Remember when this was all there was?
What?
You and me.
She doesn't realize how little truth there is left in that statement until she hears about Tom. Until everything in her body goes numb, until she stands alone on a courtyard for the dead, trapped for an eternity until Alfred comes and takes her hand.
It's not just us anymore, Rene, she thinks desperately, and it jolts her out of the numbness. As soon as it's gone, she wants it back - she has never been prepared for this kind of catastrophic grief. Rene should be alive, except for her. She can't do this again.
Tom was never supposed to be the one to die.
She locks herself away for three days in an empty room in the safehouse. She doesn't eat, she doesn't sleep. Just lies in a pile of blankets, staring at the blank walls and thinking how could I do this.
It doesn't matter that Dieppe wasn't her fault. She had nothing to do with the three thousand Canadian men; her hands are free from their blood.
But Tom wasn't those men. Tom was family.
She spends three days wondering if she should kill herself. She doesn't know how she'll ever be able to walk again, or breathe without this guilt tearing at her chest - Rene. Tom. Both her fault.
Alfred kicks the door down on the third day.
More accurately, Neil kicks the door down, and then leaves Alfred to enter the room alone. Aurora can't think if she's fine or furious. She can't think a lot of things these days.
"Aurora." Alfred says, and it's his voice - hesitant, quiet but not a whisper - that jolts her out of her stupor. She feels the tears come for the first time, a tidal wave of bruising, and she buries her face in his shoulder and cries until her heart is hurting. Until she has a headache and nearly passes out from her limited gasps of air. And then she curls up into him and lets him stroke her hair and whisper that none of this is her fault, over and over until she falls asleep; until she almost believes him.
The next day, she leaves the bedroom.
As soon as she sees Harry's face, she hates herself for ever considering suicide - he looks so broken, and so young, and she would have left him to deal with this alone. So she brings him into her arms, and he lets himself be held as his tears soak her shirtsleeve full of all that's been taken.
When she goes to Neil, he looks like nothing but lost.
She can't remember a time when Neil - self-assured, forthright, convicted Neil - lost his way. She couldn't even imagine this look on his face, like every hope he's ever had has been torn away. He is a ship adrift on an ocean, and all the earth has sunk into the sea.
Tom is gone. Rene is gone. Siobhan betrayed them (and she knows this hurt Harry, most of all. She's learned to read love on all types of faces, and his is more open than most).
So, they feel a little broken. Torn apart from the team they'd always relied on. When they return to base, they all head immediately to bed. Aurora sits on the edge of hers, quietly waiting for the storm to pass. Or to consume them all; to tear them apart with its devastation.
(A part of her is hoping for the second one.)
A knock interrupts her waiting. She summons the strength of Atlas, and she stands with the world on her shoulders to open it.
It's Alfred.
"I couldn't sleep." He says simply, and Aurora steps aside to let him in.
"Me neither," she replies, and it's only a shadow of a whisper. When did she let herself become this fragile?
They sit in silence for a few minutes, until Alfred takes her hand, and she curls her head onto his shoulder, and then they sit in silence for a few minutes more.
A knock comes less than an hour later.
Harry, this time, his eyes pleading and desperate. "Can I come sit in here, just for a little while?" He asks, and Aurora slides over so he can sit on the bed. They're barely there a minute when her door is slammed open, this time without a knock, to reveal a frantic Neil.
"Aurora, Harry and Alfred aren't in their beds -"
It takes him a moment to register the scene before him. When he does, he deflates. "I thought -" he starts, then breaks off. "I was worried," he finishes instead.
"Come." Harry says sleepily, and the bed is small but they make it fit, a tangle of limbs that somehow ends up being comfortable. And this is exactly what Aurora needs - she has them all within her reach, and with this knowledge, she's finally able to sleep.
She sleeps without nightmares. It's the least life can give her, now.
Tom. Rene.
They will not forget them. They start to heal, slowly, but there are still the imprints of two lives missing in every conversation, every lighthearted joke, every tactical discussion. Their souls are stuck between the DNA of the survivors; adhered to every happy moment the future holds.
The first time Aurora doesn't wake up thinking about them, she cries.
(Moving on feels too much like forgetting, like running from the guilt she's well deserved. Moving on feels too much like acceptance.)
She sleeps over at Alfred's instead of facing it alone.
Harry and Neil come over the next morning, and she feels the bittersweet peace of having these people there to share it with. They will never be complete, not fully, but that doesn't change that she loves these three with all of the desperation and hope she has left in her breaking body, that she will love them this way until her life is done. That they will be alright, eventually.
Someday, this will heal, Alfred whispers to her every night when she can't sleep from the nightmares, and she holds onto this like a liferaft; like every shattered hope she still holds onto. She loves them. She loves them. Someday, someday, someday.