The quiet of the estate had long since shifted from peace to pressure.

Yvonne arrived without ceremony, escorted in by Arlo and met at the door by a subdued Damian who didn’t need to say a word. He just looked at her the way a man looks when something fragile is slipping through his fingers, and Yvonne- no stranger to the weight of grief or the walls this group of people that had come together could build- set her jaw and nodded.

She found Eris alone in the sitting room, perched on the edge of a chair like a statue mid-collapse. Her hands were folded in her lap, a cup of tea untouched beside her, and her eyes were fixed on something beyond the far window.

“I’m fine,” Eris said flatly the moment Yvonne stepped into the room.

“Of course you are,” Yvonne replied, sitting across from her. “Because gods never break.”

That earned her a flicker of movement, barely a twitch of the lips. Not a smile. Not even close; but it was something.

Yvonne leaned back, relaxed, patient. “You know, I’ve out stubborned Roman Novak. And Gray. And Rylan on three separate occasions.”

“I’m aware.”

“So,” Yvonne said, resting her hands in her lap. “How long were you going to keep pretending?”

Eris didn’t answer at first. Her eyes didn’t move and her jaw tightened. But the silence stretched too thin and somewhere beneath it, it cracked.

“It’s just…” Eris’ voice dropped to a whisper, throat dry, words sticky and sharp. “Ollie would be twelve years, eight months, and twenty days old.”

The words spilled out like blood from a wound reopened. Her throat contricted and her breath caught on a jagged inhale. The tears didn’t fall yet, but her voice- oh, her voice- fractured.

“I never stopped counting,” she whispered. “Not when I told myself to. Not even when I tried to let go.”

Yvonne said nothing. Just listened, just stayed.

Eris swallowed hard, but the pressure behind her nose and eyes built like a storm refusing to be ignored. “He would have loved being an uncle. He would’ve read to her. Probably bossed everyone around about how to change a nappy the right way. He had Wyatt’s eyes. His patience. His kindness.”

Her lips trembled now, her hands balled into fists on her knees.

“Wyatt would’ve liked Arlo,” she went on, voice growing more brittle with each word. “He would have been confused by Roman. Thought Damian was arrogant and disliked him immediately at first, but respected him anyway before becoming best friends with him. Would’ve been wary of Gray for maybe a day before realizing I’m apparently only capable of bonding with people whose primary trait is ‘bastard’ and then he would have loved them all.”

The tears began to fall.

“And he would have loved Aurora,” she choked. “He would have lost his mind ordering for her. Little booties, matching outfits, those stupid soft books with the crinkle sound… he would have gone overboard.”

Once she started, she couldn’t stop.

The words came in stumbles and gasps. She spoke of Wyatt’s stupid bedtime songs. The way Oliver used to kick the walls when he couldn’t sleep. The softness of their mornings. The emptiness that came after. The horror of finding their bodies among all the dead in the palace. The guilt of surviving. The unbearable fear that loving again meant betraying them.

And all the while, Yvonne didn’t interrupt. Just let her break.

Let her fall apart there in the sitting room, breathing the weight of grief too long buried and joy too sharp to hold without bleeding. She reached for no answers, offered no platitudes.

Because Eris didn’t need fixing.

She needed witnessing.

So Yvonne sat quietly as Eris spoke, her whole frame trembling, the words of a woman who had held her pain together with wire and steel for over a decade.

The grief wasn’t quiet, wasn’t graceful. It was ugly and real and desperate. But it was hers.

It took a while for the room to quiet again. Not completely though, not in that hollow way grief sometimes demanded, but in the way that come after a storm had passed through and left everything wet and raw and real.

Eris sat slouched in the chair now, her hands were limp in her lap, her body aching, not just from the battle last week, but from the weight of years carried without release.

Yvonne sat across from her, hands still, eyes gentle. When she finally spoke, it was quiet. Unthreatening. Honest.

“Did you ever talk to anyone?” Yvonne asked. “A healer? A friend?”

Eris let out a short sound, harsh and sharp, almost like a laugh but nothing like joy. It cracked down the center like glass breaking.

“No,” she rasped, voice rough. “I didn’t get the luxury of mourning my husband and son.”

She leaned back in her chair, eyes fixed on the ceiling like maybe if she didn’t look Yvonne in the eyes, the truth would sting a little less.

“There was no time to sit in the quiet and let myself fall apart. No moment to breathe. No candles. No folded hands. Just…” Her fingers clenched. “Blood. And screaming. And my baby- *my baby*- and my husband’s body, still warm, still there- and all I had was rage.”

She looked at Yvonne then and her expression was hollow and burning all at once.

“I didn’t grieve. I burned. I killed. I buried it all with blades and fire and bone.” She pressed a hand to her chest, over the pulse of agony that had always lingered like a scar right where her heart was.

“Grief is a privilege,” she said, softer now, bitter and broken. “And I was never privileged.”

Silence stretched between them, the kind that wasn’t meant to be filled. Yvonne didn’t argue, didn’t tell her she was wrong, because she wasn’t. Instead, she just said. “You are now.”

Eris closed her eyes and let that hurt, too.

There were different kinds of crying. Eris had seen them all in others. Heard them, catalogued them. Weaponized them when necessary. She knew the sharp cries of the wounded, the breathless sobs of the broken, the strangled sound of someone realizing they had lost everything. She’d caused some of them. She’d walked away from all of them.

But she never let herself be any of them until now.

With Yvonne there, quiet, unmoving, and unwavering, Eris broke in a way that had no defense. No walls. No stoic silence or sharp tongue to protect her from the avalanche that finally came.

It started as a breath, just a trembling inhale.

Then another.

Then-

It tore out of her.

A cry so guttural and raw that it echoed through the thick walls of the estate like someone dying. She bent forward in the chair, clutching her stomach as if the pain lived inside her bones, sobbing so violently her shoulders shook and her throat rasped like gravel dragged over glass.

She cried because she hadn’t been able to in ten years.

Because she had trained herself not to. Had built an entire life out of not feeling, not breaking, not weeping.

Because Wyatt- *her Wyatt*- was gone. Because he would never hold her again. Never ruffled Oliver’s hair. Never lean over her and smile with that stupid, sleepy look he used to wear in the early mornings before duty called.

Because Oliver would never be an uncle. Because he’d been stolen from Eris before he could turn three. Because there was a hole in her heart shaped like a little boy with his father’s eyes and his mother’s fire, and no one- not Damian or Gray or Roman or Arlo- could fill it.

Because the universe was cruel.

Because hope was crueler.

Because she didn’t believe she deserved to grieve, and now that it was here, it was drowning her.

She cried because she missed them- because there had been a time she didn’t know if she could survive a day without them, and now ten years had passed and she still woke up missing Wyatt’s laugh and the feel of Oliver’s tiny arms around her neck.

And somewhere in the middle of it, when her voice cracked and shredded and left her nearly voiceless, a new grief took hold.

She cried because Aurora deserved more.

Because the tiny little girl in the nursery upstairs deserved a whole godmom, not just the fragments held together by vengeance and regret. Because Damian deserved a partner who wasn’t shattered beneath the surface. Because love sometimes wasn’t enough to fix what had been broken.

Because her lover, her friends, her new family could hold her together, but none of them could bring her murdered husband and son back.

And all of that, all of it, came out in screams and sobs and choking gasps until her voice gave out entirely.

Yvonne didn’t move. She simply stayed, hand resting nearby, her presence steady like a lighthouse in a violent storm, bearing witness to the pain no one else had ever been allowed to see. Not just as a healer, not just as a professional. But as a woman who also knew what it meant to carry grief through the fire and still keep walking.

By the time the sobs began to slow, Eris was slumped over in the chair, her throat torn raw, her cheeks soaked, her body trembling from the sheer effort of finally letting go.

Not a single word had been exchanged since the beginning.

And yet, for the first time in ten years, Eris Kane had been allowed to mourn.

The silence that followed was not peace, it was aftermath.

Eris sat curled into herself, a blanket drapped loosely around her shoulders that Yvonne had placed there at some point between sobs. Her face was blotchy, lips trembling, chest still heaving with the echo of everything she’d screamed and sobbed out just minutes ago. Her voice was completely gone, shredded and silent. And yet, the grief still clung to her like a second skin.

But so did the relief.

Because after ten long years of bottling it all in, Eris’d finally let it out.

Yvonne didn’t speak right away. She gave her space, like she always did. Watched Eris breathe; shaky, but still breathing. Her eyes were red and unfocused, still dazed from the force of it all. Her hands trembled faintly in her lap.

Finally, softly, Yvonne leaned forward, her voice gentle with no edge, just truth.

“You’re allowed to grieve for the life you lost, Eris,” she said, “But you’re just as allowed to grieve for the life you should have had.”

Eris didn’t look up, but her jaw clenched and her breath caught like a hitch on a broken wheel.

“There’s no expiration date on grief,” Yvonne continued. “No timeline. No rules. People like to say it gets better with time, but the truth is, it changes. It grows roots in your bones and softens its edges sometimes, yes. But it doesn’t go away. And it shouldn’t have to.”

She paused, let the weight of her words settle.

“You lost a child. A husband. A future you built dreams around. And when you were still bleeding from those wounds, the world asked you to become a weapon instead. You never got to be just a mother, or a wife, or a woman who lost everything.”

Eris’ eyes shut tightly, a single tear slipping down her cheek.

Yvonne softened further. “You don’t have to be whole to be loved, Eris. You never did.”

That made Eris inhale sharply.

“This found family of yours,” Yvonne said, smiling faintly. “ They love you not in spite of the broken pieces, but with them. The raw edges, the jagged grief, the fury and the silence and the walls you build so high no one else has ever climbed them.”

Yvonne leaned forward, her tone threading with something gentle and unyielding. “You don’t need to hide your grief to protect them. Or Damian. Or yourself. You are not less of a godmother, a lover, or a woman for hurting. You are human. And you deserve to grieve without guilt.”

Eris didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

But her shoulders sagged and her fingers curled tighter into the blanket around her. Her eyes fluttered shut as another tear slipped free, softer this time. Not a storm. Just mourning.

Just healing.

And Yvonne sat beside her, steady and still as the quiet filled the room- not as suffocation, but space. A space where Eris Kane, fierce and fractured was allowed to exist exactly as she was:

Grieved. Loved. And finally, seen.

(This is a passage from a book I’m writing which is why there’s so many characters. The story probably isn’t clear since, again, this is a single scene from an entire trilogy. But the FMC hasn’t been allowed to experience grief before and I thought this scene where she finally was able to fit the prompt.)