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Pain is familiar. A constant companion, so many years spent living in its clenched embrace it’s become a twisted sort of comfort. Bronte knows pain.
He knows the lifecycle of a scream, the piercing clarity of the first syllable and how it shifts into gasps for breath, that brief respite before the air rushes past the vocal cords with renewed vigor, scraping at the flesh of the throat in desperation. He’s intimately familiar with the rasp that accompanies, turning pleading into sounds almost unrecognizable. But he can parse out words through gritted teeth, through whimpers and choking and tears.
He knows the ways a body can contort before it breaks. How far a back can arch off the floor, how close it can curl in on itself. The pattern the muscles of the neck make when a head is thrown back, the ways shoulder blades move beneath the skin as a person writhes. Hands, in particular, can configure in so many ways. Fists, splayed, digging into the ground, tearing at clothes, at skin.
That’s what most think upon seeing him. They imagine howls and moans, sobbing forms crawling upon the ground, him stone above them, enactor of judgement. It’s not incorrect. But their fear makes them dramatic. They think of lightning striking, forgetting the underlying tremors of thunder.
He knows just as well the silence of bitten lips, of breath held, the clack of teeth gritted. He knows how some simply collapse, folding on themselves, knees hitting the ground and eyes rolling to expose the whites. He knows whimpers, and negotiations, and trembling. How knees curl into chests and hair sticks to sweat-slicked skin. Knows how quickly blood can drain from a face, and the peculiar colors people can turn, how the loss scrambles their faculties into survival.
But even those who know there is more to agony than screams tend to forget, in the lightning strike, the crash of thunder, how the quiet rainfall erodes just as thoroughly.
That sometimes pain is an unceasing ache in the shoulder, a grinding in the hip that can only get worse, a pause for breath at the top of every staircase taken when no one can see. A pulse in the base of the skull you learn to think around, a twinge in the wrist you learn to wrap. There is pain that does not end, that can only be endured.
Pain takes many forms, and Bronte is familiar with all of them.
He does more than inflict it--inflicting is the least of his experience. He has spent years living at its side, pins and needles scattered over his vertebrae, an insidious weight draped over his shoulders in a betrayal of his own body’s.
The centuries of companionship, of its embrace, make it of no effort at all to recognize the hold it has started to take on another.
Sophie rubs a hand over her forehead, blinking soundly and blowing out a subtle breath. Her pulse beats alongside her rib cage, and she digs a knuckle into the knot of emotion at its center. It doesn’t relieve the pressure, but she can’t help poking it in hope it someday will.
Lethargy pulls, the room dancing in the corners of her vision, but she makes herself straighten.
Bronte watches, impassive, across the room, and she waits for the reprimand. She was sloppy, inexcusably so. She should’ve held on better, maintained a steady grip. Instead with a twinge in her joints it’d slipped, half the energy ricocheting back up her own nervous system and sparking stars across her corneas.
It doesn’t come. He watches her for a moment and says instead, “Sit down.”
Sophie shakes her head. “It won’t happen again. I promise.”
“Yes it will. Sit down.”
“It was just--”
“Sit down.” He glares, and Sophie lowers herself to the floor. It’s a relief, admittedly. Her heart's beating harder than usual, and she’s almost tempted to lay back fully on the floor to see if it would balance all the fluctuation in her system. But Bronte is watching, so she refrains.
He crosses the room to her and, startlingly, lowers himself next to her. He extends a fresh bottle of Youth. She takes it reflexively, but looks at it puzzled. The glass chills her fingers and she can’t tell whether that’s pleasant or just another input on top of the rest.
“How long has this been happening?” Bronte asks, and he’s lowered himself fully to the floor. His posture’s slightly stiff, and she’d be caught on the sight of Councillor Bronte sitting on the floor if it weren’t for the words.
“How long has what been happening?” She pulls at the cap of the bottle to give herself something to do, somewhere else to look.
He stares flatly. “I saw how you faltered.”
She winces. “It’s just a headache. I should’ve grabbed something from Elwin, but I didn’t have time. That’s all.”
“That's all?” he challenges, and Sophie’s face burns. “I have lived longer than the calendar you were raised with has existed. You cannot fool me with those simple excuses. Try again.”
Sophie insists, “I’m not trying to fool you!”
“Have you had trouble breathing at all? Dizziness? Tremors and aches? Tiredness you can’t explain? Pins and needles in your limbs?”
Sophie’s mouth is open to deny before he even starts talking, but then snaps it shut. She thinks, for a moment, of how the room had danced just moments before when she’d lost control. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Bronte lets out an irritated breath. “Would you be less difficult if I told you I speak from experience?” He doesn’t look at her as he says it, brushing a speck off the leg of his pants.
“I don’t understand.”
“You think it is just a headache. How long has this headache lasted?” Bronte asks, and unease begins to unfurl in Sophie’s chest.
She says slowly, “Three days. But I can handle a headache. I was a Telepath around humans, remember?”
Bronte tilts his head slightly to the side. “I have no doubt you can handle pain far better than most. My concern is that it’s not a normal headache.”
Sophie thinks, briefly, of the months after her kidnapping. The days of hazy aches and buzzing in her skull, of how many times she almost faded. “What do you mean? What else would it be?”
Bronte deliberates for a moment, before finally saying. “I had hoped you would be spared--that the issue was with how unguided I was, the first and only for so many thousands of years. I suspect now that I was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
Bronte flexes his fingers, watching the movement. “There is consequence to power such as ours. Pain is not a pretty thing. It eats at you, and the more you wield it, the more it conforms to you. I am saying,” he clarifies when he sees her expression, “that if I am right, your headache will not ever go away for long. And if it does not ache, then your heart will race, or your joints will chafe.”
Sophie swallows, her grip tight on the bottle. “How do I stop that from happening?”
Bronte gives a grim twist of his lips. “In all my years, I have yet to find a way.”
The candle flickers in a slight wind from the open balcony, and Bronte stares at the movement. It’s the only light against the pressing dark of the night, leaving spots in his vision, and he can’t find sleep.
The overcast night weighs on him, a pressure promising storms later to accompany the pinpricks of lightning coursing along his nerves. He’s lived a thousand nights like this, will live a thousand more. Though they weren’t always like this, not exactly.
Once, when his head pounded, the three of them would run from the storms, leaping around the world to clearer skies. They’d find somewhere quiet and secluded, and he’d sit quietly waiting for it to clear while the two of them bickered and teased.
Or if they couldn’t run, if the problem wasn’t pressure but him, the wear and tear of his own body that had become too familiar with channeling pain to understand it wasn’t his, he didn’t need it, they’d stay in. Make a mess of the kitchen, keep his glass full, bring books and conversation and, if even that was too much, simple company. The warmth of a body, of two, next to him in the near-dark.
Near, because Fintan always kept a candle lit. It’d flicker away on a nightstand, a dresser, the table. He’d play with it at times, dancing flame over his fingers and twisting it into various shapes and colors. He was most fond of blue, because Fallon was fond of blue and the way the sparks flickered. Maybe he still is; Bronte doesn’t know. He’s chosen not to.
Once he’d known more of them than he had of himself.
He’d known what creams Fallon liked to use in his hair, which scents he thought paired well and how atrocious he found beech wood furniture. That he wrote in flourishes and couldn’t distinguish his right from his left, and he liked to keep his starstones on brooches so he couldn’t drop them. His voice held even when he read aloud and he talked with his hands. His hands had been equally steady, efficient against Bronte’s skin in trying to ease his budding aches. They hadn’t known at the time they’d settle into something permanent, something he’d note with the same dismissal as the sun in the sky.
He’d known Fintan lived loud and fast, that he ran hot and hated long sleeves. He liked how orange looked with blue and how Bronte’s curls fluffed up when he ran his hands through them. His pockets were always full of buttons and pebbles and pills to steady Bronte’s heart rate. He liked when Fallon’s face flushed and watching sunsets from the rooftop. He argued for the sake of it and could hold stiller than stone when a bird landed in his hand, which they were wont to do in the cold. He could pop a shoulder into place without wincing and proclaimed daily that the three of them were going to change the world.
He’d been right, in a way.
The world he lives in now, candle flickering in the silent cold of his tower, is anathema to the warmth of his youth. The three of them wouldn’t recognize it, wouldn’t recognize him. A world in which he is alone in the dark, in which he cannot get out of bed and they are not there to bracket him with their bodies.
But that is the world as it is. His bed has been too large for him for a long time, long enough he doesn’t remember how it felt to have it full. Just as he doesn’t remember what it’s like to breathe without an ache in his chest, or stand without the world tilting.
Pain is not only physical, and Bronte is familiar with all its forms.
Sophie knows pain. Has spent years in close companionship with it, enduring headache after headache to try and live a semblance of a life in spite of the way her vision blurred and her teeth tingled, because there was nothing else to do but accept it and move on.
But then, when she was twelve years and six months old, she’d been given a reprieve. There was nothing wrong with her after all, and she didn’t have to live like that. After seven years of pain she’d been set free. She hadn’t realized how heavy the weight had become until it’d been taken away.
She’d basked in it, marvelling at the energy she now had to spare, at all the things she could accomplish when she didn’t spend a portion of herself each day fighting her own body.
Now, there’s a faint tingle in her fingertips and Bronte’s words playing on repeat in her head. Her headache had faded on day four, though the base of her skull still moves stiffly. But there’s no relief to it now, instead a fear it will return.
There is a consequence to power. She’s always known this, known it from the moment she could make out words on a page and imagine the kings and heroes they spoke of. She knows there is give and take. She hadn’t thought it could be so literal.
Someone nudges her, and she stumbles into someone else.
Fitz, gentleman he is, doesn’t complain. He straightens her without comment, adjusting the strap of his bag, and Keefe has another hand at her back in support, though he was the one who unsteadied her.
“It’s a miracle you can even walk,” he comments, faint amusement in his voice. “I barely touched you.”
Sophie’s face warms. “Sorry. I guess I was…distracted.”
“By what?” Fitz asks, holding the door to their dorm open for the two of them. Keefe lets Sophie go first, and she drops her bag to the ground by the door, kicking off her shoes. It gives her a moment when they follow her in.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s not important.” She doesn’t need to regale them with the exciting stories of migraine after migraine from her childhood.
“You sure?” he asks. “You’ve been distracted a lot lately.”
“Have I?”
“Yep,” Keefe answers, not letting her off the hook. He’s left his shoes by the door and flopped onto Fitz’s bed. Fitz gives him a brief exasperated look, but turns back to Sophie.
Sophie joins Keefe on Fitz’s bed, stretching out her legs and leaning back against the headboard. It helps some. “I guess I’ve just been thinking about something Bronte said.”
Keefe sits up and Fitz crawls into the bed too, reaching for Mr. Snuggles. “Which was…?” he prompts, and Sophie sighs.
She’s not sure why she’s reluctant to say. Both of them know her better than, perhaps, she even knows herself. Have dedicated the past several years to patiently learning every piece of her, no matter how jagged or enigmatic. They know the length she likes to keep her hair and the way she drifts to the left when she walks. The volume she plays music when she studies and her utter loathing for the texture of suede. They know her imagination gets away from her in the pitch black, so they keep a nightlight on their bedside tables that cast stars across the room when she stays over.
They know she can never quite make herself trust what people say at face value, that she spent far too long hearing what people don’t give voice to ever let herself believe. They know she doesn’t know if she’s human or elf, that neither feels quite right even though she knows what her DNA claims. They know she can’t quite see herself as a person instead of a thing with a purpose, even though they’ve told her otherwise a thousand times.
They know of the knot she keeps beneath her ribs and how it sits like a rock beneath her skin. That she has only ever trained her inflicting out of necessity and would abandon the ability in a heartbeat if it weren’t her best line of defense. They know, so why is it so hard to say this?
Fitz’s knee nudges her. They’re still patiently waiting for an answer, and Sophie laments how Edaline clued them in to her dinosaur methodology, because it still works.
“He said,” she starts, “that pain isn’t pretty, and it eats at you.”
“So?” Keefe says , and Fitz asks, “What does he mean, eats at you?”
Sophie picks at the hem of her shirt, because she hasn’t told them about the headaches, or how she gets dizzy when she stands sometimes, and how much energy it can take to walk some days. It’s not like she was hiding it, but she hadn’t thought it mattered. Everyone got headaches. Everyone got dizzy sometimes. Everyone had low energy days. And if it was happening more frequently, well, it was probably temporary--a particularly stressful semester, or a particularly bad month that would blow over.
“Soph?” Keefe prods, and now there’s an undercurrent of real concern.
She blows out a breath, thunking her head back against the wall. “He made it sound like, with time, my inflicting is going to start hurting me.” With a small laugh, she shakes her head, because she’s still hedging around the truth. “Actually, he thinks it already is.”
“What?” Fitz starts, leaning in, reaching for her. His fingers tangle with hers, tight, and Keefe’s moved closer on her other side. “What does that mean? How is it hurting you?”
Keefe tucks a bit of hair behind her ear, finger trailing lightly down over the skin of her neck, a palm to her shoulder. His hand is warm, enough she can feel it through the fabric, and her heart pounds with the thought of what his half-lidded eyes mean, the way his lips twist. “You feel tired,” he says at first, still searching. “But I can’t feel anything else.”
Sophie shrugs. “It’s not so bad right now. It’s not always acute.”
“What does that mean?” Fitz says again, his brow pinched.
Sophie squeezes his hand, leaning into his shoulder. “I’ve started having…symptoms,” she admits quietly. “Headaches that don’t go away for days, and getting dizzy, small things like that. I didn’t think anything of it, but it made me lose my concentration when I was training with Bronte, and I guess he thinks it's from my inflicting. He said something about how the more I use it, the more it’ll stick to me.”
“Okay, so how do we stop that from happening?” Keefe asks.
Sophie shakes her head. “Bronte doesn’t know--it might not be possible.”
Fitz voice is tight. “So, what, your inflicting will hurt you too every time you use it?”
“No, not like that. It’s not like I’m inflicting on myself. But when I use it, it’ll wear away at me more and more, and it’ll hurt even when I don’t use it. That’s how he made it sound.”
“I don’t like how that sounds,” Fitz says, and Keefe agrees. “Are you hurting now?”
“It’s fine,” she says, giving a small smile. “It’s barely noticeable.”
“Sophie,” Keefe starts, but she cuts him off.
“Really, I’m fine. I’m mostly just tired, like you said.” She bumps him with a shoulder when he starts to protest. “Please? I don’t want to think about it.”
Fitz lifts their still-joined hands, pressing a kiss to the back. “Fine. But we’re going to circle back to this, Sophie. We are,” he insists when she opens her mouth, and she knows he’s right and it’s the smart thing to do, but she still wants to argue. She fights the urge, instead enjoying the little bit of time she’s bought herself.
“Later,” she says, relaxing into the bedspread, enjoying the setting sun over the campus through the windows. Keefe reaches over to turn on the nightlight.
Bronte can recall with near perfect clarity when he first realized something was wrong. It’d taken years, the aches sneaking up on him in gradual increments, imperceptible, until one day he’d looked up and realized he couldn’t remember the last day he hadn’t had to breathe through.
It’s not as though it could’ve happened any other way. They’d been such a small population when he was a child, and he’d been something brand new. No one knew what to do, what to make of him. They’d tried, certainly. But empaths and beguilers were far cries from helpful, nothing even remotely similar to the novel realm of pain.
Everything he’d learned, every scrap of control and understanding he’d gained over himself had been hard-won and alone. Earned in late-night breakthroughs and experiments by candle light, through brute force and a thousand errors. He’d worked over twice as hard for an inch as his peers did for a mile, and he’d been proud. He still was, to an extent, though far less egotistically. But it was an undeniable feat.
He hadn’t realized at first the aches were connected. Pain worked so insidiously, patient and enduring. He’d thought his courses overly stressful, and there were the conflicts with the other species, and the simple bruises of being a youth with access to the world and companions who were convinced they’d change it. Everyone had bad days, and sometimes they stretched to weeks, and sometimes they stretched to months.
Then, he’d faltered. A playful nudge that’d sent him off-kitler. The blood rushed in his head, and if Fallon had not been at his other side he would’ve collapsed entirely. As it was, it had been a controlled slide to the ground, the edges of his vision dimming. There were hands on him, voices he couldn’t make out, and he’d realized with a lightning strike of clarity that it was not getting better.
He’d been in bed the rest of the week, Fintan and Fallon both a constant presence at his sides, dragging from him everything he had not said and helping him piece it together.
Consequence of being the first--the only--they thought. In his experiments, in the trial and error, he must’ve done some measure of damage. Bad practices, but there’d been no one to tell him otherwise, and there was no recourse he could find. They’d tried. He’d serve instead as the warning he did not receive to those who came next.
But no one came next. Fintan shared his flame with others, and Fallon his mind, but Bronte and pain were a solitary companionship. Perhaps it was for the best, because though he was no longer experimenting, it continued to worsen.
They decided his current methods must still be faulty, and he’d screamed until he’d lost his voice and his legs gave out. It hadn’t taken long, which was the most disappointing part of it all. His body couldn’t support its own rage. All that work, the years of working all alone from scratch to where he was now, and he’d gone about it all wrong. He’d thought it could not get worse than excavating a new ability all on his own, but he had to not only start over, but un-do every instinct and muscle memory he’d built.
He’d done it, of course. In this he refused even the whisper of failure, despite the years it took. He’d found an entirely new approach, and thought surely it would work. Some damage would be irreversible, he’d come to learn, but it would not worsen.
Yet relief never came. It seemed to make no difference what he did, what he tried. Whether he conducted with his mind or his heart, whether from fear or guilt or pain, whether lightning or thunder, it eroded at him steady as rainfall over stone.
He’d had to stop practicing for several years, nearly housebound. The two of them tried their best to fill the silences he’d become prone to. He watched as their lives grew louder, busier, and he could not stand without the room dancing. Even busy as they became, talk of turning their scattered people into a robust population, of a seat of power for three, they never faltered. It did not make it easier to bear his own limitations.
He concluded, finally, that there was no recourse. He’d attempted every permutation he could manage, had by his youth fleshed out the boundaries and patterns of his ability better than those a thousand years older, and found that harsh truth. He had built faulty pathways in his mind, bridges in places they should not have been, stripping himself bare before he’d known he’d done it.
He could not take that third seat. Had to watch instead as Fintan and Fallon both shifted their lives to accommodate another, and they came home to him with stories and warmth, trying to cajole him into a life that felt as foreign as the body he inhabited. Had he truly dreamed of that once? Had he truly once dreamed?
Now his mind occupied itself with questions, wondering what quirk of his genetics have converged into this life he knows, what his DNA was attempting to accomplish. He imagines it an error, a clerical misstep because what purpose does pain serve? It does not connect people like intimate words spoken without breath, it does not provide light or warmth.
His conviction in this grew each passing year he remained alone, years turning to decades turning to centuries, and pain his domain alone. More so than any but him truly knew. Even them.
Until.
Sophie’s taking the weekend off. Not necessarily by choice, in that Fitz and Keefe have both threatened to tie her down if necessary, but she has begrudgingly admitted they’re right.
“Better?” Fitz asks from beside her, squinting through the sunlight where he lays in repose in the sand. Sophie herself has a chair, and Keefe is half-way through burying himself alive a little ways in front of them.
She takes a moment to respond, assessing the beating of her heart and the join where her spine meets her skull. “Better,” she decides after a moment, and he smiles.
It’d been raining back home. A light drizzle, barely enough to mist your face, but the steady drizzle had started her temples throbbing and her stomach churning, and Keefe had barely stepped into the room with her before proclaiming it unacceptable.
Waves lap gently at the sand, the sun warm overhead, and she can’t believe how long it's been since she last enjoyed a beach. It had been her last summer with her human family, the final weeks before the school year started again, simple sandwiches and chips enjoyed with wrinkled hands and faces streaked in suncream.
“Good?” Keefe asks in follow up, calling across the sand in a pattern they’re starting to learn.
“Okay,” she admits. Better than earlier in the week, where twice she’d had to lay on the floor to keep her heart from pounding itself out of her chest. They’d found her during the second time, which had only fueled their insistence on a break. But her limbs are still heavy, and she thinks if she stood now she’d stumble. So she’ll sit instead, watching the two of them, though they’re watching her just as much even though they’re pretending they’re not.
Bronte has been too in their sessions, in the months since they’d sat on the floor and he’d told her pain eats. She’s not sure what he’s watching for, or what memories play behind his eyes when they go distant, but there’s a quality to how they train that’s shifted into something somber. She doesn’t know if it’s better or worse.
“Okay,” Fitz repeats, reminding her where she is. “We’ll take okay.”
Sophie settles into her chair, digging her feet into the warm sand. She closes her eyes, breathing the salt air and listening to the gentle lapping of the waves. Silence falls for a while, the two giving her the reprieve they came for, until Keefe insists that Fitz help finish burying him whole.
She cracks an eye open to watch Keefe disappear except for his head, his hair filled with sand. Without his hands--a critical oversight on his part, in her opinion--he’s completely helpless against Fitz mussing it, then holding his face to press a kiss to his forehead, his lips.
Keefe protests loudly the prison of his own making, until finally Fitz digs him free and Keefe immediately tackles them both to the ground. Sand flies and Sophie laughs, shielding her face. Fitz’s hair is sandier than Keefe’s by the time they’re through, and they both run down to the water to rinse off, though Fitz takes it at an easy jog. She assumes that was their plan at least, but the way they’re dunking each other she isn’t sure whether they’ll be any cleaner by the time they’re through.
Keefe leaves Fitz in the water, running back up the sand to present her with a shell, the spiral tight and the patterning a subtle pink. She runs a finger over the ridges, the lingering water dripping into her lap. She looks up at Keefe, who sits waiting for her verdict. The skin across his cheeks is flushed with sun, the salt texturing his hair, and his lips are pressed together in anticipation. Fitz glances up at them from the edge of the water where he’s toeing at the wet sand, looking for more shells.
Sophie considers for a moment. The waning sun, the beginning tinges of color across the clear sky. The weight of her body, the thrum of her pulse. It’s holding steady now, and she has to admit their conspiring to get her to rest has helped.
Keefe grins when she pushes to her feet, taking a deep breath just in case. She reaches for his hand, letting him lead her down to the water to peruse the shells herself. Fitz sees them coming and lights up, and she thinks she cannot imagine a world without this warmth bracketing her.
It’d been difficult to describe the medley of responses he’d had to learning of another, the knowledge one of many in a series of blows. He’d been wrong about the child being a hoax, the search had been hidden from him, she’d been allowed into their cities unrestricted and had blatantly broken the law, and then she’d been kidnapped and tortured while her parents held a funeral and she’d had to rescue herself. The others wanted to let her go, pet her hair and whisper apologies while they pretended this was a catastrophe that could be contained and managed.
And then they’d told him she’d manifested a second, a third ability, and one of them was his.
He hadn’t believed. It simply wasn’t possible that after several thousand years of solitary companionship there was another. He had been a fluke. This could not be natural, could not be anything but foul play.
They’d told him they wanted him to train this biding bomb to wield pain, as if she weren’t a danger enough already. Why not give the fire more fuel? But they would not listen, though he had far more experience than the rest of them combined. He’d watched this very collective form, had helped plot its creation in late nights by candle light.
He could not remember those conversations anymore, not beyond a dream they’d change the world. They didn’t matter, not when he hadn’t been there to see them realized, not when he hadn’t been there to see them falter.
He can recall the way the door slammed, Fallon rushing in in such a panic he hadn’t taken off his shoes at the door. Bronte always recalled that, even when he’d started to forget the shade of his eyes. Fallon had hated getting the floors dirty.
It’d been months since they’d last spoken, the demands of their positions increasing daily, and Bronte had all but shoved them out the door. He could not stand to see how they looked at him, patient and unbothered.
Now Fallon shook on his doorsteps, babbling about fires and blazes and bodies and Fintan. Fintan, reaching for the sky, Fintan, falling. It seemed an impossibility for him to falter. He’d always been the brightest of them.
But he’d followed when Fallon begged, because Bronte had always hated the sound his voice made when it cracked. He’d seen the ruin Fintan had made of his home, tearing pictures from the walls and overturning the furniture regardless of the pink shine to his forearms, the blisters freshly forming. Bronte hadn’t known Fintan could burn.
Bronte had known, though, the moment they’d stepped over the threshold and he’d turned, seen that look in Fintan’s eye, that he was lost. There was no point in coming. He would not listen.
And he didn’t. He screamed and tore at the curtains, sobbing until his cheeks shone. He ripped his circlet from his head, slamming it against the wall and all but throwing them from the room.
Fallon tried again, and Bronte looked outside to the clouds rolling in. He imagined the rainfall. He turned, and he left.
Fallon had never forgiven him. Fintan had never been the same.
Bronte, though, had already become familiar with solitude. With getting himself out of bed when his vision blurred. So when Fallon faltered next, having never imagined he’d be alone, Bronte took their place. The others did not like him, nor he them, and he was perfectly content in that. He outlasted them, and he outlasted the next. He thought, perhaps, he’d outlast them all, these replacements who shattered under the slightest pressure.
The world could collapse again, he thought, and he would wake up and push himself up like he always has. He would take a deep breath, and stretch away the aches he could, and live a solitary aftermath.
Except. Foul play or not, there was another, and though he tried again and again to wear her down, steady as rainfall over stone, she had not faltered. She had screamed, and she had folded in on herself, and she had pushed back to her feet.
Then, she had achieved what he could not. It did not have to be pain, to be writhing limbs and throats made raw. It could be peace, and light, and joy. For her, at least. No matter how he tried he could not copy her, his mind thousands of years too settled into its pathways. He’d sooner wake to warmth in his bed again than learn to impart joy on another.
And so, he’d thought, this was confirmation. It had been bad practice, consequence of a thousand experiments, of trial and error. He had indeed served as warning, and she would be free. He wanted her to be.
Then he had watched her falter.
Rain falls in a gentle drizzle, and Sophie watches the leaves and flowers sway, grateful for the warmth of the blanket pulled tight to her. Keefe had found it who knew where, and Fitz had made the cup of tea still cooling on the nightside table.
The boys in question sit on the floor and at the desk respectively, working in silence. It doesn’t come naturally to Keefe, and he keeps fidgeting. He’s already drawn a thousand stars across his arms, and he glances at her every few moments. Her headache is likely bothering him, but he refuses to leave, and she appreciates the company.
Fitz looks at her frequently too, though he’s subtler with it. His notes are spread all over the desk, his brow furrowed as he works.
Sophie’s own papers are cocooned with her, and she works through them the best she can. It’s slow, but she’d taken every exam with a thousand teenaged thoughts slicing through her brain when she was twelve. And she’s almost done, even though her fingers have begun a slight tremble. If only the words would stay clear on the page, and her heart would stop throbbing that laboured beat. She’s not even doing anything.
A hand slips the papers from her grasp, and she realizes she’s been staring, unmoving. Keefe sets them to the side and she watches them go with a half a thought to take them back, but she aches, and doesn’t really want to. Fitz turns his attention towards them as Keefe settles on the edge of the mattress. He trails a finger lightly over her skin and winces.
“C’mon, Soph,” he says. “How can you even think?”
She gives half a shrug and he frowns. Fitz asks from the desk, “Worse?” Keefe nods for her, and Fitz abandons his notes to come closer. “What can we do?”
There’s nothing to do. Not all storms, clouds, thunder or lightning can be run from. This disequilibrium is entirely her body’s own making. She wonders if her creators knew the consequences of a power like hers. She wonders if they’d made her like this anyways.
“You’ve already made me tea,” she reminds him, and he dismisses that with a wave of his hand. “Really,” she insists.
“Sophie,” he frowns.
“Fitz,” she says, and it comes out more a breath. He exchanges a glance with Keefe, and she doesn’t have the energy to try and dissect what they’re thinking. “Not now, please.”
Keefe squeezes her hand. “Okay.”
“Thank you,” she mumbles, closing her eyes and resting her head back on the headboard. Maybe being more horizontal would help, she’s not quite sure yet. She opens her eyes again when the mattress shifts, and they’ve each chosen a side of her. Keefe on her left, Fitz on her right. They’re careful, trying not to disturb her position as they settle.
It’s still afternoon, and she knows they have other things to do. She can quite literally see Fitz’s unfinished notes from here, and knows he has work due tomorrow. But neither of them comment on it, instead giving her sweet smiles and speaking in low voices. Nothing of importance, nothing she needs to pay attention to. Just noise to fill the silence, of art pieces Keefe would like to make and recipes Fitz is curious to try, of tricks he plans to pull and updates from back home, until even that fades into a peaceful quiet.
Keefe reaches over to turn on the nightlight, half-asleep, and Sophie can’t help but be fond of the gesture. They’ve dulled the light, toned down the stars into something easier on her eyes when her head aches. It is something they are learning together, these new limitations. What helps, what hurts. And she is grateful to not be enduring it alone.
Sophie settles into the blankets, listens to their breathing, a cadence she knows better than the sound of her own. They’ve leaned closer unconsciously, the press of their bodies comforting even through the blanket.
Pain is familiar, more so each day. But, she thinks, as the rain falls, so is joy.