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Three in the morning finds him in the kitchen brewing himself chamomile tea. Grogo offered to do it, but Corrado needs to do something with his hands, needs to prove to himself that he has hands, and watching the water in the pot heat and boil soothes something inside of him that he doesn't want to name.
He pours the water into a mug, watches the tea bag rise with the liquid, and throws what remains in the pot into the sink.
Corrado can feel Grogo at his back, silent and still in the enchanted stone near the lightswitch, but neither of them says anything. If Corrado were to ask, Grogo would migrate to another stone in the house and leave him alone, but Corrado's breath catches in his throat at the mere thought. He doesn't ask, and Grogo stays silent at his back.
Tonight is not a good night.
Corrado waits for the tea to steep, then he throws the bag with the organic—another thing he had to get used to. Ten years ago, no one would even dream about differentiating rubbish before tossing it out. Now it's good for the planet, or… something. He hasn't had time to look into that. Cornelia and the rest said something about climate change, but he has no idea what they were talking about. He'll need to go to the library, find information on that. Or figure out how this Internet thing works, if it's as useful as the kids tell him.
Grogo doesn't move when Corrado turns and falls onto the closest chair, mug carefully laid on the table before him. Its face keeps looking at Corrado out of the stone, and Corrado lowers his eyes.
For a moment, he thinks about asking Grogo to leave after all. He can feel himself unspooling, coming undone at the seams of his already-fragile mind, and he doesn't want anyone to see him grip the mug two-handed like everything will splinter away if he lets go.
But if Grogo leaves Corrado will be alone, and he's been alone too many years for the thought not to spread a fog of terror over his mind. And tonight—
No, tonight is not a good night.
The tea scalds his tongue. Corrado can feel it descend his oesophagus all the way to his stomach, but he takes another sip, and another. Grogo makes a worried noise, little more than stone agains stone, but Corrado's blood, the half that is his mother's, understands its meaning. Grogo says nothing, though, and they both pretend that Corrado is human enough not to know that the sound was a form of communication.
Corrado pushes the mug away. His throat hurts, his tongue burns. It feels good, the pain, and he knows it shouldn't.
Grogo makes the noise again.
Corrado wants to close his eyes and bury his head in his arms. He wants to forget the last ten years. He wants not to have lived the last ten years. He wants to be back in the Valley, back in DarkLight, with Tiberio and Gribben and Gaio and Tintafosca and Bellula. He wants to ask for Vepre's counsel and Artemisia's advice.
He wants, he wants, he wants, and he can have none of it. He can't wheel back time, he can't open the Portal, he can't undo the mistakes that led him here, and he can't. Fucking. Sleep.
So he takes the mug again, blows on the tea inside, and tries to just enjoy the warmth between his hands without thinking about his mind fracturing into sharp shards that slice him open whenever he strays too close to thinking of everything and anything at all.
He lets the wisps of vapour lull him into a daze, and when the tea is cool enough he drinks it to the last drop. His tongue still smarts, and some vague memory of so long ago tells him it will for hours still, maybe a day. He welcomes the pain, because it means that he's still here, that this is not a dream his mind's conjured to make reality more bearable as he sleeps, cold and exhausted, on the edge of the Frontier.
Grogo is still there when he looks up. Corrado's heart tightens around his lungs, but it doesn't feel suffocating. Not entirely.
"Where's Ander?" he asks. He's still holding the mug. His fingers open with a dull ache that tells him he was clutching it too tightly for too long. No claw draws gouges into the wood when he lays his hands on the table. Corrado looks at his fingers and his heart starts pounding inside his chest at his defencelessness. He grabs the mug again.
"The young sir left after dinner and has yet to return," Grogo says. There is nothing in its voice that hints at what it thinks of Corrado's state. "Should I ask the gargoyles to track him?"
Corrado shakes his head tiredly. "No, Grogo, thank you." Ander is a wild creature at heart. He won't take quickly to be confined inside four walls, away from Corvina and the Maquis. It will take time to get him used to the thought that he can't live like a Sparrowhawk, not on This Side, not for most of the month. To the thought that he has people who care, now, or at least Corrado and Grogo.
Orders know it's taking Corrado too long to get used to acting human again, and he did live as a human for a sizeable part of his first thirty years alive.
"Very well, Sir," Grogo says.
Corrado looks at the spots on the bottom of the mug and tries not to think of rain-soaked feathers in the dead of winter, of kobolds and sandgrain shapeshifters and a circle of Dìnedàn to sleep in. He tries not to think of a loneliness so sharp it bled his heart out whenever he was too tired to think about anything else.
Dawn finds him still sitting at the kitchen table, an empty mug in his hands and too many regrets in his head.