VI. The Elixir and the Catching

There was one more strand of the old simile that neither Ilyrisse's ledger nor Vaelira's wordless plate-refilling had yet accounted for, and it belonged to a rarer, darker sort of evening than either of the two women liked to dwell on for long.

The elixir was not, strictly, a drink, though Eremos had made it into something that resembled one, in the early confused years after he first discovered that the accumulated grief of a thousand souls could, on certain nights, grow heavier than even his considerable capacity to carry it. He had gone looking, then, for something that could do for his memory what the Garden of a Thousand Souls did for his overflow of feeling — a controlled place to put the unbearable weight down, if only for an hour, if only long enough to remember what it felt like to exist without every single one of his family's sorrows pressing constantly against the inside of his ribs.

What he had found, deep in one of the Fragment's oldest and least hospitable corners, was a slow-brewed liquor distilled from something that no longer had a name in any language currently spoken in the Between, and it did, for the space of an evening, exactly what he had gone looking for it to do. It loosened the grip his memory kept on every grief he had ever inherited. It let him laugh without immediately calculating whose sorrow that laughter might be borrowed against. It let him, for a few merciful hours, simply be a young man drinking too much in the company of people who loved him, rather than the permanent load-bearing wall of an entire household's accumulated mourning.

It also, reliably and without exception, left him unable to stand on his own by the end of the evening, his usual careful control over his own considerable strength dissolving along with everything else the elixir had loosened, until he became, for those few unguarded hours, something closer to an ordinary drunk young man than the ancient and devoted force he was every other night of his existence — clumsy, affectionate, prone to weeping over small unremarkable kindnesses, and entirely unable to catch himself when his own legs finally gave out beneath him.

Vaelira never once let him drink alone.

She did not lecture him about it — had decided, early on, that a boy who carried this much grief for this many people had earned the right to occasionally set some part of it down, even if the method he'd chosen came with its own inconvenient costs — but she made certain, every single time, without exception, across every one of these rare unguarded evenings, that she was the one sitting closest to him when his control finally slipped. She learned the particular warning signs of it long before he learned to recognize them in himself: the slight softening at the corners of his mismatched eyes, the way his usually careful, measured voice began to run loose and unguarded at the edges, the small telling moment when he started reaching for people simply to touch them rather than to comfort them, no longer entirely certain of the difference.

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"You're listing," she told him once, on one such evening, catching his shoulder before it could carry the rest of him sideways off the low bench they'd been sharing. "Like a ship. It's very undignified. I want you to know I'm only catching you because the alternative involves considerably more paperwork."

"You always catch me," he said, his words blurring pleasantly at their edges, his head coming to rest against her shoulder with none of its usual careful restraint. "Every time. I don't know why you bother. I'm not — I'm not good company like this. I say things I don't mean to say."

"You say things you mean and are usually too careful to say," Vaelira corrected, adjusting her position slightly to better bear his weight, her voice gone soft in the particular way it only went for him, on nights like this, when no one else was close enough to hear it. "That is a very different failing, and I find I don't mind it nearly as much as you seem to think I should."

He was quiet a moment, his eyes half-closed, his breathing slow and uneven against her shoulder. "I forget, when I drink it," he admitted, finally, in the loose, unguarded voice the elixir always eventually produced. "Everyone's grief. All of it, just for a little while. It's the only time I ever get to put it down completely, and I know it's a coward's way of resting, and I keep doing it anyway, because the alternative is carrying it every single hour of every single day for the rest of forever, and I don't — I don't know how to do that without occasionally needing somewhere to set it down."

"It isn't cowardice," Vaelira said, quietly, her hand coming to rest against the back of his head, holding him steady against her shoulder the way she had held him steady, in one form or another, since the very first night she'd woken furious and disoriented in his arms and discovered, to her own considerable irritation, that some stubborn part of her had already decided to stay. "Cowardice would be refusing to pick the weight back up in the morning. You have never once done that. You put it down for a single evening, and every single morning after, you pick every ounce of it back up again without complaint, and I happen to think that a person who does that consistently, across as many centuries as you've already done it, has more than earned the occasional night of forgetting."

He did not answer, had already drifted, by then, into the particular boneless half-sleep the elixir eventually produced, his considerable weight settled entirely against her, trusting without any conscious decision to trust that she would not let him fall the rest of the way to the floor.

She did not move him. She sat there instead, for as long as it took, bearing the whole unguarded weight of him against her shoulder, thinking, in the particular unspoken language she reserved for moments no one else would ever witness, that this — precisely this, an ancient and devoted boy finally allowed to be clumsy and unguarded and entirely undignified for the length of a single evening — was worth every single indignant complaint she ever performed about neglected flowers and gardener's habits. He gave himself away, hour after hour, day after day, to every grieving soul in this enormous household. She had decided, long ago, without ever once announcing the decision aloud, that the very least she could do in return was make absolutely certain that on the rare nights he finally allowed himself to fall, there would always be someone close enough, and steady enough, and devoted enough, to catch him.