August's head rested against Elias's shoulder — not out of comfort, but collapse. The weight of illness had settled into his limbs like a silent anchor, pulling him down until there was nothing left to hold himself up. He was all pale silk and tremor now, folded against Elias with the softness of something unraveling.
Elias didn't move. He barely breathed. The morning light had begun to climb gently through the tall window behind them, casting a soft gold spill across the wooden floor. Beyond the glass, the garden stirred — dew clinging to vines, roses bowing with the weight of dawn. Petals fluttered in the breeze, and somewhere in the hedges, a bird trilled half-heartedly before falling quiet again.
August stirred.
A breath, shallow and halting. Then another.
He tried to sit up, his hand clutching Elias's coat as if to steady himself — as if he could still will his body to obey. Elias moved at once, arm behind his back, supporting him. But August's legs gave out before he could fully rise.
He fell forward — not heavily, but helplessly — into Elias's chest.
"Careful," Elias murmured, catching him with both hands. August's forehead touched the base of his throat, and for a moment, he simply stayed there — breath trembling, lashes low over fevered eyes. Not fever, no. Something else. A deeper sickness that pulled at the bones.
Elias shifted, slowly, and guided him toward the armchair by the window. The old one with the creased leather and carved arms, worn smooth from years of hands. It sat just near the window, where the morning touched the sill and spilled over the garden like melted glass.
He sat August down with the care of someone placing a matchstick figure on porcelain. One hand lingered behind his neck, then dropped.
August leaned back, breathing shallowly, and let his head rest against the chair. Light touched the curve of his cheekbone. Beyond him, in the garden, a breeze stirred the tall grass and scattered pink blossoms across the path.
And then, as if confessing to no one at all, August murmured:
"…It's all your fault, you fool…"
His voice was barely audible — hushed, dry, and far too soft to reach Elias, who was turning away toward the desk.
There, on the edge, lay the small book. The one they shouldn't have opened. Its cover shut now, quiet and unassuming, like it hadn't whispered anything wicked at all.
Elias's jaw set.
"I'll burn that whole book," he said, quietly but with iron beneath the words.
There was no drama in it — just a quiet, absolute finality.
Behind him, August let his eyes drift toward the garden. He didn't speak again. The morning moved around him — a butterfly grazed the glass, a leaf turned in the wind — but he remained still, caught between waking and some dream half-lived.
Elias stood a moment longer, watching the book like it might lunge.
And outside, the garden breathed.
The book should have been in the fire.
Elias had said the words with conviction, even felt them ring against his ribs like the pull of a match across flint. But now, as August rested in the quiet room beyond the hall, Elias sat with the book still unopened, its spine resting beneath his palm.
He hadn't burned it. Not yet.
The study was silent save for the sound of distant birds and the rhythmic tap of windblown branches against the windowpane. The room was shadowed — not with darkness, but with thought. Dust hung like lace in the sunbeam slanting across the desk. Elias exhaled and opened the book.
Not quickly. Not with anger.
He turned the pages as one might turn the leaves of a diary not meant for their hands — slow, deliberate, half-afraid of what might rise from the margins. Each ink-stroked line whispered things ancient and odd, remnants of rituals and forgotten codes, myths tangled with truth. But none of it spoke of illness. Not August's.
His fingers paused at a page scrawled in another's hand. Blood rites, something about inheritance. No. He shut the book, lips pressed into a pale line, and stood.
There were other books. There had to be.
Elias crossed the room to the high shelf along the western wall — the one thick with dust and little-used texts, medical and otherwise. His hand hovered before choosing a thin, leather-bound volume near the bottom: A Treatise on Ailments of Unnamed Origin.
He began to read.
Slowly. Carefully. Page by page.
Meanwhile, down the hall in the quiet study, August sat in silence.
The armchair near the window cradled him like a memory long forgotten — old, familiar, and worn through with ghosts. His body felt like glass filled with water: fragile, heavy, and unwilling to obey. He tried to lift his hand. His fingers twitched and then went still.
Nothing.
The air was warm, sweet with the faint scent of roses creeping in from the garden. August tilted his head slowly to one side, the movement like dragging silk through sand. His pale eyes flicked across the view — lavender bushes swaying gently, a trellis bent beneath heavy blooms, the tall iron gate at the far end, locked.
Just beyond that gate — but hidden from his line of sight — lay two gravestones beneath the sycamore tree. His parents.
He couldn't see them. The angle from the window spared him that view. And yet the weight of their presence, just beyond the frame, ached like pressure behind the eyes.
His lashes fluttered.
A long breath.
And slowly, his eyes began to close.
Not in surrender — not quite. But in a kind of silent retreat, like a soldier folding himself inward against a wound no one can see.
Back in the library, Elias flipped a page. Then another.
His brow furrowed. A line caught his eye — an old illness, unnamed, traced in fragments through early physician records. It described a patient: pallor without fever, collapse without wound. Muscles failing but heart still steady. Mind clear, body faltering. A kind of withering from within, as if something ancient had been stirred awake.
His heart thudded. The description matched August too closely.
He set the book down, slowly. Fingers still touching the page.
Outside, the wind stirred the hedges. Somewhere far down the garden path, petals gathered around forgotten stone. The house held its breath.
And the truth, like a shadow rising beneath the skin of the world, waited to be named.
Elias closed the book with a sound softer than a sigh.
It was there — written in the yellowed script of someone long forgotten, someone who had seen this before. Not a curse, not a poison. A disease. A silent thief that took its toll over months, perhaps years, fed by neglect and shadowed grief. It could be cured — but only if fought early. Only if the one afflicted allowed the fight.
He stood up too fast. The chair groaned behind him.
August.
Elias left the book open on the desk, pages fluttering in the draft like the wings of something trying to escape, and crossed the corridor with brisk, soundless steps. He entered the study, the door clicking shut behind him.
"August."
The name came out quieter than he meant it to — reverent, as if it might break in the air. But it reached him.
On the armchair by the window, August stirred. His eyelids shifted, heavy as stone, and he pushed himself upright, just a little — one arm trembling beneath the weight of his own body.
His face was pale as rain-washed parchment, lips parted like he had meant to speak and forgot how. He didn't look at Elias.
Elias knelt before him.
"You have a disease," he said, softly at first. "And it can be cured."
Still, August said nothing. His eyes drifted sideways to the window, to the garden blooming just beyond the glass. Roses opened slowly, unaware.
Elias's voice sharpened with quiet urgency. "It's not some curse, not fate. It's neglect. It's you starving yourself. It's pressure. It's not letting yourself rest. You don't need magic, August. You need to eat. Every day. And sleep. And stop forcing the world onto your back like it's your cross to bear."
August's lashes lowered, shadowing the grey of his eyes.
Elias continued. "You have to stop letting the past keep its claws in you. It's swallowing you whole — bit by bit. You won't even realize until—"
He stopped. The words choked against the edge of his throat. He hated how helpless they sounded, how they flailed against August's silence like waves on cold marble.
Across from him, August's gaze didn't waver. But inwardly, his thoughts whispered like a blade drawn slow.
As if I don't know nothing about myself.
As if I haven't already counted every part of me unraveling.
He didn't speak it aloud.
Elias waited, but no answer came. Just the low sound of wind in the garden, and a single crow calling from somewhere far beyond the hedge.
August's hands lay limp on the armrest. His body still ached from the inside out — not a pain with sharp edges, but the kind that grinds slowly, always there.
And yet, he still did not look at Elias.
The silence between them settled like dust.
Elias remained kneeling, fists clenched against his own thighs. The light from the window framed August in gold and ash — half-alive, half-ghost.
He didn't need saving, Elias knew. He needed choosing. Every day. By himself.
But damn it all — Elias would choose him, even when he couldn't.
Even when August refused to choose himself.