This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Elias opened his eyes and looked around.

“What?”

He knew this room. That was the first wrong thing—the deep, sinking familiarity of it. The pale walls. The thin mattress beneath him. The particular grey light of a particular window. A hospital room, old and worn and known to him in his bones.

“Strange,” he murmured. “Where is everyone?”

But he didn’t chase the thought. Some quiet instinct told him not to look at it too closely, and so he didn’t. His body felt heavy in a way he had almost forgotten a body could feel—weak, leaden, every breath a small effort. He lay still and let the wrongness wash over him without examining it.

He had been sixteen the first time he came to a room like this.

It returned to him slowly, the way old pain does. He had held out as long as he could before going to a hospital at all—because for an orphan with nothing, a hospital was a luxury measured in pieces of yourself, and he had put it off until he simply could not bear the pain any longer.

They had given the pain a name, in the end. It had already spread by the time anyone looked; the doctors said a great many things after that, and he had heard almost none of them, the words sliding off him like water off glass.

Life had been hard before that. He hadn’t known, then, that it could get harder.

Two years, he had lasted after that. Two years in rooms like this one.

He had survived the way all the patients here survived—on the kindness of strangers, on donations from people who would never know his name, scraping out one more month and then another. And somewhere in those two years, if he was honest, he had grown tired. Bone-tired, in a way sleep never touched.

What was the point, a small grey voice had asked him, more and more often. The thing inside him was not leaving. The days only hurt. And no one—this was the part that hollowed him out worst—no one out there knew him well enough to grieve. He could slip out of the world entirely and leave no gap in anyone’s life, because there was no one whose life he was truly part of.

He remembered lying just like this, looking toward the window, the grey light beyond it, while that voice murmured its terrible, reasonable question. Why not just—

A sheep said baaa.

Elias blinked.

There was a sheep on his lap. A small one, no bigger than a dog, soft and round and impossibly out of place against the grey hospital blanket, looking up at him with clear and gentle green eyes.

“Where,” Elias said faintly, “did you come from?”

And then he looked into those green eyes, and he remembered.

Everything came back at once—the realm, the flowers, the family, the life. The whole warm weight of the second chance he had been given. This was the dream. This was a Nightmare sheep, and this was the nightmare: not a monster, not the frontier’s illusions, but simply this—the worst and loneliest hour of a life he had already left behind.

“Yikes,” he breathed, a little shakily. “I’d almost forgotten how bad it got.”

The sheep pressed closer, butting its soft head against his chest, and let out a low, mournful little baaa—as though it were apologizing for the place it had brought him.

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And Elias—Elias who had a home now, a family, a hundred creatures who loved him—felt the fear go out of him, and smiled.

“It’s okay,” he said, and wrapped his arms around the wonderful cotton-soft warmth of it, holding it the way he wished someone had held that frightened sixteen-year-old, all those years and worlds ago. “It’s okay. I’m not there anymore. I got out. I have so much now—you have no idea.”

He looked once more around the grey and familiar room, at the boy he had been and the despair he had carried, and this time he did not flinch from it. He only looked at it gently, the way you might look at an old photograph of someone you had grieved and finally forgiven.

“It’s okay,” he said a third time, softly, to the room and the memory and himself.

And the hospital began to fade—the walls, the window, the thin grey light all dissolving into nothing, drawn quietly inward and absorbed into the sheep, until there was only the soft warm creature in his arms and then, gently, nothing at all.

Elias woke with tears on his face.

He lay there a moment in the dark of his own room—his real room, in his realm, in his life—and let himself simply feel the difference between then and now. Then he reached, without quite deciding to, for the means to call his parents.

His mother answered, her voice thick with sleep and then sharp with worry the instant she heard his breathing. “Elias? What’s wrong, what happened—”

He tried to speak and found his throat had closed.

“Nothing,” he managed, finally, the word coming out wet and cracked. “Nothing’s wrong. I just—” He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. “I really, really love you all. That’s all. I just needed to say it. I love you.”

There was a pause, and then his father’s voice joined his mother’s, both of them gentling, asking if he was sure, if they should come. He let their worry wash over him like warmth, and reassured them as best he could, and when at last he hung up he felt scoured clean and unspeakably grateful.

He opened his bedroom door half expecting Sebastian, who was so often there at odd hours with tea and a knowing eye.

Instead he found Cassian.

The commander stood a little way down the hall, near enough to be deliberate, and his golden eyes moved at once to Elias’s red and swollen ones. Something flickered across his face—something that, on a less guarded man, might have been alarm, or grief, or a question. He didn’t voice it. He simply crossed the space between them, set a heavy hand on Elias’s shoulder, and gripped it once—steady, wordless, there—before letting go and continuing on his way as though he had only happened to be passing.

It was the not-speaking that told Elias everything. That, and the clothes.

Because Cassian was dressed exactly as he had been the evening before. He had not changed. He had not slept. He had stood the whole night through in that hallway, outside Elias’s door, keeping watch over a friend who had gone willingly into a nightmare—just in case.

Elias’s chest ached, and this time with something good.

He went after the retreating commander before he could think better of it, and caught him, and wrapped his arms around him from behind in a quick, fierce hug—the easy, unguarded kind he gave only to family.

“Thank you,” he said into the back of Cassian’s coat, grinning even as his eyes stung again. “For standing there all night. You didn’t have to. Thank you.”

Cassian went very still, the way he always did when kindness caught him off his guard—and then, gruffly, said something that might have been you’re welcome and might have been an order to go eat something, and did not pull away.

After that, Elias went to find Sebastian, to be fussed over and helped into fresh clothes—because, the butler informed him with grave disapproval, he had been wearing variations of the same outfit for the better part of a week, and that simply would not do.

Elias let himself be fussed over.

It was, he thought, a very good morning to be alive, standing patiently while Sebastian despaired over his wardrobe. The work was not done—the Nightmare sheep, like its gentler kin, needed to walk its fourth step several times over before the evolution would truly take, which meant more nights like the one behind him, more old griefs to pass back through. He would do them. He had walked back through the worst hour of his old life once now and come out the other side into this one; he could do it again, as many times as the sheep needed.

Because each time he did, he came home to the same place.

To a home full of people who would stand all night in a hallway for him. To a family who answered the phone before dawn and never once asked why he was crying, only whether they could help.

He had been so alone, once, in a grey room on another world.

He wasn’t anymore. And that, he was certain now, would be true every single time he opened his eyes.

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