Morning made the house honest. The sun pushed past the dusty blinds, cutting through the night's illusions and showing what was left: dust along the baseboards, a hairline crack in the sink, three dark crescents of blood on the bedroom wall where knuckles had met plaster.
A ledger of pain, Rose thought, her eyes sticking to the stains. He didn't just carve their names on his skin. He wrote his grief on the walls, too. And we all pretend not to see it.
She padded out into the silence, her eyes swollen, her uniform jacket thrown over yesterday's shirt. The air smelled of coffee, lemon cleaner, and the thin, metallic tang of bandage tape. The couch held a neatly folded blanket and a single, deep dent that matched a man who had lain very still all night.
He didn't even let himself have the comfort of his own bed, she realized, a fresh wave of ache washing over her. He gave it to me and exiled himself to this couch, to this dent. As if he doesn't deserve a proper night's sleep. As if he's on permanent watch.
Lena stood at the stove, her shoulders set, her face a carefully arranged mask. She turned at the sound of footsteps, her gaze taking in Rose standing in the doorway of the boys' room, then the empty couch, then Rose again. A complex storm of emotions, confusion, a mother's instinctual worry, a dawning, heartbreaking understanding, flickered beneath her composure before she banked it.
"Sit," Lena said. It was not a suggestion.
A plate landed in front of Rose with a soft thud. Eggs, toast, jam that had been opened for celebrations long past. Her stomach clenched. How can we do this? How can we just… eat? As if the world didn't end yesterday? She picked up the fork because the ritual of it, the sheer, brutal normalcy, felt like the only thread keeping the day from unraveling completely.
The sound of water running down the hall cut off. He came in, hair damp, wearing a clean shirt that only made the new lines on his face and the silver in his hair seem more stark. He moved with a quiet, controlled economy, the soft whir of his prosthetic a constant, low hum underscoring the silence.
He moved like a machine, Rose observed, her heart aching. Every motion calculated, efficient. No waste. Is that what's left? Just the essential, functional parts of a person?
He took the chair opposite Rose and ate with a strict, unhurried efficiency, transferring fuel from plate to body without any evidence of taste or satisfaction.
He's not eating. He's refueling. Like a ship in dry dock, taking on supplies for a voyage into a dark sea. He's not here with us. He's already gone.
Lena set a cup at his elbow. "Your hand," she said, her voice cracking as she looked at the split, swollen skin across his knuckles.
He glanced down as if noticing the injury for the first time, then closed his fingers into a loose fist. "It's nothing."
Of course it's nothing, Rose thought, the realization a cold stone in her gut. Because the rest of the pain is too big to fit on a plate. A little physical agony is a welcome distraction. It's a pain he can understand, a pain he can control. It's a sanctuary from the other kind.
He finished the last precise bite and stood. "I have to report to the garrison." It was not an apology or a request, but a declaration of fact, a line of duty laid end to end.
Duty. That's the cage he's built for himself. The one thing strong enough to hold all that grief. He'll wrap himself in it until he disappears.
Lena nodded, her eyes glistening. She couldn't ask him to stay. This was his duty now, the only structure he had left. "Be safe."
He bent down, his movement slightly stiff, and pressed a dry, clumsy kiss to her forehead. It was a gesture that was both practiced and new, born of a terrible, recent necessity. Then he turned and left without a backward glance, the door clicking shut behind him and taking all the warmth from the room.
The house seemed to exhale, the silence it left behind even heavier than before. Rose stared at the knife block on the counter. Three slots, one blade missing.
Like this family. A set, now incomplete. Who are we now? The mother, the ghost of a brother, and the girl who loved the wrong son?
Lena poured more coffee, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet. "He slept on the couch," she said, a simple statement of fact that held no accusation, only a deep, weary understanding of the girl who had slept in her son's bed.
Rose kept her eyes on her mug, the ceramic warm against her palms. "He put me in his bed. I think it… it used to be both of theirs." The words felt like a confession, and a betrayal. To speak of both was to acknowledge the absence that now filled the house like a gas.
Lena's mouth pressed into a flat line, as if the word both had physically struck her. She reached for a dish towel and began to fold it, over and over, until it was small enough to hide in her palm, giving her hands somewhere to go.
"He used to put his brother to bed when Zack fell asleep in stupid places," Lena said, her voice soft and distant, a vessel for a memory too precious to be shattered by the present. "On the floor with a book. On the back step. In front of the icebox. He would carry him and then lie down next to him and pretend he was not tired."
He carried him. The image was so vivid, so tender, it was like a physical blow. Rose saw it instantly: a younger, softer Caellum, not a fortress but a guardian, gently lifting his lighter, carefree brother. The love in that simple act was so vast it made the current emptiness unbearable. She held her coffee with both hands, the heat a grounding anchor against the tremor that wanted to take over.
"He will not break where you can see," Lena continued, her gaze fixed on the neatly folded cloth, a tiny, perfect square of order in a chaotic world. "People will tell you he is cold. He is not. He is holding a wall up that fell on him. If he lets go, he thinks the whole house will go with it."
Rose could only nod, because words had failed in the face of such a perfect, devastating truth. A wall that fell on him. That's exactly what he was. Not a monument, but a load-bearing structure, cracking under a weight no single person should ever have to carry. And he was doing it in silence, believing that his suffering was the price for their stability.
Outside, a train horn blew twice, a lonely sound in the still morning. The house settled around them, a structure trying to remember its shape around a central, supporting pillar that was now gone. They ate what they could, two women left behind in the quiet aftermath, performing the small, sacred ritual of a finished plate as if it were another rule that could, somehow, keep the world from collapsing entirely.