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And dearest, can you tell,
I am trying
To love you less.
ADA LIMÓN
氷
She stumbles on the first step.
Zayne acts on instinct, borrowed from a braver version of himself a decade ago, at least he’d like to think: the intuitive way his hand reached out to grasp her elbow—not harsh, just guiding—to help right her back upward. She sputters a little. She blinks. She comes back to herself. She barely registers the touch, he notes; the way her eyes glaze over the autumn leaves peppering the rest of the sidewalk as she stared idly down at her snagged heel she didn't notice walking right into.
They parked his car a few streets away born from her suggestion of walking the rest of the way over and he wonders if she regrets it now. Notes of accusing make it’s way into her voice when she lets out a small noise of indignation, and his heart unsprings a little of the tension inside of it, because if she still had the capacity to be mad: then maybe it can’t be all that bad. She curses down at her heels softly, before seeming to remember her corporeality, before trusting in his hold as she shifts on her feet to try and spring it free. All the while his presence is pliant, stable, and supportive.
Zayne waits.
When she finally manages to unbound herself she coughs once, twice. “Sorry,” she says, a little sheepish, still not looking at him. “I — I guess I’m just not very used to these heels.”
Zayne nods and waits a beat before letting go. “No problem.”
They continue walking in silence the rest of the way. The smell of mildew has unfurled from the earth this late in the afternoon, dousing everything just a touch misty and a little softer than their already quiet footsteps filtering in through the cobblestones. Auburn leaves petal down in their wake, with pale hues of sunlight mellowed out just enough everything is a little more golden than it probably should be. Zayne keeps some distance away, just enough to be able to still grab onto her elbow in case she misstepped again: otherwise just enough of a breath away, just enough not to overstep himself.
It’s only been a month after all.
⊹
Hysteria is something Zayne has been too privy to given his line of work: patients on their death bed screaming bloody murder at his staff in an effort to stave off the immoving crush of the end, soldiers on near-death psychosis bleeding and rambling their throats off at their makeshift medtent at Mt. Eternal; the ravaging cries of the humans turned wanderers he makes nightly visits to in his dreams.
Zayne is used to—and even expects—the savagery.
⊹
The day she got the call, however.
That wasn’t hysteria.
⊹
There are cries that start slow at the eyes, just a pool of never-ending streams quickly trickling it’s way down your face. But it’s not assaulting. It’s not uncomfortable just yet, quiet and somber and non-invasive as it was. There are cries that then grow in crescendo, that marry hiccups and wheezes and the occasional whimper with it. It’s not accosting, too, not just yet: just a very real display of human vulnerability that comes with being confronted of your mortality.
But then—
Then there is a cry so bad that it spikes up the protocore levels in your heart, that it takes a seasoned cardiac surgeon and researcher who has dedicated his entire life’s work to cataloging every minute shift of spike in your energy levels, to throw all of those warning signs away and just hold you: despite and in spite and because of all you are. He lets go of science. He lets go of everything. He had to.
Because her cry then, thought Zayne, was a war cry.
⊹
“...Do you need someone to go with you?”
A pause. A sniffle. An unanchoring. An orphan only child having to violently confirm her worst nightmare.
And then:
“Would you please?”
⊹
Zayne spots a small line for a flower stall and asks if she’d like to pick some up. Her eyes clear their way through enough haze to get a confirmation out, and when he tries parking her on a bench to wait, she just shrugs him off and insists on coming with to pick out the arrangement herself. He’s never had much practice in telling her no, not a decade or six months or a week or a second ago.
He wouldn’t start now.
The florist—Jeremiah, the name tag reads—eyes her in a way that had him eye him himself. He looked fresh out of college, painfully young and naive looking, but the familiarity in which he was assessing the way her eyes roamed over the day’s selection spoke of genuine curiosity.
Zayne gets in his line of vision before any of it morphs into interest. “How much for 2 wreaths?”
Jeremiah stares up at him, and he can see the mental gears shifting on his head, noting the fine line of his shoulders that imposed unmoving stability and no room for coercion. The knife-level precision of a surgeon that sharpened when needed.
“If it’s for the miss,” he says instead, surprising Zayne. “It’s on the house.”
⊹
The painter gave her an oil portrait of their last family picture that would never wither, not even if it sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The hunter traveled to another planet to procure especially rare star fragments of their birthdays, it’s luminescence always shining no matter if they were in Linkon or sitting on another fabric of time altogether.
Zayne, though: he could be here. He could happen here. With her, for her, by her.
⊹
They get to the graveyard to no fanfare. There had been an earlier funeral that day it seemed, the smell of ash in the air and barren soil marrying with the rose beds lining up the path of the entrance. She is quiet. Zayne is, too, but: he’s never known her to be quiet. Her black slip dress wove it’s way with the wind with each step, but it felt papery and wispy, like the rest of her dull eyes going over some of the gravestones they passed by on the way.
He feels—more than sees—each step growing heavier for her. She won’t reach for him, not of her own accord, he’s always known this; and so he has to meet her where she was at. And where she was at right now was someone not in a position to do any of that if it meant complicating things.
The click of her heels and the patter of his shoes stop under the shade of a willow tree. Under it lay two silver-grey tombstones, freshly cleaned and laid out.
Zayne holds his breath. His hold on the wreaths, even tighter. Little autumn leaves drop feather-light kisses on their bodies, and the sun is starting to hide beyond the horizon, but through it all they paid no mind.
She inches a step closer. Then another. Then another.
Zayne thinks she starts saying something as she carefully kneels over the first grave, but he doesn’t move closer to confirm. Instead he plucks a single rose out of their bouquet and perches it on her tombstone just delicately so. As he does, he feels her eyes on him. The first probably since. He feels her remembering, probably, the mint candy he gave both of them at every check-up and how accustomed—maybe even expectant—they’d both grown to it.
He remembers more than that though.
A warm meal on sudden nights his parents were called in for emergency surgeries. A warm bed when she refused to make him leave and sleep on the chill of an empty home. Another emergency contact on his file, too, on the off chance neither of his parents could make it to his earlier flare-up episodes at school. A kind compliment thrown his way when he graduated highschool at the top of his class, Caleb grinning ear-to-ear next to her with a camera ready. A stern but firm reminder to not skip his meals when he should be the one doling those out being on the physician's end. A plea this time—real and raw and urgent—to take care of her, once she’s long passed, once she felt her days start getting even more numbered and how she’d trust her life with his and Caleb’s and no one else.
Zayne remembers all that as he deposits the single red rose.
After, he backs away and leans over just enough to ghost a kiss on the top of her head as he says gently, “I’ll just be here,” before giving her all the time in the world.
⊹
Caleb got a hero’s funeral just two days after they confirmed the bodies.
Zayne was there with her, too, in big and bright and sunlit Skyhaven: he saw the way her eyes walked themselves farther and farther away from her soul as they lit up the jets and blew smoke on his coffin. It was grand and she just needed to be small. Zayne supposes it was hard for her to feel like Caleb was hers when she had to share his last moments with the Fleet, and harder, thinks Zayne: to remember who he was when they insisted on decorating him like a war hero when she just needed her best friend.
During the procession, as his commander doled on and on about his achievements and they had someone named Gideon recount some of his academy days and she wasn’t even processing much of anything, Zayne put a hand to her knee. It never left the entire ceremony, not even when they were flown back into Linkon that same night and he made her warm tea and she asked if he could stay the night and he couldn’t find enough compartmentalization in his heart to say no.
“I do not know,” sighs Zayne, eyes roaming over the next tombstone over, “exactly what to feel now that you have driven her to tears again for probably the last time, Caleb.”
⊹
“I’m sorry.”
When the words tumble themselves out of his mouth, Zayne is surprised to find the tang of it unfamiliar. They’re back in his apartment and he’s fixing her a meal and he wishes they were doing this under different circumstances, and wishes he had her without the doubt of whether her pain was the only thing binding her to him. Belatedly, he realizes he’s never said those words to her. Not when it happened and not during. There’s a bit of bile pooling around the bottom of his stomach, an internal alarm system warning him he was crossing over dangerous and uncharted territory. His relationship with her was a study in boundaries, he the enforcerer even with all her efforts to gun him down.
She looks at him though, and for a beat, his world just stops. “For what?”
“For losing both of them,” Zayne says. “There is no greater pain.”
The corners of her eyes are an ocean with piranhas. It’s drowning in itself. Only Zayne, Zayne: he thinks he can’t do the saving for her. Not for this. There’s a clear demarcation line between loss and love and he wasn’t sure he was necessarily in a position he wouldn’t be tempted to cross over some of those himself if only to get her to stop crying. She just lost her grandmother and bestfriend and if what she needed of him was to mold himself into insurance, he’d be the best goddamn security blanket there was.
But then—
“Thank you,” she says, and then: “And I’m sorry too.”
Now it was Zayne’s time to look puzzled. “For what?”
She looks at him—properly looks at him—with the predators in her eyes and the toxic waste in his stomach that had him realize maybe she wanted some lines crossed herself. “I’m sorry because you lost them, too.”