Vigil

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That night was long.

At three o'clock in the morning, after dozing for half an hour and being woken again by nightmares, Lupin got up to do whatever cleaning, cooking, etc., that could be found around his half-sibling's middling-sized, oddly spacious apartment. He wasn't hopeful that there would be anything left after his cleaning frenzy of the afternoon and evening before, but he was willing to try.

Fern was already long since awake, occupied in blinking thoughtfully at the ceiling of his room and hugging his baby doll, when Lupin passed by on his way to the kitchen.

So they got up together and made breakfast, flipping quietly, companionably, through Sineult's little assortment of cookbooks and magazine-clipping recipes until they uncovered a couple that Fern thought might be exciting to try out, and when those were made and eaten and Fern's baby had been 'fed' to his liking, they washed the dishes up together in the same almost comforting silence. It was too early for the setup to feel normal, yet while lacking that, it still felt comfortable. By the time they had finished washing up (Fern had insisted that his doll, a small stuffed thing with a constantly smiling red embroidery mouth, be diapered and dressed appropriately), Lupin's head was clear enough to realise that he had never bothered to change himself or Fern out of their pajamas, so that was the thing they set their minds to next.

Morning passed, buried so deep in work that no bad thoughts could invade their minds. Fern did the little bit of his schoolwork that Lupin could give him without getting into Sineult's curriculum setup, which neither of them had any clue about, and when it was finished and pronounced well done they both pitched in to scrub out the little electric stove in the dining room/kitchen. Fern asked questions about Scammony, and how he would be when he was born, while they worked; Lupin answered as best he knew how. When noontime rolled around they were so tired that they had to curl up on Sineult and Onyx's bed and take a nap together, but it was worth it.

Neither Lupin nor Fern had had more than a fleeting thought of anything outside their own little world all morning.

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Morning dawned bright, clear, and already filled with work to be done for Jessamine's household as well. Overnight, Hyssop and Hazel's fevers had gone up and they had drifted off into a trancelike state, trapped in their own misery somewhere between the waking world and the world of dreams. Jessamine didn't know what to do about it. Sedge was nearing his breaking point, all hope lost with whatever small sanity his two cubs had still kept, and no words of comfort would reach him, not even his husband's pressing ones. Because Oak, Jessamine was wearily happy to see, was still holding on to the few scraps of hope that the rise and fall of the twins' chests offered.

Spruce and Jade were too busy waiting for their cub to go under as well to even know what hopes they were holding on to.

From the moment Jessamine got up and discovered his two grandcubs lying in their bed, lost in a sleep too deep for any noise to waken them, his day was a fevered rush. There was nothing to be done, but he rushed anyway, certain in the most conscious sort of way that if he stopped and thought about what he was trying for even a second, he would go the same way Sedge had gone. He was working to do something that was, by all accounts, perfectly impossible: to even try saving every one of his charges was more than ridiculous, it was downright stupid, and beyond that, it was hurting his family. He knew it was. From the beginning, he had given them hope, not letting himself or them give in to what he had known was the reality, and now it was being yanked out from under them and they were falling because of it. The only reason he still wouldn't let himself give up was the nagging little voice in the back of his head shouting that if he did, it would be his fault when his patients let go as well.

So he went on, mixing up medicines that he would try and discard. Some of them might help a bit, but he already knew none of them would be a cure, because the very nature of the Deathfever was that it couldn't be cured. Hemlock helped, dogged as always; Mem wouldn't give up soon, Jessamine thought to himself proudly, stirring his newest batch to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. He had inherited his da's admittedly over-optimistic sense of determination. His brothers had on the other hand gotten their sire's patient realism. Well, maybe they had twisted it a little. Day had never gone quite as doom's-day as Spruce liked to, but he had never shared Jessamine's bright outlook on life either. Simple patience had been his forte, no matter how bad things were.

Still, Jessamine supposed, it had to be hard on a person's ability to hope when they made a living at burying themselves in other people's sorrows, the way that Spruce did.

There. The potful had finished boiling and could be taken off the heat so that when it cooled, he could spoon more of it into the meals of the four remaining conscious diners. When he had fed them, he was going to take Oak and Spruce along and see if Hazel or Hyssop would take liquids: now that they didn't know what was going on, it might be easier to persuade them to swallow. But then again if the problem was physical and not mental, the dark inner sanctum of their coma would not offer any more possibility than the first, least threatening hours of the sickness had. He hated not knowing.

He put the hot pan on a towel on the counter next to the stovetop, at the same time strangling a depressed sigh before it could be voiced. Hemlock had taken a minute the evening before to ask into Jessamine's own state of mind, and the implications had begun a train of thought that wouldn't go away: in short, though the question had been asked in love, Jessamine wished that it had never been asked at all.

Once, only once, Jessamine had failed in his duty as a healer. The calling had been passed on to him by his own da, after two or three of Jessamine's older siblings had turned it down, and Jessamine had never found it a burden. He liked taking care of people, or perhaps more truthfully, he had always really enjoyed ordering people around. He was good at it, too. Modesty had never been one of his stronger points, and a healer had to know how to push the rightness of his cure without fail, even to the point of being obnoxious. Jessamine did that regularly anyway. And he liked herbs, besides.

So he had taken over the job, and he had never lost a patient that had even the merest chance of living, not even after he coerced Day into marrying him and the cubs were always playing underfoot. Cousins, siblings, little second-generationers by the millions, it had often seemed, and he took care of them all very well. So well, in fact, that when his own husband's life started draining out of him, sucked by the disease that had settled in his lungs, he had never even noticed until it was too late to do anything about it. Day had been so patient, so quiet, that Jessamine had never even bothered to stop and ask.

There were still times when he really, deeply despised himself for letting it happen, even with the vision of Day's reprimanding, unhappy frown that always rose with the feeling. The only thing Jessamine's mate had ever really lectured Jessamine for was him, knowing that a mistake he had made was past, continuing to angst over it anyway, and Day would certainly not have approved of his guilt in this case. But it wasn't a thing he could just let go of lightly: he had, in effect, killed his mate, and there would always be that pocket of loneliness that had once held Day's love to remind him. Because it was more than just failing as a healer-it was a thing every newlywed cub-bearer feared, it was failing his mate, and he knew that that was what Hemlock had been afraid he was falling into again. If Birch died, if Topaz or Beryl died, or even Sineult, who wasn't Jessamine's family by blood but who had come to be family just the same, then Jessamine would be left with that feeling again. That failure.

The question had been asked in love, but it was one of the very questions Jessamine had been trying not to think about.

But life went on, especially when there was someone to be taken care of. Sedge could afford to break down, and Jessamine tried, at least, to not begrudge him that. The other cub-bearer had taken a good deal in the past few days and he wasn't good at handling stress like that either. It wasn't even as if his calm presence could help his cubs any, wandering in fever as they were. Jessamine's place, the duty of the eldest in the family and of the tribe healer, was to never lay down and give up, not until the very last breath was drawn and the spirit had fled past all hope of rescue, and he had tried to do so to the best of his plentiful ability. Because he was too good at being persistent, and his resolve really didn't fail all that often. He rarely needed to force himself to go on: yet now was proving to be one of those times.

He was so tired.

He hadn't expected Sineult to fall ill, and that was one of the greatest things that was bothering, not just Jessamine, but everyone in the house. A pregnant cub-bearer shouldn't get sick. The smells didn't mix well at all, and beyond that, the whole affair always felt like a crime against nature; although out in nature it was as common as anything else, even more, for such a vulnerable one to catch sicknesses. Jessamine felt that it must have something to do with the inbred desire all Kindred had to keep their offspring or the mates carrying them safe. And not only males looked after the cub-bearers when they were pregnant - everyone pitched in. Off in the wild all eyes had been needed.

"Da," Spruce said abruptly, sticking his head in through the doorway of the kitchen. His eyebrows were drawn sharply together, as if in deep and savage thought. "Jade says he thinks a really, really hot bath might do well, to force them to sweat it out; and the moisture in the air would help with hydration, if we're careful and don't smother them with steam. Had you thought of that?"

"Well, I was going to give them a good sponge bath and plenty of water to drink, but no, I hadn't considered moving them out of the bed," Jessamine admitted, pausing wide-eyed with his hands in the sink. "I should have; Jade's right, that's a very good idea."

"Good." His son's tension seemed to fade a little, shoulders straightening under the weight of worries that they carried. "Jade will feel better, knowing that it helped."

Jessamine smiled, half to himself, half to his grown offspring standing in the doorway.

"I think I will too."

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