nightmares
Gantsetseg is used to dealing with Alan’s bad dreams. Comes with having been a soldier, apparently, even if the soldiering was under Garlemald. Or maybe especially if the soldiering was under Garlemald. He’d been awkward about it, the first night he spent in her yurt. Worried he’d wake her and she wouldn’t get the sleep she needs. Since at the time she’d been recovering from Elidibus-in-a-Zenos-suit breaking three ribs, an arm, and her left horn, and was therefore on heroic quantities of pain medication, she’d correctly told him he was being an idiot. She’d put tiger bones and yol feathers above the bed, herbs in the pillow for sweeter dreams. She’d held him tight, his face buried in her chest, because her horns made doing it the other way around pretty much impossible. It helped.
It keeps helping when they go to Werlyt, Bozja, Paglth’an. When the drums of war pound through their souls, and he wakes sweating and shaking. When she can be there and offer her heart, clumsy as she is with it.
And then they go to Garlemald, and suddenly he isn’t alone in his night terrors.
It starts with the weather. The airship flight takes a full day in fierce winds, turbulence threatening to send them to their deaths in the icy mountains below. While she’s awake, huddling in the hold, she’s fine. It’s only once night falls and her dreams bring her a different flight—one where she was manacled next to her tribesmen in a black steel beast, her captors speaking their strange harsh language all around her, and the entire ship had swayed like this just before the winds had brought it down—that the fear rises with manzasiri claws and drags her screaming out of her bunk, clawing at her blankets and the walls and, unfortunately, Alan’s face.
“Oh, fuck, honey,” she says.
Alan Venditor, the man she loves, attempts a smile. In the low light he’s turned on so he can see her better, his third eye gleams like a pearl. “You’ve given me worse on purpose. I’m more worried about you. Nightmare?”
Well, it’s not like she can deny it. “’S th’ wind,” she mutters. “Screaming.”
He swallows. She’s told him the story; knowing him, he probably still feels guilty. He wasn’t one of those ironmen, but to him it doesn’t matter. He was an officer of the Empire, ambitious and heartless as any of his fellows, and that’s not as easy to shed as his black armor. But that man, that decurion, is not the same man sitting on the bunk next to her and taking her hand in his. His voice is so soft as he asks, “...Do you think you can fall back asleep?”
Oh, she hates being vulnerable. She’s Bayaqud. It’s her duty as a woman to be strong. But if she can’t lean on him she can’t lean on anyone, so she mutters, “If you hold me?” and he does, even when the side of her horn jabs him in the collarbone.
So. Garlemald’s shite.
It gets worse. Because of course it gets worse, because there’s bloody fucking Zenos and that godsdamned Ascian and a day where her body isn’t her own, a day where people die at her hands while she’s malms away trapped in a dying soldier’s corpse. She’s going to tear Zenos apart and make his ribcage into a fucking xylophone.
She doesn’t wake screaming after that. She wakes shaking, fangs rattling, curled into a ball so tightly that her tail spikes are digging into her own neck. Her mind is full of blood and bone-deep chill and Alan saying worriedly, “Gan? Gan, wake up—”
She bursts immediately into tears.
Alan is there. He doesn’t leave. He kisses her forehead and tells her she’s here, she’s alive, she’s going to be alright. He makes her hot butter tea the way she likes it, even though he hates the stuff. His voice stays gentle and soft even as his hands tremble with rage. “So,” he says, when they’re tucked up together under the furs with their respective tea mugs (his has whiskey in it), “how many pieces of Zenos does your khatun want you to bring back? Because I want a fucking trophy too.”
I’m marryin’ you, she doesn’t say. For one thing, it’s the middle of the night and they’re both exhausted. For another, she doesn’t know what Garlean betrothals are like, has never met his family, and only has one horse for a groom-price. But gods, he thinks his joy in battle is something to hide? Something that makes him a threat? She’s going to take him to meet her tribe. She’s going to see him in a red silk deel, his face painted with the tiger stripes of Bayaqud men. She’s going to have both her fathers teach him awful jokes.
But she can’t do any of that yet, so she shrugs and says, “Pretty sure she just wants a skull. Ribcage xylophone?”
He doesn’t have her fangs, but his smile is knife-sharp anyway. “Ribcage xylophone.”
Oh, she has to kiss him. Her horns bracket both their faces, the arm he has around her waist tightens to pull her practically into his lap with a leg slung over his hips, and she’s not sure which of them growls when her claws catch the back of his neck. The snow, the Ascians, Zenos—what do they matter now? She’s got him. She can face hell.
Her tea freezes solid by the time she remembers to finish it.