Jazz woke to the sound of someone moving, fabric rustling against the rough burlap of their tent.
"Frederic?" Jazz rolled over, squinting into the darkness where he could just make out the shadowy shape of someone crouching in the corner, head buried in their hands. "Frederic, is that you?"
"S-sorry," Frederic managed, the word breaking off into a shuddering sob, and Jazz realized with a start that he was crying. "Nothing is wrong. I'm, I'm sorry, I—I didn't mean to wake you."
"Are you okay?" He pushed the blankets away and rolled onto his knees, and when there was no answer he asked, carefully, "Did you… was it another dream?"
Almost every night Frederic was torn from sleep by nightmares that wrapped black hands around his throat, gasping and hissing and even screaming, sometimes, desperate to push them away. He would wake up in shallow pools of sweat and tears and he would pray and swear under his breath in half a dozen different languages, fingers searching around his neck for something that was not there. Jazz would lie awake beside him and pretend he didn't hear, pretend he wasn't listening as Frederic whispered trembling entreaties to a God Jazz did not understand, crying and shaking and whispering for hours on end until he fell asleep again and Jazz was left to stare into the silence of their shared tent alone.
But he did hear him. He always did.
"Did you dream?" he asked again, and he saw Frederic's shadow nod quietly, wiping at fallen tears.
"Yes. I… again. I had the same dream again." Jazz moved toward him and Frederic went rigid, shaking his head. "I—it's fine, Jazz, honestly. I'm—it just—I'm awake now. It's fine." He took a deep breath and started coughing like the first night Jazz had stayed at camp with them, suffocating on the thick aphotic air of some other country, some other world a world apart.
"I know it's fine," Jazz said, and kept moving until he could see the dim features of Frederic's face, his nose and eyes and mouth all a soft smear of charcoal in the darkness. He saw him try to smile, watched the smile slide off the tired slope of his lips.
"I am sorry. I know I always wake you, but I—I do try to be quiet."
Jazz leaned closer until their shoulders brushed together, not sure what he was supposed to do but knowing that he needed to do something. For all the nights he'd let the dreams tiptoe back and forth between them untouched, undiscussed, unabated… he owed his friend at least this, at least his companionship if he could offer nothing else. "I don't want you to be quiet, Frederic. I want you to wake me up when you're hurting so I can try and fix it."
Frederic took a deep breath and shook his head again, a little more gently. "I'm afraid you can't do anything to fix this, Jazz, but it's… it's alright. They—are only dreams, after all."
After a moment Jazz turned to look at him, watched his chest rise and fall with stuttering breaths. "What was it about?" he asked quietly, aware that some words were only fit to be whispers in the deepest part of the night. "Can I ask?"
"My sister," Frederic answered, voice breaking on the word. Jazz leaned closer until he could feel the warmth between them. "I just, I always... dream about my—sister."
"Emilia?" Emilia was a name Jazz knew only in passing, from listening to Frederic talk to Polka or to Viola or to the angels that haunted his sleep. It was a word that in Jazz's mind didn't belong to a woman so much as to a place, a hazy idea of green grass and old vineyards and tire swings hanging from the broken branches of dry oak trees. It gave him shivers to hear it, the way it spoke of something ineffable, something precious and lost to the fragmented seas of time. "Do you dream about her?"
"Yes, I—yes." He took shuddering gasp and Jazz reached out to touch his shoulder, his back. "Every night I dream about her, and I… I wake up and—she's—gone.
"You don't have to tell me," he whispered, but Frederic went on as if he hadn't heard him, words pouring out of him like he couldn't make them stop.
"She says, she asks me to come back, says she's missed me, that she's been praying for me, and I—sometimes I don't even know who she is." He pressed his face to the crook of his arm, quivering in the darkness, and Jazz wrapped his arm around him, embraced him, tried to keep to keep the demons away.
"You're okay, Frederic. It's okay."
"She just, she's so—" he faltered, shaking, and Jazz tightened his grip just a little. "She's so small, in my… my dreams, she—she fits almost in my hands, she's so small. I'm holding her and she's dying and she's so—small. She keeps running through my fingers like sand."
In all his years as captain of the rebellion Jazz had never gotten used to this, this uselessness of holding anguish by the hand and having no idea how to help. Beside him Frederic sobbed and rocked and buried his bright-shadow face in the flowing white fabric of his sleeve.
"It was just a dream," Jazz murmured after a minute, taking on the soft, deep voice he saved for the shell-shocked soldiers that the war had brought home. "Everything is alright here, I promise.
"I can't, I don't, I—I don't even recognize her! She is slipping through my fingers and she just keeps saying, I love you, I've waited for you, and I don't even know who she is. I wake up and her voice is gone and her face is gone and if—if I don't remember her, what proof will the world have that she ever existed? That she existed that I loved her and that she changed my whole world?" He turned to Jazz and asked, his voice like jagged grapevines clambering through toppled chimneys, "Where will I keep that… half… of me?"
Jazz didn't know what to say to that so he just held him as Frederic cried and broke and trembled in his arms, his white silk nightshirt wet with tears and nightmares and soft stifled breaths that would never see the morning light. Jazz pulled him closer, pulled Frederic into his lap and then let him sob there until it was all gone, the pain and the tears and the grief and the half-formed memories, the unanswerable questions that haunted him even in his sleep. He held him until the fear passed and he was whole again, a quivering, hiccuping mess of an unbowed man.
"Sorry," Frederic managed finally, and this time his voice didn't shake.
"It's okay," Jazz said, and let the silence settle down over them again while Frederic struggled to compose himself, sniffling in the warm dark of their shared tent.
"I don't usually… fall apart like that." Frederic sighed and sat up, scrubbing one embarrassed hand across his face. "It has been a long week, I suppose."
"Don't worry about it. It happens to the best of us." Jazz paused for a moment and then asked, softly, "Hey, do you want to go sit outside for a bit?"
Frederic looked at him, a little confused and maybe more than a little wary, like he was afraid he had just revealed this vulnerable softness to a man too embarrassed to see it for the gift it really was. "You can, if you'd like to. I—would rather stay here."
"No, come with me." Jazz was not a man of words. He had no real way to communicate what was all bound up in his chest, yes, I hear you, I will accept the burnt-wood offering of your late night heart. So instead he stood up as well as he could in their little tent and extended a hand down, saying, "I wanna show you something."
Frederic hesitated and then took his hand and followed him out into the clear, windy darkness of a Forte night. The warm embers of their fire glowed softly, sparked to life here and there by the breeze, and Jazz handed the poker across to Frederic and then began to rummage through his bag. Frederic sat down on a tree stump nearby and began to stoke the fire quietly, watching Jazz out of the corner of his eye.
"You aren't going to offer me brandy again, are you?" he murmured finally as Jazz pulled two tin cups from his pack. "I've already told you it gives me an awful headache."
"No, I have something even better than brandy." Jazz set the cups down in the soft dirt and dared a glance at Frederic as he reached across to pull the copper kettle off its thin wire hook. In the orange light Jazz could see the tell-tale ruddiness streaked across his face, eyes swollen and cheeks pale in some places and blotchy in others. He wondered how long Frederic had been crying before he'd woken up, but he had already dared too much for one night so instead he threw another branch into the burgeoning flames and asked, "You okay? Want me to pull some blankets out here?"
Frederic shook his head and smiled a bit, glancing up at the fast moving clouds. "I'm alright, thank you. It's not as cold as I had thought it might be."
"It's usually nice this time of year. Can you hear the river?"
"Mmm." He paused, listening for a moment, and then asked, "What river did you say this was? Forza?"
"Fusion." Jazz emptied the remnants of his water skin into the kettle and then set it back over the flames, listening to the soft hiss as the heat licked the beads of liquid from the sides. "It runs lengthwise across the whole continent, but most all the bridges have fallen into disrepair in the past few decades. It's a rare that anyone really gets to see the river close-up anymore."
"That's a pity. It was quite beautiful when we crossed before." Frederic paused and then added in a low voice, "Everything down here is beautiful."
Jazz looked around at the wide open fields around them, dotted here and there with yellow-faced flowers and clusters of sycamore trees, and then up ahead to where Fort Fermata towered in the distance, broken and stately and rasping against the diamond studded sky. It was, he thought, maybe the first time he'd ever heard his homeland called anything but unstable.
"Yeah," he said after a moment, still gazing up at the stars he'd had forgotten were there. "Yeah, it is. Here, do you want to hold the cups?"
He passed the mugs across and dug through his pack again, searching in the darkness for a secret pocket he knew by touch alone. He pulled the leather flap loose and drew out one of the tiny cheesecloth packets he kept there, tied in the middle with a fraying piece of pink twine. It was nothing, and it was worth its weight in gold.
"What is that?" Frederic asked softly, and Jazz looked up to see his dark eyes following him, tracing the motion of his hands.
"It's… a tea packet." Jazz reached over and took the lid off the kettle and dropped his little bundle inside with thick, uncertain fingers. This, too, was an offering, and he was afraid Frederic wouldn't know how to receive it. "I tends to be strong, so I think one should be enough for two cups."
Frederic smiled at him, eyes red but lips gentle, almost teasing "You are right," he said, "I do enjoy tea better than brandy."
"It's not just any tea." Jazz returned his smile and then turned his head to look up at the stars again, pretending that he was not baring the fragile throat of his wretched soul. "It's tea the way my mother used to make it when I was a kid, before… before she died."
Frederic looked at him with an infinite tenderness in his narrow face, understanding starting to settle into the sleepless lines of his face. "Oh," he murmured. "I'm very sorry. I shouldn't poke fun."
"It's okay. Luckily my mom wasn't the kind of woman to slip her kids booze before bedtime."
Frederic laughed, sudden and deep, and Jazz watched the fire making sharp shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and thought about how strange it was that the emptiness only made itself known when he smiled. "Well," Frederic said, "yes, I am glad to hear that. The twenty miles we have to walk tomorrow sound exhausting enough without having a migraine, too."
Jazz found himself starting to laugh too, awash in the quiet ache of feeling joy and sadness all at once. "Are you saying that if I pulled out a bottle of straight whiskey and said, 'This stuff always reminds me of having dinner with my mom,' you'd drink it?"
"If you offered it to me? Of course."
Jazz laughed and rolled his face to the sky, feeling his eyes burning at the edges with unshed tears. He was exhausted and giddy and drained and the world around him was beginning to smell like his mother, all flowers and sugar and cinnamon cloves. It was strange. It was beautiful. It was the sort of memory that was already imprinting itself into the very back of his brain.
After a long minute he sat up again and reached the kettle off its little hook, the handle warm and solid in his hand. "This was my mother's solution to everything," he said, pouring first Frederic's cup and then his own and imagining, in his mind's eye, his childhood kitchen—the white walls and the open door and the blue of his mother's skirts as she moved. "If one of us came home after a bad day she would sit us down at the table and pull out a slice of cake and a pot of tea and say a blessing while we ate."
"What was her blessing?" Frederic asked, lifting the cup with careful hands, and Jazz looked at him, saw the shadows of the fire move across his face.
"Joy—" he whispered before he could stop himself, before he could remember that he did not share this part of himself with anyone "—for your sadness. Forgiveness for your badness. And…" He stopped, his voice hoarse, his throat closing on the realization that he had not said these words in eighteen years.
"And?" Frederic was soft beside him, not pushing but enfolding, waiting, the world so quiet he could hear their mingled breath. Jazz sat there and thought about all the darkness Frederic had shared with him, all the fears and dreams and swallowed sobs he had let him see, the shaking hands and broken parts of a man too proud to let the shadows seep into morning, and he took a deep breath.
"And a heart," he answered, and then stopped, breathed again. "To hold all the world's gladness."
Frederic gazed at him, eyes warm and watery and turned the color of their tea in the flickering light. Jazz wanted to grab Frederic's arm and make him see, wanted to pry himself open and show him all the fractured memories inside, the sleepless nights and the ragged tears and the scars and the stitches and all the broken hearts he'd ever held inside his chest. He wanted to tell him I understand. I understand. I wake up from those nightmares too—I lie in bed all alone and wonder what kind of world could ever move on from this grief.
Instead he murmured, "She died when I was nine. She and my brothers both did."
Frederic did not offer condolences. He did not assure him that she was angel now, or that she was in a better place. Instead he smiled, a little sadly, and held his cup in his hands. "She sounds like a wonderful woman."
"I always thought so."
They let the silence stretch between them as Frederic took a sip of his tea and hummed in an earnest sort of pleasure, deep down in his chest. Jazz looked into his own cup and stirred it with the very tip of his finger the way he had as a child, watching the ripples form. "Do you like it?"
"It's delicious." Frederic smiled at him again, and this time the sadness that laced his lips wasn't so pronounced. "It tastes like a flower field."
"It's mostly made with floral powder, with other herbs that are supposed to add a different flavor on top. It took me years of experimenting to make it taste the way hers always did." Jazz didn't mention the way he had cried into his teacup the day he finally found the right mixture, didn't dare to turn into words the way he curled up on the floor and drank and sobbed and missed, his mother's spirit so close he could almost touch her but not quite. Instead he cleared his throat and said, "It's even better with honey. I should have brought some."
"I am certain we'll find some," Frederic told him, like they were going to be friends forever—like this wasn't a weird one-off conversation that would end when the morning light came and they all went their separate ways again, Frederic to his wandering and Jazz back home to his war.
Somehow the certainty gave him hope.
"Yeah," he said after a moment. "I'm sure we will."
They drank their tea in quiet, listening to the crickets around them and the faint sound of rushing water in the distance. Frederic sipped his drink like it was a precious thing, held it between his fingers with a reverence befitting not just a mix of leaves and water but a memory, a piece of soul, and they stared at the stars together and watched the fire die out.