Thomas checked the numbers on a quiet evening in late autumn, the plague's distant, growing shadow and his own falling anchor sitting together in his chest now, two separate griefs that had somehow, over the difficult months, learned to occupy the same space without either fully crowding out the other.
Battery: ninety percent, steady as ever, the induction loop's patient charge undiminished by anything the wider world had thrown at them. Anchor: twelve. Lower than he'd hoped, though not so much lower than the last reading that he could call it a surprise.
Victoria found him in the garden, the season's last hardy vegetables still clinging on against the coming frost, and settled beside him without needing to ask what he'd been checking.
"Twelve," he said, before she could ask.
"That's lower."
"It's lower. It's also not so much lower that I think we're facing anything sudden. I don't know that for certain. I don't know anything for certain about this, and I've made a kind of uneasy peace with that not-knowing that I didn't think I'd manage, back when the falling first started to frighten me properly." He looked at her, and found the words came easier than they once had, the months of shared honesty having worn a smoother path between them than fear alone had ever managed to cut. "I keep thinking about Aldith's fever house, and Hamo's careful pages, and I realize I've spent this whole year learning the same lesson twice over — once for the valley, facing something we can't fully control, and once for myself, facing something else we can't fully control either."
"What's the lesson?"
"That preparation isn't the same as certainty, and it isn't meant to be. We built the fever house not because we knew the sickness was coming, but because being ready mattered more than being certain. I've been trying to do the same thing with my own ending, whatever shape it eventually takes — not waiting for certainty about what happens when the number reaches zero, but simply making certain the people I love are as ready as they can be for whichever version of it actually arrives."
Victoria was quiet a long moment, her hand finding his among the cold garden rows. "I used to think I needed to solve this the way I solve everything else. A number, properly understood, properly planned around. I've stopped trying to solve it, Thomas. I don't think it's solvable, not with the pieces either of us actually has to work with. I've started, instead, simply trying to be present for whatever time it leaves us, the same way Aldith counseled me to be, that first terrible morning I learned about it."
"Is that enough?"
"I don't know. I don't think anyone facing an ending they can't fully see coming ever gets to know that for certain, whether it's a falling number or a fever with no name or simply the ordinary, ancient business of growing old the ordinary way." She turned to face him properly, her expression carrying none of her usual careful composure, only plain, unguarded honesty. "I know that I would rather spend whatever time we have left exactly like this — in a cold garden, in an ordinary autumn evening, together — than spend it anywhere else, worrying about anything else, waiting for a certainty neither of us is ever going to get."
Thomas pulled her closer, the cold evening air sharp around them both, and found, holding her, that the two griefs sitting in his chest — his own falling number, the valley's growing plague fear — had, for this one quiet moment at least, receded into something considerably smaller than the plain, sufficient fact of her presence beside him.
"I love you," he said, simply, the way he rarely allowed himself to say it without some larger context demanding the words. "Whatever the number does. Whatever the fever does. I wanted that said plainly, tonight, without any crisis forcing it out of me."
"I love you too, Thomas." She said it with the same unguarded plainness, and they sat together in the cold garden a long while afterward, two people who had built a town and weathered every danger it had thrown at them, finding, in the ordinary honesty of a shared evening, something that felt, for once, considerably more like peace than fear.