Etienne let her go, leaning back with a sigh. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. We’re both still learning about this. What does it feel like?” he asked, though a little timidly.
Astoundingly, Alphonse managed to smile at Etienne. Even at a time like this, he could still be curious, inquisitive. She bumped her elbow against his side, teasingly. “You aren’t supposed to ask a lady those sorts of questions,” she murmured, humor making her wan face glow from the inside.
She looked beyond, at the fields of wheat and barley they were passing. How they swayed in the spring breeze, green and bright, not yet the customary golden-brown of summer and harvest.
New.
What did it feel like? It was difficult to put into words. It was difficult to know. Half the time, she didn’t feel anything at all…
“Well,” she tried for an answer, placing her recently healed hand above her heart. “I feel it here mostly. My heart beats faster, or slower… and it’s heavy. Or there is intense pressure, and I think it’s going to stop altogether.” She swallowed. That was mostly when the sickness fought her tooth and nail to get out.
“Other times, it’s here…” Alphonse tapped the center of her forehead, the faint tattoo marked there. “I’ll hear a voice, and it’s not my own. It’s… it’s hard and strong and defiant and brave and… cruel.” That voice frightened her more than her heart-stopping.
“But mostly, I just have an instinct, and I want to follow it. It’s not until after the fact that I realize… I realize it wasn’t my instinct.”
And then there were the times when she felt nothing, thought nothing, and just… left her own body. She’d wake up somewhere new, or doing something she’d never done before… Other times she wasn’t gone, not totally. But it felt dizzy and blurry and much like a dream.
“I’m changing. Every day I feel it.” Her voice sounded distant to her own ears because she knew that there was nothing she could do. Even if they healed her of this sickness, forever Alphonse would be irrevocably altered.
Her eyes shot to Etienne’s face.
“Are you jealous?”
✶
Etienne opened his mouth to answer with a resounding no and then stopped. Hesitated.
Was he jealous?
He had listened to Alphonse’s descriptions of what the entity felt like with rapt attention, cataloging them against his own observations of her changing behavior. He wanted to understand the shadow that had infested his best friend. He wanted to understand what it was she was going through.
Did that mean he wanted to experience it himself? Etienne rubbed the hand-shaped scar on his chest.
He considered for a moment what it must be like: the confusion of waking up in strange places, in acting in ways that he would not normally, in struggling with the impulses of his own mind. Etienne shuddered. Who would he be if he could not trust his mind?
“No,” he said firmly. “I’m not jealous. I just want to understand.”
He turned back to the view outside, his consciousness warring inside him. There was a small voice somewhere deep in his thoughts that wondered if somehow Alphonse might learn more than he could because of the shadow in her mind. It wondered that, if he had been the one chosen, he might have been able to use the entity rather than being controlled by it.
Mentally he shook himself. It was that same pride that had set them on this path. He had made the mistake, had let himself become so convinced of his own abilities that he would put his dearest friend in harm’s way for the sake of accolades and an apprenticeship.
Etienne turned back to Alphonse. “Do you think it would help to talk to me about the impulses? Then you could know if they were yours before you acted on them.”
Her cheeks turned a ruddy pink color. “I could try…” she finally muttered, not sounding all that convincing. She was silent for a long moment.
“Have I… have I done anything—ah—untoward to you, Etienne?”
Etienne cocked his head slightly to the side, bewildered by Alphonse’s sudden embarrassment. Was she genuinely self-conscious about the impulses of another creature? They could not be her fault. Besides, he had known her since they were both eleven, awkward and pubescent. What could she possibly have problems sharing with him?
He was almost hurt by her hesitancy. He knew it was his fault, but still, he was just trying to help. Etienne blinked at her for a few seconds, struggling to understand. Anything untoward? Oh.
Oh.
Briefly, an image of Alphonse standing in front of his bed in the light of the setting moon flashed in his mind, her hands traveling almost sensually down her own body.
He reddened, just as embarrassed by the question as she had been.
“No,” he told her, his voice cracking. “You haven’t made any, uh, advances.” Etienne swallowed, but he didn’t look away. “I wouldn’t accept them if you—if you had.”
Wait, that hadn’t sounded right. He didn’t mean to insinuate that she wasn’t very—very nice.
“What I mean is, well… It would be wrong. Because it wouldn’t be you, so you couldn’t have a say. And well, Alphonse, not to say you aren’t quite, um, nice, but you are rather like a sister to me, so…” Etienne trailed off hopelessly, pink to the tips of his ears.
Alphonse’s face was beet-red. She held up her hand, which was trembling with horror. “Just. Stop. Etienne.” She looked as if she might faint with the pain of enduring this interaction.
He swallowed. He had just made it more awkward.
“I need a nap,” Alphonse said, turning away from him and resting her veiled head against a sack of flour.
⥣ ⥣ ⥣
The next two days of travel were surprisingly more comfortable than the first had been. For whatever reason, Alphonse seemed better able to control
