Autumn of 1870

For the briefest moment, there is only pain.

Dull, thrumming pain that fades into Anne's veins as she opens her eyes, the blissful forgetfulness of sleep overcoming her. She does not know why it hurts, nor why she should cherish the moment, but she does.

In those few seconds, she takes in the boy on her bed, lashes long and mouth slightly open, and the stiff, ticklish feeling of bandages on her neck and on both her wrists.

And then she is Arianne Liddell again, the sick girl who had tried to take her own life.

Sleepily, she falls back into bed. She cannot bring her legs to move. Not when the guilt of seeing Raymond right beside her crushes her heart. What would he feel when he woke up? Glad that he didn't recognize the pale girl with the bruise-like rings under her eyes?

But no. He is not yet awake when she hears him. She looks over to him, all tousled curls and soft male beauty. His voice is as lovely as his face as he hums in his sleep. She recognizes the tune as the one from the music box he made for her. The melody they made for an old, tuneless Saxon song they had found many years ago.

Silently, she moves towards him, trying to recall a time besides the present in which she woke up with him so far from her. It should have made her scream, that feeling of being so far from safety, but the song dulled her mind.

For reasons she does not understand, she begins to cry as she presses a kiss to his lips. She wants him to hold her, but he deserves the calm moments of sleep. Moments of silence and contentment like that were the kind she no longer had the strength to give him.

Weakly, she stands up. Her knees are shaking, almost buckling with the effort. She cannot remember the last time she ate as the room spins. There had only been pieces of bread besides the water and herbal tonics she was forced to sip from cloths that tasted like dust.

There is only one thought on her mind as she puts as much distance as she can between them. Leave Raymond alone. Forever. Her addled mind makes her try and open the window he had sealed behind him the previous night so that she could jump out of it.

Still, she only makes it halfway through before she collapses in another fit of shudders and held-back screams.

She has no memory of waking up. One moment, there was screaming and pain and agony, the next, they are mere echoes in the back of her mind as she gazes up to find a pair of red-rimmed blue-grey eyes looking at her with concern.

It had to be hours since she collapsed, but she cannot tell. The only thing she can process is that she is on her bed and that Raymond is no longer in his disheveled nightclothes. Still, his eyes are puffy and his nose is read as if he has been crying the whole while.

"Get away from me," she whispers, the tears clouding her vision turning everything into a blur.

"Anne, I'm here to help. I won't hurt you. You know I won't hurt you." His tone is desperate. Close to sobs. She wonders just how much she has hurt him. How much she will continue to hurt him.

"Go away. I don't want you here. You can't... You can't see me like this."

She sounds different from the last time she had cast him out. She sounds sane. Sad. Like a part of her wanted him to stay, and so he does, even as she starts to squirm against him. He overrode her senses, and she does not understand... She does not understand anything.

The lights make her nauseous. His scent makes her nauseous.  Minutes later, she is emptying the meager contents of her stomach into the chamber pot that he barely manages to retrieve for her. Each cough makes the pain in her throat unbearable.

"Please go," she says in a weak sob, thoroughly humiliated. She cannot stand that horrible pity in his stormy eyes, and barely manages to crush the desire to claw at him again.

"You're ill. I can't leave you alone."

Ill. The words cause another wave of dizzying nausea to overtake her. This time, she is sure that there is nothing left to throw up but bile and blood. She hates that word. Ill. She hates it to the point that she is not vomiting because she is sick. She is vomiting because she is disgusted.

Disgusted at herself and at how she actually wants Raymond to burn where he stands because he won't leave her alone, she feels anger burning a trail under her skin.

This time, her hand shoots out to scratch him across the eyes, but it freezes, slowly lowering as she registers the fear in his gaze. The horror. Maybe that will persuade him to leave. She folds her hands together, not wanting to hurt him despite how suffocating his presence is becoming.

"Go away," she says again, before she is forced to harm him. "Ray, please. Go before I hurt you. I don't want to hurt you, but I will. Please. Leave."

"No," he says, holding her closer to him. It makes her want to scream. His hands on her are too much. In the time since the incident, he has been the only one to hold her like this, and he is the only one she has attempted to claw at. "You need help. Besides, I am not leaving you alone. Not like this. I don't care if you hurt me."

She hopes that he realizes exactly how stupid he sounds. Already, her body is fighting against him. Her thoughts are glazing over, and she cannot think as screams overcome her. She does not know whose, and she does not know if it would be worse if they were Raymond's and not hers.

And then the warmth of his body is being pulled off of hers, and she recognizes the screams as her own. Hot tears begin to flow as there is a gap left in front of her, cold as northern glaciers.

"I did this for you! I did this for you! Come back!" Who is screaming? They are her words, but she is sure that it is not her mouth that forms them. Regardless, she does not care. She screams for it to shut up. Those were things she never wanted him to hear.

As she tries to grasp at the last dregs of her sanity, she feels someone force-feed her the sweet tonic she had grown far too much accustomed to over the last weeks. She does not have time to scream or flail or protest as her eyes are forced closed and she is dragged to the last place she would ever want to be.

She does not want the nightmares. They will be the death of her.

"No. No, they didn't reopen this time," says Raymond as his aunt gazes at him with perplexed eyes. His father stands behind him, contemplating. He looks much older than he should.

At thirty-eight, George should not have those deep-set lines on his face, and his fathomless grey eyes are harsher than they ever should have been. The incident with Anne... It does not do anything to help his father, who only continued to break down.

"Tell me about the cut, Raymond," says his aunt. He admires her for that calm voice. She does not coddle, nor does she brood. Instead, she looks at him with practiced calm and her cool hazel gaze, not once betraying anything that he knew dwelled just beneath the surface. This was not his aunt. This was a doctor, questioning him to ensure her patient's wellbeing. He was grateful for it. Another pitying glance, and he would have snapped.

"It... It is shallow. It runs from here," he points a finger to one side of his neck and drags it to the other, "to here. It is not deep enough to hit the carotid artery, but it is sealed, for the most part, with a third degree burn." He knew that his aunt knew all of these details. She also knew that for him to talk about medical things meant that he would calm down.

That scar on her neck was the most gruesome of the three Anne had. It was the largest and most nauseating. It was purple and red, and he couldn't stand to look at it for long when he needed to change her bandages.

"And her wrists?"

He winces. He remembers how pale and delicate Anne's wrists used to be. How she bent them when her fingers glided over a piano. How he felt her pulse whenever she stroked his cheek right before she kissed him. He wondered if she would be able to look at them again. Those scars...

"They are... They have deeper wounds. S-suggesting that the cut on her neck was made after the ones on her wrists, b-because blood loss would have affected her grip on the fire poker."

"And..." there is a momentary hitch in Eleanor's voice. That hitch he had dreaded. "What of her mental state?"

Raymond takes a deep breath as he feels his father's reassuring hand on his shoulder.

"Completely disrupted. Before the time of the incident, she had never shown any prior... moods. Right now, she begs for isolation more than anything else. She refuses to touch her food and throws away whatever water is brought for her to drink. I... I asked her why, and she claims she cannot hold any of it down, but I know she is lying. I was hoping you could tell me more?"

Eleanor took off her spectacles, and Raymond noticed the dark circles of her eyes as she yawned. How many days had she been forced to give up sleep to take care of Anne?

"She has not yet told me any reason, but..." she trailed off, and all three of them in that room immediately thought of the same thing.

"Eleanor," George interrupted softly, motioning for Raymond to stand up. "Let's not delve into things we still don't have the answers to. Anne's outburst could have meant anything."

The reminder bites into him.

"I don't know what she meant. She had been all right in all her letters, believe me. And I certainly have no idea what could have spooked her so much that she was driven to... this."

Eleanor sighed, kicking the fire poker she had confiscated from Anne's room weeks prior. Raymond steered clear of it. To him, it was still stained with Anne's blood.

"I have an idea, but it is very... well, she would not do it over such a small thing."

"You can tell them later," interrupted a calm voice from the doorway.

Seeing Margaret, Raymond has to blink and look again to make sure that she is not Anne. A hard thing to do when he realizes that those eyes are the exact same shade of green, and the only thing keeping Margaret from looking like her daughter is the constant sneer her face is set in. But now? It is gone. She looked defeated, for once.

"Maggie, I thought you were with Anne?" asks George, brows furrowing in confusion.

"She was asking for you, George. The laudanum has only just lost its effect, so go and talk to her while she is still calm. I will stay with Eleanor and your son."

Raymond frowns. At this point, he knows that Anne wouldn't call for him, but he had assumed that it meant that she would not call for anyone at all. But his gaze locks with his father's sympathetic one as he prepares to exit the room.

"I will tell you how she is," he says, giving Raymond's shoulder a tight squeeze. Neither of them say anything else as George leaves.

"You should not have come into her chambers at all, Raymond." Margaret sighs, taking the seat adjacent to him. Though her voice holds none of the light wonder of Anne's, he still looks away. Her gaze, though neither sharp nor cruel, is still much too accusing. There is something in that green frost that makes him feel ashamed, and for a moment, those eyes are... Anne's.

"What was I to do? I could feel her sadness, I swear to God, anyone could!" he snaps. "I couldn't just... I couldn't just leave her like that."

Margaret shakes her head, pulling at her neatly coiffed hair- another trait Anne does not share with her, for she never allowed her hair to be pulled back as tight as her mother's- and sets her eyes on Raymond again. The scrutiny is more than harsh.

"Raymond, I would have you thrown out of this house for my daughter's wellbeing if you did not save her life."

Despite his earlier resolve, he looks at Margaret, confusion evident on his face. She takes a deep breath, and Raymond braces himself for what is about to come.

"This morning," she starts slowly, making him want to force the answers out of her. "Anne tried to reopen her wounds. She was delirious, clawed at her neck until her bandages broke. This was after she tried breaking the window open so she could jump. But seeing that book? It calmed her down enough so I could force her to drink the laudanum. But it still isn't enough to change my mind."

"What do you mean?" he asks, voice barely above a whisper. Her words makes him feel conflicted. Guilty and relieved at the same time. He does not know what to say.

"I will never let you marry her, Raymond. The moment she is better, you will be gone if you know what is best for Anne. I would rather break her heart now than let you drive her into doing this again. We both know that my daughter is safer without you."

He would have protested. He should have.

But he knows that it is true.