He said it quietly, standing over her in the dark with his hand still half raised from where she'd knocked it away, and then, because standing felt suddenly unbearable, lowered himself down to sit on the cold floor beside her bed, his back against the frame, close enough to be present and far enough not to reach for her again.
ART: I'm sorry.
Neither of them spoke for a long while. The room held its silence around them, the particular heavy quiet of two people occupying the aftermath of something neither had properly prepared for, and Arthur, sitting on the cold floorboards with his knees pulled up, simply waited, offering nothing further, asking nothing at all. Eventually, he shifted slightly.
ART: Can I ask you-
YSE: I'm sorry.
She said it over him, cutting the question off before it had properly formed, her voice thick and unsteady in a way it had never once been across the entire time he'd known her.
YSE: I'm sorry you had to see that. I'm sorry you're sitting on the floor of your own room at midnight because I couldn't keep myself together for one single night. That wasn't fair to you. None of tonight has been fair to you, and I'd rather you weren't carrying any part of it.
ART: You're not making me carry anything.
YSE: I am, though. That's exactly what I'm doing. You said an honest thing, a genuinely kind and honest thing, and now you're sitting in the dark feeling guilty about it because I couldn't manage the one dignified response the situation required.
ART: Yseult.
YSE: I'm not usually like this.
ART: I know.
YSE: I'm genuinely not. I don't do this. I haven't done this in front of anyone in a very long time.
She wiped at her face with the back of one hand, the gesture rough and impatient, and Arthur, listening to the particular strain in her voice, simply let her continue without interruption.
YSE: My mother was ill for most of my childhood. Not the sort of ill that resolves. The sort that simply continues, getting slowly worse, for years, while everyone around it adjusts to a shape of life that keeps narrowing.
She said it flatly, the particular careful evenness of someone reciting facts to avoid feeling them.
YSE: My father left before I could properly remember him. I've been told several different versions of why. I stopped asking eventually. It didn't seem to change anything, knowing.
ART: Yseult-
YSE: There was a stepmother, afterward. She wasn't cruel. I want to be accurate about that, because people always assume cruelty when you say stepmother, and she wasn't. She simply never once looked at me the way she looked at her own son. Not once, in eleven years. She fed me and clothed me and made absolutely certain I understood, without ever saying it aloud, that I was an obligation she had accepted rather than a person she had chosen.
Arthur said nothing. He had learned, across a considerable childhood of his own, that some things needed room rather than response.
YSE: And there was a stepbrother.
Her voice changed on the word, something hardening beneath the exhaustion.
YSE: I don't want to talk about him. I'm not going to talk about him. I want you to understand that there's a reason I don't ever intend to see his face again, and I want you to understand that I'm not going to explain it further, tonight or otherwise.
ART: You don't have to explain anything.
YSE: I know. I'm telling you anyway, because you deserve to understand why I'm like this. Why I said what I said at the harbor. Why I've been the way I've been with you since the very first morning.
She laughed, small and broken and entirely without humor.
YSE: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for asking to be loved. It's an embarrassing thing to want out loud. Most people have the sense to keep it quiet.
ART: Yseult, it's okay.
YSE: It isn't. It's undignified and desperate and I've spent my whole life promising myself I wouldn't become someone who-
ART: It's okay.
He said it again, steadily, without any pity in it, and something in the plain certainty of it stopped her entirely. She looked at him in the dark for a long moment.
YSE: Why does that work?
ART: What?
YSE: When you say it. Why does that actually work.
She shook her head slowly, her voice dropping into something quieter and more bewildered.
YSE: I don't know why I trust you this much. I genuinely don't. I've known you less than a year, and I told you something at that harbor I've never told anyone, and I'm telling you all of this now, and I can't account for any of it.
She was quiet for a moment.
YSE: The first morning. When you woke up and I was unpacking my trunk. Do you remember?
ART: I remember.
YSE: I felt something. When I looked at you. Right at the start, before we'd exchanged a single word.
She frowned, apparently struggling to properly articulate it even now.
YSE: It felt like hope. That's the only word I've ever found for it. Not attraction, not curiosity, something underneath both of those. Like something in my soul simply looked at you and decided things might be alright after all.
She laughed again, wetly.
YSE: That sounds insane.
ART: It doesn't.
YSE: It does. I'm aware of how it sounds. I've never said it aloud before because I know exactly how it sounds.
Arthur was quiet for a moment, turning something over, and then reached out slowly, taking her hand where it rested against the blanket's edge. She did not pull away this time. He drew it toward him and pressed her palm gently against his own cheek, holding it there, and looked up at her in the dark with something warm and entirely certain settling into his expression.
ART: Don't worry, Yseult.
He smiled, small and genuine.
ART: I'll protect your fragile soul for as long as I live.
She broke completely. It came out of her all at once, everything she'd been holding through the whole long careful evening finally collapsing entirely, and she cried properly, without restraint, her hand still pressed against his cheek, her whole composed, unbreakable confidence gone entirely, and Arthur simply held her hand there and let her, saying nothing further, offering nothing but the steady, uncomplicated fact of his presence. It took a long while to pass.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: Mm.
YSE: Can I sleep in your arms tonight?
She said it very quietly, the particular small voice of someone asking for something they fully expected to be refused, and Arthur, without any hesitation whatsoever, simply nodded.
ART: Of course.
She fell asleep considerably faster than he expected. Arthur lay awake for some time afterward, her weight settled warm against his chest, her breathing gradually deepening into the slow, even rhythm of someone properly, genuinely at rest, and found himself watching the particular quality of stillness that had come over her face. The tension she carried, the tension he had never once, in all the months of knowing her, seen her fully set down, had gone entirely. She looked younger. That was the strange part. Not childish, simply unguarded in a way her waking face never permitted itself to be, every carefully maintained defense finally, temporarily lowered, the accumulated weight of eleven years of being an obligation rather than a choice, of a mother slowly failing, of a father's several unsatisfying explanations, of a stepbrother whose face she would not describe, all of it simply lifted from her shoulders for the length of a single night's sleep. Arthur watched her a while longer, and eventually slept himself.