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Tir accepted a hand at his elbow on a staircase if the hand belonged to Cedric, or to their mother, or to Fadi, or to palace staff. If Oliver offered Tir seemed to be trying to think of a way to politely say no.
Tir hated him. Ollie understood that. Of course those rainshadow eyes blamed him. He blamed himself.
Tir had died for him. Tir was hurt in some nebulous way that was not getting better—energy never entirely restored—and, yes, Tir had chosen to come on the Quest, to throw himself in front of a dragon; but a person could have more than one emotion, and Tirian could die for Oliver and then resent having to live injured because of it.
Tir noticed Ollie’s acquisition of minor elements of magic; difficult not to notice when another one of those underhearing moments erupted into reality and Oliver answered his mother’s questions about plans for the new University wing before they were asked. Tir asked what had happened, and nodded as if taking this in when told, and then got even quieter than the now-usual for half a day.
Ollie could make a guess as to why. His fairy wasn’t healing easily, his fairy who’d once upon a time used magic to heal himself and Ollie and once Cedric’s broken arm. Tir had not done anything at all magical, in fact, beyond being alive; and to watch Oliver have otherworldly senses, awareness, reactions…
That must scrape like salt in open wounds. Must cut like barbed wire, across the gaping knowledge of all that Tir had lost, from inhuman grace to the ability to climb an entire staircase without sitting down.
Tir had died for him, and so this time it would be Oliver’s turn: his heart crumpled, one more paper-brittle crease, each time Tir laughed at one of Cedric’s jokes but avoided breakfast with Ollie by claiming he had an appointment in the infirmary.
The appointment was a true one. Oliver walked over with him and knew he was expected. But the scheduling loomed suspicious and brutal as a dagger to the gut.
I love you, he thought, letting his fairy go in without him. I love you so much.
And he thought: I can never weigh you down with that. I can never tell you. Not when you look at me that way. Not now.
It wasn’t all painful. Tir was alive. That joy suffused the world. Worth every agony.
Tir didn’t avoid him entirely. More than once Ollie turned around to find rainfall eyes following him out of a room. Taking a chair in the library when he was looking for a book. Hovering in the open doorway of Ollie’s bedroom.
He always asked if Tir wanted to come in. Sometimes the answer was yes and more often it was no, but unpredictably so. Even when it was yes Tir wouldn’t talk much, but would only find a spot to curl up long legs and watch him as if trying to sort out a mystifying puzzle-piece. That part Oliver didn’t understand.
He accepted it, though. It was what he had. What he was being given, and that’d be enough.
He lived with it, because he had to. He soaked up every scrap of Tir that he could. He was grateful—more than grateful—to have that at all.
One afternoon, trying to find a spark of interest, a connection, he asked whether Tir wanted to see the astronomy tower. Tir took a deep breath, eyes searching his face.
Oliver stayed perfectly still, afraid to exhale.
Tir, slowly, nodded.
“It’s a brand-new telescope,” Ollie said, with hope, and waved a hand grandly: a spring-fair showman demonstrating a wonder. “I kept the old one too, it’s still up there, but this one’s got the best optic lenses the University could make, I thought maybe we could use it tonight, it should be a good night for that?”
Tir smiled at him. The smile was hesitant, but it was there. Oliver would buy a hundred telescopes, a thousand, for that smile.
But the night, though clear, turned out to be cold as icicles and frosted graves. Tir was visibly drained by the end of dinner, white-faced with effort and trying hard to hide it. Ollie promised, “Never mind, it’ll be there when you are,” and walked his fairy to bed, and it was a mark of how fatigued those eyes must’ve been that they accepted his aid without protest.
Oliver built up the fire in his room. Oliver brought over blankets and hot tea. Tir was already asleep, thin and depleted and lovely even so; the sharp lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, stood out in firelight.
He didn’t wake when covered up more, and echoes of that first terrible week screamed inside Ollie’s veins and lungs and everyplace, all throughout; after a second Oliver only made himself exhale, and went and found the ridiculous erotic mythology book from his own room, an inadequate present but the best he could do.
He stayed in Tir’s room all night, keeping watch. He fell asleep, not entirely on purpose, as the sky lightened into paler mists.
When he opened his eyes, Tir was sitting up in bed and reading the ridiculous book, apparently having taken it out of his hand at some point.
But Tir also held the volume back out to him immediately. Without a word. With some emotion—something Oliver genuinely couldn’t read—lacing those eyes, indefinable as the shape of the chilly morning mists.
“It’s for you,” Ollie explained, heart bleeding again. “I bought it for you.” Tir looked at the cover and then at Ollie’s face, and then put the book on his night-table: a tentative setting-down of pages in place, as if concerned that he might be doing it wrong.
Oliver beamed at him.
He then had no clue what else to do—Tir wasn’t talking—and blundered through sentences. “I, um, do you feel up to food? Breakfast? Do you want something? Anything at all, the cooks’re dying to make you whatever you—oh no I didn’t mean dying, I didn’t—”
“Anything’s fine.” Tir pulled up both knees under his blankets, wrapped arms around them. “I don’t—I don’t know. Just…give me a moment. Or two. Tell them something that you want, and I’ll meet you downstairs?”
