CHAPTER 1954: WHITE HEART - PART 3

"Nila!" Oliver said, like a child, as he threw himself at her, and grasped her, the fear controlling him like a puppet. No control over his own body. The slight thought that he might have lost his own mind. The embarrassment that came with that. His body shook, and he squeezed Nila with fingers firmly filled with fear.

"What’s wrong?" Nila asked, her voice high, but gentle, a mother soothing a child. No accusation in them, no contempt, only care. She patted his head, and helped him. "What’s happened?"

Oliver shook his head wordlessly, shivering.

"Did you have a bad dream?"

Oliver shook his head again. It was worse than that. He could not even blame the sleep. His nightmare was in the real world, entirely around him. He feared himself. They’d spoken far too closely to an old wound, and Oliver shuddered entirely at the size of it. Seven years as a slave, and then, that time by himself in Solgrim before Dominus. Those years so filled with suffering. He refused to admit it to himself, for the forwardness that he so desired. But the weight of it all, whether he liked it or not, came spilling out. The cracks in his heart that he’d been aware of for a time shattered entirely. A broken man. He wondered whether there would be any coming back.

His body at an awkward angle, he could not even truly let it relax as he grasped onto Nila. His heart pounded in terror. She gently spoke to him to soothe him, and he could hardly offer her a word as a response. For nearly half an hour, he lay like that, practically inconsolable.

As patient as a mother with her child, Nila pointed out the things around them. The comforting sound of the rain from outside their makeshift shelter. "Isn’t it nice?" She said to him. "Listen to the rain."

Oliver listened, doing as he was told. There was indeed comfort in there. Just enough to loosen his grip slightly, and speak his sentences a little longer than before.

After a time, she made a suggestion. "Should I relight the fire and make us some tea?"

Oliver had nodded in agreement, and finally released her, better than he was before, but still trembling. Embarrassment came as he sat, watching her work. The saddest of expressions on his face. A broken man. He looked at his hand, and saw it shaking. He hated the fact of it for himself. Too much, too quickly – and he’d done the one thing he’d never wanted to do, in sharing that part of himself with someone else.

Something that he’d kept so deeply locked that he was not even consciously aware that he had been holding it back. It shocked him to have spoken it. It made his heart feel as if it was in a different place. It made the ground beneath his feet feel terribly uncertain. He felt childish, and was entirely unsure of what to make it.

With tea, and her hand threaded through his, Nila managed to coax him back towards a fitful sleep, but when they awoke in the morning exhausted for it, Oliver could do naught but apologize. She had sighed at him for those apologies.

"Always holding back, aren’t you?" She said.

"You do the same..." Oliver said, remembering how she had spoken to the night before. It was strange, for them to be as close as they were, and supposedly vulnerable around each other, for them to grow even closer still, with parts of their hearts that they were not even truly sure that they had been holding back.

Oliver didn’t know what it meant, or what would happen, but in the following days, with his return to the world, now with a crown upon his head, he was sure that things could not stay the same. His own heart refused it of him. Grief, and memory, swirling together, in the most complicated of things. Right on the brink, it brought a franticness to every interaction, and a level of force that he had previously lacked.

Now, on the beach, time to himself. Time to reflect. Time for a strange excitement, as childishly, he did play, fancying that he could turn the waves back on themselves if he so wished it. Sprinting as fast as he could, jumping as high as he could, racing the waves back and forth. Then throwing himself into dangerous cartwheels that he hadn’t practised, and doing it with all the violence of a man of his strength. Missing more than once, and landing in the waves for it. Not forgetting the fact of his own occasional clumsiness, but enjoying it.

The crown again, now with a few grains of sand covering it. The crown that they bid that he wore. The responsibilities that came with it. The current situation of switching. Naught as it was before. So much to be reordered. So many objects flying through the air, with the threat of gravity to bring it down.

Pain in Oliver’s heart. Perhaps madness too. Fear, uncertainty. So many different things. But before the sea, there was power too. A clenching of the fist. Trusting in that feeling of power. There was something to be done, something to be solved. To pierce through, and crush a problem that was in front of him. Was that not always universally a good thing?

...

...

"Your Majesty, I bring to you King Patrick," Prince Hendrick said, bowing low before his father’s throne, as the doors were opened, and their guest was welcomed in.

They’d dressed Oliver like a King, with finer robes than he was used to. He’d complained in the days before, about how ill it suited him, and how much he disliked it. He couldn’t relax in it, he knew that. But there was a motive in him now, the animation of that power that he’d found at the beach. The purpose. Forward – that was always a good thing. He could go forward. No direction was he certain in, save for that.

An obvious problem to be solved. It didn’t matter what was around. Straightforward problems, like rock, they brought about a delight in Oliver Patrick. He would hit it with the pickaxe that he was trained with, long before he knew the sword.