By morning, the doctor had come and gone, talked at length with the midwife and with Evie. Sparing him only one pitiful glance as he shuffled out of the room.
It said everything that needed to be mentioned without saying a damn word.
Angel was fading, quietly, but surely, on the bed she'd fought so long to give life on. All wrapped up in one space. Her long black hair, tendrils knotted together was all over the pillows - the nice ones, the ones she said she liked best. Her hands laid neatly arranged like she was nothing but sleeping (maybe someone else could believe it, but not him, not when he knew, Angel didn't sleep so neatly, she draped and wriggled and stretched and wormed her way against him), and not the word he'd heard the Doctor mutter. Childbed fever. The same kind that took his own mother, by any account that mattered.
He wasn't sure when the baby was taken off him, he barely looked at the time, or the window, or anything else but her. About the time he started to cry again, hungry, and wanting the one person who was supposed to tend to that. He rose, holding him, bringing him closer to Angel, like maybe - if she heard him, she'd -
"Let me take him, Jacob." Evie was there like she'd never left. Just at his elbow, guiding him through the motions of something he couldn't just barge through like a warehouse door.
"She didn't want a wet nurse," he struggles on the things that had seemed so clear, before this, when he was lost to what else to do. "She wanted to do it herself."
- And Evie holds fast, fingers gripping into his forearm, not with force but reassurance. "She will. But it'll sap her strength right now, and she'll need it when she wakes up."
It's hope and not much else, but it's enough to let him let go of his son nodding on those words. When she wakes up.
Then he was alone in the room, and with nothing else to do, because leaving the room was impossible, he dragged his chair over to the side of the bed. Watching her features twitch in the throws of fever and blood loss, her skin burning hotter than he'd ever felt it, not even when they had been in the temple together. Her body shuddering as she tried to fight off things he couldn't see. Mumbling soundless and fearful words.
He did the only thing he had ever been to do when invisible things came for her in the dark. He held onto her. His fingers fishing for hers, twining them together with both his hands, resting his weight on his elbows against his knees.
Hunching over like that he passed the hours, only dimly aware that it passed at all. Of when Henry pressed a warm drink into his hands, spiced and filling to keep him going. Barely even tasting it as he drank it in a hasty gulp so he did not have to let go of her. Until eventually, it was night again, and Evie stepped up, to touch him on the shoulder, digging her fingers in to drag him up and out of that haze of thoughts in the silence. Angel twitched again, eyes darting behind closed lids.
A pattern daring to repeat itself, as he sat, watching her, "do you think it would have been different if Father had been there, to be there with her?"
Evie inhaled, soft and slow. "I don't know, Jacob."
He grunts, as sharp on his father's failings as he had ever been. "Well I am here, and I'm not leaving her."
"No one will ask you to do that." Her fingers squeezed, briefly reaching over to adjust the blankets about Angel's thin body. "And if a templar tries it right now, they'll go through me first, before I let them get in here." Fixed, hard, the promise of a Frye. " - she looks so small, like this."
"I haven't seen her like this since... " hard to admit, the fear, real and sharp in his gut. "... when I first met her, she looked like she'd crawled out of a grave. Swore I wouldn't let her get like that again." He kissed her clammy hand, like a reminder of it.
Evie watched her brother. At a loss, for more than just the promise she had made Angel. "It might never have changed anything... " A lot, a lot for Evie to admit. "... but it might've, too."
It isn't much, it didn't undo time. But it was one assurance, that there would be someone at his back, to give him the space, the time. That London, right now - was someone else's problem, that the right thing wasn't the unending war, the right thing was staying here.
Jacob swallows, rubbing his thumb against the back of Angel's hand as she whimpered again in her sleep. "What if she doesn't wake up, Evie?"
And with it, she pushed back a bit of hair that had fallen in his face. "What if she does? Are you going to give up on her? That doesn't sound like Jacob Frye."
He snorts, shaking his head, goaded like only family can goad because it always worked. "Never."
Another silence. Longer this time. Lowering his head to press his face against her hands. Angel twitched all over in her in fever, a small hum in her throat, wordless fear against the dark behind her eyelids.
Evie gripped harder, action in intent words. "Father wasn't there." If there could be a more condemning word from her, Jacob couldn't imagine it. "You are. Right now. You said never. Show her what she's fighting for. Show her never. It doesn't look like it's very pleasant in there for her, she's going to need it."
He frowns, eyes breaking away from the mother of his child for just a moment. Looking up, and how lost he was trying to work out just how to do that - "How?" Jacob croaks it, looking for something, anything.
To that, unfortunately, Evie could only shrug. "She said you reminded her every day that the world could be a little bit better when she couldn't believe it herself in her loneliness. What did you both do?"
Her hand slips away, moving away with the little words of guidance she could give to something so far out of both their hands. Heading towards the door, her footsteps still assassin quiet after all these years, still by instinct they moved on their father's training. But, no longer, in everything he taught them.
Right now that guidance had something to it, and looking down at Angel, weak, weaker than even the day he first met her, he took a breath and did the one thing she had done for him.
He opened his mouth, and he told her about everything he saw. Reminded her of everything good thing he could think of, of the people that had come to wish them well (their family), of how she was planning to decorate the nursery (their home), he asked, what she wanted to name their little boy?
He listed off every ridiculous name he could think of, every sort of name he'd imagine she'd hate. Those dreadful names he knew she'd crinkle her nose up. Ezekiel, Boris, Richars, Eustace. A pause after each other to wait for her to sit up and tell him no.
When none came, he didn't slow or stop.
He described how the little boy gurgled, reminded her what she was missing in these first few precious days, the ones she talked about when they laid in bed together. That one day that little boy would walk and she had to be there, to encourage him to be careful, because his father was going to be too excited to get him to run. That the boy was sleeping now, and he was kicking his legs, already, just like he had felt through her belly when he kissed it. That - that she was finally going to be able to see her feet again after all her bemoaning and wriggling her toes against his back when she wanted to wake up him to rub her ankles.
He told her about the stars she liked to watch out the window, told her about the moon that she carefully mapped out was glowing brightly but she was missing days in her almanack if she did not wake up.
When the sun rose, he told her roughly its best colours and asked her to tell him better ones instead of purple and slightly pink-purple, not the way she would describe it, he knew. She'd say lavender and salmon. He told her about the people moving in the street, that came and went with every dodgy bit of gossip he'd heard that always made her laugh. About Cooper's chickens being chased around the park, or the Bootmaker's dog chewing up the good leather order.
He talked, until exhaustion got him, until the words had stopped making sense, and he said the only ones that did. He asked her not to leave him and their little boy alone without her. Please, Angel, he couldn't do this without her. You promised we would do this together.
Somewhere, on that, the third night, he finally ran out of words, and with nothing else to say, he fell asleep on the edge of their bed, holding onto her hand.
--
In the early hours of the dawn, Evie crept quietly when she heard stillness in the room, poking her head through the door. Jacob was sound asleep, laying across Angel, holding her hand tightly.
Angel's fingers were gripping his back.
Evie paused only long enough to drape a blanket over her brother's shoulders before leaving them be with a brief word to the rest of the house, to leave them both be, come morning.
--
When dawn broke, Angel blinked open her eyes to the spring light streaming through the window, mottled by lace patterns that diffused it. Illuminating the dim room in the slow adjustment of her gaze. There was not one bit of her that didn't hurt, she realised, but so overwhelmed by it in turn, that it did no matter.
Instead her gaze settled to fall on the only thing that did matter. Jacob's eyes meeting hers, as his own blinked open, watching her like he scarcely believed it, disturbed by her movements. "Hey," she croaked out of a dry throat.
"Hey," he says back. So quiet it only stirred only the floating dust, dancing in the sunbeam. Words as soft as the light. "I missed you."
It isn't much when she jerks her chin up, as much strength as she has right then. But it's enough, to get him to move, sliding up to her side in the bed, gently shifting to cradling her into his chest, so often he moved her like glass, but this was more than that. It was touching every bit of her, and scarcely disturbing her, all at once to let her curl into him in response. Turning into one another, their eyes shifting closed into a finally proper sleep the way time had made preferable: next to each other.
"I promise I'm not going anywhere." she murmurs back before sleep takes them both again.
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pt four. }