Is going to one of your patient's rooms at 2 a.m. a good idea? Probably not. Is it a necessary bad idea? Yes, it is. His screams sound so...agonized as if someone's ripping apart his very being and forcing him to watch. I enter without knocking and see him trembling, murmuring something incoherent. His forehead beads with drops of cold sweat and I feel an unwelcome pang of sympathy in my chest.

  Attempting to calm him down I sit at the edge of his bed slowly, reverently, running my hands through his sweat damp hair. Doesn't work.

  "Riven?" I call out while violently shaking him out of this nightmare. God knows what he's seeing but whatever it is I hope he feels me...feels me trying to be an anchor in this darkness. Feels me trying to snap him out of it. And he does...

  Strong hands hold a firm grip on my throat slamming the back of my head against the wall. Pain explodes behind my eyes, but I keep my voice steady "Fuck! Riven it's me." I shout.

  His eyes look haunted, like they first looked when I met him.

  Slowly I feel the grip on my throat loosen. "What are you doing in here? Aren't you supposed to asleep at this hour?" His voice is hoarse from screaming...He's barely holding it together...

  "Well I was asleep until your screams woke me up."

  "I was screaming?"

  "Loud enough for it to reach my quarters."

  "Fuck," he mutters, running a hand through his hair.

  "Why were you screaming?" I inquire.

  "Dreams," he says with a shrug as if I didn't just hear the most blood curdling screams of my life.

  "Mind telling me what they were about?" I press on with a raised eyebrow.

  "Oh it was about a fucking fairy who sprinkles glitter on the lot of us," he replies with a bitter laugh.

  Knowing better than to push on further, I get up to give him a glass of water. He chugs it down desperately. Then he whistles "looks like the doc does care for me" and there's that cocky smirk I'm increasingly getting used to.

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  "I care for all the patients in here, Riven." I answer back in an exasperated tone.

  "You never cared for me."

  "You never let me care for you..."

  And that shut him up—for a while.

  "Stay with me?"

  Now it's my turn to be shocked. He wants me to stay in his room, on his damn bed, with him. "Stay here and do what? Sleep with you?" I joke but a part of me does wonder what it would be like to sleep, curled up in his arms.

  What the fuck... Respectfully, Inez, you deserve a damn slap for even thinking that.

  "Just stay. Only for a while." Cracks. There are always some cracks in that carefully crafted mask of his, always the tiniest fraction of vulnerability peeking through and God help me because I want to see more of those cracks.

  "Fine, I'll stay." I give him a small smile, as much as I could manage in my half-asleep state.

  We sit there in silence or rather with it. It's not the eery kind of silence, it's a peaceful one in which I could almost feel safe, almost.

  We stay there like that for a long time, our breaths being our only conversation. Suddenly, he speaks up. "I saw you."

  "What?"

  "In my sleep, I mean. I saw you."

  With an amused scoff I reply, "I might have bed hair on me right now, but I doubt I'm terrifying enough for you to wake up screaming like that at 2 a.m."

  "Oh trust me, you very well are," he teases with a small upwards twitch of his lips which could barely pass for a smile. But I like it nevertheless.

  "What else did you see?"

  "I saw you dying."

  His eyes seem zoned out, haunted as if he's reliving whatever he saw. "It was just a dream... I'm alive, right here in front of you."

  What he says next has shivers running down my spine not because of the words but because of the self-loathing in them.

  "And I was the one who killed you."