My Pleasure, Darling

21: Eye for an Eye

Crying can clear up the mind. Through the haze of all the things I never told them, the regret of not saying how I felt when I had the chance, the loss, the shame, some part of me still insists on surviving. Something deep within is telling me to sit up, at the very least. To get on with it. I knew this was going to happen. I knew this would be the eventual outcome. I was told as much when he sent me away. Get over it.

I never liked that part of me. The part that could, at will, shut down all emotions. That was a different Lois, and she frightens me. She frightens me, because she is me, and I fear what I might do one day when she is in control.

I find I can't complain. The part of me that, like a good soldier, can cut off all emotional thought and focus only on targets and goals, is how I made it this far. It's the part of me that flung car keys at a nigh-stranger in the middle of the night and made him drive, the part of me that went in and out of Eskalath with two vampires, the part that got us all through danger and survive to see another day. She is useful.

Felix returns. He's got a tray with two glasses and a pitcher of water, bread and some cheese. He puts it down in front of me as I slide to sit up a little, wiping my face with the backs of my hands. My voice is soft, because I am losing it. "What time is it?"

"Little bit past midnight."

I cried for a long time. The water is the first thing I go for. He begins to butter some bread and create a sandwich for me. I pour him a glass and drop the lone Bablet on the tray into it for him.

I'm mostly through my sandwich, and decimated a good bit of the water, before I can bear to utter the words. "Sorry."

"What for?"

"Taking up your whole day and-..." I trail off. What do I apologise for? Everything? I feel like a burden. Suddenly, I'm six years old again, learning for the first time that I wasn't wanted by my first parents, and terrified that I'll be abandoned again if I'm 'too much' to deal with. "I didn't mean to bother you."

He stares at me, glass in hand. It's almost finished. "Lois, I don't know how to tell you this, but you are not alone in grief."

Tears spring to my eyes the moment he says it. I know full well I don't have it in me to have another sob, but just a few tears escape, because this is the most tender thing anybody has ever said to me. "Thank you."

"It was my home too. He was my General too."

"You and I might be the only people left who knew him." I'm surprised at how much I'm not crying and falling apart. I guess I just spent the last eight or so hours doing that part. I can have a time-out for a bit. "The only people who will remember him."

He's already shaking his head. He finishes his Bablet. "You can't think like that. You can't believe that. We have to believe that some of them got out alive. Or else... how do we go on?"

I lean my head back against the headboard, staring at nothing. I am so empty, and at the same time so, so full. There is an ice-cold numbness around my pounding head, a fire in my veins urging me to physically move, a pain in my stomach, I am full to the brim of things I don't understand. "I don't know," I tell him. "But they murdered my father. Right now, I don't think going on is an option just yet."

He allows for that and gently slides the tray away to a bedside table before he gets up and sits against the headboard next to me, legs entirely stretched out, hands folded in his lap. "It will pass, you know. The pain. It will be painful for days, maybe weeks, but then the ache will slowly start to dull, every day a little bit more. And you will cope." I don't look at him, even though I want to. He goes on. "When I was twelve, my little sister died. She was five. Cancer. I didn't think any of us would recover. Especially not my parents. And while nothing ever went back to the way it was, it passed, eventually."