Chapter 54: Comfort.
The room was quiet, still, in the way that made you want to fidget at times. From downstairs, faintly, she could hear the particular quality of silence that meant Silas had fallen asleep, which she had estimated at four minutes and had been correct about.
"You’re not sleeping," she said finally, deciding that enough time had passed since her arrival.
Silence.
"Your breathing is wrong for sleeping," she said. "It’s too deliberate."
A long pause.
"Go away, Amari," Aris said, into the wall, voice small.
"I brought donuts."
Another pause, this one with a slightly different texture.
"What kind," he said.
"From that one place in the pink district that you like."
She had looked this up. Lyra had told her, in the efficient shorthand they had developed over the past weeks, in the same message that had said;
he’s upstairs, he probably won’t say so but company would help.
The blanket shifted. Aris rolled over slowly, with the particular reluctance of someone abandoning a position they’d committed to.
He looked, she noted, exactly like what Silas had said.
Rattled, in the specific way that had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with something that had gotten through a gap in the mask and hadn’t been fully processed yet.
His hair was disheveled, not in the careless comfortable way it sometimes was but in the way of someone who had been lying still for eleven hours thinking too hard.
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"Why are you sulking,"
"I’m not sulking, I’m resting."
"You’re resting in your clothes from yesterday, with the curtains shut, facing the wall."
"It’s a particular kind of resting."
"It’s sulking."
Aris said nothing, which was its own confirmation.
She opened the donut box and held it out toward him. He looked at it for a moment with the expression of someone who had decided not to be moved by things and was finding the donuts an inconvenient variable.
He reached out and took one, the chocolate one, Amari noted.
She took one herself and settled back into the chair.
They ate in the quiet for a moment, the particular quality of silence that Aris allowed around very few people and that she had learned to occupy without filling.
"Silas?" he said finally.
"He;ll be fine, was up to his usual shenanigans when i got here." she said. "He’s asleep downstairs right now."
Aris looked at the donut in his hand.
"The margin," he said.
"Margin?"
"The wound." His voice was even. Measured. The tone of someone delivering clinical information about something that was not clinical to them.
"One millimeter. Between the cut and...." He stopped.
Amari waited.
"I ran the numbers," he said, taking in a deep shaky breath.
"When Yura was treating him. I ran them and the margin was one millimeter and I—" He stopped again.
She looked at him.
The usual mask was still down. Not the way it had been described to her, not that raw unguarded fracture, but softer—the version that happened when someone had been alone long enough with something that it had worn them slightly open. The version he only produced, she had observed, when the performance had been running for too long without rest.
"You don’t have control over everything, things like that eventually end up happening inside dungeons." she said.
"I know that,"
"Knowing it and experiencing it are different."
He was quiet.
"You’re not used to caring about outcomes you can’t determine," she said. It was not an accusation. Just the observation, placed carefully, the way she placed things she thought were true and wanted to see if they landed right.
Aris looked at her with the evaluating quality, the one he used when something had arrived accurately and he was deciding what to do about the accuracy.
"No," he said. "I’m not."
There was something in his voice that she couldn’t quite figure out.
She still nodded.
Then reached over and set the donut box on the bed within his reach. A small gesture. The kind that didn’t require a response.
"He’s not going anywhere," she said. "Silas."
Aris looked at the box.
"He called me no fun," he said. "In the dungeon. Before the boss."
"That sounds accurate."
The corner of his mouth moved. Just at the edge. The shape of something that had decided, tentatively, to exist.
Amari couldn’t also help but notice that his lips looked softer than usual in the dim light.
"He’s irritating," Aris said after another bite of the donut.
"Yes," Amari agreed, smiling.
"Consistently."
"That does seem to be his approach."
Aris looked at the ceiling. Then at the curtained window. Then at the donut box with the expression of someone taking inventory of a situation and finding it, against their better judgment, slightly more manageable than it had been eleven hours ago.
"The donuts are good," he said.
"I know," she said.
He reached for another one.
She let the quiet do the rest of its work as Aris ate another one of the donuts, chocolate again, she noted.
Aris didn’t particularly say anything for a long while, sitting on his bed with his cheek resting on his knee. There was a certain detachment in his eyes that Amari didn’t quite like the existence of, but still, she maintained the silence. She knew, despite her impulses, that what he needed right now more than anything was silence. Silence from the thoughts that he had probably been trying to run away for the past eleven hours.
It was a horrible fate that only awakened had to go through. The enhanced capabilities of their brains meant the thoughts and emotions they produced where always stronger than what it was for the average human, it was also why almost all awakened are loosely considered insane, if insanity was even the correct word.
For someone like Aris, whose existence was so deeply shut inside himself, Amari couldn’t even begin to image just how overwhelming having to deal with such situations were.
She turned her attention back to Aris, who by now, after a proper hour, had finally slipped into the sweet embrace of sleep.
She got up from her chair, and tenderly made him lay back on the bed, pulling the blanket over him before she picked up the now empty donut box and quietly left the room.