“I never thanked you,” I said quietly.
He didn’t look up from his work. “For?”
“For… Freya.” I had to forcibly push your name out.
“None needed.”
“In that you’re wrong,” I sighed. “After door nine….”
He cut me off, still not looking up as he worked at one of the rifles. “When you can’t carry the weight, you let your team share the burden.”
“You keep putting that burden on yourself,” I chided.
“I can carry the weight.”
“Can you though?” I put the cloth down and looked at him squarely. “Can you ever really get used to this kind of weight?”
“I didn’t say I was used to it, Erin,” he said softly. “I said I can carry it. You never get used to it, not if you’ve got anything left of your humanity.”
He sighed, putting down the cloth and moving to the kitchen counter, where he checked the kettle’s level, then flicked the switch, my eyes drawn to the little red light. Neither of us said a word as he took two cups from the cupboard, spooning coffee from a jar into each, before he turned back to me and leaned on the kitchen counter, folding his thick arms across his chest.
“You’ve adapted better than most to this new world,” he said. “But there are things now that no amount of training and drills can prepare you for. That young couple…” His words trailed off for a moment as he swallowed a hard lump, closing his eyes as he took a slow breath, gathering himself before continuing. “What we saw in that apartment is unheard of. I’ve seen the worst of the worst do the worst you can imagine to their fellow man, and I still wasn’t prepared for that. But I’ve learned over a long career and bitter experience how to compartmentalise, Erin. I’ve learned to spread the weight over time, but I don’t ever get used to it, and I’d never want to. It reminds me I’m still human.”
“I just want this feeling to go away,” I admitted. “To box it off.”
Nate shook his head, turning back to the kettle as it came to the boil. We both waited in silence for the light to flick out.
“Grief doesn’t go away, Erin,” he said, eyes fixed on the stream of boiling water as he poured. “Despite what people say, time isn’t a healer. You never really heal from grief. All you do is learn to manage it better. It’s a sneaky bastard though, and you’ve always got to be aware of it, or it will creep up on you when you least expect it.”
I absorbed this, nodding my thanks as Nate placed a fresh black coffee on the table in front of me as he returned to his chair. We sat in silence for a moment again, both sipping at our steaming beverages, sorting through our private thoughts.
“You’re just starting out,” he said, drawing me from my mental wander. “I don’t expect you to be able to put these things in a box and shove it to the dusty corners of your mind in a handful of weeks or months. You’ve lost a friend for the first time, and grief never gets easier, but there’s something particularly raw about that first experience. It rips a hole in you that you think can never be filled and will forever remain… empty.”
He sipped at his cup again, no doubt recalling that first ragged wound of his own grief that he spoke of, and that made me wonder at it too. There’s still so much I don’t know about Nate, and he hasn’t talked of his life before the world ended in any great detail. In truth, I haven’t asked, even though I’ve joked before I was going to. Who knows what wounds lie there? I don’t want to be the one to aggravate them and I figure he’ll tell me in his own sweet time. If I’ve learned anything from my first experience of real grief, it’s that grief is a very private thing. I wouldn’t want anyone questioning me if I wasn’t ready to talk about it, so until he is, Nate’s history is his own.
“Freya wasn’t even dead, and you were already grieving, denying it was happening, asking questions of yourself if there was another way, whether there was something you could do to stop this god-awful thing from happening.” He shook his head. “There wasn’t, Erin. There was nothing you could do. Pulling that trigger yourself, at that moment, would have taken something that you weren’t ready to lose just yet.” He put his cup down and in a rare show of physical affection, he placed his callused hand over mine, his eyes boring right through me. “You didn’t put a burden on me, Erin,” he said, his voice resolute. “You allowed me to take one from you, and that’s a big difference. Don’t ever apologise for asking for help.”
I cried again then, and Nate held on to my hand, the rough callus of his thumb coarse against my skin, as he gently rubbed the back of my hand. He didn’t say anything else, just let me purge myself of the swell of emotion that had been building through the conversation.
I’d felt such terrible guilt during the time I locked myself away. Guilt that I couldn’t do what you asked of me, Freya, and guilt for asking Nate to endure the pain of your mercy killing. I’d thought I was so weak, yet the truth is simpler than that, I’ve realised. Nate’s words reassured me that it isn’t me that’s weak.
It’s that Nate is so damn strong.
He carries so much weight for me, for all of us, so it has me wondering; who helps him with his burdens? Sooner or later, after so many years of death, and misery, and pain, what is this man’s limit? It seems endless, which has me in awe of
