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Sonia wakes in the middle of the night and for a long, strange, disoriented moment, has no idea where she is, when she is-- who she is. Layers of existence are pasted around and atop of her like gauzy, veil-thin bits of fabric, as if she moved too quickly she might tear through, blunder into something, somewhere, someone she should never return to. But then something stirs close by and she realizes with a grounding thump that she's not alone in the darkness: someone is with her. A hand takes hers, gingerly, gently; her fingers close around rough, uneven ridges of scars; the threads of memory braid themselves together into coherence. "Gundham."
He sits up, pushing sheets and tangled bits of clothing blanket out of the way so that he can shift over, sitting next to her in the wreck they've made of their little nest of a bed, closer than he would once have dared. But his bare hand is still in hers, and the only dark and deadly poison left in him is in her, too. Sonia turns her head into his shoulder, leaning against him, and although he moves hesitantly to touch her in return, to stroke gently along the line of her hair, smoothing it back away from her face, he doesn't flinch from the contact. "Do the nightmares still plague you?" he asks.
It's a hard question to answer, at first. Sonia rarely remembers the dreams in any kind of clear detail, much as she does not remember the things she knows they did-- the things that she knows she did. But they are so close to the delirium of not knowing, the strange, in-between place between hope and despair, where it would be so easy to tip from one into another without realizing it before it was too late... "Yes," she says. "I suppose they do."
Gundham takes a breath as if to speak, but remains silent. The quiet spreads around them, as if he intended it so; through the broken shell of the cottage, out into the empty night-- and then some bird cries in the distance, and the spell is broken. The insects resume their songs, the sound of the wave against the beach in the distance; Sonia's own breath, and the sound of Gundham's heartbeat under her ear. He bends down and kisses her hair, just above her ear. "They follow me, as well," he says quietly.
Somehow it feels more reassuring than anything else he could have said-- just to know that she isn't alone, not in this or in anything else. It's a stave against despair that no nightmare can break, a reason to go on in the face of any struggle. She squeezes his hand, gently, then on sudden impulse lifts it and presses her lips to it, kissing his knuckles, each old scar and all the new, then turns his hand to put one last kiss in his palm. "Together, we can defeat them."
She's startled the words out of him again; she can tell by the way he's gone still, thinking. "Of course," he says, at length. "With your strength added to mine, nothing can stand against us."
He sounds as if he believes it, which lets her believe it, too.