a lesson in running away (the art of returning)

a lesson in seeing the shadows and knowing how to let the light swallow them

His voice trails off as his gaze focuses on Fitz's face, knees digging into the soft mossy ground, his own tears forming but not falling.

"Please help me," Keefe whispers, his voice breaking, and Fitz wonders how long he'd been chanting that in his head. How long he'd been trapped in that nightmare. Or how many times.

But he doesn't dare ask, not as Keefe sits up fully, chest heaving as he fails to take in air, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat.

And so Fitz reaches and gently cups Keefe's cheek, lifting his head until they are eye-to-eye. "Breathe," he orders, and of course he doesn't obey, can't obey, never knows how to. So Fitz puts his other hand on Keefe's chest and finds his pulse thumping erratically beneath the cage of his ribs. He leans a little closer until he's only a few inches away, watching Keefe's eyebrows twitch together in concentration. "Come on, Keefe. Breathe."

Keefe's shoulders shake in a sob, and he takes a shaky breath. Then another. It takes a few minutes until he manages: "Bossy."

Fitz lets himself grin as his chest expands again and again, more evenly each time. His face is close enough for Fitz's eyes to adjust and pick out exactly where the crook in his nose begins and ends. He'd broken it years past, on his escape from then-Dame Alina's office, taking too long to look where he was running and faceplanting full-speed into a wall. Alina had given him detention anyway, but when Keefe shared the memory during Fitz's visit to the Healing Center, he'd already been laughing at the memory.

He always laughed the same way.

Keefe's lips curve into a wry smile. "Does this mean you're speaking to me again?"

Fitz drops his hands from Keefe's face and chest, sitting back on his heels. Typical. But it's hard to close his face back into polished stone, for some reason. Maybe because this time he won't mean it.

"What was that all about?" he asks instead of responding. It comes out a little harsher than he intended.

Keefe's smile drops off his face quicker than blinking, and he says, "I don't know." Then, barely a second later, "That was a lie. I do know."

Fitz waits. They're still close enough for him to catch every shift on his face. Lips pursing, tightening, eyes shifting to the side so he doesn't have to make eye contact.

Then, finally, "You felt it. Now you know how my legacy felt."

Fitz sucks in a breath. Keefe doesn't look at him, his eyes glazing with the memory.

"The worst part was that it felt like drowning. So I kept thinking that I could swim up to the surface. That there would be an end to it, and it was my fault for not being strong enough to emerge." He digs his fingers into the ground. "I could hear Sophie in my head, but I couldn't understand what she was saying. I thought I had to get back to—to her, and then the shadows went under my skin."

Keefe's eyes crease, squeeze shut, and a tear trickles down. Then they're open again, looking straight at him, and Fitz hadn't realized how long they'd been sitting there because the sun is rising already and now he can make out the faint freckles spangling Keefe's crooked nose and pinked cheeks, familar and alien all at the same time. "Not very fun, huh?" he says wryly.

Fitz shakes his head and thinks of the echoes in his heart. The thing about Keefe is that he feels so much, too much, all the time. If he were the one with shadowflux in his heart instead of in his blood, perhaps he wouldn't have survived. Perhaps it would have squeezed the life from him.

Then again, Fitz isn't sure he could have survived the shadows tainting his blood like that. Changing something so integral to his identity and breaking every bone and remaking them again, remaking him again until he's polished and new. Appealing, but broken in every way that counts.

Keefe watches him with eyes too cold, too tired.

"No, not very fun," Fitz whispers.

He continues. "They went under my skin, and that's when the pain started. Before, it was drowning in satin. After, I was drowning in fire. It felt like being flayed alive, I think, like I was a famous statue being carved from marble. Remember that sculpture we saw in the Forbidden Cities before we joined the Black Swan? The David, he was called. I felt like him, like it took years to make me and they were finally getting me just right. It was sparks and it was flames and it was fires. I wanted to jump in a volcano and see if it burned less."

And then he's quiet for a long moment, but he isn't crying anymore. He looks vaguely contemplative, looking at Fitz in the brightening sunlight making its way past the trees, and he wonders what Keefe sees.

Does he see brown skin, warm against the green of his sleep shirt, scarred with a mixture of acne and healed accidents from his various adventures through the Forbidden Cities or his battles with the Neverseen? Does he focus on blue eyes too fake to be real, dark hair curling across his head every which way, messy clothes messy mouth messy expression messy life?

He probably feels all of it, anyway.

"And then I woke up and all of me was new," Keefe says softly, like he doesn't want to break the silence settling over them in this clearing.

"Why don't you sleep in the hut the gnomes built for you?" Fitz asks.

"Because I don't want to be alone with the shadows," Keefe answers simply. "Out here, the trees keep me company, and the light is here more often. I'm not as scared when the light is here."

And Fitz thinks again (he's been doing too much of this tonight, when he'd entered his mind in the first place to stop thinking) about breathing deeply and hands against chests and cheeks and crooked teeth and lopsided smiles and how light can come in many different forms. "You're scared of the dark."

Keefe studies his eyes, part of him tensing with something that Fitz can't decipher. "Yes."

"And you've been having these flashbacks every night?"

"Yes," he answers again, forcing a bitter smile. "I think something in the shadows that day fucked me up, ruined something in my head. Beyond repair, maybe."

Fitz tenses, lets his hand move closer to Keefe's until they are a hair apart but not quite touching, both pressing too hard into the soil. "Why would you think that?"

"My empathy is broken. I'm broken," Keefe says, and he's too nonchalant about it. He tilts his head to the side. "I think I've gone numb."

Fitz sits there and says nothing because everything about him is the opposite of numb. Everything of both of them has always been filled with too much emotion: blazing frustration, dangerous grief, explosive excitement, razor sharp wanting and terrifying longing for something that has never been a possibility. Even now, the sun crests a tree and lights up Keefe's hair in sunlight, a soft halo that sets his features ablaze in sharp angles and bright colors.

How can someone so full of color, full of life, ever lose something like that?

Another impossibility between the two of them, that suddenly Keefe is the numb one and Fitz is the one that feels too much.

So all he can think to say is: "I'm sorry." Sympathy and apology.

Another way of taking the blame.