Page 30 of Ash Fall

"What was the panic attack about?"

"I don't know." The answer comes out of me anyway, bewildered and honest. "It came out of nowhere. We were making sandwiches, we were talking, and then between one breath and the next she was gone into it."

"No, it didn't come out of nowhere." Mars shakes his head slowly, and his eyes find mine, and there's no attack in them, which somehow makes it worse. "She said you were all leaving again, that everyone leaves her, over and over, and it sent her into a spiral she couldn't pull out of."

"That's rich coming from you." Jules's laugh has no humor anywhere in it. "The fucking king of leaving her."

The words hit the room, but I barely hear them, because Mars's answer is still going off inside me. Fuck, fuck, of course she panicked about us leaving, and it hit her this hard. I stood in her kitchen an hour after she got us all back from not knowing if we were even alive and told her three of us were driving off into the dark. Somehow, I expected her to nod and keep spreading peanut butter. She’s spent two years clawing her way back from losing her parents and Atlas in a single night. There were two years of nightmares and therapy and slowly learning to let us out of her sight. This week tore up every bit of that progress. The moon broke, and every person she loves vanished into the chaos. She sat in this house all that time not knowing if any of us were alive. It was stupid, so stupid, to just carry on with logistics and to-do lists while pretending the last week never happened. Treating a farm run as nothing was worse, because the last time we all walked out her door, the world ended.

I did this. I set her off. The difference between me and Mars tonight is a lot thinner than I want it to be.

"That's enough, Julian." Elenor's voice cuts him off cold, and her sharp eyes travel around the whole circle of us, stopping on each face in turn. "Enough from all of you. Take a good look at what's happening outside these walls and then tell me we can afford this. The sky is about to fall on this province, we leave in the morning, and my granddaughter is upstairs crying into her pillow because you all were screaming at each other in her kitchen. The stakes are too high for infighting, and they're far too high for two years of stored-up drama leaking into every room of this house. So, we're going to clear the air, right now, before we're trapped in a mine together with it."

She turns to Mars, and the spoon lowers, but her voice loses none of its steel as she waves her hand at him.

"Now's the time to explain yourself. If you have an explanation, that is, as to why you left."

The room goes still around him with all of us waiting to finally hear his answers. I cross my arms over my chest and plant my feet, and honestly, I don't give a single shit what comes out of his mouth next. There's no reason on this earth good enough for leaving the way he did, no story that unbreaks what he broke. Whatever pretty words he's had two years to polish, they change nothing about what I have to do. Luna doesn't get hurt again, not by Mars, not by anyone, not while I'm still breathing. If his explanation so much as puts one more crack in that girl, I'll finish what Jules started and throw him to the ash myself.

Let him talk.

Chapter 14 - Luna

The slam of my bedroom door is still ringing through the house as I stop in the middle of my room, close my eyes, and just breathe.

In for four, hold for four, out for four. My hands are shaking, and my skin is still warm from the light that spilled out of me. The anger and panic that tore through me downstairs are both still circling, looking for somewhere to reattach. I breathe through them anyway, the old exercises rising up from two years of practice, and slowly, the circling stops.

I need to get control of this, because there's no way we can live a life where the guys never leave my sight again. Supply runs, and a hundred other necessary things are coming, and I cannot white out every single time somebody reaches for their keys. My reaction wasn't logical, and it wasn't reasonable. Knowing that changes nothing about how completely it hijacked me, which is precisely the kind of thing I'd bring to my therapist. A dark little laugh slips out of me at the thought. It would be great to squeeze in a session right about now, but something tells me Dr. Patel is busy at the moment, what with the end of the world and all.

A few more deep breaths settle my chest, and then my door opens without a knock, because Kara has never once knocked in her life.

She steps in, closes the door behind her, and studies my face for a long beat, cataloguing whatever she finds there, and then she gives one short nod. "Are you good?"

"Yes, no, I don't know!" My hands fly up on their own. "I don't know what to do, Kara. There's no way I can have a panic attack every time one of them leaves my sight. That's not a life, that's a hostage situation, and I'm both the hostage and the kidnapper."

Kara lifts one shoulder in an elegant shrug. "Okay, then, pick your flavor. Do you want oh sweetie, or do you want listen bitch? Because I can go either way, and I'm equally gifted at both."

A laugh huffs out of me at the choices she’s giving me. "Let's go with listen bitch, because I don't think we have time for the soft sweetie approach right now."

"Alright then, bitch it is." Kara lifts her chin, crosses her arms, and stares down at me with the cool, polished expression she usually saves for rude waiters and men who man-splain things. "Get the fuck over it."

I blink at her, and she keeps going, every word deliberate.

"Yes, you've had important people leave and never come back, and it's incredibly tragic, and it would scar absolutely anybody. Nobody in this house is saying otherwise. And yes, all the guys left, and something horrible happened, and you spent a week alone in the dark with it. But they came back, Luna. Every single one of them fought and clawed and swam and walked through hell to get back to you. The real question isn't whether they'll leave, because life is going to make them leave sometimes whether any of us likes it or not. The real question is, do you trust them? Do you believe, all the way down, that no matter what this broken world throws at them, they will keep fighting to get back to you?"

My eyes squeeze shut, and I make myself sit with the question instead of flinching away from it. The proof marches through my head one face at a time. Gage fell out of the sky and walked a week through hell. Reid and Jules crossed a drowned city and a thousand kilometers. Torrin drove home from Winnipeg through the end of the world. Even Mars, two years late, still came back. Every road led here, and every single one of them pointed themselves at me and refused to stop.

I open my eyes and nod, slow and sure. "Yes, I do."

"Then there's your answer, and there's your job." Kara's voice gentles without softening, which is a trick only she has ever managed. "Stop guarding the door and start trusting the people walking through it. Believe in them and then fight just as hard to stay with them as they fight to come back. That's the deal now, and it's the whole deal."

She crosses the room and takes both of my hands in hers, thumbs pressing over my knuckles, and her cool expression cracks open into something raw and real.

"I don't know what's coming, Luna. None of us do. But from everything Gigi told us at that table, it's going to be brutal, and it's going to test every person in this house. I think all of us, every single one, are going to have to dig deep, lay our baggage and our traumas down at the door, and find whatever strength is buried underneath them, because that's the strength we're going to need if we're all going to survive this. We don't get to carry the old wounds and the new world at the same time. They're both too heavy."

The words settle into me, and they fit so I square my shoulders under them and feel a small smile forming.

"So, what you're really saying is... stop being a pussy and deal with my shit?"