You Take Care of Your Own

“You take care of your own.”

Debek always said that, and suddenly I understood exactly what he meant. It was more than just taking care of each other, helping them through the down times and being there to share the good times. It was more than fighting for the group or the one that was in danger in some or another way. Granted, those things applied to that phrase, but only by consequence, only by their generality. What he really meant lingered behind his words every time he said that phrase, and for the first time I really heard it.

Sein was breaking down completely. I had rarely seen him like this, even in his crying stages. He had lost control to his “evil twin,” something that only happened once before. The terrifying result this time was that Madeis was lucky to be alive at any level, and Sein had a black spot in his memory covering the short period of time it took him to put him there. When he lost control the first time and attacked Ashe, that was almost understandable in a way. Sein wasn’t mentally stable on almost any level. He never had been, ever since he was a young boy. He went through three distinct stages in repeating, random order and endured crippling phazes in between them. It was a miracle that most of us could even understand him half of the time. Attacking Ashe was like just another scary development in his damaged psyche.

Attacking Madeis, however… that shook the Deishen to the core, and forced us to fall into the one universal habit we had all learned in year after year of working our way back to Armnekol.

You take care of your own.

As I stood in the doorway of the guest bedroom the guards had dragged my little brother to after Rahgvi managed to throw him out of his rampage, I saw Debek’s words come to form. Sein lay on the bed looking pathetic and feeling like he had just destroyed the world. Right next to the bed stood Debek, Nsrab, and Tojeiy. None of them showed a scrap of fear. Sein had just damn near killed his brother, the one person who understood him whenever he had something to communicate to one of us. Sein and Madeis were like twins, especially after the Crash left the lot of us to survive on our own. There was no logical explanation why he would so savagely attack Madeis of all people. The fact that it happened shook something deep inside me, and I don’t think I have ever felt such cold fear consume my body.

And yet, he was Sein, and he was Deishen, so any fear we had about what had happened did not mean any of us would back away from him. Quite the opposite, really. If something was wrong that meant that we had to move closer, far closer than normal. We had to practically smother him with our presence until he stabilized, no matter how long that might take.

Nsrab healed the deep crack in the shield bone covering Sein’s breast. Rahgvi had rammed him with the end of one of his arm blades to get Sein down and staying down. Sein had cracked some of his shield bones before, but never this badly. The crack never went so deep that blood came pouring out of it. Nsrab dealt with it, and then Debek tried to talk to Sein.

It didn’t take long to work out that Sein was depressed to the point of passive suicidal. He had never done that before. Hysto was like that for three years at a time once, but Sein usually had his head so far off the ground that such thoughts never really settled inside of him. It was heartbreaking to see. Sein kept us going all these years because he always saw ahead of what was immediately going on, both literally and figuratively. On occasion he would complain about how stupid some of us were acting because one event had come and gone with a bang. He was the voice that kept spurring us on to go home, especially after Debek nearly left us to stay with Solen. Debek had told me to be realistic then, saying that we would never get home. It had been ten years already, and for all we knew we were wandering in the wrong direction. We hadn’t noticed Sein sitting in the shadowed corner of the room until he stood up silently and told Debek not to be so short-sighted. “Of course we’re going home, you idiot. What do you think we’ve been doing for the past ten years? We can’t lose our hunter, and we can’t stop time. You have a child to raise, Debek, and how the hell is he ever going to be born if you don’t make it back to Armnekol and marry his mother?” So that was the end of the discussion. We were going to make it home, no matter how long it took. He was right. We made it back, but looking at my youngest brother lying there looking so defeated… I barely recognized him.

Debek turned to Tojeiy and told him to guide Sein through the sedating meditation that he often used to calm him physically. Without a second thought, Tojeiy climbed on the bed behind Sein and lay flush against his back. The words started to flow out of his mouth so easily, and the rest of us left the room to stay unaffected by the spell Tojeiy was so skilled at weaving.

We closed the door, and Debek looked at Nsrab.

“I want you to go find Hysto and tell him that I’m taking Sein to my place. He understands Palace jargon better than I do, so he can spin out a way to justify it to all the others.”

“Right.”

“And go check on Rahgvi. If Dia isn’t with him already, make damn sure you find her, and take her to him.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“No. If you’re not back by the time Tojeiy finishes, I’ll leave him here with Badein. You know how he is about you.”

A sweet little smile found its way to Nsrab’s face. “Yeah, I know. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Without another word he turned and left. Then Debek turned to me.

“How are you feeling?”

I shook my head. “I can’t even think straight. Have you seen Madeis?”

“Not yet. What’s the damage?”

I rubbed the back of my neck absently, and Debek reached out and grabbed my hand to stop me. He knew that nervous gesture of mine, and his whole demeanor changed immediately.

“Nala, what happened?”

I swallowed hard before forcing myself to look into his eyes. “He almost killed him. I mean, he would have if Rahgvi hadn’t managed to pry him off. You remember when he attacked Ashe…” I shook my head, trying to get the image of Madeis lying limp in Rahgvi’s arms out of my eyes, trying desperately to get the sounds of Rahgvi’s scream’s out of my ears.

“It was worse than that?”

“Deseh, it doesn’t even compare. When he attacked Ashe he just pinned him down and tried to strangle him. He jabbed Madei at least twice, and there are scratches where he just clawed his nails down his neck.” The last injury stuck out in my mind, but I wasn’t sure if I could say it.

“There’s something else, isn’t there? You’ve got that look on your face.”

I closed my eyes and softly shook my head from one side to the other. “He’s got skull fractures on the back of his head. Not little ones either. It’s like he just grabbed his head and bashed it against the floor or the wall as hard as he could.”

“And Rahgvi saw that?”

“I don’t know what he did and didn’t see happen, but I saw him flip between hysterical and almost catatonic in the span of a few heartbeats. He saw something.”

The severity of it all was finally sinking in for Debek. Sein was dear to him. He was dear to all of us, but Sein and Debek had a special bond. Some thought came to Debek’s mind, and his face fell immediately.

“And he doesn’t even remember it.”

A minute or two later Nsrab returned, and almost immediately Tojeiy came out of the room.

“He’s all but unconscious.”

“Good.” Debek didn’t look at any of us as he walked back into the room and sat on the bed to look at Sein lying there so still.

Nsrab looked at me. “What happened?”

“I told him what he did.”

Nsrab was the one to heal up the deep fractures on the skull. He saw the damage even closer than I did. “Oh.”

Tojeiy set a steady gaze on his older brother. “Sein goes with Debek, right?”

Nsrab nodded. “Yeah. It’s best that way. Debek has Eiran.”

“And he loves him.”

“There’s that, too.”

“Do you think he’ll finally kiss him again?”

Part of me wanted to laugh at that. Tojeiy had a knack for being unbelievably blunt sometimes. “It’s going to happen eventually.” There were few things I was willing to stake my life on, but one of them was that Debek would destroy himself if he didn’t have someone like Sein to keep him in check. As much as it surprised me when they originally “bonded,” so to say, it made sense. Sein has the strongest will out of all seventeen of us Deishen, and he can outlast even Debek in a battle of mental attrition. I’ve never seen two people more balanced.

I stood there and watched Debek sitting at my brother’s side. I could feel from somewhere inside me that a great chaos was about to pull us all under. Rahgvi is king, and political tensions are just as taut as they were at his coronation. He’s dealt with it all masterfully, but I know this attack will change everything. Madeis was always in his shadow like a puppet master almost, or perhaps a brilliant director. He guided Rahgvi’s brattish, wandering mind and then stood back to watch the king’s natural talent take over. Losing Madeis in any fashion, Rahgvi could lose his political focus. Losing him like this… none of the Deishen would expect him to be functional for a good long time. Until then, there was Now, and Now required a few simple yet daunting feats from us as it always did. We knew what they were without having to be told at this point. We knew them like we knew our own names.

We had to isolate Sein in close quarters to keep his “evil twin” sub-surface where he belonged.

We had to put myself and Debek as Sein’s “guardians” to control his contact with other people.

We had to isolate Rahgvi in the company of his older sister Dia because he opened up to her in a way he did to no one else.

We had to keep Nsrab, Tojeiy and Lubil at Madeis’s side to ensure that his physical health would be properly tended to.

We had to put Hysto as the “guardian” for Rahgvi so he could control attempted contacts by anyone else outside our sphere.

In short, it all came down to what Debek always told us whenever our unit was compromised in some way.

You take care of your own.