Anonymous prompted 18. things you said when you were scared

set roughly ingladrial's verse "Northampton Echoes" and after the episode Buried Secrets.

ooo

He finds her on the rooftop, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, gazing up at a sky that is dark and clouded. The dim outline of her is almost lost against the night, the stars all blotted out, and he wonders what it is she is looking at up there until he tips back his own head, gazing into the inky depths of the clouds, and realises it doesn't matter.

"Hey," he says, sitting down beside her, the slats of the roof creaking beneath his weight. Around them the farm yard is quiet and still, the woods beyond looming in shadowed specters that silently watch them.

She doesn't answer, just continues to stare into the heavens and he glances towards where she sits, dappled in midnight, and wishes he could see her face.

The impulse to touch her comes upon him so suddenly, he is reaching for her before he even knows he will. In the darkness his knuckles graze her cheek, and come away damp.

In the silence on that forlorn rooftop, her shuddering breath seems to scratch the night.

"What if my mother is still alive?" she whispers. Her voice is choked with tears and his heart breaks. "What if they've got her somewhere - experimenting on her? What if they've had her all these years?"

He doesn't know what to say. He never does.

But as he stares back up into the darkly mottled fathoms of the cloudy night sky, he feels the force of her anguish, and understands.

He puts an arm around her shoulders and folds her in towards him. She crumples against his plastron and begins to cry, trembling in his embrace so that he holds her tighter, closer, keeping her together so that she can fall apart and he is glad she is not alone with her grief anymore, that at the least he can be there to face the indifferent night beside her.