The rustle of bedsheets breaking the silence of the night was essentially a ritual she had become accustom to. The first few times, she had placed her hand on his shoulder, hoping to feel his tension melt at least some under her familiar touch.
It never did.
After a few nights of the same, she had tried just whispering his name...each syllable hanging between them unanswered.
Eventually, she just let him be...pretending that she was capable of sleeping through his relentless tossing and turning. Pretending that she couldn't hear him choke on the occasional sob that he tried so hard to suppress.
He was still her husband, but she could hardly recognize him anymore. The only one who could consistently ground her...one of the only beacons of hope she could find in the new world...had been changed for good. Maybe it was wrong to assume that things would never go back to how they once were, but she had seen it herself the moment he was given the news regarding Henry's gruesome fate.
She was sure she would never forget the instant she could see the warm, familiar light behind his eyes finally flicker out completely. Even in previous moments of hardship she could feel that there was still something there, even if that something was buried so deeply beneath the surface that it seemed to be nonexistent. But this was different. Now there was truly nothing.
After all of the hardships the world had put him through, he finally had nothing left to give. The once hopefully optimistic King was nothing more than a ghost of who he used to be.
Of course the majority of her consciousness ached for him. A smaller part of her was bitter, however, that he seemed to be turning his back on her when she needed him most. If there had ever been a time when she most desperately needed him to look into her eyes, press his forehead against hers, and promise that everything was going to be okay in the same gentle whisper that she had come to know so fondly, it was now...in the aftermath of the loss of so many that she had come to know as friends and of yet another child.
But he never did.
Instead, he would tell her he loved her in a manner that resembled habit more than anything else, but still turn away from her when he slept. He would occasionally turn his lips up into something that almost resembled a smile, but it would never quite reach his eyes.
Maybe he never promised that everything would be okay because it wouldn't be. Maybe he would never truly smile again, and she would never be able to walk past the achingly empty room that Henry had once called his own without struggling to breathe. Maybe this would finally be what broke them. But if it was, something inside her hoped there was a chance that at least they could be broken together, and that maybe they could pick up the pieces just enough to survive.
"Ezekiel," she whispered one night when the bitter chill of winter's approach made his skin cool to the touch. For the first time in a long time, he turned to look at her over his shoulder in response, and hot tears stung at her eyes as she blinked them away. "I'll never stop loving you."
For a moment, she almost saw it...the familiar light that used to flicker behind his eyes...but it disappeared as quickly as it came. And when he turned around to pull her in close to his chest, she wished that the feeling of his rapid heartbeat was more soothing than it felt.
That winter she watched as the vicious cold snap drained the color from the world around them, allowing it to fall into place with their new normal, and the snow fell thick over the graves of all of those that they'd lost.