Free Web NovelChapter 36: Chapter 36
(Rhydian)
I find the wood in the storage shed behind the training yard.
Not looking for it specifically — I’m there for a broken fence post that needs replacing before the patrol rotation changes and someone trips over it in the dark, and I find the fence post, and then I find the stack of good cedar in the back corner. Dry, straight-grained, the smell of it sharp and clean in the cold shed air.
I stand there for a while.
I don’t know how to build a crib. I’ve never built anything more permanent than a lean-to shelter in the mountains, never had reason to, never had anything worth building for. But I look at the cedar and I think about my hands and what they know and how they know it — years of making do, of figuring out what a thing needs and working backward from that — and I think: how hard can it be.
I take three planks back to the quarters.
That night, after Elena is asleep, I sit by the fire with the wood and a knife and I start figuring it out.
I could sleep anyway it’s better to build it and keep my self busy.
Not because of nightmares — the nightmares have gotten quieter, more occasional, the courtyard visiting less often now that I have something real to come back to when I wake up. I’m awake because my brain won’t stop. It runs the patrol schedules and the Shadowpine intelligence and the Marcus situation and then, when it runs out of threats to organize, it runs forward into the future in a way it never used to do.
I used to live strictly in the present. Four years in a cave will do that — there’s no point planning beyond the next meal, the next night, the next morning, when your entire infrastructure is provisional.
Now my brain keeps going forward.
It shows me things I don’t have language for yet. A child learning to walk on the stone floor. A small voice in the Pack house corridors. Elena’s face doing something it hasn’t done yet, some expression that belongs to a version of her I haven’t met.
It shows me myself — older, heavier in the jaw, standing in a yard watching someone small navigate something difficult. The particular feeling of watching that and knowing you get to stay for it. That you’re not going to be exiled or killed or left. That you built something that holds.
I work on the crib.
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Elena finds out on the fourth night.
She wakes up at some point — I don’t know what time, the fire has burned low — and she lies there for a moment the way she does, reassembling herself, and then she turns over and I’m not in the bed and she sits up.
"Rhydian."
"Here."
She finds me by the fire. The crib frame is taking shape — rough still, joinery imprecise, some of the angles not quite right — but recognizable. Clearly a thing.
She’s quiet for a moment.
I keep working. I don’t look at her because if I look at her I’ll have to talk and I don’t have the words for what this is yet, what this specific compulsion is, why my hands need to make something with their own material rather than buy something or commission something from someone who knows what they’re doing.
She gets up. Wraps herself in the blanket from the bed. Comes and sits on the floor beside me.
Still doesn’t say anything.
She watches my hands. The way she watches things she’s paying real attention to — completely present, no performance.
"The joinery on the right side," she says finally.
"I know."
"I can show you the—"
"I’ll figure it out." fгeewebnovёl.com
She’s quiet again. Not offended — she knows the difference between *I don’t want your help* and *I need to do this part myself.* She lets it sit.
"How long have you been doing this," she says.
"Few nights."
"Every night?"
"Most of them."
She pulls the blanket tighter. Her shoulder is against my arm. We sit close without making anything of it, the way we sit now, the casual proximity that happened so gradually I can’t point to when it started.
"You didn’t tell me," she says.
"Neither did you. For a week."
She concedes that with a slight exhale.
I work the knife along a joint. Getting it closer. The cedar smells clean and good in the firelit room and I think about what it will smell like in six months when it’s something a person sleeps in, when it has the particular smell of somewhere someone lives.
My father never built me anything.
My mother commissioned everything. That was how their world worked — things arrived because money made them arrive, and the arriving was the point, not the making. I grew up in rooms full of things that were expensive and owned and utterly impersonal.
I want this to be different.
I want there to be something in this room that my hands made. That came from knowing how to make do and figure things out and work a problem with whatever materials are available.
Four years alone taught me to survive. Maybe that’s worth something now.
I’m on the final edge of the lower frame when it slips.
The knife catches the side of my left index finger — not deep, just a shallow pull across the pad, the kind of cut that bleeds enthusiastically and means nothing. I pull my hand back. Look at it.
A thin line of red.
"Here," Elena says immediately. She’s got the blanket folded back before I can do anything, and she takes my hand — both of hers around mine, the same grip she uses when she’s done the healing work, gentle and certain.
She looks at the cut. Then she lifts my hand to her mouth.
She presses her lips to my finger.
Not the healing gift — I know what that feels like, the particular warmth of it. This is different. Just her mouth, her lips closed over the small wound, warm and deliberate.
She stays there for a moment.
I look at the side of her face. The firelight on her jaw, the scar on her cheek, the particular way she holds things she’s being careful with.
She lifts her head.
Her eyes come up to mine and something in them is doing the thing I’ve been learning to read — the deep thing, the thing she doesn’t always put into words because she’s still learning that she doesn’t have to hold everything inside.
"I’ll kiss every wound you ever get," she says.
She says it simply. Not a performance. Not even fully deliberate — it sounds like something that arrived at the surface from somewhere she keeps things without deciding to keep them there.
I look at her.
I’ve been cut before. Stabbed, slashed, bitten, scraped over rocks and tree roots and four years of terrain that wanted to break me. I have a map of damage on my body that Elena has touched and catalogued and healed twice and never once looked at like it was anything other than mine, ordinary, something that belongs to the person in front of her.
*I’ll kiss every wound you ever get.* ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
My throat closes.
I turn my hand over. I take hers.
"You can’t promise that," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I mean it.
"I just did."
"Elena—"
"I know what I said." She looks at me steadily. "Every one."
I look at her for a long moment.
Then I lift her hand to my mouth.
The inside of her wrist, where I first learned to feel her pulse, where the skin is thin and real and specifically her. I press my lips there and I feel her heartbeat — steady, faster than usual, present.
"Then I’ll build something that makes wounds less likely," I say against her wrist. "For both of us."
She looks at the crib. At the rough frame in the firelight, my amateur joinery, the cedar that smells like something becoming.
Her thumb moves across my knuckles.
"The right side," she says.
"I know."
"I’ll show you in the morning."
"I’ll figure it out tonight."
She almost smiles. Leans her head against my shoulder.
I pick the knife back up. Work the joint. The fire burns low and the settlement sleeps and the room is warm and my finger has stopped bleeding, and beside me Elena is a solid warm presence that has become the most structural thing in my world.
I keep building.
