Work Text:
Azune knows something is wrong the moment Hal’s sending asks him to meet at his home instead of the tavern. As the danger in the city mounted, Hal had become increasingly reticent to offer his home to them as anything but the direst of emergency meeting places. Even with Shadia staying with Elodie and Hero, he still tried to keep the home as a refuge, as a last resort. None of them blamed him, but it tended to mean that any meeting moved from a third-space elsewhere to the Fang home was going to be fraught.
When he’s finally able to get away late into the evening, it’s Hal alone that greets him at the door and it only compounds the worry that had been silently festering for hours since the sending, since his terse Of course, I’ll be there as soon as possible. Has something happened? had gone unanswered. Hal was never the first to greet him, and certainly not alone.
The Fang home is warm when Hal ushers him inside, as welcoming as always, but it’s also silent in a way it categorically never was. There is no Shadia, home to visit or to grab something to take to her temporary-permanent room at Elodie’s. No Bolaire on the chaise, a glass of wine and a play or a collection of poetry from Hal’s collection held up to himself like a shield to keep Murray at bay. No Murray at all, and something cold settles in Azune’s chest at that realization. It could be easily explained away why Bolaire’s presence in the home would perhaps not be immediately obvious, but not Murray.
It shouldn’t just be Hal, looking haggard but unharmed, doublet cast aside in favor of a loose poet shirt, the sleeves pushed up past his elbows. Hair mussed like he’d been running his hands through it far too often, bare feet like he’d been home for some time. Dying embers in the hearth, like he’d been home alone for that time. Azune looks around the room, looks past Hal’s shoulder, trying to catalog anything and everything to figure out what he’s missing, what he’s not been told. “What happened?”
Hal frowns, and Azune still struggles to not see Thjazi in his expressions. This one he knew intimately: I have information you won’t like. “There was an incident earlier today. We’re all fine now, but Murray was injured. She’s—”
“Where.”
Hal keeps talking like he hadn’t spoken, shaking his head. The same way he tried sometimes to cut through Shadia’s words when he needed her to listen. The same way Thjazi did, when someone tried to talk over him. “She’s fine. She lost a lot of blood but she’s stable.”
“Where.”
“Upstairs, resting. Or should be, but it’s Murray, so—”
Nodding, Azune turns to head up the stairs, knows the Fang home well enough to guess which guest bedroom Hal might’ve taken Murray to. He doesn’t expect Hal’s hand to shoot out to grab him, to wrap around his forearm with an almost growled, “Azune, hold on, just wait a moment.” Doesn’t expect the desperate strength behind the grip, almost enough to bruise, and certainty enough to betray Hal’s own heightened anxiety—a slight tremor that Azune knows isn’t his own.
He was stronger than Hal by a fair margin, he could easily pull away, but there’s no part of him emotionally capable of following through with the motion, not when it was Hal. So against everything he wants in the moment—to balk at being asked to wait when Murray was somewhere hurting, to wrench his arm out of Hal’s hold and march up the stairs to be at her side—he stills, and he waits. If she’s fine, let me go see her, he wants to say, but can’t form the words in a way that the demand doesn’t die in his throat. He can hear the blood roaring in his ears, he can feel his chest ache. Feels, fleetingly, lightheaded. If she’s fine, why are you stopping me?
“She’s been asleep for most of the afternoon. I was just making some tea to take up to see if she was awake. I want you to take it for me, but give me a few more minutes. And breathe, please.”
Hal squeezes his arm and pulls away and mouth dry, eyes stinging, Azune nods jerkily. Take a long, deep breath while Hal walks away from him and into the kitchen, leaves him alone at the bottom of the stairs.
It’s both an eternity and exactly two-hundred and seventeen heartbeats before Hal returns carrying a tray that he offers over with a nod. “Second door on the left. Come get me if either of you need anything.”
Azune recognizes the moment the tray is settled into his hands why Hal had made him wait for it—he can’t rush up the stairs to her side like he wants, can’t storm up and startle her out of well-needed rest, when he’s made to balance a tray of scalding hot tea in a pair of well-loved mugs. Walking up the stairs, he contemplates them—he doesn’t know which of Hal’s children had made these particular mugs, but it was undoubtedly one of them; squat, small-handled things glazed lavender with flecks of the Lloy’s iron-enriched red. The tea is herbal and fragrant—yarrow for fevers, chamomile for inflammation—and Azune wonders idly if Hal or Shadia had taken up the work of making batches of Thaisha’s remedies and blends when she’d left or if this was still leftover from Thaisha’s own work.
Murray is already awake when he shoulders the door open, laid on her back with her face turned to the side. In the sparse candlelight of the room he can just make out the shadow-softened edges of her, and although there was nothing fragile about Murray, here—stripped of her jewelry and her gem-toned finest, wrapped in a borrowed shirt, tucked half under the sheets of one of Hal’s guest beds—he could perhaps forgive someone for making the mistake of assuming her so.
She has a hand outstretched, idly making the flame of a candle on the nightstand dance, an almost hypnotic wave-like undulation in time with the movement of her fingers. When her eyes flick to him, the flame—for the briefest instant—seems to grow, burns superheated blue before settling back to placidly guttering orange as she releases control of it. Her head lolls on the pillow when she turns her gaze onto him fully, a gem-grin smile too wide to be wholly authentic. “Come to nurse me back to health?”
“If you’ll let me.” He sets the tray of tea on the dresser, already knew they’d leave it there to go cold. Someone could always warm it back up later, if Murray took interest in a cup. “Hal said you should be resting.”
“Laying down is resting,” she grouses, voice rough with sleep and with obvious pain. And although part of him needs to know just how badly she had been hurt, needs to wallow in the new-bruise ache that he hadn’t been there to protect her, a part of him is grateful that he couldn’t see any of it. That he could pretend, for just that moment, that she was simply waking up from a well-deserved rest. Shapers knew she’d been getting so little.
“I don’t think casting is, though.”
She rolls her eyes but doesn’t humor him with a response. Instead she holds her hand out, fingers splayed in invitation and that’s all it takes for him to cross the room and all but collapse to his knees at her bedside, to take her offered hand in one of his own like grasping for a lifeline. Shed of all her jewelry, it was a strange sensation to hold her hand without the familiar feeling of skin-warmed metal or the soft scratch of her quill as it drew tiny nonsense patterns across his knuckles. Her hand is so soft, and so much smaller than his, and he cradles it as gently as he is capable, terrified suddenly of causing her pain, but when she squeezes his hand it’s strong enough to grind bone.
She starts to turn onto her side to face him, using their hands for leverage and pillowing her head with her other arm, winces when the movement aggravates whatever remnants of her wounds he couldn’t see beneath her borrowed clothes. His free hand immediately comes up to cradle the back of her neck, and he can feel the way she trembles with the strain under his palm.
Instinctively, he reaches down into the untapped well of his own healing, siphoning just enough to help ease the ache of the movement and presses it through his fingers. Murray sighs when the healing sinks in like a balm, a shuddering kind of relief. She settles onto her side, her cheek just briefly pressed against his forearm before he recalls his hand. “Didn’t have’ta do that, ‘m just a little achy.”
“You’re still in pain. I can help,” he argues, pushing some of the hair that had fallen into her face and tucking it behind her ear. He wants to ask what happened, how exactly and how best he can help, but he doesn’t want to make her explain. Not yet. Not until she wants to tell him. “You should’ve sent for me sooner.”
“You were at work, where you needed to be.”
“No, I needed to be here. With you.”
“It would look awfully suspicious if you dropped everything to come every time I called,” she says, reasonable and realistic even when she was in pain. In the gentled clasp of their hands he can feel her thumb as it brushes back and forth across his fingers, self-soothing, and he gives her hand another little squeeze.
He knows she’s right—of course she is, they’d all been so careful to ensure it was as difficult as possible to connect any one of them back to each other—but in the moment he doesn’t care how it would’ve looked for Murray to call him to her side, what it would’ve put at risk, only cares that he wasn’t there when she needed him. That he could’ve lost her and he wouldn’t have known until she was already gone, reliant on a sending from Hal or Bolaire to keep their covers intact. “So let it look suspicious. You could’ve—”
His voice breaks on something not quite fully a sob and he drops his face to the bed, presses his forehead against the edge of the mattress in what he can’t justify as anything but act of desperate supplication before her. “I can’t lose you,” he pleads, voice thick, eyes winced closed and stinging again, “Murray, I can’t lose you.”
He knows when she starts sobbing, the sharp wet inhale, the way her hand starts to shake clasped between his, the way she squeezes tight enough again that he actually winces, momentarily grateful she can’t see his face. He looks up as tears start to run down her face, as her expression crumbles. And he wants to wipe them away, to cradle her face in his palms, but he can’t make himself let go of her hand long enough to try. Rubs his thumb in what he hopes are soothing circles against the skin of her hand and lets her break, lets her sob, for as long as she needs.
(Even though his own eyes sting with tears, he doesn’t cry, more often than not he can’t—they build up but never fall, just make him feel as feverish and wrung-out as if had cried but without any of the catharsis, and now is not an exception.)
Her tears peter out in their own time, run their course until her lashes are heavy with them, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. She sniffles miserably and shifts herself closer towards him, heedless of the discomfort it so obviously still causes to move. Curls herself loosely around their hands, her head bowed close enough to the edge of the bed that he can stretch to press a single lingering kiss to her forehead before sitting back on his ankles. He rests his cheek on their clasped hands to look into her eyes, presses more healing through that point of contact. Would take every drop of pain from her if she would just allow him to.
“I was so fucking scared,” she whispers, her whole shuddering with the admission, so quiet and raw and vulnerable he would’ve been certain the words weren’t meant for him if she weren’t so close that they were sharing breath, if her eyes—beautiful and fever-bright in the low light, and maybe she would benefit from a cup of that tea, after all—ever looked anywhere but right back into his. “For a moment, I really thought—”
He squeezes her hand tighter, and takes a chance to steer the conversation in a way he hopes she’s herself enough to appreciate, even if the words try their hardest to stick in his own choked-up throat. “I brought— Hal made me bring tea, if you’re up for it. Chamomile,” he says with false solemnity, “your favorite.”
The joke just barely lands. Murray quirks a terrible attempt at a smile and the little laugh that bubbles out of her throat comes out mostly as a sob. “Can you just— stay with me? Keep holdin’ my hand, at least until I fall back asleep?”
“I’ll stay with you for as long as you’ll have me.”
“Don’t make me drink the fuckin’ chamomile.”
“No promises.”