stella king 👩‍🍳 nina zenik (molasses) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2019-07-29 21:05:00 |
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That night, Stella dreamt of dying. It wasn’t her own death she dreamt of, though she woke up feeling like she might as well have. Her heart had been cut from her chest, leaving behind a gaping wound that was unlikely to ever heal. The warmth of Matthias’ blood seemed to cover her clean, bare hands as she sat up in the middle of the night, grasping at the flimsy comforter to find his body. She wasn’t ready to let go, wasn’t ready to leave him behind. I’ll take the parem, again, and then I can heal you. I can survive it a second time. The jurda parem? She couldn’t even remember having taken it the first time, though she was vaguely aware of the wrongness she felt inside of her each time Nina reached for a way to fix this mistake, this tragedy. But was it her power that was wrong? Or was it the wrongness of this whole scene that reverberated through her bones? Matthias was too strong, too alive to be lying on the ground, life too quickly draining from his beautiful body. Stella all at once felt the comfort of her own bed and the grittiness of the ground beneath her. She smelled the faint scent of Everett’s body wash, and the ever-lingering saltiness of the canals of Ketterdam. She desperately tried to grasp at the tendrils of her own reality but, with each hollow ache in her chest, she was pulled back into Nina’s grief, the two realities swimming together and becoming inextricably one impossible thing. It’s not worth the risk. Just promise me you’ll try to save the other druskelle. There must be a Fjerda worth saving. Even without the context of how they’d reached this point, Stella understood all of the reasons why it would always be worth the risk. She had risked everything to stay behind and try to save him, and would gladly give her own life if it meant knowing he would have his. She’d been willing to trade her freedom for his, and even that had never been enough, not after everything. And now she was losing him and it was all so unfair, so wrong, so insurmountable. She felt the sob that was ripped from her in the depths of her being. She knew now what it meant to be unmade, to be thoroughly unraveled and reshaped into the physical manifestation of loss. “I promise,” she forced herself to say, the two terrible, damning words breaking her heart all over again as Nina and Stella and Stella and Nina dissolved into tears once more. Not Matthias, not him, please not him. When he would think back on it later, Everett would have wished that he'd been just a bit less comfortable in Stella's bed. Had he been so, he thought that maybe, just maybe, the sounds of her crying or even the fact that she was having a nightmare at all would have permeated his mind, waking him faster so he could offer his support quicker than the slow pace his brain took. But once he did register that he was at Stella's and that his girlfriend was crying, Everett was immediately alert. He sat up, blinking blearily into the darkness as the blanket fell around him. "Stells?" he murmured, tone full of concern. "What's wrong?" Stella fought confusion at the voice that cut through her thoughts. It wasn’t Inej talking to her, and Stella felt so foreign. But then she found herself, again, the nearness of Nina and the Grisha’s reality so close that she felt half rooted in it, despite knowing that she was in her bed. She couldn’t move, couldn’t calm herself down. It was everything in her just to respond. “He’s dead,” she whimpered. “He’s gone.” And the tears renewed with a vengeance, as she buried her face in her shaking hands. Fully awake now, Everett shifted on the bed, easing in closer to Stella. He didn't know who he was, but panic started to rise. Her brother? Another relative? That didn't seem right, unless she had gotten a call that he'd slept through. Surely he couldn't have been that deep of a sleeper. Placing a hand on Stella's arm, he asked, "What happened?" Stella lowered her hands at his touch and, through the haze of her tears, she could see Matthias’ head in her lap, his eyes closed as if he could just be sleeping. When she reached out to stroke his hair, though, he wasn’t there, and her shoulders sagged beneath the weight of the emptiness. “I don’t know,” she cried. “Someone shot him. I don’t know what happened. Why? Why would someone do this? I can’t leave him like this. I can’t leave Matthias alone here.” As her hands lowered, Everett took one of them in his, while his other hand lifted. Carefully, gently he placed his palm at her jaw, thumb gentle as he swiped away the tears on one half of her face. He still didn't know what was going on, but he knew that the only way he was going to find out was through his girlfriend, who was clearly beyond upset. That on its own made his chest ache. "Take a breath." His voice was quiet, but firm. "Just -- deep breath in, Stella." Somehow, Stella listened. She was still distraught, still hollow, still sure that there was nothing more cruel that the universe could give her, but she took a shaky, deep breath, and then another. Slowly, slowly, the certainty that she was seeing what waited for her in Ketterdam began to fade and her bedroom became more and more solidified around her. She was almost caught off guard to see Everett sitting up next to her and she had to remind herself that she was Stella and it was normal to wake up next to him, whether they fell asleep here or in his bed. A brief moment of calm clarity and then… Stella turned to Everett and buried her face against his shoulder as her sobs came in earnest because even if Nina was taking her place on the backburner where she belonged, Stella could do nothing to shake the very real hole in her chest that came with losing someone you loved. She didn’t know how much time had passed before her sobs came back under control, but as she slowly got a grip on herself, she turned her head towards him. “When do we stop believing that these dreams belong to someone else,” she asked, voice raw and full of the sheer exhaustion and emptiness that was settling over her. There was no hesitation as Everett's arms circled around Stella, holding her close as she cried against him. It was a helpless feeling. Everett's main purpose in life, or so he had always thought, was to help people. It was why he had gone into psychology, it was why he was so good at his job as a counselor for high schoolers, it was why he did most of what he did. Not only was the drive there, though, but he also had the knowledge. He knew how to help people. He could read and understand others better than most. But, as Stella cried, he didn't know what to do. At least, he didn't know what to do that would fix what she was facing. That might not have been possible for him to do, though. All he could really do, Everett knew, especially once she confirmed that everything she was feeling was thanks to a dream, was exactly what he was doing -- hold her, support her, be there for her. "I don't know," Everett breathed, his hand gently gliding up and down her back in what he hoped was a comfort. "It gets harder to believe anything else with each dream." Stella felt torn between wanting to dissolve into tears again, and having none left within her. She let her head rested against his shoulder, willfully ignoring the guilt she felt for taking comfort from him because she knew that guilt belonged to Nina who’d just lost the love of her life. Now matter how much she tried to shake it, though, it felt impossible to get rid of Nina’s feelings. “I feel like my heart’s been ripped out of me,” Stella said, clutching at her chest, “or like I reached right into it with my powers and squeezed the life out of it.” Reaching up, she hastily wiped away a stray tear. “It’s unfair knowing that, regardless of the time or place or context, we will always miss each other,” she said, taking in a deep breath. “I would have been content to know they could be happy there.” Everett knew what it was to love someone in another world. The complications that were between Major and Liv were unique, but what couple wasn't? Of course, it had been more than just relationship quirks that had plagued that particular relationship; a called off engagement was one thing, but being made into a zombie by the woman that he had once been engaged to who was now a zombie herself was something else altogether. But just because Everett knew how that felt, he would never pretend to know what Stella was going through. The feelings of those secondary lives couldn't be more real, though, and he knew that any pain Nina was feeling was just what Stella was enduring. "None of this is fair," Everett agreed, reaching a hand to smooth over her hair just once. "And you shouldn't have to be living through it." He may not have known the details, but it was easy enough to assume. "I'm sorry, Stells." Stella squeezed her eyes shut, as though doing so would force the images of Matthias’ lifeless body from her memory. It didn’t. “They were so close to being allowed to be happy,” she said, voice hoarse. “I could feel it in her, how sure she was that they were finally free to move on and just be happy.” She held her shaking hands up, still seeing the faint redness of his blood on them. “And now he’s just gone. What is the point of…” she choked on a sob, but continued, “of anything if he’s gone?” It was a valid enough question. Everett had enough training on grief counseling to know as much. Stella -- or Nina, though the differences couldn't feel very clear in the moment -- had lost someone who was dear to her. How could anyone, least of all him, expect her to think or wonder anything else? But the words that Everett could say to help the situation were few. Instead of digging through his trove of counselor words of encouragement, he stayed quiet, pulling her in a bit closer. It seemed like the only comfort he could actually give. The comfort Everett was quite possibly the only comfort Stella could have received just then. There were no words that could be uttered to her to erase what she’d just lived through, or to make the wound feel less impossible to heal. Anything he might have been able to say to try and accomplish any like that more than likely couldn’t have been well-received. But Everett always seemed to know what she needed and what she needed just then was a safe space to fall apart. And so she did. Letting Everett hold her close, she let her grief take hold of her and she cried harder than she could remember having cried before. She didn’t know how long he held her like that, or how long the tears came in earnest before exhaustion overcame the mourning. What she did know was that, when she woke up later, she’d remember the arms that never let her go, that kept her, Stella, from sinking beneath the cruel tides of a faraway harbor. |