(A/N: This chapter backtracks a little because Chapter 15 was rewritten for ao3 (you can find me as strollamongthestars) after some file loss. I'm uploading it here as Chapter 16 because it gives more detail to the ending of Chapter 15 and sets up Ch. 17 a lot better. Enjoy and fav, review if you want to brighten up my day!)

Reaver watched, waiting for Sparrow to finish her thought at first. She was staring at him in that defiant way. Her green eyes leveled at him and her brows lowered into a firm line. It struck him then, as she insisted that his life not only mattered but mattered to her that Reaver understood how annoyingly good she was. Pure. How she could believe that after everything, and she did believe it. He could see it in the stubborn set of her jaw and earnest insistence in her voice. It was almost enough to change his mind, almost. He lifted his drink to his mouth and swallowed another bitter mouthful. If his life mattered at all in this world, Reaver had a feeling that it was not in the positive way Sparrow meant.

The change in her demeanor was quiet but quick. The bottle of Hobbe's Water was still raised to his lips when a shiver seemed to go through her, like the temperature around her had dropped suddenly. Her pupils dilated and her head dropped, her arms went boneless. As quickly as she had engaged him in conversation, Sparrow was gone.

"Hero?" He put the bottle down, a needle of worry stabbing his heart. There was magic at work in this, though whose was what worried him more. He had seen the shivers, the twitches that seemed to roll through her on occasion and leave her irritated and wary. Reaver straightened, searching the dark shadows of the tower for movement, his eyes attuned to the unnatural creature he was expecting to find. He saw nothing, just cobwebs collecting dust and shoved aside furniture. The Shadows had not come to the tower, or if they had, they were content to watch events take place.

"Sparrow?" he reached out to her now, gently placing a hand on her shoulder to shake her awake.

She moved suddenly, startling him, and turned to the side, bracing her palms against the cold stone floor, and vomited.

Reaver recoiled initially, luckily he avoided getting any sick on himself, but he found himself almost compelled forward again. He moved from his spot by the fire and positioned himself behind Sparrow, holding her hair back from her face as she retched what seemed like every meal she must have ever eaten onto the floor.

"Well I'm never eating again." He joked dryly as he cast about for something she could wipe her mouth with. She might actually be happy they found the Hobbe's Water now so she could at least burn the acrid taste of bile from her tongue. He pulled a rag from the lopsided table behind them that Sparrow had previously used to prep their food. "Here." He offered her the rag, letting it dangle well within sight and reach, but Sparrow made no move to take it or thank him. Reaver had assumed that Sparrow had come back to herself. His lips pressed together into a thin line, the needle of worry quickly transforming into a pulverizing mace. He had experienced his own haunting visions, but they were merely that, distractions that pulled his attention away from the real world. They didn't pull him completely away not like…Reaver held Sparrow to his chest, if only so that he could see her face without letting her hair get completely covered in sick. He gently wiped her slack mouth with the rag, her eyes were still vacant.

In the next few minutes Reaver came to several conclusions: first, he believed in Sparrow's heroic invulnerability as much as any common peasant, second, someone was interfering with Sparrow (which he considered to be his responsibility), and third, one day this would be a very amusing story, provided Sparrow ever woke up. He transferred her to her bedroll and laid her down in a position he liked to call the "party went well" position. She was on her side, left arm bent and tucked under her head and left leg bent to prevent her from turning onto her stomach. If her eyes hadn't been wide open, Reaver could have believed that Sparrow was sleeping and experiencing an active dream.

"Well," he sat back, a little nauseated by the sick feeling in his chest, and studied the shadowy tower room once more in the flickering fire light. "This is highly irregular." He saw nothing there, but that didn't mean he wasn't being watched. It was as he was studying the shadows again, his tired mind wandering towards darker thoughts that Reaver noticed a blueish light illuminating the particular dark corner he was glaring at. It was a familiar shade, Sparrow's shade of blue, the color that cracked through her skin when she lobbed fireballs at the enemy (mainly at him). He turned his gaze back to the entranced woman who was now covered in more will lines than he had ever seen and floating several inches off the ground. Her brow was furrowed into a hard line, her lips pulled back into an angry snarl. Her new will lines etched themselves into her skin in intricate swirling patterns as he watched, their blue glow pulsing against her skin. The warm orange glow of the fire retreated and the tower filled with the cool glow of Sparrow's power.

Reaver rose quickly to his feet and reached for his gun, the engraved golden handle fit perfectly into his palm. The tower began to shake as the power continued to build around Sparrow. Dust sprinkled onto his head from the rafters above.

"Hero!" Reaver called out.

Her pupils snapped back into focus, the blue will lines faded and she slammed into the wooden floor. She groaned and raised her hands to her eyes, pressing the heels of her palms into them.

Reaver eyed the rafters, still nervous that they might collapse on them before dragging his attention back to the woman on the floor. "Care to explain?"

"I think, I think I just told Theresa to fuck off." Sparrow remained still, frozen almost with her eyes covered for a moment longer. Her breathing came in shaky gasps and her hands still trembled, the pressure they put onto her eyes doing very little to hide the tremors from Reaver's shocked gaze.

The pirate remained where he was, hand still on the hilt of his gun, his mind quickly processing his companion's words and the possibly dire consequences. Theresa was old, ancient even. She was manipulating events around Albion long before he had strutted onto the scene with a fancy pistol and ship full of despots.

"About time wasn't it?" He breathed out with a laugh, "Though I didn't expect to be quite so dramatic. Perhaps next time I host a ball you'll do it again? I can't think of anything that would be more exciting than to dance in an enclosed space with a Hero who looks like she's about to burst into pieces."

Sparrow didn't seem to hear him. She just groaned.

Reaver sagged against the table, piled high with manuscripts and mason jars, and swept his hair back from his face. He was incredibly relieved that the tower hadn't come raining down on them. The thought of being buried again…it didn't sit well. "Oh tosh," he scoffed, hoping to keep whatever dignity he had left by hiding his intense relief that Sparrow hadn't combusted. "It's not like the old Seer can do anything to you now, right? She'll hold a grudge but what's that to you out here in the wide open fields of Albion?"

Sparrow's hands slipped from grounding into her eyes to taking two handfuls of her copper locks. She looked more than worried, she looked exactly how the good girl who just told her parents off would, horrified and instantly filled with regret. The will lines were fading slowly beneath the sun-warmed color of her skin, but they still glowed gently in spider web patterns and swirls around her eyes and down the side of her cheeks onto her neck. If Reaver were a study of the patterns, which he wasn't quite sure he was ready to admit, then he would say that the patterns had changed. Her will lines appeared only when she exercised her powers and faded quickly after, the strength of their brilliance directly related to the amount of power she used. The strength and persistence of her will lines was more than he had ever seen either in the brief time they had been together now or when they had traveled together before. If Reaver were one to admit such things, he would say that it worried him. That the sequence of events: the disappearance of the Dark Seal, the attack in Bowerstone Square, the pure invasion of his privacy that was their shared vision of his past, and now Sparrow's growing will abilities were, on their own, troubling. Taken together as somehow connected events and he might wonder, even as he espoused his support of her independence of that crone, if the powers of an ancient seer might be useful.

Reaver let his hand fall away from his gun placing them on either side of himself to grip the edges of the table. He was still exhausted from the trek from the Bowerstone camp to Garth's tower. Sparrow's powerful aunt was a complication that he had believed solved when Sparrow had hinted at their estrangement to Lotus. He knew that she wouldn't have approved of Sparrow helping him, but he wasn't sure what Sparrow would do when confronted with the seer's displeasure. Like many things he was unsure of with Sparrow, what would she do with the Dark Seal when they found it? Even at his strongest he would have hesitated in fighting the hero head on, but now weakened as he was….

"She called me a 'fool.'" Sparrow's soft voice cut through his thoughts.

"Of course, a true Hero is a powerful ally to have."

Sparrow lowered her hands, pushing herself up onto her elbows. Her brows furrowed in thought as she recalled the most recent events.

Reaver waited, expecting more from her. She certainly had never left him alone and he wasn't about to allow something like his traveling companion turning into a human chandelier go unexplained.

"Are you going to make me ask, Hero?" he finally said, rolling his eyes at the puzzled expression that flitted across her face.

"I can't…."

"You will. You pried from me a tale I have shared only," he thought back to the petrified face of last person who learned the truth of him. That was the last time he kept his diaries in his residence. He had taken to burying them in the ruins of Oakvale after that. "Once, funnily enough that was an accident as well."

Sparrow pulled herself into a fully seated position, crossing her legs as she straightened, thought the action did make her face turn a little green. "I'm not sure what happened, is what I'm trying to say." She frowned, "or that I want to tell you. It is…private."

Reaver narrowed his grey eyes as her, and their gazes met each a force of stubborn will. "As was mine."

Sparrow held his gaze for several heartbeats and then looked away, her face resigned. "Theresa has been watching me through the Spire, I think. I'm not sure how. When I was imprisoned there…." Sparrow trailed off, and then she brought her hand to her thigh. She smacked her palm against her leg repeatedly, drumming out a rhythm that Reaver recognized from his short time as Lucian's prisoner.

"The Spire is more than a prison or a tower. It's alive. It breathes and beats with a power of its own. Lucian used that power to control. The heartbeat of the Spire." She stopped drumming. "Sometimes I can still feel it. Pulsing in my bones, as if I never left. Especially when we would talk about Theresa." Sparrow looked up at him, not quite raising her head fully to stare at him fully, but watching him through the curtain of copper hair that had fallen over her face. Her emerald eyes still burning with the last dregs of power.

Reaver remembered her unwillingness to discuss her adopted aunt's past, the odd trances that Sparrow tried to brush off, and most of all he remembered Theresa's wizened voice warning Sparrow the day they had defeated Lucian that the Spire had only enough power to grant one wish. Clearly, she had lied.

"Tonight Theresa used that power to pull me," Sparrow struggled for a moment, clearly unable to find the words to explain what had happened after she had unceremoniously slumped over during their dinner conversation. "Out, like water from a glass."

"Or vomit from your mouth." Reaver remarked, it should be noted rather unhelpfully, if the ensuing grimace from Sparrow was anything to judge by.

"Did I-?" Sparrow started to question but quickly found her answer by first looking at the ground around her and a quick glance down at her person. "Shit."

"Shadows, I'm glad you didn't do that."

A glare. Punctuated by a thrum of power that made the hairs on Reaver's arms stand on end.

"I was only joking." Reaver protested. "Partially."

Sparrow shook her head, "I didn't mean to do that." She looked at her hands, shaking as they were, as if the answer was somehow printed onto her skin. Folded into the creases of her knuckles scribed onto the backs of her hands. "I didn't mean to do that."

It was at that moment that Reaver, exhausted as he was, concerned (objectively, as anyone would be in such a situation) as he was, and as enduringly self-absorbed as he was, began to realize that Sparrow the Hero of All was, quite frankly, losing it. Thus, a rare moment occurred, instead of pushing Sparrow to finish her account of the evening and satisfy his curiosity, Reaver suggested they go the fuck to sleep and deal with it in the morning to which Sparrow wholeheartedly agreed. The only true trouble was where they would sleep now that Sparrow had christened such a wide area with her own fine cooking, as Reaver put it.

An hour later, Sparrow's hair was still damp from her bath in Garth's remarkably uncluttered bathing facilities. She placed a hand on Reaver's elbow as he began to push open the door to the room at the top of the tower.

"Did I tell you that Garth left a note?"

It had been a climb getting to the only other room that existed in the tower. One, stairs. There were a lot of stairs. Second, Sparrow's fear of heights had kicked in about halfway up (entirely Reaver's fault, if he hadn't joked about spitting on visitors she wouldn't have thought about falling) and then progress slowed to a crawl. Literally.

"Did he?" The door latch was stuck and Reaver tried a second time to pull the lever down to unlatch it. The latch hardly moved.

Sparrow grabbed his arm again, nudging him to the side of the narrow stair. She kept talking while she fiddled with the door. He was only too happy to let her.

"He was very clear. Here's the key to my tower, oh by the by, don't sleep in the bed at the top. It's haunted." She gave the latch another tug and the sound of metal snapping echoed down the stairs. The door creaked open, nothing but moonlight illuminating the dusty room on the other side.

"And you decided to reveal this now because?" Reaver sighed.

"I think we should sleep on the floor. I'm done with ghosts."