AN: This is one of a series of stories based on dialogue prompts.
"I didn't know you could sing."
Will curled himself up and pressed his face into her. She lay beside him in the narrow infirmary bed and stroked his hair. He was going to be fine. They both knew that now but there had been moments after he'd been brought in, bleeding and barely able to open his eyes, when it wasn't so sure. He muttered now and twitched sometimes as though fighting off something in his dreams but he was better. The iratzes were working, the medicines were stopping the poisons, he was recovering.
He didn't seek comfort. He had trained himself out of looking for a hand to hold or soft reassurance. Tessa had learned how to see when he needed it. He couldn't ask for it, even now, all grown up, he couldn't ask for it. So she pulled him in and held him close and waited for the warrior to fall away enough that the little boy inside could grab hold.
She sang to him that night. She sang him lullabies that she knew from her childhood and ballads she had learned from her friends and when he was half asleep, still and quiet, she sang him songs his mother knew. Linette sang all the time and Tessa had picked up the words and the rhythms to songs in Welsh that had become her children's favourites. The pattern of the language easier in song than it was to speak.
"I didn't know you could sing," Will said. It was the first thing he had said since he'd been brought in. He'd been too injured for words before. Her chest relaxed. They had said he would recover. They had said he would be fine. She finally believed it.
"I'm terrible at singing, you're obviously still delirious," she told him but she sang the same one again with her lips against his feverish forehead and his unbandaged hand fisted in her dress like a child's.