Who: Jacques and Ofelia...again. ALSO BIRDIE. When: Backdated to this weekend! Early Saturday morning;3am What:Log/Complete Rating:PG-13 (ish) for language. No funny business here.
The room was dark but for the soft glow coming from Ofelia’s laptop. Most nights, the room was occupied by herself and Liria, whose sleep schedule was as contrary as her own and didn’t seem to notice that it was strange when Ofelia didn’t manage to get to sleep until four o’clock in the morning. Perhaps her schedule might have righted itself were it not for her unusual habit of sleeping entire days away. It had become more regular for a few weeks, but she was slipping back into old habits, prompted, no doubt, from a increasingly depressed attitude toward Camulus, the media attention, and some troubling news from home. Perched on her desk chair, her knees at her chest and an over-large t-shirt stretched out to cover her top half along with her legs, she sat curled up in this half-ball, black hair piled messily on her head, re-reading an e-mail from her father. Beyond the usual admonishments -- why aren’t you training, you’re bringing dishonour to our family, nice Catholic girls don’t -- it included a brief paragraph stating in plain Portuguese that her grandmother’s health was rapidly declining. The person who’d been the cause of most of the joy and misery of her eighteen years was getting older and the doctors didn’t think she’d outlive the year. Like a glutton for punishment, Ofelia read and re-read the paragraph over and over again until the bottoming-out feeling of her stomach at the realization that the single person who understood wouldn’t see her finish out the tournament turned into a hard, cold knot.
The clock blinked 3am on the nightstand beside her, a particularly troubling time for her on most nights. She offered a glance at Jacques, wondering if he’d notice her presence by climbing back into bed and thought better of it. Even when he slept over, they never really spoke of the arrangement and, while she felt like she could tell him she was anxious during the witching hour (it was easier to sense the restless souls then, a creeping feeling that sent goosebumps up her arms and down the column of her spine) she didn’t know that it would be enough to explain why she wanted to not sleep on the opposite end of the bed tonight and she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to recount her grandmother’s illness. On her shoulder, Birdie seemed to mirror her mood: she was at once listless and anxious, hopping back and forth along Ofelia’s collarbone than burrowing deep into the crook of her neck, her feathers standing up as she shivered. With a heavy sigh, she decided that sleep was still some ways away and she turned back to her computer, lifting her heavy headphones on in an attempt to distract herself with The Cure and photoshop.
Jacques had become used to sleeping with a light sleeper in the past few weeks. At first, he woke up all the time, sensing every move Ofelia made. But by now, he could hardly feel her leaving and returning. He thought perhaps that meant he was more comfortable next to her than he used to be. But sometimes, he wished he still knew exactly when she was sleeping and when she was awake. It would make him worry that much less. Jacques was starting to worry a little. It wasn’t entirely normal to stay up for days on end and then sleep through several more. He didn’t want to cross any boundaries by bringing it up. Tonight, it was actually the bird who woke him up. It made a strange noise, which startled Jacques out of his slumber just enough for it to register that the bed next to him was empty. Sleepily, he sat up, rubbing a hand through his hair and squinting around, still half-asleep. “Fe?” He whispered rather hoarsely, glancing wildly around the room only to find her still at her desk. It was three in the morning. She probably hadn’t slept.
Jacques shivered against the night air even though he had the decency to sleep in a t-shirt along with his boxers here. But he was brave and pulled himself out from underneath the covers. He swung himself to the end of the bed closest to the desk and looked up at Birdie, who looked sick and anxious. Almost automatically, his eyes followed to Ofelia’s face, which seemed to be a mirror of the bird’s mood. That hardly surprised him anymore. “Ofelia.” He repeated in a stronger voice,so she’d hear him above the music in her ears. “What are you doing?”
Ofelia had been working at ensuring Jacques’ felt comfortable around her; it was a concentrated effort, but she’d managed to stop jumping and wincing everytime he touched her. It was a happy balance, anyway: he didn’t seem to be an overly touchy-feely sort of person and, while she quite liked it when he did touch her, it saved her from having to be constantly on guard. But all of this work was not at the forefront of her mind as she worked on a graphic art project she’d started some days earlier. Lost in the computer screen and the music, the sound of Jacques’ voice next to her made her start, and she pulled off the headphone rather quickly, causing the bird to flap its wings in a panic brought on by her own. “Cristo, Jacques. You scared me have to death,” she murmured, muting the music with her keyboard. But there was no anger visible, just a tired sort of guilt and a look like a deer caught in the headlights. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose.
Attempting to formulate an answer to her question, she looked just South of the truth -- a trick her brother had taught her to avoid being caught in a lie. With a glance back at her computer screen, Birdie hopping along the desk with a sort of anxious despondency, she lifted her shoulders up in a slight shrug. “Distracting myself with photoshop. It’s the hour of the anti-Christ and I can feel Them. It just doesn’t make for a good sleep.” As she spoke, she avoided his eyes, which were still heavy with sleep, choosing instead to focus on the bird, whom she offered her finger as a perch too. “Sorry you woke up. You should go back to sleep and I’ll keep the music off.”
Jacques felt slightly guilty when he saw her jump, but he was still too groggy for it to really register. His mind cleared enough to catch the fact that she wasn’t quite looking at him when she spoke, which might not have meant anything, but probably meant that she was hiding something. He studied her again, taking a moment to soak the scene in now that he was fully conscious. Birdie was still acting as a barometer to her mood, which was something he quite appreciated. It was easier to tell what an animal was feeling than a person. As usual, however, he got vaguely worried about the bird’s output of nervous energy, and even though it might mean that she’d taunt him later for being too fond of it, Jacques stood next to her chair and smiled at the little animal as though that might encourage it to feel better. He glanced at the computer screen, where she was indeed wrapped up in an art project. But he couldn’t just sleep now.
“I’ll stay awake, it’s fine. I’m not tired.” He lied, shrugging. “It’s the weekend, anyway. We can sleep in.” Not til four in the afternoon, he wanted to add, but he thought better of it. Jacques was always careful about how he touched Ofelia. He never wanted it to be too much, but there was never a good way to determine when it was. He knew he’d probably screwed up by both touching her too much and not enough, but he strove for a happy medium. And right now felt like a time it might be welcome. Jacques simply draped his arm around her thin shoulders, holding her for a moment. “It’s fucking freezing. Come back to bed, you’re going to get sick.” And there he’d sounded like her mother, but he did not particularly care.
It was becoming more difficult to keep things from him, a fact Ofelia attributed to increased time spent together and Jacques, rightly, saw as the natural outcome of an animal companion which registered your emotions almost more intensely than you did, no skills of deception available to it. If he’d been worried about her reaction to the arm draped around her shoulders (rather awkwardly, as he was considerably taller than her and she was still sitting), they were dispelled immediately as Birdie, more generous in its affections, far outstripped Ofelia’s reactions and fluttered up to Jacques’ shoulder before she had even decided to stand. Narrowing her eyes at the bird, she sighed and stood, her t-shirt rising to reveal a pair of (albeit short) boxers and she reached her arms out to hug him tightly, slipping them through his arms and around his chest. This was, in itself, unusual. But it was three a.m. and she was homesick; he was the closest thing she had to a best friend.
“You just contradicted yourself,” she replied, voice muffled by his t-shirt as she tucked her head down. “You said you weren’t tired and you were awake, and then you told me to get back into bed.” Being contradictory seemed to counter-act the fact that she was rather clinging to him at the moment, at least by her own logic, and despite the late hour, Ofelia wasn’t sleepy enough to stop keeping score. But the longer she held onto him, the more her chest tightened and the confession about her grandmother seemed on her lips. She refused to cry, but when she spoke again she shook her head and her voice was hoarse. “Anyway, I don’t want to go back to bed. Just go back to your room and I’ll finish my piece.” The fact that she still hadn’t let go likely made her command a difficult one to follow.
It was Jacques’ turn to give a small start as he suddenly found both a bird on his shoulder and a small girl clinging to him. One was more surprising than the other. (He insisted sometimes that Birdie liked him more than Ofelia did, which he knew couldn’t possibly be true and thus it was all a little flattering.) Jacques didn’t comment further on this, though and simply held her to him. He stared at the top of her head in some confusion, but when that didn’t get anywhere he decided to just let it be and he began to smooth out her hair in the most comforting gesture available to him at the moment.
“I said get back in bed. I didn’t say we had to go back to sleep.” He pointed out, out of some sick habit of always having to be in the lead. “I’m really awake.” He was, too, now that he knew there was something going on with Ofelia. She was worrying him. The hug in itself was strange, but she seemed upset on top of that. “I’m not going back to my room.” Jacques shrugged off that terrible idea with a little shrug the moment it exited Ofelia’s lips. He bent his neck to kiss the top of her head gently, as it was the only part he could reach at the moment. He stalled there for a second, but inevitably the inquiry came out. “Are you okay?” It seemed like a stupid question with all the evidence he had to the contrary.
For once, Ofelia didn’t feel the need to argue with him -- perhaps in part because she realized he was right, that he hadn’t actually specified, and that there was no where else the empty argument could go. It had been deflated, and couldn’t serve any further purpose of distraction. It was sometimes difficult with Jacques, knowing how much to reveal. He was the sort of person who implicitly seemed to require her trust, who asked for it without saying as much, and she was the sort of person who was not used to giving it. But another part of her was compelled to tell more than she usually would, in spite of her convictions that this would end as badly as anything else could, that their arrangement was temporary and empty of meaning. This line of reasoning was unhealthy, but it kept her expectations low. That was how Ofelia lived most of her life and, while it hadn’t been exactly successful, it had kept her from feeling the pangs of rejection too keenly.
When she felt the light kiss on the top of her head, she first buried herself more deeply into his chest and then tried to compose herself enough that she might answer. There was, therefore, a long pause in which her chest rose and fell against his more quickly, in which her eyes began to dampen, hidden only by the fact that her face was out of sight. Try though she might, her time to compose herself was not working and her eyes began to itch as her eyelashes clumped against the tears that were not yet falling, simply making it uncomfortable to open her eyes. And so she disentangled herself from the embrace and, head down, she slumped onto the edge of the bed, her hands pressed on either side of her. Birdie, tellingly, remained perched on Jacques. Like an over-tired child, she rubbed one hand heavily over her eyes and her mouth fell as she tried to speak. She was not sobbing, or even crying, just somewhere near the verge of it and her breathing and the strange, halting way she spoke signalled this liminal state. “My grandmother’s sick and my dad’s angry with me and I’m tired of the entire internet hating me,” she said in one breath, making a sharp, strangled sound when it was done. The truth was, the third, even second part of the confession didn’t matter much to her. They hid, in some way, the gravity of the first admission.
Jacques held Ofelia to him for as long as she would allow it, because honestly, that was why he was here. He wanted to help her, because he liked her a lot. And that was the simplicity with which Jacques took most of their relationship, no matter what new facets they kept throwing in.Maybe that was oversimplifying everything. It probably was. It was more complicated than the assumption that because he was willing and able to listen to her, she would tell everything willingly. Jacques was trying to be patient with that. It was more difficult to listen to her discount their relationship as just a series of random hookups by now. But he couldn’t say that, since that’s technically all it was and they both knew it. At the core, though, this was a friendship. And so in the moments he could show that he actually knew how to be a good friend, as often as everything else in interpersonal relationships failed him, he tried.
Jacques continued to hold her until she broke away. It was only then he noticed the tears gathering on her eyelids, and they made him quite worried. She’d been sad before, yes, but he’d never seen Ofelia cry. She sat on her bed, and without quite realizing that he was doing it without permission, Jacques joined her. He took a blanket from her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders, hugging her into it. It was an automatic gesture of comfort from when he was small; he’d had a comfort blanket until he was about four. His mother used to wrap it around him just like this after some of the more frightening transformations. It was really his only trick to make anyone feel better. “I’m sorry.” He said softly, not knowing what would help. “Fuck the people on the internet. Also your dad, but don’t tell him I said that. Is your grandmother okay?” The fact that she was this sad almost made him dread the answer.
Whether it was that she was too tired to resist or that she wanted felt protected by the blanket, and the arms which wrapped her up in it, Ofelia couldn’t say; compounded by her fatigue was a general inability to scrutinize her own feelings for fear of what they would reveal to her about herself, and so she went into his side without any real thought. This was how it was, the way she lived: in fear, always, of everything and everyone, but especially of herself. Perhaps it was that fact which made the news of her grandmother’s condition so painful, like a swift punch in the stomach that stole your air. She was afraid for what it meant for the woman she admired and loved and feared as much as she was afraid for what it meant for her. For Ofelia. Moulding herself against Jacques’ side, she watched listlessly as Birdie fluttered down from his shoulder and nestled, instead, on her lap. The yellow finch looked as utterly dejected as she felt, which only made her feel worse.
Taking a long, shaky breath, Ofelia raised her shoulders and dropped them in a small shrug, swallowing hard in an attempt for formulate words. “I don’t actually care about the internet or my Dad, I just said that because it’s easier to be angry then --” And she broke off, shaking her head, covering her eyes with one hand. It took her a few moments to speak again, and when she did she seemed slightly more composed. “She’s only 76. Brazil isn’t a poor country and neither is my family.” This was only a half-truth about Brazil, but she was too tired to explain further. “76 is young, Jacques. People are living until they’re 120. But for people like us, for for me and a avó, we die younger. We’ve been near Death too long and...” When she trailed off she was silent and the bird, who had been chirping anxiously a moment before, stilled. Ofelia watched for signs of life from it, saw the quickened rise and flow of its chest, but didn’t say anything. It frightened her.
Jacques did not want to think about Ofelia in connection with her own death. Or even the death of a member of a family that was so close to her. It felt like some strange kind of premonition that he didn’t want to acknowledge. He knew death existed, and that it came for everyone. He was with too many reminders of that fact to not remember it daily. But he liked to think that somehow, everyone he was fond of would never feel its sting. This was a slap in the face to the contrary. He watched the bird as it sat on Ofelia’s lap, and his forehead wrinkled in concern as it began tweeting desperately and then stopped. He reached out to lay his hand on it both to give comfort and ensure that it was still warm. But Jacques was really more afraid of what this meant. This was how Ofelia felt.
“It isn’t fair.” He murmured, holding Ofelia too him as though that would stop her from having to go through this. “But maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe she has more time than you know. I mean if she’s your grandmother, she’s got to be kind of badass. She’ll fight, don’t think she’s lost yet.” He knew his optimism was probably unwelcome, and he didn’t want her to think he wasn’t being sensitive so he shook his head and started over. “But this is shit.” It wasn’t actually a good recovery, so Jacques fell silent, just pressing his forehead onto the top of her head as though to shelter her from something. He knew he couldn’t. But it wouldn’t hurt to try.
That her grandmother was a “badass,” Ofelia could attest to: Beatriz was a fearsome woman with enough gumption and strength to win a thousand Tournaments, even at 76. She had a strength of conviction, a strong stomach, a morbidly ironic sense of humour and took little nonsense from anyone. She cared for Ofelia, but there was a lack of maternal affection between them: she could be exacting and she could be brutally honest, but she also understood. When she looked at her granddaughter in the eyes, when she spoke to her about their shared experience, all the warmth that was absent in the forms of hugs or bedtime stories rushed in and Ofelia felt comforted. She pushed her granddaughter; she could be unforgiving in her methodology and relentless in her training style. But she never humiliated her, and she certainly didn’t admonish her. To Beatriz, there were no such thing as failures if one continued to try and overcome their fears.
But that Jacques attributed this as hereditary startled her; then he conceived of her, on any level, as a fighter was nothing if not shocking. The only disappointment she’d given her grandmother had been a habit of giving up prematurely, of rolling over and letting her fears take over. That he thought she, Ofelia, would be able to fight it, made her give a half-laugh,half-cry at the irony of such a skewed perspective. But she didn’t pull away. “You can’t fight it because it’s already in you. Everytime you go down there, everytime it costs you a little. It’s like a really fucking obnoxious debt collector and eventually, your body shuts down. I think I learnt that before I learnt that people carried babies in their stomachs. I think I knew about the inevitably of dying for us before I knew about the possibility of life.” She pulled her head back a little to look at him and frowned, shaking her head. Though the crying had ceased, vision was still blurred and she blinked rapidly. “A lot isn’t fair. But I’m selfish, too. It’s not fair to her that I’m afraid of no one ever understanding me again. Sometimes I think that’s why she had my dad, just so that there was some small possibility that he’d be like her and she’d have someone else.” She pulled her knees up to her chest under the blanket, so she was compact and felt, momentarily, safe. “It isn’t fair to her that I’m more afraid of seeing her down there then I am of her actually dying.”
Jacques didn’t understand. He didn’t like it, but he honestly did not understand Ofelia and her power. He had tried to research it, a little, but there was only so much research he could wrap his mind around while trying to stay on top of his own intensive training. He got the impression, however, that this was something he could never quite comprehend unless he experienced it personally. He wanted to know, but at the same time he respected the fact that he couldn’t. Not ever. Not really. He did understand, however, the importance to have someone who knew exactly what was happening to you, especially people like them, whose lives and powers were so unique that the majority of the world really never had an inkling. Before he came to Camulus, he’d been secluded from other victims of the Darwin Virus. He didn’t know anyone like himself. These last few months had been like coming home in that regard. But for a power like Ofelia’s, it went a step further. Her life was terrifying, her nightmares were walking, and he knew all that but he couldn’t begin to imagine what it really was. That intrigued him and bothered him at the same time. He couldn’t counsel her on what to do. Jacques didn’t know how to deal with this either. But at the core, it was death in a family, and an important one. That was universal. Loss happened everywhere. He could wrap his mind around that little bit.
“It’s fair that you’re scared to lose her.” Jacques stared back down at her, his voice more firm but still very gentle. “Anyone would be. And seeing her down there, I can’t imagine it, but of course that would be awful. You know what happens. That makes it difficult, since you can’t do what the rest of us do and just dream up some other afterlife. Of course you’re scared. Anyone would be.” His voice grew softer again at the next question, since it was something he wasn’t sure he was supposed to be asking in the first place. “Do you know...how much longer, at all? Or isn’t there really a way to tell?”
Ofelia felt warmed by his attempts at comfort. They were unusual and perhaps even slightly uncomfortable as her own parents, for all their virtues, had never been particularly empathetic. It was difficult in these moments not to admit that her feelings for Jacques were growing steadily away from the friendship and the physical, that she liked him with a capital L, that she felt better when he was around. But that moment of warmth which had made the last month so unexpectedly happy felt eclipsed, now, by the cold creeping air of death. Perhaps it was the time -- 3:21 -- or the conversation. But Ofelia felt strongly the sense of it lurking somewhere close by and she shivered, lifting up her blanket to pull him amongst their folds, afraid that he could feel it too.
“The doctors say she won’t live longer than the year,” she replied flatly, her voice hushed in the dark. When she looked up into his face, it was more difficult for her to cover how frightened she was and she frowned, reaching a hand out and placing it on his neck for no reason other than to feel that he was warm and had a pulse, that he wasn’t worth being afraid of. She sat there, like that, just moving her thumb in small circles over the skin of his throat near his collarbone, before continuing on. “Not as long as that long. I saw her a few weeks ago, when we first came to Camulus. We meet below sometimes and I could feel it then. I could see her so strongly, all the lines in her face. Usually when you’re below, you look like an apparition. That she was so physically there...” She shivered. “Existe um remédio para tudo, é chamada de morte. It’s a Portuguese proverb. It means, there is a cure for everything. It is called death.” She offered up a sad smile and leaned forward, kissing him lightly, anxiously, fretfully, as if she’d never done it before. As she pulled away, she laughed softly, only it sounded strange. Strangled. “Sometimes it feels like my entire existence was a mistake. I can’t tell if I belong here or There.”
Jacques took the opportunity of being covered with the blanket to pull her to him a little more tightly, because her fear was slightly contagious and he felt more and more like she was slipping away right now. He had to be reminded that she wasn’t the small ghost she sometimes seemed and that she wouldn’t just leave without warning. Sometimes, with all her tales of the other world and the phantoms that inhabited it, he was afraid she would. But her hand on his neck reminded him they were both very much here. He bent his head and closed his eyes against her skin, not really questioning what she was doing because it felt like the right thing at the moment. He reached for her other hand and grasped it gently, entwining his fingers with hers to at least link them against the rest of the world.
The kiss surprised him. He wasn’t expecting it, and she looked absolutely terrified. He carefully returned it, though, as cautiously as he possibly could. Part of him sort of wanted to shake her and just tell her to stop, that they were fine, that this would pass and nothing would go wrong. But that wasn’t true, and that wasn’t a good way to deal with problems, anyway. But what she said hit him so hard that he almost transformed into something, and he wasn’t even sure what it was. He just felt himself beginning to get very cold. So he must have been feeling fear. But he closed his eyes, concentrated for a minute, and never took a form other than his own. The effort had shaken him, but when he opened his eyes they were stern rather than frightened. “You belong here. Of course you do.” He needed to make sure she wasn’t going to fade away, somehow. “Don’t even think that.” He knew she couldn’t help it. That was the problem.
It was clear to her then that he was scared and she realized that, while she interpreted the signs wrong -- Jacques didn’t appear, after all, to be in any hurry to leave -- she felt a small victory thrill through her. It was pointless to tell him that she was a freak. He brushed such warnings off and insisted that the entire school was strange, that Ofelia was one among many. That her strangeness wasn’t in competition with the strangeness of the others. But seeing then, there, that it had registered at the level of the body, that she could feel through the fingers, even their lips, that she’d managed to frighten him, it felt safer to proceed forward. Now he knew, and she wouldn’t feel so terrible thinking that he’d been tricked or, worse still, wondering when he’d realize the dupe. At his words she nodded, but there was a lack of sincerity: unlike many depressed teenagers, it was rare for Ofelia to yearn for her own end. Tonight, a part of her wondered which road would be the least painful and she didn’t settle on life with any real resolution.
“You’re cold,” she said hoarsely, feeling his skin temperature drop and watching him with some concern. His fear was felt and she was too selfish to think of his own reactions, of his transformations, only feared that she was right, that Death was palpable in the room to be felt even by those inept in the arts of necromancy. With a light shrug, she offered up a strained whisper of a smile and tried comforting words that came out embarrassed and with the pang of imagined humiliation. “And I’m not going anywhere tonight so don’t worry about me. I mean, not that you spend time worrying about me. I just mean. If you are. You don’t have to.” Pressing her lips together, she forced herself to stop talking. Again she leaned forward to kiss him, only this time it was just to the left of his mouth and she place a hand on his cheek; it was harder, more forceful, as if impressing the fact of her physicality on him. She wasn’t a ghost, the kiss said. She wasn’t a ghost, she wasn’t a ghost, she wasn’t a ghost. It was as much to convince him as it was herself. “You should go back to sleep, Jacques. I’ll lie down too.” And still holding his hand, she crawled over the small bed, resting her head on the side closest to the wall so that together with his sleeping figure, she’d be cocooned in a sort of protective fortress.
He shook his head vigorously when she pointed out that he was cold, which was rather pointless since it was obvious and he didn’t need to lie about it. But he didn’t want her to think it was her own fault, since it wasn’t. “It’s fine. There was a draft for a second, it’s gone.” Jacques didn’t like admitting that he was so easily read, but he was. The fact that his emotions were literally written on his skin made it easy for people to tell exactly what he was feeling, even if he didn’t change right there. This was annoying for him, but probably quite convenient for everyone else. She seemed to sense intrinsically, somehow, though, that he was scared. And he was. Not of her, he never would be. But Jacques was scared for her. He didn’t want to see her suffer or lose her, but during moments like this, the chance seemed real. It seemed imminent, even.
But the kiss broke the moment of fear, just like it had intended. He reached to touch Ofelia’s face, pressing her hair back with his thumb. He closed his eyes once more and his breath slowed, calmed. His muscles relaxed,though he hadn’t been aware he’d been tightening them. Jacques smiled at her, trying to prove that this was all right. This was nothing. He lay down next to her without protest, but tonight he didn’t want to lie on the other side of the bed. He didn’t let go of her hand, and moved as close to her as he could without actually breathing down her neck. “I’ll stay awake til you’re asleep.” He told her without much conviction, since he never knew when that was. And then remembering that maybe this would be a day she slept too late, he added, “We can sleep in tomorrow and go out for lunch maybe?” He was trying to help in little ways, but he didn’t know if they would add up to anything remotely effective. But it was all he could do, and he was trying.
Ofelia didn’t care to keep score anymore, as if something had changed over the last fifteen minutes of conversation. She didn’t, therefore, tell him that he always fell asleep first and instead only smiled amusedly to herself, watching his face as he settled in. Slipping a leg in between his so they were slightly tangled, she felt herself bristle at Jacques’ suggestion. It didn’t annoy her or rather, didn’t make her annoyed with him. Defensively, she wondered if the comment was meant to be aimed at her recent unorthodox sleeping habits and she had to swallow hard to bite back any reproofs. Instead she nodded lightly without really knowing if she’d keep her promise: “Okay,” she said in a voice heavy with fatigue and the emotions of their conversation. “A late lunch.” The qualifier helped her from feeling guilty.
As she lay down and felt her chest rise and fall more steadily, more rhythmically, she watched Birdie flutter down into the nest she’d built at the head of Ofelia’s bed. Bits of paper, coloured cloth and cotton from her room made up the little nook and she fluffed her feathers, tucking her head down as if contented. But still as Ofelia watched her, she could sense the mirror sadness and she worried. Even if she couldn’t take care of herself, she wished she might be able to properly take care of the tiny yellow finch. Pulling her eyes away from the nest, she met Jacques’ blue ones again, dim in the darkness of the room and watched him, silently, for a few moments. “Birdie’s really glad you’re here,” she murmured, squeezing his hand lightly. What she really meant was obvious, but even between the wall and Jacques, she didn’t feel safe enough to say it..