Wildfire

102

When Kanaye finally appears he has two very confused young men in two, both of them clinging to his sides as if they were afraid he might melt away if they let go... My ears hearing Kanaye as he rushes to us with his mates being pulled along but I understand not a single thing he is saying... I simply let my eyes track them as they move further into our private space and find myself focused on the faces of the faithful physician's mates... How lucky he must have understood himself to be when nature revealed not one wife for him but two... Both of them so richly colored as opposites but so complimentary that I find myself trapped in gazing at them for a moment in my daze... 

 One of them with ashen hair almost similar to the hair you would expect to see on the elderly but so very long and messily braided, his skin so absurdly pale that I absentmindedly wonder if he is ill... The other with hair so very striking, his tea-colored waves looking as though they have just been freed of their plaitings falling down around his shoulders in such long near-ringlets... His skin looking so kissed by the sun that I am sure if I were to move closer he would smell of the same brightness that radiates down from the sky in all of the best ways... My brain wanting to focus on anything other than the fact that Emrys is still so very obviously in shock... And that I have been ordered by Papa to stay here in our chamber with him so that we can be attended to privately by Kanaye, our wounds and Emrys's state of mind not something that our subjects need to see until they are tended to... There is nothing wrong with showing that we have been injured... 

Just that... It will only exacerbate the melancholia we all feel if the people starting to rally to aid in the cleaning up of the chaos and the identifying of bodies if they see their rulers so very broken... Emrys being so unresponsive that he could not even bear to stay sitting up once deposited here, his body turned on his side so that he may keep his tired eyes trained on me while curled so tightly in on himself... Me with bruises starting to show and burns making themselves known... I had taken more damage than I had realized during the fray... And all it had taken for Papa to convince me to stay put here in our bedchamber was an intense moment of lightheadedness when he had pulled me in for a comforting hug and I had become breathless with the intensity of the pain now housed in my ribcage... 

...

Emrys

...

I am not sure what upsets Kanaye more... The fact that I cannot seem to muster anything to my lips except for a question I know he cannot answer... The words not making their way past my lips for I know that unless he was there in the man's last moments he would have no idea what to make of the nonsense Cho had been spouting in his last moments among the living... For some odd reason, it is the only thing I can think to think of... My Moon Beam looking ever so scattered and deflated as he sits on the edge of the bed, his hand in mine... His eyes staring as though nothing is in front of him while I keep my own vision focused on him... 

I need to watch and be sure that he isn't going to throw himself at the first thing to startle him... I need to be sure that my slice of Starlight does not throw himself at danger ever again, the part that he played in bringing down his abusers today having taken such a big toll on his delicate body and soul... His eyes drifting downwards every few moments so that he might look at his hands as if they were permanently stained with the blood of Xiang and Shen... A new spot of dried blood being found each and every time for his fingernails to try and scrape away so that he does not have to see it... 

But I know that just as I had not wanted to walk past the bodies of the innocent that should have never been in the palace today in the first place while Rayne and I were still in danger of being attacked I know that my wife will need to come to terms with his actions as well... I just hope he does not fault himself too majorly or harshly in light of all that has gone on... 

Watching him cleave my father's eyes from his skull with such determination had been unlike anything I had ever seen before... And Rayne's fury is certainly something I am not sure will ever make itself known again in such a spectacular fashion... If not because I do not think anyone would dare challenge him after the word gets out that not only did he fight the mad King... but that he also drove Shen, a full-blooded branch family noble into the ground... Then because he will try so very hard to never let himself become that angry again... Even if it would end up being the very same kind of beneficial if we were ever in a situation as awful as this one again... His family and I should be so very proud of him...

  But I already know that he will likely not want to hear it beyond accepting that standing his ground and protecting what he could of our home and the people sheltered in it... Just like I am so very aware that the sedative that Kanaye pulls from his medical bag is not something that Rayne will actively want... Neither one of us wants it actually... 

Rayne needs to stay awake long enough to bathe so that he might at least attempt to see himself as clean once more... And I am too afraid that if I close my eyes that I will see the face of the man bound to haunt me until my own last days...

Cho... 

Standing there with his voice echoing those words over and over to me...

 Nothing more...

 Nothing less...