[Fic] Suil A Ruin
Sep. 27th, 2007 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeTitle: Suil a Ruin
Fandom: The Dresden Files
Characters: Morgan, OC
Word Count: 4,057
Rating: PGish
Summary: Morgan is going to take a leave of absence whether he wants to or not.
"Tai chi?"
I nodded, trying to keep concentrating on my form. I'd been practicing for a couple of years now, but it certainly wasn't my strong point. I had to concentrate to make the proper movements while keeping my stance and posture straight, my muscles with just the proper amount of tension and relaxation, my joints loose and my weight balanced. It was harder than it had looked in the beginning. Give it five or ten years, though, I might master it.
I would have expected a chuckle from him at the way I must have looked. Skilled warrior, untrained novice. But this was Morgan, and he wasn't a chuckling kind of a guy.
And the next thing I knew he was standing behind me, and his arms were coming around my body alongside mine.
"Your stance isn't quite…" He stopped in mid-sentence and his hands covered my wrists. "Here."
I didn't know Morgan knew tai chi.
It was sliding from early in the morning to early in the afternoon, and we hadn't spoken at all since breakfast. The whole week seemed to be going like that: small spurts of conversation punctuating long, increasingly comfortable silences. This was the first time he'd initiated any close contact with me that wasn't inquiring what I was doing or sharing a household task.
It was a start. I wasn't sure what it was starting, but it was the start of something. Something good and worthwhile, I hoped.
Besides, he knew what he was doing. Morgan was one of the foremost fighters among the Wardens, and if he was going to give me martial arts pointers, I was damn well going to listen. He guided me through the forms I had been trying to remember and practice, and then stepped back. I tried to do what he'd shown me how to do a moment ago, but it felt clumsier without his grip on my wrists, guiding me.
"Better," he said anyway.
I fell back into a basic stance and then dropped out of it. "You think?"
He nodded. "Why haven't you joined the Wardens?"
And here we'd come to left field. I blinked at him. "Exc… No one's ever recruited me into the Wardens, I assumed I wasn't eligible."
He blinked back. "You were taught by the Gatekeeper, I assume you have some skill." Ouch, Morgan. "You're not untalented for combat. I would have thought you'd been …" He couldn't seem to figure out what to say or how to say it, so he left it at that.
"First of all, I have skills. I have mad leet skills, thank you very much." From the blank look I was guessing Morgan didn't spend much time around teenagers or anyone who spoke pop culture. "Second of all, the closest I've gotten to a combat situation is running away from them. Or cleaning up the people who get into them afterwards. Or negotiating the cessation of hostilities between street gangs. Long story," I told his arched-eyebrows look.
"That doesn't matter anymore," he said after a moment. "The Wardens need every…"
"No, Morgan. If that's a recruiting speech, save it. I have responsibilities too, and I won't leave my kids to throw myself at the vampires when the best I can do is be a meat shield for someone else. I make a better healer than a fighter," I smiled to tone it down, but I really didn't want to think he was offering what I thought he was offering.
"A less experienced fighter than a healer," he corrected. "You could…"
"No."
He looked distrustful, or disgruntled, but he quit asking. And instead of continuing a conversation he turned and started to stomp up towards the cabin. Stomp was definitely the verb for it.
"Morgan."
He stopped. But he didn't turn around. "Claire."
"Which would you rather have, a halfway to competent fighter you have to train up to be any use in the field, or an already competent physician, healer, and guardian to take care of the wounded when they come in?"
He did about a quarter of a turn, then his head turned the rest of the way to look over his shoulder at me. "I would rather have every available fighter in the field, helping to put an end to this conflict, than more healers."
"… why?" I frowned. It didn't seem to make sense.
"Do you remember what happened in Sicily? In the Congo?"
Mass slaughter. I'd heard, but I'd been in Istanbul when they took the Congo, just barely missing all the death. And only hours before the hospital in the Congo had been massacred I'd been requested to move there. My throat went dry, and I nodded because I couldn't speak. Before I'd seen it I had thought gas was a quiet death, but it wasn't always. Sometimes it was more horrible because you couldn't see or hear it coming. And I'd seen what sarin gas did to people, which was what they were saying had been used. I could picture it. I didn't want to.
"They have a source of information from within our ranks. Until we stop this conflict…" And neither of us was under the illusion that diplomacy would do a damn thing. "… the hospitals are the most vulnerable point. Yes, I would rather have more fighters than more healers." He sounded as though he meant to say something else after that, but didn't.
And I couldn't argue the point. As long as the conflict had been going on, they had been whittling down our numbers any way they could. Attacking the hospitals, any one place or person who was helping put our people back in the field, was a good way to do that. No healers meant slower recovery for the fighters, slower recovery for the fighters meant smaller forces. Which meant we were more easily overwhelmed. It was basic, good strategy. For their side.
He was looking at me as though he was waiting for something. I pushed my hair back from my face and tried to drag my spirits up out of the gutter. This wasn't what we'd come here for.
"Show me that again?"
Lunch time was somewhere around two o'clock. We spent the rest of the morning going over the basics of tai chi and kung fu, or at least I thought that's what it was. He didn't put a name to it, and I didn't ask. It was self defense, basic techniques that we discovered I could do easily enough. Basic techniques of fighting under the guise of physical fitness and meditation. We were at least pretending that we were trying to relax. I was a little surprised that he was going along with it, but he didn't say anything about Sicily or the Congo or India or any of those other crises again.
We broke for lunch when I heard his stomach growling and pointed out that just because he'd gone three days without eating or sleeping in the past didn't mean he had to do so now to impress me. That actually got a laugh out of him, even if it was a quiet one.
"Sandwiches?" I had made lunch.
"You cook. I pretend to cook. Besides, you can't exactly…" Screw up a sandwich, I had been going to say, but he was picking the tomato out of his club with a look of deep disgust. "Okay, you saw me put that in there, you could have…"
The corner of his mouth was twitching upwards. Son of a bitch.
"Oh, you're mean."
Morgan laughed, putting it back and wiping his fingers on the napkin. "You left yourself open for that one."
"So I did." I pulled up a chair, tried not to grin too much. Teasing was good. Laughing was good, too. Scars and all, the sternness in him was tempered into something handsome and intriguing when he was relaxed like that, smiling. I covered up my impure thoughts with a few big bites.
He had a thoughtful expression on his face, then, as though it had been a long time since he'd laughed and made jokes with that kind of careless abandon. The way the war had been going, I wouldn't have been surprised.
My hand moved before I thought about it, reaching out to bat at his ponytail like a cat might do with a feather. It was something we had done amongst ourselves on Devil's Island, a joking way of reminding each other to cap up before any sort of surgery did. I'm not sure what I was trying to remind Moran of. He blinked, his attention focusing back on me, his hand coming up for a second and then lowering again.
"Hello," I smiled. "Earth to Morgan."
He blinked at me, but I didn't think it was incomprehension of my meaning. He had been thinking about something and I'd interrupted it.
"Who was it?" I asked. Instinct; I had meant to ask what he was thinking about, but who seemed more appropriate. It was the tiniest twitch at the corner of his left eye that told me I was right.
But he didn't say anything, just kept eating with the same kind of single minded determination that he showed on the battlefield. Exactly the same kind of determination. A little excessive, I felt, dispatching a club sandwich with the same viciousness as an enemy soldier. I watched him so intently I was a little surprised he didn't notice. His eyes were tight and glittering with anger, the old kind that surged up with a fury when you least expected or wanted it.
I looked away from him when I realized I was leaning in too close. His passion was compelling and something I didn't want to be drawn into. Single-minded devotion to a cause and a purpose was admirable until it broke you, and then it was as much sad as terrifying. I looked away because I didn't want to see that Morgan would throw himself against that rock until he shattered. Stupid soul-gazes.
I looked away just in time to meet the gaze of the red-tailed hawk that was perched on a nearby branch. Nearby was a relative term, of course, but it was close enough for me to see its not inconsiderable size.
"Morgan."
He looked up, startled out of his thoughts again. I pointed.
"A hawk." He sounded as pleasantly surprised as I had been. At least it was a pleasant surprise.
"A red-tailed hawk." I smiled. "Hopefully that's a good omen."
Morgan smiled a little at that. "But a good omen of what?"
"Things to come? Battles we will win, even the small ones. Something nice." I shrugged. There was surely some kind of mythology connected with hawks and something they represented if you saw one, but apart from the snake in the claws I couldn't think of a thing.
"Something nice," he repeated, thoughtful, as though he wasn't sure what that looked like anymore. I knew what that felt like.
The hawk stayed long enough to look around and proclaim his sovereignty over all he surveyed, and then flew off. "Must not have been hungry."
Morgan laughed, which startled both of us. It hadn't been intended as funny, but something about the offhand, casual remark, something that maybe had more to do with three days of nothing bad happening, had hit him. One of those moments when a realization sneaks up behind you and clobbers you in the head. I grinned a little, making the moment less ridiculous. I had no such excuse for reaching out and covering his hand with mine.
We stayed around the house for the rest of the day, making it a lazy day of reading books and drifting on the couch. Occasionally we stood to get a drink or make sure the ice spell was working or get different book.
By the time evening came we had turned off the ice spell and were sitting in front of the fire in comfortable silence. I liked that the silence was comfortable by now. I had my legs stretched out to one side and was leaning back on my hands, and he sat cross-legged and straight-backed, and somehow neither of us felt the need to fill up the space between us with spoken words. I looked over at him. He smiled softly at me.
His hair was still in what was left of his ponytail, but it had started to fall over his face. I balanced myself on one hand and reached out to tuck the loose strands behind his ear. "Why do you do that? The…" Ponytail thing. I gestured, he understood.
"It keeps it out of the way," he said, looking faintly amused.
"You could always cut it."
Although now that I said it I found I couldn't picture Morgan with shorter hair, and he gave me an odd look with a smile for asking.
"No I couldn't."
"That's possibly true."
Now that we had started talking it was easier to continue without feeling that I'd broken some kind of sacred silence. "How long have you been wearing it?" It was, I thought but couldn't explain why, the same thing as asking him how long he had been a Warden.
He did lean back a little at that, considering. "A long time," he said finally, quietly. "Over a century. I don't know how many years."
Over a century. He'd been a Warden longer than I had been alive. No wonder he was tired. "Over a century…" I'd said it out loud, I knew because he nodded, smiling. Maybe I was tired.
"I've only been a healer for thirty, forty years I think. About forty years. Rashid taught me how to be a sorceress before he taught me how to be a healer, I don't know why."
Although now that I thought about it, it wasn't really true. He'd taught me how to be a healer while he'd taught me how to be a sorceress, but I hadn't noticed it at the time. Then again, the way he taught, the two were inextricably intertwined. Your magic was connected with who you decided to be, and somewhere along the line I'd decided to help people get themselves better. It wasn't a stretch from there to turn myself into a healer.
"You are a good healer," he said, after I'd stopped expecting the conversation to continue. "I've seen your work. No scars, quick healing. You make people… better."
I wasn't sure I knew what he meant, and said so.
"You make people better, you…" Morgan struggled with concepts he had never bothered to try to grasp, not elaborately, not from what I'd heard about him at least. "You give them reasons to hold on, things to hold on to. You heal them not just in body, but in spirit as well. Not everyone comes out of the hospitals as ready for battle as your patients do."
"Not everyone comes out of the battle ready for the hospital," I teased him gently, because I wasn't quite able to take a compliment like that without blushing. But I didn't have anything to follow that up with, either, so I looked down until I came up with something, and then back up at him when I didn't.
We stared at each other for a long time before either of us made a move. Neither of us tried to gaze on the other, I think out of mutual respect rather than wariness for what we'd see. I wasn't afraid of what I'd see in him, though. I don't know if he was worried because of that or didn't think about it at all. I just looked at him. He looked at me with his usual blank inquisitiveness. Trying to be blank, actually. He looked too tired to feel any one thing very strongly.
I reached up and around and flicked my fingers over the end of his ponytail which, to be honest, looked as though he had it in more because he hadn't had time to get a haircut from someone not trying to kill him than because he'd been growing it out deliberately. It did look good on him, at least. Not quite as shaggy as it might have otherwise. He blinked at the gesture, reflexively moving to avoid the intimate contact, or to block what he almost thought of as an attack. My hand caught his wrist, I didn't know why until I said it.
"You need to relax, Morgan," I told him. Like I'd been telling him all week, but this was different. This was something I could use to bring the point home. "I'm not going to attack you. And you twitched as though you needed to defend yourself from me." I brought up his hand, his wrist in my hand, between us. Not for any reason, just to keep that point of contact and because I could.
"I didn't…" he started, but it was too much of a lie and Morgan was too honest to even lie to himself. "I wasn't…" Again, he couldn't say it. I slid my hand up along the back of his and curled my fingers between his, down over his palm. If he realized how far gone he was… I hadn't even realized how far gone he was. I didn't know why, or what I'd do.
"We're safe. Nothing's going to come after us, no one knows we're here but the two of us. Not even Rashid knows where we are. And I'm not going to hurt you." I added that last part with emphasis, because I wasn't sure he really understood that. "And you still almost hurt me because you were reacting. Instead of acting."
He listened, and I saw him thinking about that. Saw him coming to some not so pleasant conclusions. He didn't pull his hand away either, although I think he'd forgotten it was there.
"I have to," he said finally. "It …"
He didn't find the right words he wanted to explain, but I shook my head. "I know. And under most circumstances, that would be fine. But, Morgan, you almost killed the Captain because you reacted. Instead of acting."
Low blow. He flinched, and then he did drop my hand and stood, stepping away. He didn't have anything to say to that, although he stood, as well. I wasn't sure there was anything to say.
"There… we are fighting a war. Even if you don't know it."
Oh. Well, maybe he could find something to say.
It had been a little bit spiteful, but I didn't want to respond in kind. So I kept my voice even. "I know about war, Morgan. I also know what it can do to people. You're used to fighting enemies you can kill with a sword or a spell, the enemies I fight are far, far different. And they're still the product of war just as much as your zombies and ghouls and things. And they can kill you just as quickly."
He turned, gave me a skeptical look.
"Despair. Grief. Numbness. Burn out." Which someone had said about him, but the Old Man hadn't told me who or if Morgan knew he'd been described as such. "Shell shock. Post traumatic stress disorder, they call it now." I smiled, though. Shell shock carried more recognition for him.
"I'm not…"
I flicked my fingers at him and watched him fight not to crouch into a defensive posture. And I didn't even need to tell him. He knew he was proving my point when he did it.
"This is medical leave, not a vacation. You don't need to feel guilty because you're relaxing in a cabin instead of fighting and dying alongside those children. You can't lead anyone in the shape you're in, not to the best of your ability anyway. And they deserve your best."
We stared at each other for a few minutes longer and I could tell he was struggling with the concept. Poor guy. He'd lived through the ascent of the psychiatric sciences, and yet even when the Old Man had been a young whippersnapper there had been talk of spiritual and psychic wounds. He should know better. He just didn't pay attention. The Old Man hadn't trained me to be a shrink so much as a counselor, someone's priestess. Maybe that made it a little more acceptable for Morgan, I didn't know.
I took his hand again and this time I tugged him over to the couch, but couldn't quite get him to sit down. Neither of us looked at each other for a minute, I didn't know why he wasn't, but I wasn't sure what to do. My fingers curled back around his, because one of the first things I learned about people in pain or broken, even the ones who don't quite understand what that means, was that they need contact. And Morgan needed contact. Needed to remember, in a more visceral and instinctive way, why we were doing this. Why he was doing what he was doing. Maybe needed to remember something good about other people instead of all the crap he'd been taking and seeing and dishing out.
This time, he didn't pull back. This time, instead of moving away, he reached up and touched my shoulder and I decided that maybe the Old Man had been a little quick to judge. He wasn't that far gone. Just lost. I looked up at him and smiled.
His lips were soft. I hadn't expected him to be soft. In any way.
I put my hand to his cheek at the same time I felt his hand at the small of my back. I don't think either of us was too sure of what we were doing. He couldn't have kissed a woman in years, and I still couldn't quite believe I was kissing Morgan, renowned among Wardens for being a rock you could bruise yourself upon without it taking the slightest notice.
But he was warm, and he was softening, and somehow we were sitting on the couch instead of standing in front of it. Our clasped hands were now between us, keeping that physical distance that didn't matter when it came to the intimacy of the thing. He still kissed like he was shy.
Partly it was the hesitation in him that made me go back to thinking the Old Man had been right. Not just the sexual aspect of the whole evening. If it had been so long since Morgan was intimate with anyone, whether in the sexual or filial sense, it had been too long since he remembered what we fought for. It wasn't just about loyalty, after all. Even to your commanders, your comrades at arms, it was also about your friends. Dresden, madman and force of chaos that he was, understood that. I wondered how many people Morgan had had to lose to forget that.
And then what? And nothing. I couldn't think of anything to say or do and sex didn't seem to be on the menu for tonight. I wasn't even sure I wanted it to be. He was still too stiff and far too brittle, and when I kissed him again it was just lips, and just holding on, and maybe rubbing my hand on his bony shoulder a little because it seemed like he needed it. There was something shivering inside there. Something that he was holding down far too tightly.
It turned a little sideways, then, and we stopped kissing. His shirt was soft against my cheek and his shoulder was still a little bony but less so, this way. I took my time breathing and his breaths made the little whispers of hair by my ear move and tickle my skin. He didn't know how to be comfortable holding me, but he tried.
"I don't…" He tried to speak, but whatever it was got stuck somewhere in between thought and speech and died with a strangled sound in his throat. I started to lean back, to look at him and try to guess what he meant or wanted. His arm tightened around my shoulders, so at least I knew that much. And we stayed like that for a while longer.
Fandom: The Dresden Files
Characters: Morgan, OC
Word Count: 4,057
Rating: PGish
Summary: Morgan is going to take a leave of absence whether he wants to or not.
"Tai chi?"
I nodded, trying to keep concentrating on my form. I'd been practicing for a couple of years now, but it certainly wasn't my strong point. I had to concentrate to make the proper movements while keeping my stance and posture straight, my muscles with just the proper amount of tension and relaxation, my joints loose and my weight balanced. It was harder than it had looked in the beginning. Give it five or ten years, though, I might master it.
I would have expected a chuckle from him at the way I must have looked. Skilled warrior, untrained novice. But this was Morgan, and he wasn't a chuckling kind of a guy.
And the next thing I knew he was standing behind me, and his arms were coming around my body alongside mine.
"Your stance isn't quite…" He stopped in mid-sentence and his hands covered my wrists. "Here."
I didn't know Morgan knew tai chi.
It was sliding from early in the morning to early in the afternoon, and we hadn't spoken at all since breakfast. The whole week seemed to be going like that: small spurts of conversation punctuating long, increasingly comfortable silences. This was the first time he'd initiated any close contact with me that wasn't inquiring what I was doing or sharing a household task.
It was a start. I wasn't sure what it was starting, but it was the start of something. Something good and worthwhile, I hoped.
Besides, he knew what he was doing. Morgan was one of the foremost fighters among the Wardens, and if he was going to give me martial arts pointers, I was damn well going to listen. He guided me through the forms I had been trying to remember and practice, and then stepped back. I tried to do what he'd shown me how to do a moment ago, but it felt clumsier without his grip on my wrists, guiding me.
"Better," he said anyway.
I fell back into a basic stance and then dropped out of it. "You think?"
He nodded. "Why haven't you joined the Wardens?"
And here we'd come to left field. I blinked at him. "Exc… No one's ever recruited me into the Wardens, I assumed I wasn't eligible."
He blinked back. "You were taught by the Gatekeeper, I assume you have some skill." Ouch, Morgan. "You're not untalented for combat. I would have thought you'd been …" He couldn't seem to figure out what to say or how to say it, so he left it at that.
"First of all, I have skills. I have mad leet skills, thank you very much." From the blank look I was guessing Morgan didn't spend much time around teenagers or anyone who spoke pop culture. "Second of all, the closest I've gotten to a combat situation is running away from them. Or cleaning up the people who get into them afterwards. Or negotiating the cessation of hostilities between street gangs. Long story," I told his arched-eyebrows look.
"That doesn't matter anymore," he said after a moment. "The Wardens need every…"
"No, Morgan. If that's a recruiting speech, save it. I have responsibilities too, and I won't leave my kids to throw myself at the vampires when the best I can do is be a meat shield for someone else. I make a better healer than a fighter," I smiled to tone it down, but I really didn't want to think he was offering what I thought he was offering.
"A less experienced fighter than a healer," he corrected. "You could…"
"No."
He looked distrustful, or disgruntled, but he quit asking. And instead of continuing a conversation he turned and started to stomp up towards the cabin. Stomp was definitely the verb for it.
"Morgan."
He stopped. But he didn't turn around. "Claire."
"Which would you rather have, a halfway to competent fighter you have to train up to be any use in the field, or an already competent physician, healer, and guardian to take care of the wounded when they come in?"
He did about a quarter of a turn, then his head turned the rest of the way to look over his shoulder at me. "I would rather have every available fighter in the field, helping to put an end to this conflict, than more healers."
"… why?" I frowned. It didn't seem to make sense.
"Do you remember what happened in Sicily? In the Congo?"
Mass slaughter. I'd heard, but I'd been in Istanbul when they took the Congo, just barely missing all the death. And only hours before the hospital in the Congo had been massacred I'd been requested to move there. My throat went dry, and I nodded because I couldn't speak. Before I'd seen it I had thought gas was a quiet death, but it wasn't always. Sometimes it was more horrible because you couldn't see or hear it coming. And I'd seen what sarin gas did to people, which was what they were saying had been used. I could picture it. I didn't want to.
"They have a source of information from within our ranks. Until we stop this conflict…" And neither of us was under the illusion that diplomacy would do a damn thing. "… the hospitals are the most vulnerable point. Yes, I would rather have more fighters than more healers." He sounded as though he meant to say something else after that, but didn't.
And I couldn't argue the point. As long as the conflict had been going on, they had been whittling down our numbers any way they could. Attacking the hospitals, any one place or person who was helping put our people back in the field, was a good way to do that. No healers meant slower recovery for the fighters, slower recovery for the fighters meant smaller forces. Which meant we were more easily overwhelmed. It was basic, good strategy. For their side.
He was looking at me as though he was waiting for something. I pushed my hair back from my face and tried to drag my spirits up out of the gutter. This wasn't what we'd come here for.
"Show me that again?"
Lunch time was somewhere around two o'clock. We spent the rest of the morning going over the basics of tai chi and kung fu, or at least I thought that's what it was. He didn't put a name to it, and I didn't ask. It was self defense, basic techniques that we discovered I could do easily enough. Basic techniques of fighting under the guise of physical fitness and meditation. We were at least pretending that we were trying to relax. I was a little surprised that he was going along with it, but he didn't say anything about Sicily or the Congo or India or any of those other crises again.
We broke for lunch when I heard his stomach growling and pointed out that just because he'd gone three days without eating or sleeping in the past didn't mean he had to do so now to impress me. That actually got a laugh out of him, even if it was a quiet one.
"Sandwiches?" I had made lunch.
"You cook. I pretend to cook. Besides, you can't exactly…" Screw up a sandwich, I had been going to say, but he was picking the tomato out of his club with a look of deep disgust. "Okay, you saw me put that in there, you could have…"
The corner of his mouth was twitching upwards. Son of a bitch.
"Oh, you're mean."
Morgan laughed, putting it back and wiping his fingers on the napkin. "You left yourself open for that one."
"So I did." I pulled up a chair, tried not to grin too much. Teasing was good. Laughing was good, too. Scars and all, the sternness in him was tempered into something handsome and intriguing when he was relaxed like that, smiling. I covered up my impure thoughts with a few big bites.
He had a thoughtful expression on his face, then, as though it had been a long time since he'd laughed and made jokes with that kind of careless abandon. The way the war had been going, I wouldn't have been surprised.
My hand moved before I thought about it, reaching out to bat at his ponytail like a cat might do with a feather. It was something we had done amongst ourselves on Devil's Island, a joking way of reminding each other to cap up before any sort of surgery did. I'm not sure what I was trying to remind Moran of. He blinked, his attention focusing back on me, his hand coming up for a second and then lowering again.
"Hello," I smiled. "Earth to Morgan."
He blinked at me, but I didn't think it was incomprehension of my meaning. He had been thinking about something and I'd interrupted it.
"Who was it?" I asked. Instinct; I had meant to ask what he was thinking about, but who seemed more appropriate. It was the tiniest twitch at the corner of his left eye that told me I was right.
But he didn't say anything, just kept eating with the same kind of single minded determination that he showed on the battlefield. Exactly the same kind of determination. A little excessive, I felt, dispatching a club sandwich with the same viciousness as an enemy soldier. I watched him so intently I was a little surprised he didn't notice. His eyes were tight and glittering with anger, the old kind that surged up with a fury when you least expected or wanted it.
I looked away from him when I realized I was leaning in too close. His passion was compelling and something I didn't want to be drawn into. Single-minded devotion to a cause and a purpose was admirable until it broke you, and then it was as much sad as terrifying. I looked away because I didn't want to see that Morgan would throw himself against that rock until he shattered. Stupid soul-gazes.
I looked away just in time to meet the gaze of the red-tailed hawk that was perched on a nearby branch. Nearby was a relative term, of course, but it was close enough for me to see its not inconsiderable size.
"Morgan."
He looked up, startled out of his thoughts again. I pointed.
"A hawk." He sounded as pleasantly surprised as I had been. At least it was a pleasant surprise.
"A red-tailed hawk." I smiled. "Hopefully that's a good omen."
Morgan smiled a little at that. "But a good omen of what?"
"Things to come? Battles we will win, even the small ones. Something nice." I shrugged. There was surely some kind of mythology connected with hawks and something they represented if you saw one, but apart from the snake in the claws I couldn't think of a thing.
"Something nice," he repeated, thoughtful, as though he wasn't sure what that looked like anymore. I knew what that felt like.
The hawk stayed long enough to look around and proclaim his sovereignty over all he surveyed, and then flew off. "Must not have been hungry."
Morgan laughed, which startled both of us. It hadn't been intended as funny, but something about the offhand, casual remark, something that maybe had more to do with three days of nothing bad happening, had hit him. One of those moments when a realization sneaks up behind you and clobbers you in the head. I grinned a little, making the moment less ridiculous. I had no such excuse for reaching out and covering his hand with mine.
We stayed around the house for the rest of the day, making it a lazy day of reading books and drifting on the couch. Occasionally we stood to get a drink or make sure the ice spell was working or get different book.
By the time evening came we had turned off the ice spell and were sitting in front of the fire in comfortable silence. I liked that the silence was comfortable by now. I had my legs stretched out to one side and was leaning back on my hands, and he sat cross-legged and straight-backed, and somehow neither of us felt the need to fill up the space between us with spoken words. I looked over at him. He smiled softly at me.
His hair was still in what was left of his ponytail, but it had started to fall over his face. I balanced myself on one hand and reached out to tuck the loose strands behind his ear. "Why do you do that? The…" Ponytail thing. I gestured, he understood.
"It keeps it out of the way," he said, looking faintly amused.
"You could always cut it."
Although now that I said it I found I couldn't picture Morgan with shorter hair, and he gave me an odd look with a smile for asking.
"No I couldn't."
"That's possibly true."
Now that we had started talking it was easier to continue without feeling that I'd broken some kind of sacred silence. "How long have you been wearing it?" It was, I thought but couldn't explain why, the same thing as asking him how long he had been a Warden.
He did lean back a little at that, considering. "A long time," he said finally, quietly. "Over a century. I don't know how many years."
Over a century. He'd been a Warden longer than I had been alive. No wonder he was tired. "Over a century…" I'd said it out loud, I knew because he nodded, smiling. Maybe I was tired.
"I've only been a healer for thirty, forty years I think. About forty years. Rashid taught me how to be a sorceress before he taught me how to be a healer, I don't know why."
Although now that I thought about it, it wasn't really true. He'd taught me how to be a healer while he'd taught me how to be a sorceress, but I hadn't noticed it at the time. Then again, the way he taught, the two were inextricably intertwined. Your magic was connected with who you decided to be, and somewhere along the line I'd decided to help people get themselves better. It wasn't a stretch from there to turn myself into a healer.
"You are a good healer," he said, after I'd stopped expecting the conversation to continue. "I've seen your work. No scars, quick healing. You make people… better."
I wasn't sure I knew what he meant, and said so.
"You make people better, you…" Morgan struggled with concepts he had never bothered to try to grasp, not elaborately, not from what I'd heard about him at least. "You give them reasons to hold on, things to hold on to. You heal them not just in body, but in spirit as well. Not everyone comes out of the hospitals as ready for battle as your patients do."
"Not everyone comes out of the battle ready for the hospital," I teased him gently, because I wasn't quite able to take a compliment like that without blushing. But I didn't have anything to follow that up with, either, so I looked down until I came up with something, and then back up at him when I didn't.
We stared at each other for a long time before either of us made a move. Neither of us tried to gaze on the other, I think out of mutual respect rather than wariness for what we'd see. I wasn't afraid of what I'd see in him, though. I don't know if he was worried because of that or didn't think about it at all. I just looked at him. He looked at me with his usual blank inquisitiveness. Trying to be blank, actually. He looked too tired to feel any one thing very strongly.
I reached up and around and flicked my fingers over the end of his ponytail which, to be honest, looked as though he had it in more because he hadn't had time to get a haircut from someone not trying to kill him than because he'd been growing it out deliberately. It did look good on him, at least. Not quite as shaggy as it might have otherwise. He blinked at the gesture, reflexively moving to avoid the intimate contact, or to block what he almost thought of as an attack. My hand caught his wrist, I didn't know why until I said it.
"You need to relax, Morgan," I told him. Like I'd been telling him all week, but this was different. This was something I could use to bring the point home. "I'm not going to attack you. And you twitched as though you needed to defend yourself from me." I brought up his hand, his wrist in my hand, between us. Not for any reason, just to keep that point of contact and because I could.
"I didn't…" he started, but it was too much of a lie and Morgan was too honest to even lie to himself. "I wasn't…" Again, he couldn't say it. I slid my hand up along the back of his and curled my fingers between his, down over his palm. If he realized how far gone he was… I hadn't even realized how far gone he was. I didn't know why, or what I'd do.
"We're safe. Nothing's going to come after us, no one knows we're here but the two of us. Not even Rashid knows where we are. And I'm not going to hurt you." I added that last part with emphasis, because I wasn't sure he really understood that. "And you still almost hurt me because you were reacting. Instead of acting."
He listened, and I saw him thinking about that. Saw him coming to some not so pleasant conclusions. He didn't pull his hand away either, although I think he'd forgotten it was there.
"I have to," he said finally. "It …"
He didn't find the right words he wanted to explain, but I shook my head. "I know. And under most circumstances, that would be fine. But, Morgan, you almost killed the Captain because you reacted. Instead of acting."
Low blow. He flinched, and then he did drop my hand and stood, stepping away. He didn't have anything to say to that, although he stood, as well. I wasn't sure there was anything to say.
"There… we are fighting a war. Even if you don't know it."
Oh. Well, maybe he could find something to say.
It had been a little bit spiteful, but I didn't want to respond in kind. So I kept my voice even. "I know about war, Morgan. I also know what it can do to people. You're used to fighting enemies you can kill with a sword or a spell, the enemies I fight are far, far different. And they're still the product of war just as much as your zombies and ghouls and things. And they can kill you just as quickly."
He turned, gave me a skeptical look.
"Despair. Grief. Numbness. Burn out." Which someone had said about him, but the Old Man hadn't told me who or if Morgan knew he'd been described as such. "Shell shock. Post traumatic stress disorder, they call it now." I smiled, though. Shell shock carried more recognition for him.
"I'm not…"
I flicked my fingers at him and watched him fight not to crouch into a defensive posture. And I didn't even need to tell him. He knew he was proving my point when he did it.
"This is medical leave, not a vacation. You don't need to feel guilty because you're relaxing in a cabin instead of fighting and dying alongside those children. You can't lead anyone in the shape you're in, not to the best of your ability anyway. And they deserve your best."
We stared at each other for a few minutes longer and I could tell he was struggling with the concept. Poor guy. He'd lived through the ascent of the psychiatric sciences, and yet even when the Old Man had been a young whippersnapper there had been talk of spiritual and psychic wounds. He should know better. He just didn't pay attention. The Old Man hadn't trained me to be a shrink so much as a counselor, someone's priestess. Maybe that made it a little more acceptable for Morgan, I didn't know.
I took his hand again and this time I tugged him over to the couch, but couldn't quite get him to sit down. Neither of us looked at each other for a minute, I didn't know why he wasn't, but I wasn't sure what to do. My fingers curled back around his, because one of the first things I learned about people in pain or broken, even the ones who don't quite understand what that means, was that they need contact. And Morgan needed contact. Needed to remember, in a more visceral and instinctive way, why we were doing this. Why he was doing what he was doing. Maybe needed to remember something good about other people instead of all the crap he'd been taking and seeing and dishing out.
This time, he didn't pull back. This time, instead of moving away, he reached up and touched my shoulder and I decided that maybe the Old Man had been a little quick to judge. He wasn't that far gone. Just lost. I looked up at him and smiled.
His lips were soft. I hadn't expected him to be soft. In any way.
I put my hand to his cheek at the same time I felt his hand at the small of my back. I don't think either of us was too sure of what we were doing. He couldn't have kissed a woman in years, and I still couldn't quite believe I was kissing Morgan, renowned among Wardens for being a rock you could bruise yourself upon without it taking the slightest notice.
But he was warm, and he was softening, and somehow we were sitting on the couch instead of standing in front of it. Our clasped hands were now between us, keeping that physical distance that didn't matter when it came to the intimacy of the thing. He still kissed like he was shy.
Partly it was the hesitation in him that made me go back to thinking the Old Man had been right. Not just the sexual aspect of the whole evening. If it had been so long since Morgan was intimate with anyone, whether in the sexual or filial sense, it had been too long since he remembered what we fought for. It wasn't just about loyalty, after all. Even to your commanders, your comrades at arms, it was also about your friends. Dresden, madman and force of chaos that he was, understood that. I wondered how many people Morgan had had to lose to forget that.
And then what? And nothing. I couldn't think of anything to say or do and sex didn't seem to be on the menu for tonight. I wasn't even sure I wanted it to be. He was still too stiff and far too brittle, and when I kissed him again it was just lips, and just holding on, and maybe rubbing my hand on his bony shoulder a little because it seemed like he needed it. There was something shivering inside there. Something that he was holding down far too tightly.
It turned a little sideways, then, and we stopped kissing. His shirt was soft against my cheek and his shoulder was still a little bony but less so, this way. I took my time breathing and his breaths made the little whispers of hair by my ear move and tickle my skin. He didn't know how to be comfortable holding me, but he tried.
"I don't…" He tried to speak, but whatever it was got stuck somewhere in between thought and speech and died with a strangled sound in his throat. I started to lean back, to look at him and try to guess what he meant or wanted. His arm tightened around my shoulders, so at least I knew that much. And we stayed like that for a while longer.