his eyes, or if he could, it would be by a sliver, and then again, they’d fall shut once a tide of exhaustion pushed through his body. Everything ached, dull and tended to but still raw and sore—the ache was hardly tangible, like a memory more than a sensation.
Sometimes, consciousness found him in that car again, dragged him gently to his destination and awoke him momentarily with sunlight on his face or the shock of blunt force trauma to the head with a car crash into a tree. Other times, it was Adrian successfully drawing Mary into itself, and Rocky motionless beside him, or not there at all; Grace alone in space, drifting to his death in a metal coffin. A few times, he was back in her mobile home, but those memories stopped being as twisted as they used to. They would only talk, then, and he would always look her in the eyes and say that he understood, that he accepted it, even if no part of him could agree with her choice. Heart versus mind. The Apple of Discord, even if there is no power to be found in this struggle; power, he would relinquish to her easily, and had, too many times to count.
Sometimes when he woke, he didn’t remember himself again. He would blearily listen to the sounds of the room, try to catch slivers of light from beneath his eyelids, but they would bear no information, no knowledge, only a hazy recollection that he should have recognised those voices. Sometimes, he only knew his name, and sometimes, he knew everything but that. Sometimes, there was a different kind of ache in him, one that only the sound of melodious whistling could put an end to, and other times, there was only the physical pain, the burn of every part of his body.
Most often, he flickered in and out of existence in his classroom, or in his laboratory. In this dream unreality, he was older and tainted, marred and decorated by the scars of his mission—he had returned. But he was speaking with the same kids he had when Eva had shown up and whirred him away, or working at the laboratory with Shapiro and DuBois unscathed. And there were other moments, too, idle conversation on Stratt’s Vat over mediocre coffee, Ilyukhina sharing her seemingly endless supply of Russian candy with him, the one time Lokken had pulled out a tube of Freia chocolates and all but forced it into his hands while he swayed on his feet, hugs from Dr. Sroka, looking at pictures of Harry’s dog while the man in question replaced the empty boxes of gloves for the third time in the day. Passive moments, captured in time without Grace’s input. He had forgotten them, but they were there, in his subconscious, a reminder he didn’t want to have.
He had been somebody, though he refused to see it for a long time, to these people. He had always thought he’d disappear afterwards—that he vanished from the minds of his kids when they finally left the halls of Grover Middle, and that he’d simply leave, blink out of existence in the minds of anybody working on the Petrova Project. It was another comfortable untruth. If he was real to them, then it hurt even more, that he had to have left.
I hate you. I love you. I understand.
I pick Athena, he’d think, then, because he didn’t want to get married and power was too mortifying a concept to consider. He wanted the wisdom, he wanted to understand, but it seemed that wisdom could not exist without love or power.
In the moments when he wasn’t buried deep in his own unconscious recollections, when he was aware enough to know he was Ryland Grace, and that wherever he was, they were trying to help his starvation—that is, if this wasn’t some odd afterlife that he’d stumbled into, but that concept seemed doubtful and scientifically baseless, based on the current evidence he had—he would catch ends of sentences, or even images. Without any way to measure time, he would see the same two silhouettes nearby, feel a hand in his own, listen to them talk. History, music, who he had been.
The impressions wouldn’t linger. As soon as the next bout of sleep found him, they’d vanish again, stolen away by the current. He didn’t cling onto them too hard, because even though so much of him wished to analyse this situation from each available angle, he simply could not fathom having the energy to devote to that. To even drift somewhere up there, closer to awareness, was exhausting.
And so he slept. Comfortable in it, not really anywhere at all, not obliged to anything, for a moment in his life.
He had expected the familiar drone of what’s two plus two? so much that it left him unsteady to be met with silence as his eyes finally shot open and he took in the blinding light of the room.
It wasn’t gradual. It was a sudden plunge out of the floating sea, and he hadn’t been prepared for it in the slightest. He knew who he was, by logic, knew where he was—more or less, at least—but it did not matter, because for a few terrifying seconds he was a stranger in his own body, a phantom suddenly mortalised; it was impossible, but he felt as though he was suddenly keenly aware of each and every sinew, every tiniest capillary that worked to deliver blood to his appendages, of each squeeze of his arteries, every single secretion, heartbeat, cell death and replication—he was aware of it, part of it, his body not a cohesive structure and instead a colony like Rocky’s. He was one of the cells, communicating with the others through desmosomes, or through signals excreted, hormonal messages passed from one sector to the next. One in a million of workers, unimportant.
His fingers twitched again, and after a moment he realised that it was his conscious effort that led to the motion. Huh.
It all began to settle, dust after a battle. The brightness wasn’t the sun, but artificial lights, though they were quieter than Grace would have anticipated. His limbs were his own, and he knew them, he was familiar with their shape, even if to move them any more would have been a herculean effort. The soft fabric beneath him was bedding, the scratchy material on him was a hospital style gown, easy to remove in case of emergency. The melody in the background, a steady repeating hum of familiar notes, was his name, and then a soft lullaby. Sung by Rocky.
“Rocky, Rocky…” he wanted to say more, somehow tell him about everything that was crowding in his chest, making him feel as if he would simply melt into this adoration he was feeling. It was a special sensation, unique, and he pitied anybody who would never feel so… powerfully devoted.
With great effort, he pressed a hand to his eyes. He was crying. He remembered wanting to, remembered finding it impossible. He remembered dying with the thought that he’d never again feel the rain. Just a second, he thought, just a moment to revel in his own tears and then he would reach out to Rocky, assure him verbally that it would be okay.
Things were going to be okay.
He noticed her in a split second.
His breath caught in his throat.
Grace had dreamed of her. He’d wanted to tell her—all the things, really, it did not matter in what order, it did not matter that he would cry and he would give her even more of that trust, the same kind that she was scared of, no matter how bizarre the concept of Eva Stratt being scared of anything at all still seemed. He’d tell her in spite of the fact that she might not have wanted to know, because he needed to say it, he needed them both to be aware of the tangled mess she’d left in his chest. He’d thought himself ready for this, for her face, for the sight of her hands, but—
He was in a hospital bed. There was an IV in his hand, keeping him in place, and oh, he was trapped here, she had taken Rocky and she would do something horrible again, she would send him back into the stars just like he had dreamed some time ago—she wouldn’t do that, he wasn’t thinking of Eva Stratt, he was thinking of a monster his mind had created from the single worst decision the both of them had ever had to make—it didn’t matter, because the fear was real, and he pushed against the covers with weak muscles, uncoordinated, sedated—had she been the one to do it? Had she sent him floating in that endless ocean?—did she know of the confessions of his dreams, did she find them ridiculous?—she didn’t, she had tried to tell him once, when he couldn’t properly put it together, that she also cared for him like for nobody else—
“Stratt,”
He was breathless. His panic was irrational. It was all too soon. All those things he wanted to say, but he had always been a coward—you are brave, in Rocky’s voice, a truth, if only for a moment—and so this was the only word that would make it past his lips.
He tried to free himself of the IV. God, she was staring at him, what was she going to do? Pounce? Hug him? She was always proactive, always in motion, and he needed a moment, he needed to think, he needed to get away.
“Eva—” he caught himself in time. “Stratt.”
She was older, more worn, and she held herself guarded, the same way he remembered from meetings and conferences—but even after all these years, her tells had remained exactly the same. He waited for a second, still fighting to make as much room between them as possible. He was too weak to run, though. Just as he had told Rocky, when the truth of his refusal was pulled out of him—there was nowhere more to run, at this point in his life. The IV held, the covers were like quicksand. His chest stuttered in the short breaths he could take, his eyes wide, staring at her.
And her guard fell. It did not mean she was more conventionally emotional, that had never been her, that part of Eva had never been an act; but she didn’t stop herself, she didn’t try to make him believe that all there was to her was a stone-faced façade.
She lifted her hands up in a shaky gesture of peace. She had her tablet on her knees. Her greying hair hung up to her clavicles in oily, unbrushed strands.
Rocky had quieted. Grace knew he was still there. It felt like two worlds colliding. Him and Eva in one room—impossible, and yet.
“Dr. Grace.”
And Grace thought—no. This isn’t how they are; this had never been the two of them. He was the one who was panicked, who didn’t know what to do, who put all his faith in this woman; she was the person with the solutions. She didn’t hesitate, not about this. She never hesitated, not unless she knew there was a chance she could be wrong, and even then, it wasn’t ever this open. And they weren’t strangers, not when it was just them and Rocky.
“No,” his voice was too rough, too raspy. Each word took three tries to get out, and when he managed it, they still came out weak. “Ryland.”
“Ryland,” she echoed. She clasped her hands before her, squeezed the palms tight, fingers intertwined as they had been with his for all that time he slept. She cleared her throat with her usual barely-there smile. “Eva.”
“What—” he swallowed around the ache in his throat. He desperately needed to drink something; and a part of him, the part that still stuttered and trembled with adrenaline at the sight of her, wished for something stronger than water. “What are… you… doing here?”
Two taps for question, weak against the bed. He barely had to think about them at all.
Where is here? Where am I? How am I alive?
Unimportant, he’d decided, sometime between one blink and the next, mesmerised, staring at her.
In her silence, in her gaze that rested against his cheek, his that stopped at the tip of her nose, at the wrinkles of her forehead, marks of age that he did not yet get to have, a string stretched taut between them. Between her hands, one around the other, frozen as if in prayer, and his own inability to move farther away; between his honesty and her openness.
She looked away. Her eyes traced the room. She tried to inch her leg closer to Rocky, who was likewise a statue at her side, but he chose that moment to shudder, slide an inch away.
And the string snapped.
Grace felt himself fold, any cards he could have hoped to have blown away, and he reached out to her with no barrier at all, because it was mortifying, he did not know what to do, but she had always been the one with the answers. They could fall apart later, when he had his wits about him. He could not think about it right now.
“Eva,” he urged, still rough and whisper-like. But she heard him, sat right at his bedside. He reached out farther, almost enough to touch her hand, but his arm fell limp before he could. “Please.”
She understood. He saw it flash across her face, the shock of it, and he wanted to yell at her, to throw something, damn it, just hug me—
She stood up, sharp, at attention, and he tried again, his hand barely above the mattress. He was crying, he needed her, and the same caring words she always offered him, Rylie, manneke, her little man.
It was two steps. She took them, sat down on the bed, laid her hand on his hair and he leaned into it with as much force as he could. A shiver went through him, and if he hadn’t been crying already, he would have started. He wanted her touch on him, more of it, wanted to fall into her chest and give up any fight that he had. Eyes closed, and they were back before anything could have happened, before the pain, in her bed, in their unspoken agreement, in the safety of undefined words.
He tried to gather the power, to lift his hands, to pull her to him, closer, again, but he didn’t need to. She knew, as she always did. She was careful, even more so than the first time he slipped into this headspace around her, her hands ghosting over his flesh until they had a good grasp around his back, until she could lower him on the bed again, his head at her chest, pressed into her sternum.
And if he closed his eyes, if he let himself sleep again, if he let the melody Rocky was now speaking remain only a song, then it would all be alright; then he would be safe with her, again. Just for this moment.
With his face to her body, he hummed the notes he’d been taught, Rocky but shorter, simpler, and heard his own name hummed back. He felt the bed shake as Rocky pressed against his calf again, as he had done a million times.
And so here was a dream, where they were together, and it was perfectly alright. Where his tears were his alone, where her heart and Rocky’s five could protect him and he could feel safe in between the two of them.
It may not have been true, normally. But he could let it be true, just this once.