a lesson in running away (the art of returning)

a lesson in missing someone enough to lose a lung

"I dream of him, you know," Biana says, her voice small enough to hurt. Tentative enough for him to know who she's talking about. "Do you?"

"I haven't dreamed in a while," Fitz admits. He can't track it back to a certain point; maybe the echoes, maybe the betrayals, but he knows that something in his mind has turned gray and fuzzy and he can't retrieve the color that once swirled through his thoughts. If he were a painter, maybe he could find them again.

But he only knows one painter.

"Well, you think of him, don't you," Biana says, and it's not a question. "I know you do."

"How do you know?"

"Because you talk to yourself sometimes." Biana brushes her hand over the pink of her carpet, the one they are stretched out on their stomachs, chins on their forearms. The scars on her exposed shoulder and tracing up her face catch the light and turn pale against warm brown skin. He doesn't let his eyes stick on them for long. She hates it when he does that. "And because I do too, and that's how I know Alvar thinks of us."

Fitz rolls onto his side, facing her directly, eyebrows raised. "Why do you say that?"

"Because we're the same. All four of us. We're cut from the same cloth, molded from the same expectations. We share thoughts like we used to share mallowmelt, all from the same plate, the same fork, the same laughter." She eyes him carefully.

He presses his lips together, but he can't stop himself from repeating, "The four of us."

Biana twists to face him, teal eyes matching their mirror across the foot of space between them. It has been so long since they've talked like this, been close like this, that he had nearly forgotten about the faint freckles scattered across her nose. They're barely visible now, faded into the darkness of her skin. "The four of us. You, me, Alvar, Keefe. We're the same."

"I heard you the first time," he says. "You don't have to remind me." I already know. With a touch of irony, "Two out of four ain't bad in terms of fuckups, right?"

Biana laughs outright. "I think you can add two to that number."

Fitz shakes his head, and a few strands of hair fall into his eyes. "You and I aren't fuckups."

"Think about it, Fitz," Biana says. "Are you everything you wanted to be?"

Fitz thinks about cognates and how powerful he's become. He thinks about the scar on his stomach and the limp and the remaining echoes in his heart, and he thinks about Biana's scars and Alden's fragile mind and Della's hardened eyes, and he thinks about dreaming and "He's gone? Typical." and the weight a mind can take on when it's left to hold the world up.

"When I was younger, I think I wanted to be happy," he says softly but doesn't answer her question, and Biana doesn't respond, only turns back on her stomach and rests her chin back on her hands. Her skin wrinkles, her chin smushes in, and she's growing up but now more than anything Fitz remembers that they are still only kids, still too young to know loss, to understand why it burns to breathe.

They sit there like that, in a sort of contemplation, half-waiting for the other to speak. Until she does, slowly, like she's trying to remember how to form the words she needs to.

"Don't you miss him?" Biana asks.

He doesn't know if she's talking about Keefe or Alvar.

"Yes," he says.

...

At thirteen years old, Fitz manifested as a Telepath.

Although looking back, he supposes it was less of a manifestation and more of a discovery, a finding of himself that he doesn't think ended. And a part of that finding was learning where to go, where to search, how other minds felt when they didn't want to be entered and how they felt when they did, the difference between thinking and making a decision, all the new rules to break and who he was allowed to break them with.