Movement Eight — Hope You Aren't Acting

Sorrel didn't move away. I want that understood plainly too — she didn't stiffen, didn't pull back the way a person unused to this might have, startled by the sudden weight of a grief they hadn't expected to be handed. She simply tightened her arm around him, drew him closer instead of further, and let her other hand settle flat and steady against his back, unmoving, the particular grounding pressure of someone who has done this before, for him and for others, and has never once found it frightening.

"There you are," she said, quiet, into his hair. Not surprised. Not alarmed. Simply, gently, glad, the way you'd greet someone who had finally, after a very long absence, come home.

He didn't answer. He couldn't, not yet, his breath still breaking unevenly against her skin, his whole body drawn tight the way a plant draws tight against a frost it wasn't braced for.

"Hope you aren't acting, my little guy," Sorrel said, after a while, when the worst of the first wave had passed and his breathing had begun, slowly, to find something closer to a rhythm again. There was no accusation in it. If anything, there was tenderness dressed up as teasing, the particular gentle joke offered to someone who needs a door left slightly open in case they'd rather laugh than keep crying.

He made a sound against her chest — not quite a laugh, not quite anything else either, something caught somewhere in between the two.

"I'm not acting," he managed, finally, his voice rough, unsteady, nothing at all like the light, easy tone he'd been offering her only minutes before.

"I know," Sorrel said. "I'd know. You forget what I am, sometimes, underneath everything else. A druid can read a plant's true state better than almost anyone in this whole gray world — whether it's thriving, or simply performing thriving because it's decided the garden needs to believe it is. I've been reading you since before you had a proper face to read at all. I know exactly what your real weather looks like, little guy, and I know exactly what the performed one looks like too, and this — " she pressed her palm a little more firmly against his back, " — this isn't the performed one."

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He didn't answer, not with words. His hand, still gripping the blanket, loosened, slowly, fingers uncurling one at a time, until it simply rested there instead, open, spent.

"I don't know how to stop," he admitted, finally, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Then don't," Sorrel said. "Don't stop. I'm not asking you to stop. I'm not going anywhere while you don't."

"It's not — " he started, and had to stop, breath catching again. "It's not about any one thing. That's what frightens me about it. I can't hand you a reason. I don't have one small enough to say out loud."

"You don't need one small enough," Sorrel said. "Some things are too large to be handed over in a single tidy piece. That doesn't make them any less real, and it doesn't mean you owe me an explanation before you're allowed to keep feeling it."

"I keep thinking," he said, voice fracturing again around the words, "that I should be able to hold all of it without this happening. That there's some version of me strong enough not to need this."

"There isn't," Sorrel said, simply, no hesitation at all in it. "And I don't think you'd actually want there to be, if you sat with the thought long enough. A heart strong enough to never once need this wouldn't be a stronger heart, little guy. It would simply be a smaller one, closed up tight enough that nothing could reach it anymore, good or bad. I've met souls like that. I don't think you'd want to trade places with a single one of them."

He was quiet for a moment, his breath still uneven, but slower now, the words finding somewhere to land.

"You can cry for the decades I haven't been here," Sorrel said, very softly, her own voice catching, just slightly, on the words, the first sign all afternoon that whatever composure she'd been offering him so steadily had a cost of its own, quietly paid. "I mean that. However long it's been since someone let you do this properly, without needing you to explain it, without needing you to tidy it into something easier to hold — however long that's been, you're allowed all of it, right now, in this exact hour. I'm not going anywhere. I've got nowhere else I'd rather be than exactly here, holding exactly this."