She's almost surprised by the late-night knock on her door.
Almost, but not quite.
"Come in," she says, her voice hoarse. She knows who it is.
She isn't wrong. Lucille peeks timidly through the door, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her eyes downcast. "I'm sorry to disturb you," she says, and Val bites her tongue to keep from speaking. "But I cannot - I feel as though I should give Nurse Crane some space. I did not know Nurse Hereward long, but I know they were close, and I..."
Lucille's voice dries out at that, and Val finds her own. "You never disturb me," she says, and means every word. "Not ever. You stay as long as you like, alright?"
Lucille smiles, soft and sweet, and Val's heart turns over in her chest.
She knows what this is; she isn't a fool. It should be wrong, it shouldn't be, but it is and Val has seen too much, lost too much, to deny love when it demands to make itself felt. This is love, impossible though it may seem, and she's long since stopped denying it.
And yet she can't bear to revel in it, in Lucille asking for this, because the reason why has torn a gaping hole in the heart of them and the keen edge of grief has only sharpened the agony.
Like a scalpel, Val thinks distantly. With an edge so fine, the cut doesn't hurt until hours later.
Oh, dear God, it hurts now.
They settle down quietly, curling up under their duvets, the silence unnaturally loud. She can't think of anything to say, and focuses instead on Lucille's soft, steady breaths across the room.
Lucille isn't sleeping.
Minutes pass, and then dozens of minutes, but Val can hear every shift, every hitch in Lucille's breathing, and knows the sobs are coming even before they do.
She clicks the light on.
Lucille's eyes fly open, huge and fawnlike in the sudden glare, her face streaked with tears.
"I'm sorry," she says, her voice choked. "I didn't mean - "
Val says nothing, because there's nothing to say. She just holds up the corner of her duvet in silent invitation.
Lucille hesitates only briefly before scrambling across the narrow gap between their beds to climb under the covers. Her tears are still falling, and Val hugs her tight, her own eyes aching as Lucille finally, heartbreakingly, cries.
Val doesn't believe in God. Maybe she did, once, before any trace of faith was seared away by war and loss and grief. Maybe she did before she watched good men die, men she couldn't save, men who begged for their mothers and sobbed with agony, men who died weeping or lived forever maimed.
She doesn't believe in God, but she knows Lucille does, and hopes that it helps her. Hopes that it gives her some comfort, some grace.
She thinks Barbara would approve of that, if anyone would.
She doesn't believe in God, but she believes in this. In Lucille's warm heart, as she cries for someone she had only just begun to know. In the bonds of family and community and love, in the wetness of Lucille's tears on her collarbone, in the simple comfort of holding and being held as grief rages through. Her faith is in no higher power, but in the tight woven bonds between people, in the very fabric of life and death.
She believes in love, and in hope, and in the power of memory.
She thinks - she hopes - it might be enough.
Lucille clings to her, forehead pressed to her collarbone, her slender body shaking, and Val finds herself aching as much with love as with grief. In any other time, any other place, Lucille Marie Anderson in her bed would have been the stuff of fantasies, and yet the only fantasy she has now is of doing something, anything, to help the young woman brave enough to trust her with this.
Val has always been at her best when she's caring for someone else; it lets her shunt her own feelings aside, avoid the battery of emotions she doesn't want to feel. But something about Lucille crumbles all her defenses, and so as Lucille's sobs begin to quiet, Val lets her own begin.
In any other place, with any other person, Val would have fought it, and viciously. Would have held herself together long enough to retreat, like a wounded animal, to lick her injuries in private.
But Lucille is not any other person, and here, now, she surrenders.
Surrenders to grief, and to love, and to the aching, bittersweet feeling of human compassion in the face of agonising loss.
When she wakes in the morning, her cheeks still gritty and damp, it's to find Lucille still sleeping soundly in her arms.
Val smiles through her tears, and holds Lucille a little closer.