The first thing to hit Manu was the quiet. Unmoving. He hadn’t realized the spasm before Sigyn took it away, hand finally resting. Still. Somehow, he knew when she finished, when she made him whole again. The doubt resting in him before gone. There was no mistaking how her blessing worked, how the urge to scratch his skin out of his bones gave way to the soothing absence. Her blessing felt so completely opposed to his own, Manu fought the need to stare. To look and find and undo her lines until he could understand how it felt for her too. This ability to conquer, mend, create, rebuild. Sigyn was so alive, she could actually give a little bit of life back to him. Manu could never do that. Could never understand how it sat in her shoulders, filled her throat.
How does it feel?, he wanted to ask. Words almost leaving his mouth as he watched her, concentration molding her face, hands covering his own. But he bit them back, swallowed them dry. This was intimate. Belonged only to her. And Manu had no right to ask, to know. So he took a deep breath, smiled at her with the same ferocity he spoke when her head shook and she dealt with his gratitude as if it was a rather strange thing. “Well, you should know I mean it, anyway,” he chuckled, the otherwise unknown shyness making him uncomfortable.
Until her answer came to him and that feeling was overwhelmed.
It broke something in him. This honesty that few offered in Ketterdam. This strength taught by survival that so many in the Barrel needed to have. With her words, Manu realized he had been innocent. A life as a smuggler had never offered him this kind of pain and rage. This was forged differently, molded him in many different ways. And the fact he never expected it to happen only testified to how gullible he had been. To think that he already knew enough. That could only belong to the Wanderer and to the True Sea. A past so distant, it felt unreal.
For here he was, filled with anger to the point of suffocation, face turned to Sigyn, her eyelids almost closed as she touched his shoulder. And here he was, realizing he had only started to understand this world when he brought that ship down. Sank it into oblivion. Only to finally see the lesson in his own cruelty today, when drüskelle had come and his mind couldn’t form any other word than drüsje, drüsje, drüsje, drüsje. He wanted to spit that out, get rid of that poison, turn that hate on them. But all he could do was relax against her, take aanother deep breath as he raised his tattooed hand to her hair, smoothing the blonde-white strands, so much like his own.
"We’re going to make them burn instead,” a promise said quietly, cheek pressed against the top of her head as his other hand sought hers in the small space between them. Burn. Like Fjerda did to their kind. As drüskelle planned to do with them. Only that could bring him peace again. “You have my word,” for whatever that was worth for her. These murderous promises and vengeance. Even though, in many ways, Fjerda had already won. Even though, tonight, with her warmth close to him, Manu wanted to believe they didn’t. Not when they still found a way out. Not when they held each other at last.
Touch was a luxury in the barrel. At least, the kind that wouldn't sting at impact was, welting the skin into bright red mounds to turn blue and green with the following morning ━━ and that's if you were lucky, as it was just as likely to find a knife between your ribs should you take a wrong turn at the wrong time, a corpse gone cold and forgotten as the sun gleams over the horizon, from behind gabled rooftops and crumbling masonry. That variety of touch was in abundance in ketterdam, the supply overflowing. The rest, however, was a commodity; a thing of measurable value, weighed heavy in kruge and favors.
Sigyn had seen it bought, sold, and gambled; had experienced first hand the vast market for it beneath her own contract with a detached acceptance ━━ this was just how things were for those whose lives belonged to another, after all. The worst of it though, was when it was taken, a trial she remembers vividly. Weeks isolated at a time, the reason never mattered ( a job failed, tongue too sharp with unwanted commentary ), scampering about her little room with nothing but her thoughts and stretching hours of emptiness ahead of her. She recalled how desperation for any contact at all coiled tight around her throat; a brush of an elbow in passing, the press of a crowd navigating through the alleys. Anything, however cold or accidental, until it was her own nails digging into the sides of her arms that snapped her from the looping nightmare of seclusion.
She knows well it's value, and now with her freedom purchased and held by no one but herself, it is given and sought with with careful, and measured hesitancy. Nothing for free, nothing without good reason, nothing outside of her explicit control.
Manu was one of those good things, his presence one she'd come to seek, finding there in eyes as touched by Fjerdan ice as hers were a quiet understanding, a peace whose details needed no defining. Always she would remember the way he'd made the water dance and spiral above her off the graveyard's coast, how it glimmered against the moonless night sky as if the stars themselves had condensed into little droplets and sprinkled down playfully against her face.
Yet still, when his hand came to smooth the frayed strands of her hair, tangled in braids and matted with ash, there was a moment of tension, melting in the very next breath as she felt ten-years old again, comforted by family. A sigh releases the remaining reservation, and she relaxes, eyes closing against the warmth of him.
His promise curls her lips into a smile, the images a perfect lullaby ━━ silver and black glowing bright as crackling flames consumes them, the twisting of their faces, heat-strangled screaming in their mother tongue. Her fingers would curl into his as they did now while they watched. The same smile. The same ferocity in his voice. It may never be enough to fix what was broken this night, and all that had been crushed and taken from them in their pasts, but it was certainly a good place to start.
"I will hold you to it. Just like when you tell me you'll bite off the head of the next dreg who wakes me up." She half expected a pile of them, at the rate the night has gone, but of the very few words she trusted, she would rest assured Manu would keep his promise.