Page 16 of Sidhe
Nathan released Jim and stepped back. He turned, saw Sasha so close, his eyes gone liquid blue. He looked back and forth between them and softly admitted, “Because. You were worse.”
He stumbled away from them, once more a failure because he had failed to keep that awful secret from them.
“I can’t…shake it,” he said, eyes clenched tight as he backed right into the closet door, seeing the cruel versions of Jim and Sasha in the darkness behind his eyes. He opened them but like before that false image overlapped the true Jim and Sasha. “Everywhere I look…even seeing things how they’re supposed to be…it just makes me remember how it was.”
He might have been crying, or maybe it was just that he was shaking so hard his vision seemed blurred. It nearly brokehim when Sasha swooped in to gather him in his arms. Nathan choked, felt the dam about to burst, but he couldn’t let it. He tried to push Sasha away.
“Don’t…treat me like I’m…” He shook his head fiercely.
“Hurt?” Sasha finished, refusing to let go and instead holding tighter, enveloping him.
Nathan shook his head again, straining against the embrace. “Like I’m…w-weak,” he stuttered, hating the word, hating that that’s exactly what he was.
“You’rehurt, Nathan,” Sasha said, “you’re hurt and pained and…and everyone deserves to be a little weak sometimes. It doesn’t change anything about you. Not to me. I still love you. I want to figure this out with you and…and make it better. We can make it better.”
It was like a mother comforting a child that would die too young and the lie was worse than soothing words. Nathan couldn’t hate Sasha for it, but he still resented it. “Don’t…”Don’t try to save me, don’t try to fix me, don’t hold me like I’m breaking…even when I am.“Don’t tell the others,” he said instead. If he kept denying that he could be helped they’d only worry more and insist even harder that he could be.
“Nathan,” filtered over Jim’s voice around Sasha’s encompassing body, “whatever Malak did to you, I swear, you’re still the same Nathan you’ve always been. I feel it. There’s just something else there too. Why do you think the Gatehouse wards stopped working for you? You’re just more like me. If you still have faith in me, Nate, than you have to believe you’ll be okay too. Do you? Still have faith in me?”
Nathan had seen what Jim was capable of—what he believed for a whole year Jim was capable of. He couldn’t just turn that off, and that was the problem. He couldn’t think of either of them separate from the way things had been. And that was whyhe was still a Shadow Immortal, because a part of him was still in the Veil.
He suddenly felt sick having Sasha hold him. He tried harder to push from his arms.
“Nathan…” Sasha tried even though he finally relinquished his grip.
“Not right now. Okay? Can we…not do the group therapy thing, please?” Nathan moved swiftly out of reaching distance. He almost sat right back down on the floor beneath the window before he thought better of it. He sat on the bed, raked his hands through his hair. “Now you know. Okay, you know, and you get why I keep…freaking. But this isn’t a ‘let’s make Nathan better with hugs and optimism’ kind of thing, okay? I don’t know how to get…better.”
Sasha and Jim advanced on him, and Nathan had to hold back a flinch.
“Itwillget better,” Jim said, “and we will figure this out. You’re home now. What happened, whatever Malak made you believe about us or see, it wasn’t real.Thisis. You’ll remember that. You will.”
He remembered now. It just didn’t help.
“And we won’t tell the others,” Sasha promised. “They don’t need to know what happened in the Veil. But Nathan,” he dropped to his knees in front of him, “you have to believe us that you’re home, you’re safe. This is us, the real us, and you’re you. I love you.”
Those words were a knife to Nathan’s chest. He couldn’t say them back. He couldn’t remember the last time he had said them and meant it. So he didn’t say anything. He just looked up, saw those blue eyes glittering at him, and tried to remember the relief and joy he had felt when he first woke up and realized he was back where he belonged, tried to remember the feelings that had swelled in his chest when he kissed his incubus again for thefirst time, tried to remember that their dancing downstairs had felt so right before it all went wrong.
But he couldn’t hold onto it all. Because it couldn’t be the way it was. Sasha wasn’t fully his anymore. Part of Sasha belonged to Malak now. And part of Nathan would always belong to him too.
Chapter 6
Nathanstayedinhisroom, they brought him food, he managed to join the others for a bit in the evening without falling apart, and when he returned to his room, Sasha stayed with him. Jim wanted to stay as well but Nathan mustered a smile and said, “That’s just a little too kinky for me, bro.”
So he slept in Sasha’s arms again, and as hard as it was at first to curl up and relax, he found a little of the peace he had felt the night before and settled in. Sasha didn’t even try to kiss him goodnight, just held him close.
Nathan dreamt of the Veil, his choreographed, personal Hell, and woke up shivering against Sasha’s warm skin. He wouldn’t admit it, but he did miss that Jim wasn’t there too.
He could cling, he could pretend and force himself to relax, but when he looked up and met Sasha’s eyes, the overlap of a much darker Sasha still got to him.
The next day was even more tense than the first had been, everyone tiptoeing so lightly around him as if even the smallestthing might set him off. He hated that they kept shooing Wally away so she wouldn’t hiss and spit at him. He hated that he was tiptoeing too, terrified that his eyes would flash black and never go back again if he lost his temper.
No one tried to do anything substantial, no research or talks of hunts like the day before. Instead they hung around trying to make him feel like life could be normal. He still had flashes, visions that shook him, but he held himself together, bringing himself back each time before anyone could ask if he was okay. The flask he had snuck some whiskey into helped.
Nathan knew that no matter what Malak’s plans were, Sasha’s deal was the clincher. Becoming an incubus could have undone his contract, after all—at the price of Jim, but still—so maybe it could have also rid him of his black eyes, and replaced them with slit red. With Sasha having given up his ability to turn Nathan that option was out of the question forever now.
Sasha sensed Nathan’s turmoil; Nathan could see it in the incubus’ sad eyes. Every time Sasha touched him—and the incubus touched him often, gently, lovingly—Nathan wanted to melt into it, to go back to that bliss that used to come so easily, but even the smallest touches made him think of touching and being touched more deeply. And those thoughts brought with them something else.
Nathan had lived his nightmares every night for an entire year. Sasha always looked so beautiful before the scene turned horrifying, and Jim was always there with them. Eventually, they hadn’t even needed to hold him down anymore, because he had stopped fighting.
