My whole body clenched red hot when he drew away from me—shrunk from the hint of a touch I was too cowardly to give him. And I guess I was right to fear that touch. He wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready, shit.

But it made the tears hotter and saltier and I felt you climb onto me, zpsnk!ed in your smallest lizard body, weaving yourself in my forelock as you felt the blood pump through my ears and my skull. “Lee…” I said again, and it was stupid because it wasn’t doing anything; it wasn’t fixing an impossibly broken heart and it wasn’t breaking a soul back into a body and it wasn’t rewinding time itself to a point where he still had his daughter.

(And I was still trippin’ over that—he has a daughter, he has a daughter, he has a daughter, a daughter, a daughter—)

I caught her scent before I even saw her, but the shock of it hadn’t entirely escaped me when I looked up at my Ma and her quiet words of refined silk. My eyes were bloodshot and wide, way too big for my face and all kinds of soaked from the sloppy shit that was cascading down my cheeks; I looked at her like a lost child looks at their mama, and the fact that she was telling Lee how much his daughter regretted her last words struck all kinds of chords within me, breaking me way too hard on the inside, causing some inner certainty and hammer itself into my head.

I gasped and tried to control the sobs that wanted to shake me so hard. “Ma—“ I croaked, not even knowing what I wanted to say but knowing, in my heart of hearts, that it was now or never, “Ma…Ma, I’m s—“

"I don't want to do this anymore."

The dead man was talking. My gaze shot back to him, cutting off my words, his broken body looking up at me with eyes filled with broken, melted shards of ice.

What can I do for you, Lee? I thought rapidly, desperately, the need of it coursing through my veins and making my head spin a dozen directions, What can I do to fix it, what can I do, what can I do—?

"I don't want it. The Edge. Take it. It's yours."

…

…

Wait—

I stared down at him, my sight blurry with salt and confusion as I tried to quickly analyze the things he said. Which didn’t help, cuz I guess I was thinking about it WAY too fast or whatever, because the only thing I could think about when he said the “Edge” was the herd, and that didn’t make any sense—so I stood there, at a huge loss, a complete and utter loss, useless and flailing miserably with how to help one of my best friends.

It didn’t help when I looked to Ma for guidance—maybe she would know what he was talking about—but all I saw from her was a wall of PISSED that damn-near made me snap my neck back in trying to avoid the flame of her blazing eyes. Which only confused me further and amped up the panic fluttering in my breast; my gaze switched between the broken pile of a man clutching the body of his daughter to the icy flames that almost seemed to leak from my Ma’s taught body—and I’d never been so lost before in my life.

“…Lee,” I said, and my tone shifted to something of a stronger whisper cuz now my voice had purpose, “Lee, please. I don’t…don’t want—“ Don’t want to lose you. But my voice failed and I choked up for a moment and I gathered my voice again and tried once more.

“I want…I wanna help, Lee. Please. I want—but—“ My face was still soaked and all I could do was shake my head slowly, my eyes lost, so wide and afraid he was finally going.

“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I finally confessed, and goddamn I felt so small when I said it, just as small as the words were themselves slipping from my teeth like that.  And who wouldn’t feel small from where I was standing? Before me was a bottomless pit of a darkness I had always feared instead of seeing with my own two eyes—and to my side was a blaze of fury that eluded me almost as much as it terrified me.

What did Lee say to get Ma so pissed like that?



[...except Ros never knew Mau was Queenie of the Edge :D So that's fun.]