Day 42:
"What the hell were you thinking?" Cor's blade vanished as he advanced on her. He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her once until her head tilted back to look at him.
"You know what I was thinking," she said distantly.
"You can't keep doing this, Reina." He knew he shouldn't have been shouting at her, shaking her like he could force some sense into her. He was only going to make everything worse.
Her eyes went distant. Dead. Staring through him, not at him. "I need to protect you."
But Gods damn it, if she would just admit that she wasn't alright, that she needed someone or something or anything.
"I don't need to be protected! And stop using that Gods damned ring!" He forced himself to let go of her before he shook her again.
The ashy lines had faded away on her face and neck, so far as he could see in this light. But her arms were hidden beneath long gloves. Every time she used that magic, she payed for it. It wasn't worth the cost.
"I'm fine," she said. "I know what I'm doing."
"Do you? Because it looks to me like you're too busy worrying about other people to see anything at all. A day will come when you can't afford to spend the attention or energy on making sure everyone else is safe. You're just going to have to trust that we can do that ourselves."
"I'm not strong enough to do that." She turned away.
He grabbed her arm and turned her back. "Then you'd better damn well get stronger. Or you're going to get yourself killed because you're paying attention to where I'm standing instead of where you're standing."
Her eyes widened, just for a moment, and her breath stopped even though her lips parted. The distant, empty look cracked. Underneath she was just broken. A tear ran down her cheek.
Shit.
He had known. He had damn well known and he had done it anyway.
He let go of her arm but she never moved. Just kept on staring straight ahead for what seemed like a solid minute before she crumpled. Her head dropped, her hands covered her face.
"Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop…" She whispered. Not to him. "Please stop…"
"Reina…" Cor touched her shoulders cautiously. She didn't pull away.
Hell if he knew what to do with this but he was the one who had started it and he wasn't walking away without fixing it. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. She went. Wasn't clear if she knew he was there or not. Not until she hugged him back a minute later and buried her face against his chest. She gripped the back of his shirt and he hugged her tighter. Maybe that helped. Maybe he was just squeezing her so tight she couldn't breathe, but eventually she did stop crying. Then she stood there leaning against him and breathing uneven, shallow breaths.
They were still standing in some daemon-infested ruin.
"Come on." Cor squeezed her once more and released her. "Let's get out of here."
She pulled away, looked at him, and ran both hands over her cheeks to dry them. She was still unsteady. Still not okay. And still pretending she was.
"We need the mythril." Her voice shook when she spoke, however hard she tried to sound fine.
They found whatever she had come for in the next room. After that they followed her out, listening to the sound of their own footsteps echoing in the silent halls.
Cor drove back to Meldacio at a more reasonable speed than he had left it. Iris wasn't sitting next to him, gripping the edges of her seat like she thought that was the only way she was going to stay in it. Somehow he didn't think Ardyn was worried about mortality.
Nothing had changed in Meldacio. It seemed wrong that a whole outpost could sleep through what had just happened, but it was probably better. Wasn't any of their concern what Reina did or didn't do. Everything in the trailer was just how they'd left it: beds in disarray, Cor's coat on the floor, and the door swinging open.
Cor dragged a chair inside and sat at the foot of Reina's bunk, arms crossed over his chest.
"You should get some sleep," she said. As if nothing had happened. As if she hadn't just broken down because he had grabbed her arm. As if she hadn't just spent five minutes sobbing into his chest.
They were pretending everything was fine. Eventually he was going to get sick of this charade. He was already sick of it. But he played along because he had already yelled at her once tonight and she didn't need anything else on her plate.
Didn't mean she was getting off the hook.
"So you can run off again?" He asked.
"Where would I go?"
"If I knew the answer to that, I'd be more comfortable letting you sleep unsupervised."
Reina sighed. "I've already accomplished what we came to do."
"You tell a convincing lie these days," Cor said.
The others had climbed into their bunks already, though Iris watched their exchange intently. Ardyn was, as usual, unconcerned about everything going on around him.
"What can I do to convince you?" She asked.
"Nothing. Now go to sleep," he said.
"You know I can't."
"After all that?"
The last royal glaive on Lucian soil, a fourteen hour drive to opposite corners of Lucis, and one galavant through some ancient ruins and she still wasn't sleeping.
She shrugged, staring at her bed with distaste.
"Then lay down and pretend like you're sleeping." Cor leaned back in his chair. What hours remained of the night would be long—but not as long as tomorrow. He would worry about the problem of what to do tomorrow night when he reached it.
She unlaced her boots, pulled off her cloak and her shoulder-length gloves, and climbed into her bed. From where he sat he could see her eyes closed. She didn't move again for a while.
One by one they fell asleep. Iris, satisfied that nothing else was going to happen, was the first. It was difficult to tell with Ardyn, but as far as Cor could see, he also drifted off. Reina lay in precisely the same position, so still he half wondered if that was her at all or some new trick. If she had fallen asleep he couldn't tell. If she was awake, he couldn't tell either.
Not until she spoke. "I'm going to try to Dream again."
It was quiet enough that he had no doubt she meant the words for him alone.
"Don't you dare. Just go to sleep."
"I need to see." She propped herself up on one elbow to look at him. "You know why."
And she hadn't managed to last night.
Cor sighed. He rose from his chair and sat on the end of her bunk instead, where he could tell when she fell asleep. "You have thirty minutes from the second you fall asleep. After that I'm waking you up, Dream or no Dream. If I can't, I'll call Regis."
"That's fair."
"Good." Because he hadn't been planning to negotiate.
She tossed and turned more when she was actually trying to fall asleep. Then she would get all worked up because she couldn't, which only made her less likely to.
"Stop it." Cor laid his hand across her shins. "Choose one position and stay there. Stop trying to fall asleep and just do it."
"How can I fall asleep if I'm not trying?" Her face might have been blank, but the frustration he expected bled out in her voice.
"That's usually when it happens."
She fell still and silent. For a little while. When she started to move again he squeezed her leg in reminder.
"You can put yourself to sleep. You're not a child."
With the drama she fit in that sigh, she might still have been an adolescent, though.
She rolled onto her other side so she could look at him. "Cor, I haven't slept straight in ten years."
"This is a good time to start."
"I can't."
"Not while you're talking to me, you can't. Now shut up. Close your eyes. Find somewhere comfortable—last chance. Don't think about sleeping. Don't worry about how you can't Dream if you can't sleep. Don't worry about how Regis is getting by back in Insomnia. He's fine. Think about something mundane. Peaceful."
There was enough light from the lamps outside to see her face by. Stillness was broken by growing frustration. A furrow formed between her brows. The muscles along her jaw flexed.
Cor squeezed her leg again. "Think of something else. You remember the combat lessons I gave you?"
He hadn't. Not in this lifetime. But the way she fought and what she had said about her Dream told him he had, somewhere in her past, even if not in his.
"The blocking drill," he said, "Run through it in your mind. Then the next one. Every pattern you can pull from your memory, step through it. Square your feet. Lift your staff. And don't you dare get sloppy."
He thought he saw a smile. Could have been a trick of the light.
The frustration drained from her features. So did the tension from her body. In its place was the blank focus that filled a mind when muscle memory took control. And maybe something like peace. They were alike that way.
He guessed ten minutes before she fell asleep that way. She couldn't have gone far through her drills in that time, if he had taught her everything he knew. Which meant she had been exhausted and keeping herself up in restless frustration. Or just keeping herself up because she didn't want to sleep. But if he could get her to lay down and close her eyes, maybe he could force her to get some rest sometimes.
From the moment he heard her breathing shift to the slow steady pace that signaled sleep, he timed her. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Somewhere along the way he saw the second shift—the one that meant she had reached what she called the Black River. And somewhere after that, with tension growing in her body and her hands clenched into fists, tears began to stream past her temples to wet her hair. He fought with himself over waking her up then, but kept his word to her.
Thirty minutes.
Cor leaned forward to touch her shoulder. "Reina. Wake up."
Even though it had taken her an hour to get to sleep in the first place.
"Reina." He tried again, more firmly but still low enough not to wake Iris or Ardyn. If that didn't work it was time for a phone call. He would wake Regis at three in the morning for this. Regis wouldn't even be mad.
He hadn't thought it would work. But her eyes opened wide and she stared straight past him before she looked at him. She shook her head. No Dreams.
"He's keeping me out. Or in, rather. I can feel him watching me as soon as I reach the In-Between," she said. "Maybe even outside it."
"The Draconian?"
"Yes."
Given the choice, he would not have handed her Bahamut over a Dream—no matter what Cor thought of her Dreams, at least they weren't consciously trying to kill her. But now was not the time for that talk.
"Go back to sleep," he said. "For real this time. You need it."
She opened her mouth, an objection on her lips, but stopped. "Fine. I'll try."
"Pick up where you left off. The last step you remember."
He lost track of time, waiting for her to fall asleep again. She must have, or else he would never have let his guard down enough to drift off himself. He also had no recollection of laying down next to her, but when he woke in the morning they were both crammed into a too-small bunk.
