Work Text:
Suvi waits.
Ame’s face is peaceful, and it unnerves Suvi. How could she be so quiet, so still? Ame's meant to move. For all she grumbled tramping through Orima’s kudzu, following Ame into the unknown felt more right than any other march she’d been on. Now Ame had left, gone somewhere deep and distant, and it’s equal parts enraging and terrifying.
Dr. Tamri knocks quietly, startling her. “Apprentice Suvi? I’m here for rounds.”
“Yes, please. Come in.” Suvi stands, moving away from the bed, pulling at her sleeves. Bishop sleeves, like most of her tops—the Citadel loves luxury but a closed, tight cuff is as practical as it is lovely. Dr. Tamri walks towards Ame and holds out her hand. The medical signet ring on her left pinky glows softly, amplifying the magic weaving over Ame.
The Fox’s ears flatten and a growl emanates from deep in his chest. The doctor doesn’t falter but winces, slightly, no doubt remembering the nip Suvi earned mere hours before for trying to move him off Ame’s bed.
“Do you need me to take him?” Suvi asks. She doesn’t want to, but Ame’s needs come before Fox’s wants.
“No, he’s fine.” Dr. Tamri’s head tilts, and she smiles softly. “It’s touching.”
Suvi thought so as well but hadn’t said it out loud. The Fox let her keep vigil without commentary. She supposes she owes him the same.
“Well, I think we’ve done all we can.”
“What?” Suvi’s attention snaps to Dr. Tamri.
"She's not in any danger that we can fix. We've healed what we can. Now, she needs to rest."
"For how long?" Suvi demands.
"For as long as it takes," Dr. Tamri says, firm but kind.
Suvi stares at Fox, then Dr. Tamri, and then nods. She finds Eursulon in the hall, back from grabbing food, and she gives him the update, promising to be back soon. He stares after her as she sweeps out of the building and heads for Steel’s home.
Suvi hopes there are more answers there than in Ame's cold, silent room. Steel’s voice had taken over for Ame’s all those years ago, slowly easing the ache in Suvi’s chest that yearned for her first friend, and she desperately hopes Steel can drive Ame out of her head again.
---
Eursulon rests.
His body, usually cramped in too small corners or out under an unwaveringly lonely sky, feels almost small in the corner of Ame’s room. From where he lies, he can see Fox curled up on Ame’s chest, eyes cycling from face to throat to somewhere distant, like in Orima’s shrine. It unmakes some of the Fox’s confidence, the eight foot swagger he wields crashing and leaving Eursulon to see the truth of him: a small, scared animal, desperate and exhausted.
Some deep, buried part of Eursulon understands the fear creeping in Fox’s body as the familiar watches his tether to the world. He remembers the nights across the window sill in Grandmother Wren’s cottage when all the comfort he had was the rise and fall of Suvi’s and Ame’s chests. He learned to trust their breaths, never as loud or all encompassing as the Great Bear’s, but still a promise of togetherness in the vast, wide world.
“Fox?”
“Yeah?”
“I will watch her. You must sleep.”
“I will sleep. When Boss wakes up.”
“Fox,” Eursulon sighs, “Ame may not—“
“Boss will wake up. She has to. I promised. I said I wanted to make sure she was safe while she slept, and Big Guy, I’m going to keep her so safe. I have to. I’m better at smelling and hearing, I have to—“
“Fox, Ame may not wake up for a while. But she will wake up.” Eursulon gets up as he speaks, slowly approaching Ame’s bedside. He wants to help the Fox, but a scared animal trusts instincts.
“Let me watch. I can smell, I can hear—I am the strongest man in Silbury,” he chuckles out, somehow a sad sound.
The Fox watches. He looks at Eursulon, and then back at Ame, and then somewhere Eursulon can’t see at all. Finally, the Fox says, “Okay. For a bit. Only a bit. And if,” he stops, eyes closing, “if things go bad, wake me up.”
“Fox, she will—“
“Don’t make promises. She promises, and I promise, and I’m starting to really hate promises.”
Eursulon’s heart cracks. It’s a resilient, forged together thing, and the Fox’s panic strikes his own long-seeded fears without even trying.
“Okay, Fox.” Eursulon strokes a slow, careful hand down Fox’s back, repeating the motion until Fox drifts off.
Eursulon steps back, returning to his seat on the floor with his back against the wall this time. He moves Wavebreaker to straddle his lap instead of digging awkwardly into his back, and in the quiet, Eursulon waits.
—
Suvi thinks.
Steel finally—finally—has given her something to think on, to mull over and stretch apart in her mind, syllable by syllable.
She cannot sit every hour of the day with Ame, not with the information she has now and Ame’s unrelenting silence haunting her, so she lights incense. In the flame, she weaves a small spell to tell Ame, should she wake up and speak, that Suvi is on her way. She needs Ame to hear her voice, so she can trust something solid when she wakes up in this new, unfamiliar place.
There’s no spell to let Ame know, wherever her soul is, that Suvi leaves because she has to. She hopes the smell of the incense, so intimately woven into Suvi’s hair and clothes, will make the deep, animal part of Ame understand.
—
Steel yells.
Her study, like most wizards' studies, is warded, keyed to her, and layered with silencing spells. So when Suvi falls asleep on their sofa after another relentless day of work and worry and running from her rooms to Ame's to Steel's home, Steel pulls a blanket over her, walks to her study, and locks the door. She takes a deep breath, leaning back against the heavy wood of the door, appreciating the slight pinch of the carvings against her back.
"You're all, in the most disrespectful way I can mean this, a bunch of assholes," she yells at the ceiling.
When she started doing this in the months after Soft and Stone died, it ended with sobbing and begging more often than not. Her brain knew there was nothing she could do this way, but her body needed to do something, anything. Every fruitless search for Eoighorain, each day without news of her best friends, the worried inquiries from Wren -- it all led her to this room, at the end of the day, where she could scream and cry and be no one's Sword.
"She doesn't deserve this. She is good, and I know you all know this because you made her, but she cannot do this again."
Now, she'll end up yelling at Soft and Stone -- and Wren, too, now -- like their spirits can do anything. There's something cathartic about imagining it's within their control. If she yells loudly enough, fights long enough, that they will catch up and intercede and things will right themselves. It is a foolish belief she does not allow herself to kindle outside the walls of this room.
"I can't watch another part of her die. Please, don't make me bury another piece of her childhood."
Steel pushes off from the door as she talks, her fists balling up at her side, impotent.
"Wren is gone. No one else is left, and I don't know what to do. She needs answers I don't have for fights I can't predict she will enter. She needs Ame."
For the first time in years, she cries as she yells, and she doesn't stop until she is sure that all of her terror and anger sits in these walls, stained into the floor and the ceiling and the desk, so she can leave, lower her eyes from the spirits above, and be the Sword she has been trained to be.
—
Suvi fucks.
There’s nothing that takes her out of the prison of her too-fast mind better than pressing a body into her own. Silver comes to her shortly after her arrival when "how long" becomes "as long as it takes." They’d been pushing and pulling each other for so long at this point, Silver seems preternaturally aware of when to come to her and when to go.
“Where’d my belt go?”
Suvi points to the top of a floor lamp, a soft smile on her face.
“Ah.” Silver walks and grabs it, looping it through in fluid motions. He lets the silence sit around them for a moment, and then, he says, “I know you don’t want to talk about her.”
Suvi tenses, saying, “I never said that. We can talk about her. There’s just not much to talk about. She’s asleep. Still.”
Fully clothed again, much to Suvi’s disappointment, Silver steps back towards the couch Suvi is spread out on. He says, “I meant about her. Not her medical status.”
“What do you want to know?” Suvi sits up, pulling her favorite throw into a make-shift robe. Silver’s eyes catch hers, and she starts to glare, but then stops to pinch her nose. “I can’t tell you about Port Talon. You know that.”
Silver stops and cocks an eyebrow, then says, “I didn’t ask you to. Is Ame just some witch from Port Talon? Is that why you think I’m asking about whatever clusterfuck happened out there?”
“Ame’s a witch, but she’s not from that backwater nowhere. Port Talon should be grateful every second of every day that Ame decided their town meant something to her.” Silver starts to speak, but Suvi cuts him off. “And she’s not just a witch. She’s important. She’s good.”
“Suvi, who is she to you?” Silver asks. The edge of exasperation in his voice grates on her. Her quick anger, her biting tongue, fight their way out of her body. She steps back from him and catches his eyes, glaring and not flinching away from him.
“What do you want me to say? That she’s special? That I can’t stand seeing her like this? That I’m furious she has gone somewhere I cannot follow again?”
“Yes!" He throws his hands up, gesturing around the room. "You're walking around here, around everywhere in Malacanth, like it's business as usual. Hiding behind the routines of the Citadel won’t help you, Suvi.“
"Oh, and slicing open my heart will?" She sneers.
"Don't do that." He points at her, stepping closer. She steps back, not afraid, but desperate for the conversation to end. "Don't speak to me like I don't know you. Like I don't care."
“Bear trains with Steel, Steel goes to meetings, I do paperwork, and we fuck." She strides away from him towards her desk. Her palms find the smooth wood, cold and comforting and solid. "We all try to pretend like everything is normal. And I have to hold onto that Silver. If I let go of that, then it all comes crashing down.”
“Suvi,” he starts, then stops. She can hear him shuffling towards her, and she whips around with an accusatory finger pointed at him.
“No, Silver, you asked,” she seethes. “You asked for it, you get it, so here you go: I don’t want to talk about her because she has already wormed her way into my every thought. I walk in any direction away from her, and it feels wrong. And the only thing I can do right now is wait and think and try to believe that she will come back.”
On the last syllable, Suvi’s voice cracks, and a shameful, hot tear creeps down her cheek. Silver sighs, and she expects him to leave, but he walks towards her. He reaches out, placing his hands on her arms, gently drawing her into him.
“Please don’t ask me to talk about her again,” Suvi whispers. Silver kisses her hair, the coiled strands brushing his lips.
"Okay," he says. "I won't ask. But if you decide to talk, I will be here. Don't think me ignorant to who you are, Suvi."
They stand like that for a few minutes, and the air around them cools. Suvi lets herself be dragged to bed, and she’s tangled in his body long enough to let go of the anger and fear gripping her chest. She runs out the door hours later, flying to Ame’s side, and Silver leaves.
The dimension door fizzles out, and he stops in his rooms, trying to orient himself. He knows, after last night, on a deeper level what “contingency” means in a spell. He understands the wait, the impermanence, the situational aspect of it, and he wonders if witches weave spells in that way. After a moment, he thinks probably not. He imagines Suvi tearing into Ame’s room, and he thinks perhaps witches know better what magic is and can be.