Chapter Forty-Nine - Long Night

“Ever been so tired you can’t sleep?

Fucking sucks.”

– Firefighter, the morning after a night of beating down the flames

 

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“What?”

“Well, everything we’ve talked about is right and all, but it felt incomplete. Like that was just half the puzzle. There were parts of the, uh, break that didn’t make sense to me. But I recall that Tynea warned me that I’d experience a large shift in my hormonal levels, emotional experience, et cetera, after becoming a woman. And that, I think, matters a lot here. I’m not sure I would’ve been nearly so affected by your plight, as Aden, or by my own reaction to it. Like, sure, I would’ve been quite stressed, and would’ve wanted to help. But I would’ve kept my cool in a natural manner. More…masculine, I guess? Like a doctor handles triage. I think being female made the panic worse than it should’ve been and I wasn’t prepared.”

“Ah.” Leah’s mouth hung open, lost in thought. Despite myself, I had to grin, fighting the urge to close it for her.

“Leah.” She twitched, and blinked at me like an owl.

“Hm?” Tilted head, she frowned, as if she expected more complications.

I smoothed out the frown with a careful finger. “We’ve talked mostly about me. But I wasn’t the only one who went through a harrowing experience. How are you? Why do you think you, uh, crashed like that?”

Leah blew up her cheeks, before she noisily expelled the air through her nose, her exhaust washing over my face, making me blink. She blinked in return, and blushed a little. “Sorry. That was rude.”

I chuckled, and wiped my face down with the sleeve of my bathrobe. “Don’t worry. I’d have complained if it’d gotten disgusting.”

“Urgh. Still. Sorry.” She looked away uncomfortably.

I decided to distract her by taking her hand, and pulling her over to the wall, next to the staircase. I made us a pair of extremely messy silk pillows, tattered bird’s nests more than anything, to sit on.

Once we were seated comfortably side-by-side, Leah picked up the conversation again.

“Right. So, first of all. Even though flashbacks are horrible and I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy, and even though it’s unsettling that I’ve had one after all this time, strangely, I almost welcome it. I’m familiar with them, after all. A familiar devil I know how to survive. Out here? It’s almost like coming home.”

She pondered her words a little, before speaking further. 

“Hmm. Having a flashback is very much like being a different person for a bit. While I can’t say they won’t repeat themselves eventually, I know to recognize the warning signs, and I won’t ignore them again.”

She looked at me, quite seriously.

“That means I can warn you when I feel an episode coming.”

“Okay? That’s good, but what do I do when that happens?”

“Remind me that it’s a flashback. That’s the biggest thing. Try to get me to engage with you. Ask me questions, wait for me to answer. Oh, that’s important, too. Having an episode is like having five times the load on your mind. It takes much longer for questions to penetrate, and even longer to answer.”

“So, I just make sure you’re safe, comfortable, and mostly let you ride it out while asking the occasional question about, what, your actual surroundings?”

“Yeah. Basically that.”

I glanced up and let that play through my mind. Then I got a strong urge to hug Leah, which I did. I crawled into her lap and straddled her legs, put my chin on her shoulder, and held on.

Leah’s arms circled my own, and she buried her nose beneath my ear, squeezing me even tighter.

As her warm breath brushed past my throat, stress escaped me with a sigh, and tension I didn’t even realize I had, flowed out of the muscles between my shoulder blades.

After a little while, I continued our conversation. “Leah, I’m glad I know what to do if it happens again, and all, but why do you think you had a flashback in the first place?”

Leah stiffened slightly, groaned a little, but replied anyway, “My own worst hangup. Do you remember when I told you I had a little sister, once?”

I sat up, and studied her face. Exhaustion writ large. This wasn’t a topic Leah really wanted to talk about, but I could also see that she’d decided it was necessary. “Sure, you said that you…lost her to a tumor.”

“Yes. Yeah, and back then, well, I thought it was my fault. That I should’ve noticed it, that I wasn’t a good big sister. That I’d broken my promise. That I could’ve saved her if only I’d seen it coming.”

Leah looked away, off in her memories. I could almost see the bags under her eyes grow. Oh, we really needed food, didn’t we? Like, really. With everything going on, even though I probably should’ve, I didn’t feel hungry in the slightest. Still.

Starving wasn’t helping either of us.

“Tynea, can you give us two food things please? Something to take the edge off of our, uh, malnutrition, I guess it is, at this point.”

Absolutely. How about a smoothie?

“Sounds good?”

Here you go.

 

Cost	x	Item
1	4	Nutri Pack
4		Total
637		Combined Remaining Points

 

Two boxes popped into existence between us, in the classic boring non-white cheap plastic look. They clattered quietly against the floor, drawing Leah’s attention. One had her name on it, the other my own.

Huh. Oh! Right, Tynea had mentioned that I needed a variety of minerals and stuff, to catch up to the effects of the chrysalis. Made sense that my food would be a little different from Leahs.

Leah looked at me questioningly, and I smiled at her while sending her the receipt in answer.

“Oh, nice! I’m famished.” She happily picked up the boxes, handed me mine, and then we opened them to find fist-sized squeeze-packs of juice in there.

I picked one out, turned one-eighty, and leaned my back against Leah’s chest. With Leah’s torso not being that much bigger than mine, and me sitting on her lap, our heads were almost even, so I was careful to twist a little to the side for her, placing her face in the same mostly antennae-free zone my own enjoyed. If she wanted to, she could probably even rest her chin on my shoulder like this, but instead she curled her free arm around me again, making me feel at home and so very welcome.

My tail got in the way though, so I lifted my hips a little and let it curve naturally along my butt, so that it lay in front of us on the floor. It really was amazingly long, like, twice my legs and then some.

Actually, huh. That meant it was longer than two meters, huh? That was more than I’d designed it to be, if I remembered correctly? I didn’t mind, it was fluffy, pretty, quite useful, and the length hadn’t gotten in my way even once. But it did leave the question of how that had happened.

Something to ask Tynea about… Well, not right now. It wasn’t critical.

The Nutri Pack came with a little straw poking out at the top, folded over sideways. Pulling on it triggered a seal, and a wave of incredibly tasty fragrance almost assaulted my nose and antennae. Which reacted with a sort of myologic sneeze, nearly smacking myself in the face.

“Whoa…” The intense duality of scent and taste overwhelmed me a little, made my head spin. Leah giggled at me going all crosseyed, but was more careful with her own box and used her teeth instead, sparing me another deluge of aroma.

I followed suit, enjoying the mixture of a mild acidic tang, energizing sweetness, and the filling savouriness of a double serving. We remained quiet like that, just enjoying the stress-free moment, as the juice tended to us.

Eventually, of course, the unresolved made itself felt again. Leah laid her head back against the wall and picked up the verbal string we’d let slip earlier.

“I spent years recovering from that time of shame and grief. Learned that I wasn’t responsible, couldn’t have been. The necessary procedures would’ve been priced beyond the capability of any orphanage to pay, way beyond their willingness to consider it if they could.

“But on some level, the damage was done. I kept having flashbacks until I was almost sixteen years old. By that time, I’d already proven myself a capable caretaker, and the flashbacks were restricted to moments alone. Moments where my subconscious knew I had no support, basically, and rang the alarm bells in a weird, twisted way.

“That was the last two, maybe three years of that, though. Come sixteen, I stopped having them at all. I guess… I guess I got a little lazy after a while, with working through things? Or maybe that’s unfair to myself. Maybe this kind of, what did you call it? Break? Maybe that would’ve happened no matter what, given our circumstances, the terrible stress I survived over the last, uh, eleven days, now, I think.

“Anyway, I am, and especially was, reliant on you. That makes me more aware of your condition than is entirely healthy for me, considering my past. Then, my own weapon hurt you on some level, and I didn’t even notice. Not until you said something…which I think you can appreciate the problematic parallels.”

I nodded, smoothing my palm along her thigh to share more contact. She kept talking,

“That was the event that really stressed me out, after everything. Our fighting the Antithesis, well, sure. That’s not something to be lightly done, but I was chosen to be a Vanguard. I’m as suited to it as you are. At least I think so?”

I recalled Tynea’s words on that topic, of the careful profiling, how aware the Protectors were of who should, or rather, shouldn’t be one. 

“Uh, there is a lot more to that selection than whether you can make yourself fight, but sure. Vanguards are, to my understanding, more go-getting than not. ” There was more to me specifically that made me extremely suited to the battlefield, but that would have to wait for another day, another talk—and some more getting used to fighting again.

“Right. And I don’t feel out of place, or undeserving, as a Vanguard. But the last few days were a confluence of atrocious circumstances. It knocked me for a loop.” A thoughtful pause. “I guess I don’t know how I’ll stand up to more fighting until I try, but I feel quite settled right now. Which is really weird, but such is the mind. Toss me in the blender, and if I’m familiar with the pain, I’ll come out stable. What the fuck.”

I glanced askance at her, with a wry grin, “It forcefully slapped you in the face with everything that’s wrong, like a wet fish, so you couldn’t miss it. I think that’s how the subconscious mind navigates a maze. ‘Here, have a familiar problem to the problem so you can solve the problem.’ At least, that’s how it usually works for me.”

Leah chortled lightly. “That…sounds about right.”

After a moment of thinking, I continued. “Well, it seems like…that’s that? I could tell you about my childhood, I guess. But I think that should wait until we’re out of the, uh, conflict zone. I worry that it might do something to you with those flashbacks, since we’d be talking about children. Not just me, either.”

“Mmm. That’s probably not unreasonable.”

“Then, points, and how to spend them?”

Leah squeezed me around the middle. “Tomorrow. Let’s do that tomorrow, when we’ve had some rest.”

“Alright.”

I stretched out my arms and legs and tail, yawned, watched my antennae shiver like a pair of fluffy feather dusters in response, let Leah scratch me lightly behind the base of them with a giggle, and got up.

Propping my feet against hers, I reached for her hands with both of mine, and levered her up into a standing position. I took a few moments to attach lines of silk to multiple spots around the walls, and we spent the next ten minutes weaving them together into a single rope which I continued, and glued with supporting lines along the ceiling, all the way to the cocoon.

The storm added a lot of noise to the vibrations in the thing, so I figured reading it with any accuracy was going to be impossible. I still attached it to the stems of my antennae, so that any strong impact against the building would wake me up.

We settled down within the cocoon after removing the bottles of water and the last jar of nutrient slurry from Leah’s Sleeve. 

In a reversal of our previous positions, Leah tucked my head under hers, and hugged me against her chest, after opening her Sleeve enough for my cheek to rest against her soft silken top, instead of the hard exoskeleton. 

My tail served as a pillow of fluffiness elsewhere, and slowly, I relaxed enough to drift off, long before Leah did.

 

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