Indigo's Owl [Indigo Rewrite]

Chapter 23 - Nightmares

An hour or two after midnight, Shift arrived back at Indigo base from a thankfully uneventful patrol.

After stripping off his Keeper suit in the prep room, he wandered into the kitchen in the close-fit tank top and pants he'd worn under his suit to acquire a snack. Then, Om Nom bar in his mouth, he headed up the stairs, already snuggled beneath the blankets in his mind.

The sixth-floor corridor was quiet except for his steps, the dim lights just bright enough to navigate by. A yawn escaped him as he glanced down the hall at each of the bedroom doors — a habit he'd developed over the last year to reassure himself that they'd all made it through another day. All were occupied and locked with the exception of his own and Kione's, who often took the graveyard shift and slept through the morning.

Shift was about to stumble into his own room when he noticed the blue light coming from under Athira's door. It wasn't particularly unusual — uncovered, her runes were often bright enough to filter under the door if she were near it — but at this hour, she should have been in bed.

He tapped on her bedroom door softly, keeping his voice low so as to not wake the others. "Athira? Everything okay in there?"

No reply.

Shift tried again, a little louder this time, but once again, Athira didn't reply. He stepped back, observing the blue light for a long moment until he was sure whatever it was coming from on the other side hadn't moved.

Had it been any other day, Shift might have left it, but after what'd happened with the Sleeper earlier, he decided to listen to the little, insistent voice in the back of his head that needed to make sure and keyed in the code to open the door.

The door slid open.

The blue light was indeed coming from Athira's runes. She sat on the floor at the end of her bed in the loose tracksuit pants and crop top she favoured as PJs. Her elbows rested on her drawn-up knees, head squeezed between her arms. The fingers of one hand were tangled tight in her hair, while the other held her amulet, opened to reveal something inside.

Concerned, Shift stepped inside. "Athira?"

When she didn't move, he knelt beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Are you—"

Athira flinched, slapping his hand away as her head snapped up. She pressed her back against her bed until her eyes — eyes that were filled with a raw, wild kind of panic — finally landed on him.

"Shift," she said, more like she was reminding herself than any kind of greeting. She sank against the wall, running her hands along her arms. "It's just you."

"I didn't mean to scare you," said Shift, lowering his hands. "I just saw the light under the door and wanted to make sure everything was okay."

"Okay?" Athira managed a short, choked kind of laugh. She looked down at her amulet, where a photo of a much younger Athira, Raph, and Zoe with someone he vaguely recognised as their late mother had been carefully fixed inside. Athira closed it with a shaky hand and slipped the chain back over her neck. "Everything is so far from okay right now."

"I thought you said everything was fine earlier?" asked Shift, recalling the conversation they'd had in the back of the ambulance after the Sleeper. She'd seemed dazed when she'd woken some twenty minutes after passing out, but had insisted everything was okay. "What happened?"

She dug her fingers into her skin. "I took off my suit."

Shift didn't quite understand what she meant at first — and then he noticed her runes.

The usually crisp, clear outlines of her runes were ragged, like something had eaten away at their edges. The runes hadn't yet broken, but without a doubt, they were decaying.