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I don't know what time it is when I ease myself out of bed. Raven's still asleep so I move as soundlessly as I can out of the room. I don't know what's woken me up but I don't want to disturb her after everything else I've done to cause her problems. So, I tug on a shirt and pad my way into the living room. The sun is just starting to rise and I stand in front of the window, letting the chill of the morning wake me up.

Stretching, I close my eyes and stand there, waiting for something. I don't know what. When I open my eyes, Demetrius is there in front of me. Demetrius who I buried a few months ago. Demetrius who died at my hands. He's just standing there, staring at me and the chill from the morning doesn't compare to the cold steel that's running through my veins right now.

"I'm sorry."

It's the only thing I can think to say. Demetrius is one piece though his eyes are dark, hollow. Accusing. I swallow and step forward, reaching for my friend but my hand passes right through him. It hurts more than it should. I know he is dead and I know he will continue to be dead but I can't help but wish he wasn't.

"Demetrius, please..."

Demetrius still doesn't move. He stares at me and I turn away, hiding my face in my hands and stifling any sort of strangled moan or sounds of pain that want to slip out of me. When I pull my hands away, Demetrius is gone and I'm alone.

I don't know how I feel about that.

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Raven is becoming accustomed the the warmth of Elias's body beside her at night. She's spending more and more nights at his apartment, and she's glad that slowly they're getting to a point where he's okay with that, where he wants her there. She knows there are still times he worries, where he tries to push her away, but she hopes she's made it clear enough by now that she's not going anywhere.

She wakes in the early hours of the morning, the warm weight beside her suddenly gone. Half asleep, she stretches her hand out across the bed as though she'll find him, but when it becomes clear that Elias is no longer in bed with her, she forces herself to open her eyes and sit up. She straps her brace on quickly and pads barefoot into the living room, wrapping her arms around herself against the cold, but when she enters the room she stops short.

Elias is standing in the living room, his head in his hands, and as she walks in he lets out a small, strangled sound that she can tell he's trying to muffle.

"Elias?" she questions, moving across the room until she can reach him, her hand touching gently at his elbow. "What's wrong?"

"I didn't mean to wake you up," I say when I feel her presence in the room, her hand at my elbow. I let my hands drop and look at her, trying to smile though there's really nothing in me that's helping that along. I feel so wrung out, so confused and so gutted by all I saw and heard during the Purge.

I was really worried that I could have killed someone who didn't deserve it. My memories of that night are so murky that, even now, I can't be sure I didn't.

"I was -- " I don't know how to explain this. I don't know what to tell her. "I saw Demetrius."

Raven is an early riser and the sun is starting to come up, so it's not as if he's woken her in the middle of the night. Even if he had she wouldn't mind, and clearly something is wrong, so that's by far the more pressing concern. The smile he gives her is strained and forced, but she waits him out, knowing that if she gives him enough time, he'll speak.

When he does she's not sure how to react at first. It takes her only a moment to place the name. She remembers that day vividly, remembers his friend's body on the ground in the middle of the street, Elias staring at him in horror. He'd seen people who had died on Halloween, and she doesn't know what any of this means or how she's supposed to fix it.

"Just now?" she asks, glancing around the room as though she could see him too. She knows that's not how it works, because she hadn't seen any of the people he'd mentioned last time. Raven understands things she can see and touch with her own hands, things she can take apart and make sense of, and all of this just leaves her feeling bewildered and concerned. "Here?"

"Yeah. Just now. Here." The words sound heavy and hollow because I know that what I say makes no sense. Demetrius is dead. She'd seen that with her own eyes that day. Seeing Demetrius once again, even if he hadn't spoken, had been a mixture of relief and embarrassment. It was good to know that he was going to pass over, that he wasn't going to be stuck here but having to face him again...

I sigh. I thought that this had gone away, that being in Darrow had somehow tempered this...ability of mine. I don't even know what to call it.

"I know what it sounds like," I tell her, shaking my head, "but I promise you, I'm not cracking up any more than I already have. This was happening before I even got here, while I was dying. I think it's because of the poison, actually."

His friend is dead, that much is something they both know for sure. She'd helped him bury the body, and now somehow Elias is seeing him standing in his living room. A year ago she might have called him crazy, but Raven has been living in this city for long enough to know that stranger things have happened.

What concerns her is the idea that this was happening before Darrow, even. The poison in his system is something they've talked a little about, but blessedly it's stayed mostly dormant until now. She avoids the information because she doesn't know what to do with it, most of the time. She hates the idea that there's anything in his body that could be slowly hurting him, something that the doctors here can't understand. "I don't think you're crazy," she assures him, and she believes it. He understands this more than she does, and she trusts him.

That doesn't mean that they don't have options, though. There are people in this city with abilities Raven doesn't always understand, but it could be worth asking around. One of her best friends is a wizard, after all. "Does it... hurt you?" she asks, knowing it's a stupid question. He's seeing his dead friends in his apartment, of course it must be hurting him, but she means more physically. If he's starting to have visions like this, the poison might be less dormant than she thought.

"Physically?" I shake my head and reach to rub the scar on my arm where the poison had first entered my body. It's still raised and red, a mark left by my own mother during an attempt to kill me. A rare failure for the Commandant. I'm sure she looks forward to finding me and finishing the job in the future.

"It hurts in other ways, though," I admit, rubbing my face and shaking my head. "It's...it's good to see people that I've lost but it's not -- "

They're dead. They're gone. Some of them because of me and there is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is see them and encourage them to cross over to their afterlife. I can apologize, I can ask for forgiveness but that's not guaranteed.

"Back home, when this happened, it was because the poison was taking hold," I explain, holding my arm and frowning, "and I was either unconsciousness or close to it. It would be after a seizure or something close to it when I was walking the edge of life and death. I don't know what's causing it now."

It doesn't make things better, exactly, but she is a little relieved to hear that at least he's not in any physical pain. She still remembers the way he'd looked when he arrived, and she doesn't ever want him to have to go through anything like that again. The rest of it though, she doesn't know how to help with. Of course it must be hard for him to see visions of people he's lost, people who were his friends.

She tries to imagine what she'd do if it started happening to her, if suddenly Finn showed up in the middle of her apartment. For all that she misses him, she knows she wouldn't want him appearing like that.

Raven runs a hand lightly over his arm, hoping she can at least provide some kind of comfort even if she doesn't know how to make it stop. "There are people here that might be able to help," she says slowly, not wanting to overstep. "Maybe the doctors can't, but there are people who can do all sorts of things, much as it pains me to admit that science might not be able to solve everything."

"Help?" I repeat, not sure what or who she might be alluding to. I rub the back of my neck, head tilting forward like it was too heavy for me to even keep holding up.

"How do you mean?" I don't know if I necessarily want more people in on this than I've already told. I also don't know how anyone can stop what's happening to me without removing the poison that's in my blood and considering how long it's been there, I don't know if that can be undone.

"I don't know if anyone's going to be able to remove what's in my blood," I remind her with a shake of my head. "Not without -- not without activating the poison again."

She chews on her lip, wondering whether it's worth asking anybody at all. She doesn't want to force him to talk to anyone if he doesn't want to, and she can understand that this isn't the most enjoyable subject to bring up to just anyone. The last thing she wants to do is make things worse for him, and if stirring up the poison in his blood does that, she doesn't know if or how magic could stop it.

"So how can I help?" she asks gently, ducking her head and lifting his chin a little so she can look at him properly. This is so out of her realm of expertise that she feels completely useless, and that's not a feeling Raven does well with. She can usually fix any problem she sets her mind to, but she doesn't know how to handle visions of dead people and a mysterious poison in his blood.

All she knows is that this is clearly putting him through hell, and she'll do anything she can to make it easier for him.

"I don't know if there is anything short of me dying that will solve this," I tell her with a shake of his head. There is no cure for the nightweed and the only thing that kept him sane back home had been the tellis extract. With that nowhere in sight, he's not sure what can be done, if anything.

"I'm not asking you to kill me before you start thinking that I'm not...that all right," I say hurriedly, shaking my head and meeting her eyes. "This is something I'll just have to live with, I think."

Maybe, since my access to the Waiting Place is cut off, I'll only see Demetrius. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't happen often. "Distraction, I think, is what helped back home. If I didn't think about it, I didn't have seizures that sent me to -- to the Waiting Place."

At least she doesn't have to worry about him taking that particular solution too far. She'd been about to protest when he first said the words, not because she seriously thinks he would hurt himself to make the visions stop, but because it wasn't a thing she wanted to even entertain the idea of.

It doesn't seem fair that it's just something he has to live with, but she's at a loss for how to argue. She doesn't know how to fix this, and it's not like she doesn't know a thing or two about just having to live with things. Abby hadn't been able to fix the damage to her spine, and the doctors in this place can't, either. It's just something she has to deal with for the rest of her life.

Distraction, she supposes, she can do. If it's all that she can offer, she'll be on hand to distract him whenever he wants. "Okay, distractions then," she agrees, nodding. It's the same way she keeps her attention off the pain that comes back some days, and she's found Elias to be a hell of a distraction herself. She leans up to kiss him, pressing her lips against his as though that will be distraction enough, like she can shut Demetrius out if he's standing anywhere in this room right now.

Well, I can't argue with that as a method of distraction. It certainly scatters all other thoughts that are in my head, filling me up with warmth and something very close to an emotion that scares me. I tamp down on it, push it aside or else I'm going to say something embarrassing and I don't know if either of us is ready for something like that. This still feels new, fragile, like I could ruin it at any moment.

I'm loathe to pull away from her lips but I find I have to breathe. I don't plan on taking too long away from her proximity though since it's one of the few things that makes me feel normal.

"That's a better distraction than I had back in Serra," I say, quiet amusement in my voice. "We typically either were fighting someone else, each other, or running from someone. This is better."

She knows exactly what that feels like, remembers it well, but that's not a place she wants to revisit right now. She's spent more time fighting or running than she ever wants to do again in her life, and at this hour of the morning, still in the t-shirt she wears to bed in Elias's little apartment, it's the last thing she wants to be thinking about.

"Yeah well, there was no me in Serra," she retorts, pressing another soft kiss to his lips. Maybe she doesn't know how to make Demetrius disappear or stop the poison that's running through his veins, but if this is a way that she can help, she's not about to say no. Kissing him still feels a little like stealing almost, small moments snatched up and tucked away to remember later.

She doesn't know why exactly she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe after everything that happened she'll spend the rest of the foreseeable future this way, but she doesn't want to dwell on it. What matters is that they're both here, so she runs her hands over her arms to steady them both, presses another kiss to his jaw. "This is definitely better."

"You would have been the center of attention in Serra," I told her, whispering the words against her lips and feeling my own mouth pull into a smile. Helene certainly would have either loved her or felt threatened by her. I don't know how Laia would react but I try not to think of Laia and Raven in the same span of time. It feels like cheating of a sort and I don't want Raven to think that I'm ever thinking of anyone but her when I'm with her.

"They wouldn't have known what to do with you," I tell her, reaching to cradle her cheeks again. I remember doing this back during the Purge, back when I'd been hallucinating badly while I implored her to leave me alone, get somewhere safe. "I wouldn't have known what to do with you."

I still barely knew sometimes. But, she was gracious and smart enough to take the lead and I wasn't so dumb that I couldn't follow her. I brush my thumbs along her cheeks, pushing hair behind her ears and turning my face to try and kiss her again, kiss her properly.

"I -- " The words try to, once again, spill from my lips but I stop them by kissing her again and again, mapping her face with my fingers and lips.

People back home hadn't known what to do with her either, she muses. She'd been more headstrong than they'd ever counted on when they tried to tell her she couldn't join Zero-G, and then she'd run rings around all of them. They hadn't expected her to fly a dropship to Earth either, but she'd done that, too. The Grounders definitely hadn't known how to handle her, but all of that is behind her now.

"You would have worked it out," she says, laughing a little against his lips. He cradles her face and Raven's hands curl around his neck, holding him against her. Like this it's easy to pretend like nothing else exists, not the poison that won't let him go or the things in either of their pasts that threaten to bubble over.

There's something he stops himself from saying and she wants to know what it is, but for the moment she's distracted. He keeps kissing her like she's some kind of lifeline, and Raven falls into it, the unasked question dying on her lips before she can even think of asking it. "You worked out what to do with me here," she points out, kissing him again to make her case. Maybe he'd spent a long time trying to push her away, but it hadn't taken him all that long to figure out that it was never going to work on her.

"I think you underestimate my abilities with women," I tell her, shaking my head. The smile stays on my face and I keep my eyes shut, breathing her in, feeling her warm skin beneath my hands, the wisps of her hair tickling my knuckles. There is nothing else like this in my world. There is nothing else this precious and I'm so worried that something will ruin it. Whether it be me or something from my world, the fear will not relent though I've been able to control it for awhile now.

I just wish it would go away.

"But, I'm glad you're not in Serra," I tell her fiercely, punctuating the statement with a kiss, harder and deeper. I don't tell her why, don't want to bring my mother into this conversation but I don't want her there. If anyone were to know what she is to me, it would mean certain death for her. No. It's safer to have this cocoon of safety here.

My hands move from her face down her back, the line of her spine until I can get a hand underneath the thin tee shirt she's wearing and onto her back proper. I splay my fingers out and try and bring her closer to me.

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