Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Doing the same

CASPIAN

The fire is almost dead. The room is warm in that hollow, amber way that only happens when a night has gone on longer than either person planned. Farah sits with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the last of the coals breathe. She doesn’t know when she stopped being afraid of the silence between them. Somewhere between the fifth lifetime and the sixth, it stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like something else entirely. Something she doesn’t have a name for yet. Caspian is still in the chair across from her, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on the dead fire. He looks, for the first time since she stumbled into his territory soaking wet and terrified, like a man who is simply tired. Not cold. Not cruel. Just old in a way that has nothing to do with his face. She thinks about Ismene. Twenty-three and furious and dead at twenty-four. She thinks about eleven months of cataloguing medical texts with shaking hands. She thinks about better. Impossibly, inconveniently, entirely irrationally — better. And she feels something crack open in her chest that she is not ready to examine in the light.

“You should sleep,” she says quietly. Not because she wants him to leave. Because she can see what it costs him to stay awake, night after night, holding himself at arm’s length from everything.

He looks at her then. Really looks. The way he has been carefully not doing all evening.

“So should you,” he says.

“I asked first.”

The corner of his mouth moves. It is not a smile. But it is the place where a smile would live, if he ever let one through. She files it away without meaning to. She is collecting these small things about him like someone who doesn’t know they’re building something.

She stands, and he watches her cross the room. She pauses at the doorway, her hand on the frame. She should say goodnight. She should say something that puts the appropriate distance back between them, something that reminds them both what they are to each other — prisoner and captor, enemy and enemy, two people with no business sitting by a dying fire talking about chess.

She turns back.

“Caspian.”

He is still watching her.

“I’m sorry about Ismene,” she says. “And the others. I know that’s not — I know I’m not the one you want an apology from. But I’m sorry anyway.”

Something moves through his face like weather. She sees him work to contain it. She sees, for just a second, that he can’t.

“Go to sleep, Farah,” he says. His voice is rough in a way that has nothing to do with anger.

She goes.

But she lies awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling, pressing her fingers to her sternum where the cracking feeling won’t stop. And down the hall, she knows without knowing how that he is doing the same.