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Maelle woke up to the smell of smoke. Eyes heavy with sleep, her room blurred around her. In front of her, she saw her bedside table, with her music box on top of it. Her eyes slowly focused on her door.
A flickering, bright white light behind her door. She suddenly felt wide awake. Her heart was pounding in her chest.
She opened the door. Fire. Roaring, cracking, eating away at the wood furniture.
There was a wall of flames in front of Gustave's bedroom door at the end of the hallway. The heat of the flames in the hallway made it difficult to breathe. She couldn't reach his door. It was so far away.
"Gustave?" she called out into the roaring flames. She called out for Gustave multiple times, before the air in the hallway made it difficult to breathe. She choked on the smoke. Her eyes started to water, and she felt a strange pain on the side of her face.
The flames were getting closer. She tried to call out to Gustave again, but all that came out of her throat was a choked sound. The flames were getting closer. All she could see was white fire, blazing.
She was burning. She was burning, just like her brother.
His face flashed through her mind. It was not Gustave's face, it was a stranger. And yet seeing him made her chest ache. She felt like her lungs had turned to stone. Far away, she heard someone screaming, raw and agonized.
The flames were getting closer. She was burning. Alicia tried to scream. -
---
Maelle shoots upright in her bed, gasping for air. The fire. She has to get to her brother-
In a heartbeat, she stumbles to her door, almost knocking over the potted plant on her bedside table. She throws it open. A dark hallway. Quiet. She is still struggling to breathe, but there is no smoke, no fire.
She had another nightmare. Maelle tries to tell herself that it was just a dream, but it still feels too real. The shape of her dream is distant and clouded but with jagged edges, aching like a painful memory.
She walks over to Gustave's door, reaching out but hestitating. She doesn't want to wake him, but she needs to see him, she needs to know he is okay. She presses a hand over her mouth, and realizes she is shaking.
She hears footsteps from Gustave's room, and suddenly feels guilty for waking him. Gustave softly opens his door, blinking slowly. Maelle breathes, relieved to see him, but she still feels a lump in her throat.
Before he can say anything, Maelle whispers: "I'm sorry... I didn't mean to wake you up." She tries to sound casual, but her voice breaks, getting almost inaudible towards the end of the sentence.
"Hey now, it's okay", Gustave whispers and embraces her, steadying her. She hugs him back, holding on tight to him. "You're okay", her brother says, and Maelle starts crying.
Gustave holds her close, and Maelle listens to his calm and even breathing. In between sobs, her breathing slowly gets more even too.
---
They end up sitting in the kitchen, as they often do when Maelle had a nightmare. It's been happening more frequently. Gustave says it's probably the stress from the expedition training, but Maelle isn't so sure.
Gustave is heating some milk on the stove, telling Maelle an anecdote from his past. This too is part of their routine after nightmares.
Gustave is an entertaining storyteller, but he tends to go on tangents and stumble over his words sometimes. Maelle doesn't mind at all. Listening to the cadence of his voice calms her down and distracts her from the memories of her dream.
"You should have seen Sciel's face," Gustave laughs, as he fills the steaming milk into two cups "When I showed up to work on the aquafarm with half my moustache gone and a bald spot on the side of my head. She thought I lost a bet."
Despite her lingering unease, Maelle smiles at imagining Gustave with a ridiculous haircut. "You're lucky it grew back." Her voice sounds brittle to her own ears.
"Well, I learned my lesson about trying to shave without a mirror after staying up all night. It's honestly a miracle I made it to work at all that day." Gustave hands Maelle a cup of hot milk.
"Thank you." she says, and she doesn't mean only the milk. She is truly grateful that Gustave puts up with her nightmares. She knows that she is difficult, but he doesn't seem to mind.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Gustave's gentle question distracts her from her overthinking. Maelle takes a sip of warm milk, considering the question.
Gustave already knows about her strange fear of fire. She's been irrationally afraid of it as far as she can remember. In her previous foster homes, she always avoided the kitchen stoves. The smell of smoke and seeing wood burning made her want to run away. People around her had accused her of dodging her kitchen chores out of laziness.
But when Gustave found out about Maelle's fear, he was nothing but understanding and kind. He had found a way to power the stove with Chroma with the help of his colleague Lune. At one point, he had even thanked Maelle for giving him inspiration to work on a new invention. Maelle remembers the small, amused smile Lune had given her at that; Gustave had always been a bit over-enthusiastic about his engineering.
He had also gently encouraged Maelle to try out fire-based pictos during her training. What seemed like a terrifying suggestion at first actually ended up helping her. Maelle found herself less afraid of fire when she was in control of the flames.
Which brings her back to Gustave's question. Does she want to talk about her nightmare? She was just getting over her fear of fire. The nightmare feels like a setback.
But a part of her knows that Gustave would understand. He always has.
"Sometimes, I'm still scared of fire" she says quietly. It sounds like a confession. She didn't mean to sound ashamed, so she makes an effort to to speak her next sentence in a lighter tone: "Only the big dangerous ones, of course. Candle flames tremble in fear of my sword!". She makes a small swinging gesture with her hand.
Gustave must have noticed how forced her sudden lighthearted demeanor is. But he joins in on Maelle's attempt at humor with familiar ease: "Well, I think I can emphasize with the poor candles. Your fencing is getting deadly, even I am starting to have trouble dodging."
Maelle feels a spark of pride at his praise, and easily falls into the familiar bantering: "Like it is difficult to defeat you. Last week, you couldn't even beat your apprentices at Pétanque."
Gustave puts on a theatrical expression, pretending to be offended, his eyes sparkling with amusement: "That has nothing to do with dodging!"
"Both require focus and precision." Maelle retorts, "If you think about it, fighting Nevrons and playing Pétanque are not so different."
Gustave lets out an amused exhale "If one of the Nevrons on the continent throws Boules at me, I am quitting the expedition. I stand no chance against that."
- "Don't worry, next time we play Pétanque, I'm letting you be on my team. I'll teach you some tricks." Maelle smiles at him, and Gustave smiles back.
----
She doesn't tell him more about her dream.
She desperately wants to forget about about the burning hallway and the stranger in the flames. She already feels like the details of her nightmare are slipping away, fading like a drop of ink in water.
She yawns. "I think I should probably go back to sleep." She feels calmer now, reassured by Gustave's comforting presence.
They walk back to their bedrooms. Gustave gives her a gentle shoulder squeeze, and they say their goodnights.
When Maelle closes her door behind her, she catches sight of the music box on her bedside table. For a moment, she feels a strange sense of vertigo. Has it always been there?
Yes. She suddenly remembers it quite clearly now. She had picked out the music box at an antique store as a birthday gift. It was broken, but Gustave had repaired it for her. It played a wistful melody that felt like home.
Maelle lies down and looked at the music box on her bedside table, imagining the melody. In the hazy space between asleep and awake, she starts hearing a faint piano melody, accompanying the music box.
Then she falls into a dreamless slumber.