11.1 Fic: Flooded

Cypher froze.
“You saved us all back there, you know.”
No, please don't say that.
"Proud to be on your team."
Don't say that. Don't give this away, not to me, not now. Not after that.
"Mirage, I-"
His voice failed him, cracking like a dam.
Everything good that happened in there was you. Everything.
I didn't save anyone.
He'd forgotten to move, and now she was before him.
Desperately, pointlessly, he reached for the pieces of "it's fine," to place over his face.
There wasn't nearly enough time to collect them all.
"Hey, hey, it's okay."
The gentleness of her voice, the concerned slope of her brows, the focus in her ice-grey eyes shook him. Something crumbled, collapsed, and in its place was a flood.
"Can I hug you, please?"
He made some insensible utterance of assent. He had no will left not to. No more than a toy boat tottering over a maelstrom.
She reached for him. He reached back. The resultant riptide pulled him under.
“Tell me."
The flood covered his ears and muffled sound. It filled his mouth and choked him.
He closed his eyes against the salt and forgot how to breathe. His shoulders convulsed. His chest burned.
"It’s okay, we’re gonna be okay.”
A lifeline.
He held on. Currents of grief and fear tossed him like a ragdoll. He smashed against stone, came away raw and bruised, stinging with saline.
He held on. To midnight arms and sunset hair, to the steadier beating of a worthwhile heart.
Slowly, his feet touched earth. Sodden, silted. The flood swirled through it in foaming eddies, left him like flotsam.
He could breathe again, through waterlogged lungs. Breath brought warmth, gentle pressure, the scent of cotton and sweet summer fruits on currents of warm air.
Oh.
His legs felt weak, but they worked.
Don't you know you shouldn't touch a drowning man?
Among the detritus were the remnants of "it's fine." Incomplete, water-warped. Would they even fit? He left them there. Jetsam. Let it wash out to sea.
He felt hollow, light. Tenuous.
Everyone was still waiting ahead. The desolation of the hurricane still littered the valley wood. And the path beneath his feet still stretched toward the cowled bodies.
Mirage was watching him with an expression so open and patient it terrified him, an electric jolt snapping him back to the present.
Get it together.
He searched for an irony, a silver lining, a pun, anything. Smashed together a half-smile from the rubble.
"I just hate knowing the ending."
"Of the world?"
Confusion tinged her sympathy.
He shook his head, but he couldn't hold her gaze any longer.
“So rewrite the ending, if you don’t like it.”
He looked up. There was a friendly impatience in the corner of her tentative smile.
Just like that?
She made it so simple. Her resolve wasn't iron, not the weighty stone around his own neck. It was light, air, the certainty of dawn.
Despair fled before her. What could he do but laugh?
"You're amazing, you know that?"
All his masks lay scattered in the light. What else could he speak but truth?
"Amazing."
“I mean obviously. Did you see that fucking tornado I called?" She scoffed through a grin, "Made y’all look like toddlers out there with my knife skills.”
"I mean it."
She wavered, his sincerity awkward next to her deflection.
His turn to sympathize. He dropped his gaze and turned his feet.
"C'mon, everyone who still can sleep needs to."
He took a step, but paused for the sound of her murmured voice.
"You're amazing too, you know."
Sunlight poured into his bones. The flood's chill fell like dew evaporating in the dawn.
“Race you back to camp!"
Her speed created a wake of wind that stirred his hair and raised a flutter of paper detritus around his feet.
Following was like breathing.