Loneliness

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The rushing began in the middle of the night, after a long and draining wait spent in bathing the feverish cub and forcing liquids down his throat, with interludes of medicine and a few unsuccessful attempts at getting hot soup broth into him. Beryl's ability to go on was waning now in a way that Hazel and Hyssop's had not. Delirium had set in now, and his pulse was slowing.

They moved into the bathroom, dunking the cub in cold water-Jessamine hadn't wanted to try this except as a last resort because of the shock to the cub's body, which could very well set his natural immune system back in its work, and the final desperate use of the method set tangible threads of tension into the already strained stance of the helpers. Jade worked with a quiet despair, and his husband with the harsh focus of someone who knows that they work for the impossible and can't admit it. Even Hemlock was beginning to flag in his motivation by the time the last light of the day faded into the pure darkness of the hours between morning and night.

The fever receded a little, its fires damped by the frigid water, and back Beryl went to the bed that had been changed in his short absence. Jessamine hovered over the bed, his face pinched and white, while they waited to see what damages the impromptu bath might have done, but Amber's face was its usual impassive stare. If his worries had gained any strength, he kept them to himself.

During the first hours of delirium Beryl had talked and thrashed in the dazed half-conscious way that marked someone caught in between waking and dreaming, but everything so energetic as that had long since stopped to be replaced by low, whispering gasps for air and a stark, glassy gaze that saw things no one else in the room could. The cub's fever rose again, unchecked by cold water. After a while it hurt to listen to him breathe; his throat had dried up in of the furnace his body had become, and every new breath of oxygen made a sound like a woodrasp across that dry wasteland which no amount of drinking could heal. Even the moist wash of Amber's cloth against his twin's hot skin left no more than a drying streak that stayed a second and faded into nothingness.

Hope faded with it and with the gradually dying sound of Beryl's laboured struggle to breathe, and the comfort that was light and morning had never seemed as far away as it did that night.

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Just down the hallway Onyx was staying awake for other reasons. Sineult slept soundly in the room's single bed, but throughout the long day and the day before it Onyx had made little to no progress in convincing the vindictive creature which wore his mate's face that he was no threat, which left him to spend the night in a stiff chair in the middle of an otherwise empty room. Sineult had a truly frightening wolf form at the best of times; now, Onyx only wished he could be sure that his roommate wouldn't try to harm him if he ever did fall asleep.

And yet, he looked so innocent-so Sineult-like-when he slept that it was hard to keep those worries in mind. On their first night, he hadn't slept; Onyx's presence in the room had put him so much on edge that he couldn't and those hours of darkness had been spent in a semi-silent struggle of wills that left the red-haired Kindred's head aching. On this night, tired no doubt by the sleepless one before and grown at least a little accustomed to his mistrusted company, he had prowled for one or two hours of token protest before curling up against the two pillows at the headboard and falling into a deep doze. Onyx had been left adrift, unable to get up and entertain himself but also unable to fall asleep in one of Jessamine's painfully straight wooden kitchen chairs, while his artist's imagination contrived all sorts of possible reasons for the rushing feet past the door of his room.

For the most part, since arriving at Jessamine's home with his husband in his arms and discovering the organised chaos it'd come to, he had been numb. There had been Sineult to tend to, to talk through the discomfort of fever and the tint of anxiety behind his round green eyes, and Onyx had been content to let his own worries go and let his mate lean on him while he still could. Now he was alone without being alone, and that was more than enough fodder for nightmares.

The feet worried him. There had been celebrations after Hazel and Hyssop woke up, so he knew that they were out of the woods, but Jessamine hadn't been the one to bring the lunch tray that day and Sedge had been in such a hurry that Onyx hadn't asked any questions. As a result, he had no idea whose turn it was to reach their crisis now. Whoever it was, they were losing.

Gradually, when the supply of possible terrors had run its course and he could convince himself that there was little, if anything at all, which he might do to change any of the dreamed scenarios, his thoughts drifted towards their apartment and the son that he had left there. He and Jessamine had talked about sending one of Ginger's family to take both Lupin and Fern to the farm the Rante tribe ran, but as far as Onyx knew, that had disappeared behind the piles of things to be done to keep hope alive for the sick ones.

Under normal circumstances Onyx would have been happy to leave Fern alone with Sineult's half-brother. Lupin was certainly a good and trustworthy babysitter who took any responsibility given him seriously, in addition to having a lifetime's worth of small, exciting things to do to pass the time for himself and Fern. Now, though... There was no pureblood cub-bearer in the entire world who could go through a pregnancy without at least some crankiness, and Lupin had reason to have more than that. It wasn't Fern, really, that Onyx was worried about. The death of a cub was never an easy thing to face, and for Lupin, who had faced each death in his family with more pain instead of less, it was the ultimate punishment. Sure, he had grown up knowing that it would be the way he bore his first and only litter, but was knowing ahead of time ever a comfort?

And now, on top of that, there was the all too real chance of losing most or all of the new family he had found. That was no time to be handed the responsibility of caring for an energetic five-year-old whose mind was filled with as many anxieties and questions as Fern's had to be.

He had to talk to whoever came in with the next round of medicines about it, Onyx decided finally. Lupin needed someone near, another adult who could answer his questions and guide him through the strange problems and feelings of pregnancy, and to send him to the Rantes had been a good plan from the beginning. It was a good time to send him, too-Hazel and Hyssop needed to leave as well, both to make room for the others who were still fighting and for their own welfare, in case it was actually possible to catch the Deathfever twice. Surviving it once had been a miracle. There was no need to tempt fate.

But that, like so many other things, would wait until morning and the breaking of dawn. Until that time came, there was nothing to do but sit on his chair, watching the soft, relaxed movements of his husband's mouth against teeth that could kill, and let things go as they would.

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There was a time, caught in the pure darkness that existed for only a few hours in the earliest morning, when Lupin felt closer to that other nameless world of gods and miracles than he did to what humans called 'reality'. It wasn't always a comforting feeling.

Fern was long since asleep in his bed. Even anxious as he was, a cub was just too active to go without sleep for long. Lupin had no such internal shut-off, making exhaustion just one more nipping ache he had to deal with. He was glad to have Fern to care for and love, because otherwise, he might simply have given up and let the depression spin him down into the blackly empty despair that sucked constantly at his heart.

He had known that letting go of his little male would be hard, but to feel it growing there inside and know that that little spark of life, with all its feelings and thoughts and personality quirks, would not even last long enough to draw in a first taste of fresh air... It was beyond his ability to describe. It wasn't pain. 'Despair' was a close as he could come with mere words. And he tried to keep in mind the joy and the love that he connected with the other cub, his tiny cub-bearer, only there was something so plaintive even about the image he sometimes had of them lying there together in their bubble of warmth, creating that all-important bond of twins when one would so soon be beyond reach of the other, that it always seemed to come back to that indescribable hurt.

It was some comfort to think of Fern when the thoughts assailed him and became too much. He was growing to be a good cub, an always optimistic realist (although Lupin had no clue how these two things could fit together) whose ability to take care of his doll was relieving. Lupin was helping him to think of things that were bad for it, and after a few slips, the cub seemed to have gotten a good idea of how to judge for himself between what was okay and what wasn't. It was difficult at first for him to think of things an infant might be hurt by, since he was working with an inanimate object and not a living creature with the power of movement. For example, leaving a doll alone on the tabletop wouldn't harm it; a cub would certainly find a way to roll off. Cubs were like that.

It was normal thoughts like these, thoughts about the future and silly little everyday problems, that kept him sane-it was a shame that their comfort never lasted long, but collapsed all too soon into the deep swamp of his inner imaginations. He wanted to know whether his husband was still well or dying, whether or not Fern would still have parents come the following week. At night, the eerie disconnection (or was it the opposite?) from 'reality' surrounding him like a cold, clammy fog, it was what he didn't know that hurt him the most. Because the mind could imagine anything: anything at all.

Lupin was, as his Mem said so often, a worrywart by nature, but the greatest of his fears was simply being alone. Not by himself but alone-he had long since learned that there was a difference. One led to worries about the other, of course, and he didn't like to be in a room without someone in his immediate range of sight, but he wasn't scared to be in a room by himself. He was terrified of going back to that moment right after his father's death, when everyone that he'd ever loved had been just gone.

Other people had dreams about monsters killing them, or some faceless entity chasing them through the night. When Lupin went finally to sleep, too exhausted to stay awake any longer, his dreams were nothing like that.

He was the only one in them.

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