Feveruary [2025] Chapter 5: “Could you just hold me?”

[mekachu04]

Summary: He's not sure why it feels like he's still asleep, even long after he's woken up, tiny child body curled up under smelly blankets in a dingy back alley. He wonders where Killer wandered off to this early, his friend's body heat sorely missed in the dreary summer rain of Kutzk. The air is wet and cold and he reaches up to pull the blanket higher, water beading and rolling down the wool as he huddles under it. It keeps trying to slip off his left shoulder, the stub of his arm aching, partially the phantom pain that regularly haunts him, and then something deeper driven by the bleak weather.

Brichtrede was awake.

She'd been awake before, but lately, she seemed more aware. Today she spent a good deal of time talking in quite low tones with the doctors - there's even a new one that sees her in the afternoon, a woman that is reserved and collected, and leaves Brichtrede looking so sad. But more... alive... with each day.

Kidd knows, in turn, that his days are numbered. She'll be turning him away soon. Some changeling that latched on to her, a crib thief too old to replace her baby, but cowardly enough to try all the same.

He curled up in the chair for what might be the last time, settling in for what is likely the last safe night of sleep. It'll be one eye open for a long time after this.

"Wee yin, what's your name?"

Her voice was soft, barely there, just a breath. But it's steady, and he looked up in surprise that she's speaking to him at all. His mouth was dry, and his heart in his throat, but he doesn't know why.

What is supposed to say? /I'm Kidd Eustass./ If he tells her, would she think him some bastard son of her late husband? Would that not be worse, to sully the reputation of a dead man while she still grieves him? Or would it be enough for her to not send him away? "I'm just some kid." he says finally.

"The doctors are under the impression you're my nephew."

He shrugs. He never said that, he just hadn't told them he wasn't when they assumed.

"You certainly look like you could be," she says with a chuckle - a dry painful thing that threatens to turn to a cough. He's sitting up to get her water without even realizing he'd moved.

She sips from it, looking at him thoughtfully.

She didn't immediately turn him away, and he loitered in the room as she dozed through the afternoon. He left when they came to feed and wash her, the nurses sharing a meal with him in the clinic's mess room. A last meal.

He should go after that. Slip away now before anyone has to deal with the humiliation of turning him out.

His feet take him back to the woman's room. Back to the chair that had been his bed since he woke up small in the strange memeory of a life he never had.

"Can I ask a favour of you boy? A selfish request?"

"You can ask anything you want," he hedges.

"Its been so long, since I had to sleep alone. This place it so quiet and cold. I wake up afraid. Will you pretend one more night to be family, and share the blankets with me?"

His instinct is to sneer, to look down his nose. How weak - she's an adult for crying out loud. But he sees someone else in her place for a moment, small hands, sharp teeth, and uneasy in the falling night after being reunited once again after weeks apart. He can remember detatching an arm he doesn't have, lest it tangles in her pigtails, and blanketing himself over her tiny body. How much easier /he/ slept, the room filled with the snores and sleepy mumbling of a dozen other voices, tiny Dive pressed to his heart.

This place seems even more desolate in retrospect.

The bed is utilitarian, nothing plush or extravagant, but miles softer than the chair and he'd snuggled into her side before he could second guess himself. He felt ridiculous, but it was his first moment of peace since he woke up bundled up in the alley in the rain.

He felt himself relaxing even against his will.

"Just some kid?" she asked again.

He could only shrug.

She gave him a smile. Its a strange soft thing. "Maybe I'm mistaken. I don't have any siblings, but maybe my parents did. Perhaps not a nephew but a cousin. Do.. Do you know what my father's family is called, child? What my family name was, before I married Uilleam?"

He shook his head no.

She smiled, eyes still closed, tucking him in close, chin resting on the crown of his head.

"I'm Brichtrede Eustace now, but before Uillidh, I was Brichtrede Kidd."

---

small note on Brichtrede's husband and the two spellings: Uillidh - a diminutive of the male given name Uilleam, equivalent to English Willie or Willy