X: Undertow

Once he'd found her on the stairs, dead asleep. Other times: in the velvet seat of a bay window, face down with her arms folded at a table, curled in a porch swing. And more often than he cared to remember, he'd rolled over in bed, still half-immersed in some nonsensical dream, to find her next to him under the sheets. To wake up like that, with a lightning bolt of anxiety and his hands frantic to ensure he was still wearing his clothes, it ruined entire days. Weeks, even. Those times, when she woke, or rather when he woke her up, she'd always been defensive, embarrassed. She'd yell back that she couldn't do anything about it while he snapped at her that her preposterous sleepwalking was bound to land her in an even less friendly place sooner or later.

And now he was charging after her into a viciously cold night, a pitch-black gauntlet littered with voracious horrors that might as well have crawled out right out of whatever nightmare she might have been fleeing from. From the doorstep, he couldn't see her. It was too dark, everything too mired in blowing ice and hanging veils of fog to see beyond a few feet. The only thing he could make out was the snow falling in the immediate distance and the cloud of his own breath hanging around his face. She'd covered a lot of ground in the seconds it had taken him to double back to the sitting room for his cloak.

"Cleo!" In the absolute silence, even speaking at a normal level sounded, felt, like shouting. He just had one of those voices, he guessed. Piercing and sharp, it always seemed to come out louder than he ever intended. But with the way those things—the infected— had turned toward sound, calling after her was foolhardy enough without adding volume when it wouldn't likely make a difference anyway. If there were any in the area they'd come staggering toward the sound of his voice, if they weren't already on their way. They'd be piling around her the way they'd suddenly been all over him, and she wouldn't be able to defend herself. It was a scenario he didn't even want to consider, it made his heart beat so hard it actually hurt. For all the noise it would make, he would be reluctant to use the shotgun unless absolutely necessary. When it came to weapons, at least a blade was silent. He started out, clenching his teeth against the painful chill, moving out further toward the gate.

With his eyes adjusting to the dark, he could see her just past the last fencepost, staring into the street with her head down, walking with that slow, weaving stagger. His quick footsteps sunk into the snow, scattering it around him, slowing him down. There was a long running superstition about waking up sleepwalkers, he'd read it somewhere, something about how the soul leaves the body during sleep-but seeing it as it was bullshit and he didn't have the option in any case, he caught his arms around her and braced himself against the inevitable struggle.

"Cleo!" He snarled, laboring to keep his voice down as much as he could, a hoarse angry whisper into the tangled pile of her hairdo. "Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Wake up!"

She thrashed in response, crying out, swinging at him, and he further restricted her movements while she smothered a wordless cry against his neck, bringing up a leg to kick him unsuccessfully. It wasn't long before her resistance weakened, then vanished abruptly as she crossed the line into consciousness with her breathing still quick and panicked, inflating and deflating her lungs inside her willowy frame. She wilted, her arms coming up to brace against him, to push back and look up to orient herself. In the lack of starlight, he could scarcely see her face in the glow of the single, low-burning lantern on the street corner with most of its light blocked by a skeletal oak. Just a vague image with snow on her eyelashes, her eyes wide and blinking, searching for an explanation. "Oh—" she said shakily, her sweet toothpaste breath leaving a tangible fog in the cold dark, her hands clutching his clothes while he was pulling his cloak around her. "Oh!"

"Oh?" Breathless from the fight, he snapped at her. "Jesus Christ, Cleo, move it. Walk. Walk."

Shepherding her forward, she fumbled through the snow in her bare feet with her breath shaking, her shoulderblades practically vibrating from the cold that had crept up under her nightgown. He hurried her back up the brick steps and back through the door, only pausing to lock it before ushering her into the sitting room, parking her in front of the glowing hearth without further comment on how she could have fallen, broken her goddamned neck or leg and lain there in the snow until she froze to death or worse, just waited for those things out there to find her. Leaving the gun on the coffee table, he said nothing while he retrieved the heavy knit blanket from the sofa and wound it around her, over the wool cloak, pooling it over her nearly blue feet.

She looked small. Slumped and swallowed in Stephanie's matronly white bedgown with her hair still coiled up in a disheveled version of the elaborate updo from days before, she almost seemed like a child trying to look grown up, which was admittedly not the way he'd viewed her for years. He sat down himself to thaw by the fire he'd kept stoked all night to ward off the bone rattling cold and swallowed the tirade taking form on his tongue. There was no real reason to make this any more difficult. He'd have to swallow his anger and let her hear his thoughts about it all some other time when she was less fragile. Difficult as that was going to be.

"I'm so sorry…"

"Enough," he told her. "It's over. Just warm up."

"I guess I finally fell asleep," her voice was perceptibly slowed by the dose of laudanum.

"I guess you did," he returned shortly, turning his head to cough into his hand with a violence aggravated by the cold air in his tired lungs. "You're lucky I didn't."

She nodded in slow motion, "Orphen…"

"Shouldn't have taken that damn sedative. Of all fucking places to go...what the fuck were you thinking?"

"I wasn't thinking anything. You know that. I'm sorry."

"It's fine," he grit out. It was becoming a kind of mantra to ward off what would typically be the blooming of an argument. If she would just stop apologizing, he could stop telling her it was all fine when really it wasn't. Nothing was. Not a single goddamn thing was fine.

"It's not..."

"It's fine. You're fine, we're all fine. Warm your feet up."

Quietly she complied, lifting her naked feet to the open hearth one at a time, the fabric of her nightdress spilling back from each bare leg while he made a solid point of not looking at her daintily pointed toes, the snow-damp bandage wound tightly around the narrow stalk of her right ankle or the firelight on the curve of her calves. Mercifully, after a few minutes she tucked them back underneath her, cocooning herself in the blanket again and staring for a time into the flames without saying anything. Her stoic face scrubbed clean of the mess of ruined cosmetics and blood, she gazed in unpracticed silence with that miserable pinch between her eyebrows. While he was making that point of not watching her, as though struck with sudden purpose, a hint of her typical petulance returned when she began tugging at the pins in her hair with a kind of languid, weary hostility. She fought to undo each sculpted curl, struggling with her numbed, shaky fingers for long minutes until he finally knocked her hands away in frustrated impatience, moving behind her and reaching up to slip the pins out for her, gently uncoiling each curl with his fingers so she wouldn't rip it all out and drive him insane while she was doing it. By the end, her posture had softened, her eyes looking half-closed from his vantage point. He would have almost taken her for half-asleep if not for the tear that tracked out from her hooded eye.

"Mariabella put my hair up," she offered, unasked, looking down at the neat pile of hair pins he'd created on the floor in front of his knee and prodding them with her fingertip. "The whole time, I was so upset. We argued about something. I said something terrible…"

She was weeping now, losing her voice in the tears but turning away as though if he couldn't see she might save some of her stubborn aristocratic dignity, as if she'd had any to begin with. "How could I...?" She asked, her voice dropped so low, so husky and odd that it tugged at him. Before he could reply, she was reaching over tentatively, the way someone might reach toward an unfriendly cat, and touched her fingertips against where the bandages hid under his blood soiled shirt.

"Does it hurt?" Her voice came out thick, robbed of all of its usual brass. "Your shoulder…I mean."

"Could be worse," he told her warily. "Still healing."

"You're not well."

"I'm alright, Cleo."

"You have a fever."

"No, I don't." He did. Healing with the assistance of sorcery expedited the body's healing process, flooded white blood cells en masse toward the injury, which brought with it swelling, pain, low-grade fever. It was first year shit, totally explainable, he didn't know why he denied it. He'd had the fever for hours now, though all it did was make the cold a little more intolerable and his fuse a little shorter.

"I can tell just by looking at you," she said, then laid the back of her cold hand against his forehead, where his headband usually would have been if he hadn't removed it hours before when it began feeling like a tightening noose around his aching cranium.

"Your hands are too damn cold to tell anything."

"They are not."

He grabbed them, "They're freezing. Anything would feel like it has a fever to you right now."

With a familiar irritable exhale, she came up on her knees and leaned close, pressing her cool, damp cheek against his while he fought the probably impolite urge to squirm away from the onslaught of claustrophobic panic she tended to bring upon him when she closed in on him like this. "This is what my mother used to do," she whispered after a moment, switching sides as though to be sure, pulling one hand free to press the cold palm against the side of his hot throat. "See? You're burning alive."

No kidding. He was also forgetting to breathe. "Okay, fine."

It must have been all the shared proximity of the last day, helping her around, riding those long hours together on horseback, letting her cry and hang onto him like he had. Normally she didn't touch him in such a familiar way. But then, normally they wouldn't be sitting here together at all, but crisis had a way of forging truces and alliances where there was usually a long, ongoing war. But truce or not, she was far too close for his personal sense of comfort, however skewed that might be.

"You should've taken something for it," she told him, drawing back a little but not enough to drain away his anxiety.

"Sure, that would've been great. So I could be knocked out when you tromped out in the goddamn snow in your sleep."

"No one asked you to come after me," she said, sounding more like herself than he'd heard all day. Finally she let go of him and backed up so he could breathe again.

"Yeah, no one ever asks me. Who the hell else is going to? Your fiancé, I suppose. What's his stupid name again?"

"That is uncalled for," she hissed, the ghost of her recent tears evaporating from the growing heat in her voice. It got his heart beating quicker. It always did.

"Is it? So it's okay for you to nearly kill me so long as I shut up about that?" In hindsight, shutting up about that was actually a grand idea.

"I keep telling you how sorry I am. I'm sorry. Obviously I shouldn't believe you when you tell me how it's fine and you understand. Next time just let me take care of myself, then."

"That would have turned out well, I'm sure. Would you have preferred us finding you frozen to death or being eaten? Maybe both?"

"Doesn't sound like you'd give a damn either way."

"Oh. Of course not. I just go running after you every time you're in trouble for my fucking health, since you can see how beneficial it is to my longevity."

"Why do you, then?"

"Wha—what the hell would you expect me to do? What do you think I am?"

"I never know what to expect you to do. One second you're insisting it's all fine and then you're yelling at me. How the hell should I know?"

"I'm not yelling at you," he insisted. "You're being an idiot. No one asked me to come after you? Good fucking god. You were thanking me for it yesterday."

"Well, now I'm extremely sorry for that."

"Yeah, you would be, wouldn't you? Engaged woman that you are."

"I'm not an-!" she hissed, struggling to her feet in front of the fire, averting her face. "Why do you keep bringing that up?"

"How am I supposed to forget it with you hanging all over me and flashing that goddamn rock in my face?" Honestly, he could never have said why he couldn't just shut the hell up.

She rose up in front of him, catching the mantel over the fireplace to balance her weight off her bad ankle. She was bending forward with her weight on her hands, the bright firelight pouring through the gauzy, borrowed nightdress, projecting the contours of her body beneath like a shadow play, each long limb, the curve of her hip and valley of her waist, an obliviously teasing silhouette backlit by the burning fire, which seemed only appropriate when compared with how seeing it made him feel. The illusion of her as a child, swallowed by the billowing bedgown burned away with the flames roaring behind her.

If he'd believed in Gods, he would have silently asked for help.

With her standing there, Orphen wasn't sure there had ever been a moment in his life that carried through with such clarity, perfect lucidity, even through the fatigue and the opium-tincture. A moment where, with everything he wanted revealed to him in a display of light and shadow, several things were more plain than they may have ever been.

Mostly, that he was a horrible person. That he was incapable of thinking something pleasant or caring about her without closely following that thought with something that made him disgusted with himself.

And that he was so, so completely fucked.

His idea that things would get easier the longer he ignored his unwelcome feelings, that they would eventually fade without his encouragement like someone forgetting to water a plant or feed a pet…they were absurd. For no reason, he remembered standing in a field of cornflowers at dusk, maybe a year—year and a half before. He'd been standing in a field of cornflowers somewhere between Eugenia and Essex with the remaining light going cobalt before turning into darkness, not doing much of anything except thinking and enjoying the silence before she'd surprised him. She'd come up from behind, snuck up from the campsite near the river and touched him on the shoulder, just softly, and he'd startled like a skittish horse, ducking as though attacked, and following that in the chilly blue twilight with the shadowed trees and the clear sky, he wasn't sure if his heart was drumming in that quick, peculiar rhythm because she'd shocked him or because of how she was smiling and laughing with an almost musical sound. At the time, he'd had to tense his muscles, hold his breath, actually clench his fists. Anything to stop himself from acting out, putting his hands on her and catching that bell-like giggle in his mouth to see if it tasted as sweet as it sounded.

He'd snapped something unpleasant at her, his usual defense mechanism, and she'd stopped laughing. But later at night after the fire had dwindled to a ruby glow, he'd found himself thinking about it, skin flushed warm from the memory of it while she and Majic slept nearby, going back to the field of cornflowers in his mind and undressing her in the stomped down crabgrass, tasting the skin in the hollow at the base of her throat and the music of her bubbling laughter dwindling under the weight of his mouth and hands and hips. Sexualizing something innocent as he was constantly wont to do.

No. What he'd suffered through already was nothing compared with what was coming.

Embarrassingly, he couldn't even look away and spare himself. He almost choked on his own tongue. As someone had once told him, and as he'd deciphered months before, the fact that he felt guilty about any of it was the first differentiation between typical lust and other, more complicated, idiotic feelings. It just so happened that, perhaps inconveniently, the two often worked in tandem. They were right now. And maybe, that day long ago in the field of cornflowers, they had been then as well. He wasn't sure when he'd noticed that feeling eating a hole through him, if there had been a specific moment.

She turned, looked at him still sitting on the floor with back against the sofa, knees steepled up almost as though he'd fallen there. "Does it bother you?"

"Does what bother me?" He was, decidedly, bothered.

"The ring. It bothers you."

She didn't seem to notice how he was gaping at her, which was merciful at best. She was more focused on the stupid words he'd let roll off out of his stupid, exhausted, drugged up stupid mouth. "Go back to bed, Cleo."

"Nice. Maybe I should take some more of that laudanum so maybe I'll sleepwalk and end up outside again? I'm sure you'd like that, to shove that in my face like I can help it."

"You mean so I can go running out after you again? Maybe you just won't be satisfied until you've gotten me killed too, huh?"

She said nothing, her gaze dropping to the ground with the weight of a falling stone, looking for all the world like he'd hauled back and kicked her in stomach. And by all accounts, he had. Why he'd even let any of that come out of his mouth, he couldn't explain. His brain wasn't right. In the name of her safety, he'd been almost burned to death, half-suffocated, stabbed, bled out, cracked in the head, almost eaten alive, had run out in the frigid darkness crawling with the walking infectious dead and told that no one had asked him to do any of it. For fuck's sake, no one had to ask him. He'd meant she wouldn't be happy until he'd been killed in addition to all of that.

No. No, he didn't mean that either.

He'd given more than he had to give the last day or so, and he hadn't slept for any of that time. Now, really all he wanted was to curl up somewhere dark and warm and sleep for a couple years because he was losing her no matter how much he did, and she had no idea how it felt. No idea how that was ripping him apart, or how his laughable, pathetic attachment to her were slowly destroying him, like wind erosion on mountains or water cutting a path through limestone. Little by little, over the last few days, that buried feeling had started to throb, ache uncontrollably like an overworked, sore muscle. That long denied, ugly secret was scratching at the door, wanting out. Wanting her.

That's what he'd meant. And he wanted to shout it at her.

Which, probably, would have been the better thing to say. Except maybe the last part. He had a bad habit of speaking without thinking first. Childman had admonished him a hundred times for his lack of planning, and running in blind was never an acceptable battle strategy. But even now, without even a moment's worth of strategizing or planning what to say, it all wanted to come out, to erupt volcanically out from behind his gritting teeth: the awful hidden truth. Choking it back was like trying to swallow a mouthful of thorns. He brought a hand to his own head.

"Fuck. I didn't mean that…Not the way it sounded. Not at all."

Hugging herself, she moved away from the fire, the projection of her bare body under the loose gown vanishing, returning to him a fraction of his dwindling focus. "I know what you meant," she spat, the sound of impending tears snagging the smooth fabric of her voice once more.

"No, you don't. Really. You don't have any idea. Listen...I'm sorry. Just…" He pressed the heel of one hand against a closed eye. He'd gotten himself into this situation, him and his opium lubricated tongue. When was he going to learn when to just shut up?

She didn't reply. She was crying again, turned from him with her shoulders jerking and her face buried in her hands, wobbling away on her sprained ankle and faltering. How she'd gotten that far out in the dark outside could only be that she hadn't noticed the pain while in her fitful, walking sleep. She half-crumpled on the wooden floor and was already struggling up when he came up behind her, reaching down to pull her to her feet and she swung at him listlessly, her voice grinding out through tears with a sound like nails ripping out of wood. "I can stand on my own!"

He towed her up and she struggled, pushing him away with her face hidden by the curls he'd released from their captivity on her head. "Stop it. You know you didn't get anyone killed. What happened had nothing to do with you, you know that!"

"You seem to have a pretty fucking good idea of what I know and what I have no idea about, so you tell me!" She outright screamed at him in the ringing, early morning silence; a sound so shockingly loud it shook him more violently than a peal of sudden thunder. The fury on her face was underlined by the ever present misery that had been there every moment since he'd pulled her out of that cupboard in the burning house; a kind of dumb and mindless anguish, like the pain had gone on long enough that she was used to it, but it still hurt.

"What did it have to do with?" she wailed; her eyes had gone soft-focus like she was looking at something far away. "You tell me! Tell me why the last conversation I'll ever have with my mother was a horrible fight where I told her I hated her! Why is it that the last thing I'll ever say to my only sister is the worst possible thing I could think to say? What's wrong with me?"

He stood frozen as stone while she looked at him wildly, her hands practically fisted in her own hair. She let out a high sob, her shoulders rounding, her eyes squeezing shut.

She went limp under the burden of her admission, her dead weight pulling her back to her knees and he sank down beside her. She was no longer protesting his proximity, only curled into her knees and moaning; wracking, keening sobs that shook her whole body . It was the second time he'd voluntarily put his arms around her in the space of twenty minutes, which was definitely some kind of record. Not that he was keeping records. She seemed to set off a reflex when she drooped forward like that, hunching against the onslaught of misery that would temporarily strip her of any kind of reason or control. When she hunched forward, her hands folded tightly together in her lap, he just reacted by reaching for her on some kind of buried, nurturing impulse. To her credit, she didn't say anything about it or resist further as he might have expected, only buried herself against him and shook, cried like she was breaking apart. No matter if he held her or not, how gentle or awkwardly he smoothed her hair back from her wet face, her weeping only receded when the impulse was spent, and with her sobbing like that, one minute of it felt like a decade. When it did eventually lessen she held fast to him, puffing breath against his collarbone, trembling in the wake of the storm and breathlessly waiting for it to lash back like circling flood tide.

And there she stayed on the floor, collapsed forward into his tense, tongue-tied embrace. What he was supposed to say now, supposed to do, he couldn't have had any less of an idea. He sat, arms where they seemed required while she lay against him, exhausted by her grief, her breath ragged with tears. She'd barely spoken a word since he'd found her in the manor house, and now this. There was no way the entire house wasn't awake now, listening intently to the silence that followed her outrage.

Having had the unconventional upbringing that he'd had, his instincts in this arena provided little help. When he'd been hurt, afraid…he'd been told to be strong. To be a man. Azalie would wrinkle her nose unsympathetically and remind him that he was a boy. When he'd been inundated by cruel grief following her accident, in the days afterward, before the mock funeral that had prompted his enraged departure…there had been no one. No one he'd even trusted enough anymore to speak to, much less fall apart and scream and sob the way he'd really wanted. The way Cleo was doing now.

He wasn't going to tell her to be strong. He knew that much. She didn't need to hear it any more than he had needed to when everything he'd valued and relied on was suddenly ripped away.

Carefully, with his arms, he gave her a gentle squeeze and she fiercely mimicked the action, as though afraid she was slipping loose. The world was an ocean; he was a raft. A tiny flutter of hitching breath bubbling up out of her while she settled herself, her face tilted up on his good shoulder, gleaming and damp in the amber firelight. Her eyelashes bristled together, spiked wet with tears when she glanced up briefly, maybe expecting a brusque commentary on her thunderclap of hysteria. It made his chest tight, like his blood was too thick for his heart to pump easily.

If things had been different, he would have been there to help her. Been there to save her, save her family, spare her this agony. At the very least, if he hadn't been so soft, so bendable to her requests, he could have gotten her out of the house before it had happened. If that would have been better, it all happening in her absence…well, that was debatable. At least then she could be angry with him for removing her, instead of something abstract.

It would be better because she wouldn't have seen it, her home decimated and invaded. The loss of her sister, whether she'd seen the actual mess that was left of her or not. Bile tickled at the back of his throat just touching the memory with his reaching, anxious, upheaved mind. She vibrated with a wave of remnant tears, the aftershocks from her crying jag once again threatening to overtake her tiny, delicate frame. Funny. He'd never really thought of her as delicate until now. But looking down at her face in the firelight…she was. She was delicate. Small-boned and dainty, blonde as a bottle of sunlight with feathery eyelashes and wide, angry eyes the color of water. She had a perilous kind of allure that dragged a man in like an undertow; it irritated a primitive, nervous urge to either murder or make love, and in his case probably both. But it was easier to think of her that way when she wasn't running her mouth at him, spitting fire: her own kind of siren song. He took a deep breath to focus himself.

"It's easy to say things we don't mean," he smoothed her hair back in his own clumsy attempt at gentility; not one of his strongest qualities by a long shot. "I do it all the goddamn time. It doesn't mean, you know, like they forgot what was important. You know, like that you loved them…or…"

"I'm not at all sure they knew that," she breathed. "I don't know if I ever said it. I certainly didn't act like it. Now I'll never see them…not ever…"

"You don't have to say it to mean it. Or for them to know it, either." Or so he'd heard. He wasn't sure he wanted that to be the truth or not.

"It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense that this happened."

"Come on. Does anything make sense? The only things that make any sense are things we're used to. Things we expect, right? All of this that's happening, everything that's already happened to you…to me, even. It's not going to make sense." He mechanically ran a hand down her back, his palm tracing down the curve of her spine before stopping.

She shifted, sitting on the floor in his arms, exhaling shakily without reply, only a high whine that, even without seeing her, he could interpret as an attempt to swallow another onslaught of tears. His peculiar sympathy-reflex itched again, moving him like a puppet without thinking and turning his head to kiss her lightly on the temple. If she was put off by it, she didn't say anything, only grew very quiet and still, settling into him and after a moment, seeming to have calmed substantially.

"I don't want to feel this way anymore," she whimpered, her cool breath against the fevered curve of his throat, the damp brush of her lips there. He swallowed convulsively against the noose of new anxiety tightening around his neck.

"What way?"

"I don't know. Helpless." Her voice faltered, fighting the impulse to break down again. He understood the feeling too well. He felt that way right now. "What am I supposed to do?"

"No idea," he told her. Being honest for once. "But…hey, we always think of something…don't we? We'll...figure something out. Things'll be okay."

She turned her head, leaning her head on his shoulder again, glancing up to see his face not without embarrassment. "How?"

"I don't know. But they will. Will you trust me on that?"

She gave a vague nod. Instead of saying anything further-which rarely seemed to go well where Cleo was concerned-he turned and cautiously repeated the temple-kiss that had quieted her before, missing this time and catching the top of her cheekbone, just under the outside corner of her eye. Slow and deliberate, but he hadn't meant to linger, though he must have; it felt like he did. It only took a quick upward tilt of her head before she was much, much too close.

With her glassy, out-of-focus eyes and her tiny voice, she whispered at him. "I don't think I'll ever figure you out."

"Why would you want to do that?" He would have laughed but couldn't, and he was too worn out and startled and hopelessly transfixed by her warm breath and the flick of her wet eyelashes to do anything rational or quickly enough to save himself from what was going to happen at the most excellently wrong time.

Only a vague, half-coherent protest sounded, shouted from a distant mountaintop in his reptile brain: Don't.

Don't!

And honestly, he couldn't be sure if he had; if the dry, hesitant press of their mouths had been born of his own doing or hers; if he'd dropped his head or she'd leaned forward. He hadn't intended it, but suddenly as anything, it was happening. Cautiously, one timid kiss followed another in close succession until everything dropped into heart-pounding, tongue-sliding, open-mouthed slow motion, all with clutching hands like nervous birds uncertain where it was safe to land.

When she pulled away suddenly, inevitably, he apologized and swore all in the same rush of escaping, guilty breath. Even though, really, he wasn't sure if he was for sure to blame for it.

Though, since she was so plainly not herself, he was responsible by default. He felt every ounce of that weight dropping on him looking at the perplexed, blinking gaze she avoided looking at him with. Her shining mouth looking wet and a little swollen when she came up on her knees in her nightdress, she used her palms to wipe the clinging hair away from her damp face. Enigmatically, she didn't do what he entirely expected: she didn't leave. Didn't jump up and storm back upstairs. Instead, she just sat back down on the floor slowly, and after a long, uncomfortable minute that lasted a year, she half-turned to him, her avoidant eyes on the happy fire while he made tense, anxious fists against the floor, gripped with an agonizing arousal after just one accidental kiss that couldn't have lasted more than twenty seconds.

Pathetic.

He closed his eyes, breathing in as slowly as he could manage when his body wanted more breath than it seemed to know what to do with. When he opened them again, she was looking right at him, thinking about it. Replaying it in the theatre of her memory the same way he was helplessly doing over and over, unable to stand for all the blood rushing around agitated in his body, his tongue numb with the taste of her, everything pulled under and flailing in the undertow of Hurricane Cleo.

Really. He should have known better than to get so close. To follow her outside. To let her breathe on him. To undo her hair. To get involved, as though he could really avoid it. Especially right now, with her so unstable and him so increasingly sensitive to her and her pain. People said things, did things on a kind of wild, unthinking impulse in times of this kind of extreme emotional stress. He'd told her that himself. It was the same feral desire that was now howling wickedly in his bloodsteam, goading him to push her onto her back and let his hands drink in the topography of that forbidden territory she'd unknowingly taunted him with when she'd stepped in front of the fire.

It was better to stay away. It was essential to stay away. Because obviously, obviously, he couldn't be trusted. Not when he wasn't in full control of himself like this. Not with her frail and volatile and wholly oblivious in regards to any concept of personal space. Not maybe ever.

"I'm…tired," she forced out, flicking a glance up at him before looking away again. It was as good an excuse as any to get the conversation moving, to get them past this moment with them both paralyzed on the floor.

"Let's get you back to bed."

He had already started to stand when she turned a blatantly panicked look on him, her fingers tightening around fistfuls of his shirt.

"Nuh—I. I don't want to be up there anymore…I…can't sleep in there. All by myself. I keep…thinking…"

"Okay, okay. Sleep on the sofa. Alright?"

Her voice, dry and rattling as the wind outside, came out small. "With you?"

He must have hesitated, because she spoke again while he was thinking with his slow brain. She said, "Please?"

"If that...makes you feel better," he heard himself tell her thickly, permission that was utterly against his own judgment.

She was sluggish, her eyes glossed over from her fatigue or the laudanum, maybe. Perhaps that was the missing piece in her erratic mood swings, with her screaming at him one minute then sobbing; spitting venom then kissing him with her lips sweet and slow like honey. Or it could just be that her mental state had been a time bomb waiting to erupt. It could be that it still was.

As he was helping her over to the sofa apprehensively, allowing her to crowd up against him, there was a sense of impending doom. And not the usual, comfortable kind of doom he was accustomed to, when an argument was looming. Easing down onto the cushions with her, the air felt thick, charged up like the summer air after an electrical storm.

Cleo with her cold hands and her knees tucked up under her, she was leaning into him like a possessive housecat, pulling a blanket around them both and he wasn't thinking about it. Not any of it. Tilting his head back on the armrest, Orphen closed his eyes, bowled over by fatigue and humming with muscle cramping anxiety while they lay in a long, frightening silence. When he opened his eyes again, the clock read ten 'til six but the glow around the closed plantation shutters barely registered daylight. Out there it was gray and morgue-cold, but on the sofa, for the first time in what felt like months, he was warm, surrounded by the fragrant halo of her uncoiled hair and an almost dizzy sense of misplaced euphoria.

He couldn't think straight at all.

He should have been thinking about what that kid and the crowd in the doorway of the Lin Tavern had said about the Doctor and the treatment being worthless, the antibody that cost three thousand sockets a vial. Some perverse part of him wanted to know what Cleo thought of that estimation and what she'd have to say in defense of the good doctor and particularly of his family. He should have been thinking about where they would head next or if it was safe to visit Bazilkok, what they would do if Bagup got sicker or Tim never returned. What Majic would do if they had to shoot his father. If Hartia was still pissed off about the blood hex. Who Cleo was going to contact first to make sure they knew she was still alive. If they'd ever find Doctor Farrior. If it was even possible for this disease to be the Gris Cygnus.

What he was going to do now to ensure some measure of safety or even hope when he'd never felt more powerless in his life.

But really, despite everything that he should by all means have been contemplating…all he could think about was that in a thousand years, for all the times he'd contemplated doing it—just kissing her—he'd have never thought it would've happened like it just had. Or that afterward, they would operate on an embarrassed silence as though it hadn't occurred at all. He'd spent the better part of the last three years tamping down every impulse imaginable when it came to Cleo. That at such a crucial time he could let one slip through was embarrassing, but it was even worse how intensely wonderful he'd felt about it at the time. And maybe still did, with the pleasant weight of her body curled up against him, he could almost close his eyes and imagine that this was where she belonged. As much as she would deny requiring any sort of protector, he had long fulfilled the role with little thanks because of that long-denied, ugly secret of his. Because he loved her. Loved her as much as he likely could love anybody.

Laying with her, he found himself breathless with it; crushed under its weight. He found his fingers fascinated with the feel of her hair and the warm rush of breath seeping through his shirt while he carefully gathered her near enough to close his arms around her. Even with the now-familiar sense of frightened dread hanging in the background, there was comfort in it. Even a delirious glimpse of what felt like gorgeous, stolen happiness.

Because with what felt like the world crumbling apart around them, she was safe, and she was here. With him.

The silky hush of her voice surprised him, speaking up from the silence he'd mistaken for sleep. "Your heart is beating so fast."

He pulled in a breath, the golden crown of her head so close it was an inhalation of her: a smell of lavender shampoo and musky smoke from the fire, salty tears and warm skin.

"Yeah," he told her softly. "I know."