ᴀꜱʏʟᴜᴍ :: ᴛ.ꜱʜᴇʟʙʏ

v: broken wings

In those terrible few moments between the slam of the door against its frame and recognition, Winnow felt certain her freedom had come to a close. The men from the asylum had revoked their charity, or the man with the opium had forsaken their exchange. Perhaps the employees at the asylum had called the police the moment the dust had cleared, bidding them search for the patients they had lost like animals escaped from the zoo. Perhaps it was one of the men from before the asylum, coming to finish her off now she had cleared its halls.

As if it might delay the inevitable, Winnow squeezed her eyes closed, shrinking back against the patched and peeling armchair nearby. Her mother's woven blanket fell from her shoulders, her pained feet pushing against the floor to get her away from the door. Even a metre of distance might give her more of a chance against whoever had—

And then her mother spoke.

"Fei-Hong?" called Ru-Shi, in a slightly perplexed tone, as though she couldn't quite fathom seeing her own son in the apartment they shared. It shifted the second she saw the gun in his hand, her usual softness caving beneath firm reprimand. "Shǎguā, what are you doing? Put that away!"

Fei-Hong. Winnow's eyes fluttered open to seek the newcomer, her brow creased by a furrow. It took more than a moment to recognise him. He had been a grown man when Winnow had been dragged in fetters from the hospital to the asylum, woozy from medicine in the back of a rumbling van, but the years—for it was years; Ru-Shi had confirmed that thirty months had passed—had done something to the youthful joy Winnow had always seen in him. The lines of his face were harsh and sharp, his dark eyes narrowed, chest heaving: he must have run up the stairs to reach them.

The young man hardly spared a glance for his mother. It took half a second for his eyes to find Winnow, curled by the fireplace beneath her handwoven blanket, and then he was striding towards her, holstering his gun and crossing the space between them fast. Like their father, he wasn't a tall man, but he made up for his lack of height in sheer strength of presence.

Caught in something of a daze, Winnow watched him approach, dimly aware of the spilled tea puddling in the cracks between the floorboards. She had thought herself empty of tears, but as her older brother dropped to his knees before her and grabbed her by shoulders, pulling her to his chest, tears welled in her eyes all the same.

"Win," he murmured, running one hand over the back of her head. Their mother held back, silent. "It took too long for you to come back to us."

I'm sorry, she wanted to say, though she knew her brother didn't blame her for the way things had fallen apart. After all this time, the apology rose up anyway, two feeble words which could never bridge the chasm of time. Too much of it had passed, too many traumas filling the space between.

So Winnow said nothing, allowing him to hold her close and the silence to speak on her behalf. The last time she could remember him holding her like this, she had been limp and broken on the side of the street, the pool of blood around her mixing with the rain between the cobblestones.