Callida was beginning to stir, and Rogue tore his eyes from the dwindling fire to instead watch her resist waking up. She’d slept most of the day away already and probably needed to wake up if she was to have any chance of sleeping that night. As she struggled to roll over, Rogue’s mind once again wandered to the troubling question of what had triggered her earlier breakdown. Treating damage to the mind was not within his current purview as a healer of the body, though the two were obviously intrinsic to each other.

Groaning a little as her efforts to stay asleep failed, Callida took a deep, rousing breath. He took that as his signal. “You’re awake.” Rogue strode across the room as his wife’s eyes blinked open.

“How long was I out?”

“Hours. Most of the afternoon is gone.” Habit compelled him to check her pulse — steady and strong, fluttering momentarily as she realized the time.

“Primordials! I need to get back to the palace,” she said groggily, rolling most of the way off the bed before Rogue could stop her.

“Whoa. Be still a minute and talk to me. What happened this morning?”

“I think I must have had a panic attack,” she stated the obvious in a rush, already reaching for her boots and weapons belt.

“That’s not what I meant, Callida,” Rogue said with a small sigh of exasperation. He took her hands in his, forcing her acknowledgement as she could no longer dress herself. “I meant, what caused the panic attack?”

“That’s not important,” she deflected in a mumble, her attention stubbornly returning to her boots. Rogue surrendered and stood up to pace while she finished getting dressed. “I’ll see you later?” she said, brushing past him to the door, her lips pecking his cheek lightly along the way. Rogue seized the opportunity and snatched her hips, drawing her back. “Rogue,” she giggled, “I don’t have time for this.” Her coy deflections extinguished when she caught sight of the anxiety between his eyebrows. “What?”

Rogue scowled at his toes, struggling to find the words to express the ambiguous bothers in his head. “You always…. You never…. I know you do this to protect me, Callida, but I’m worried about whatever it is that you’re trying to protect me from. It’s obviously hurting you, and I wish…. I wish you’d allow me to help you face it.”

“It’s nothing,” she tried to insist in a gentle sing-song, a seductive hand lifting to stroke his cheek. It only succeeded in making him angry.

“Really?! That was nothing?! The strongest person I’ve ever met has a panic attack, and you expect me to buy into ‘it’s nothing’?!” Rogue’s lips became a thin line as he checked his temper. “Look, M’lady, I’m worried about you. You never let me in. I know that you can’t let me in sometimes, but… if you can’t talk to me, then maybe you need to see a monitor. You need to talk to someone. Anyone. You can’t keep this to yourself, and you shouldn’t have to. I want to understand what’s going on, and I want to help you.”

Teeth digging into her bottom lip, Callida’s fingers began an anxious massage of his palms, giving her something to focus on that didn’t require sustained eye contact. “You think I need a psych eval?”

“It probably wouldn’t hurt.”

“You… want me to tell you all the messed up things inside my head?”

“I mean, if it would help you….” All at once, it felt somehow like he’d overstepped — like he was trespassing on her privacy for even suggesting that she open up to him. “Look, Callida, I may be a healer, but I’m not trained as a monitor. I know embarrassingly little about psychiatric disorders. But I know enough to recognize that this is… not good. I just want to get you the help that you obviously need.”

Her face pinched in a frown as she considered what he was saying and calculated a counterattack. “I’ll handle it, Rogue. You don’t need to worry about–”

“That’s a load of crap, and you know it,” he huffed before he could stop himself. “Be honest with me for once. Be honest with yourself! You are not okay!”

“Okay,” came the raspy reply. She was submitting, and her fingers began working his palm evermore aggressively while she struggled with where to start. Rogue stayed silent, even breathing more quietly while she pondered. “I’ve been… um…. There’ve been a lot of different things that have kind of built up over time. It hasn’t felt important enough to share them though, and I still question the wisdom of bringing them up.”

“Why?”

She glanced up briefly, gnawing on her lip and dropping her head again the moment she met his eyes. “I didn’t want to mess things up between us again. You know, stir the pot while things are still trying to settle.”

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That hit like a punch to the gut. “I’m sorry.”

“No. Please don’t….” She fumbled through an apologetic clarification that would take back any perceived blame or lingering resentment. It only made Rogue feel worse that she felt the need to comfort him over his well deserved guilt and shame, and anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be about him.

“Callida, what have you been choosing to keep from me?” he eventually returned to the original point. “What’s been building up to the point that you had a panic attack this morning?”

She stalled mid-thought and recalibrated, her mannerisms growing awkward. “I think it really started with… well, it started well before then, but our trip to the temple was the tipping point, and then today was….” She sniffed after a prolonged pause, a hand disengaging from his to wipe her nose on the back of her sleeve. “U-um. We’ve never really talked about… about the significance of the Yudha name since we were first married. But maybe we need to?”

“What do you mean?” He braced against a rooting sense of unease.

“The Guardians at the North Temple c-called me… um…. They called me the… the Mother of Prophecy… again. Said that’s why, or rather, um, they suspect that the prophecy is the reason why the Rose and Dagger Guardians tried to kill…. So I need to understand this prophecy. What it means. I need to understand it so I can protect our family from it. Rogue, what do you know about all of this?”

He knew even before she looked up and commented on it that he’d gone sheet white. “The prophecy? You’re worried about… about that?! That is what triggered your panic attack?!” That curse had finally caught up to him, rattling at the cages he’d carefully set up to lock away his own overwhelming traumas. A curse that had taken his family from him as a child. A curse that was now torturing his wife and stalking his infant sons. A curse that he’d never even believed in to begin with! “It’s all a bunch of nonsense,” he snarled the moment his thoughts coalesced, realizing a moment too late that Callida was watching him intently. “It’s a foolish tradition that gets people killed for absolutely no reason, and I want nothing to do with it.”

“The way things are going, I don’t know that we’ll be able to hide from it–”

“It’s worked so far!” he bellowed.

“What are you saying? You’ve been hiding from this? This. This exact thing? You thought this might happen? You knew?!”

“That’s not the point, Callida.”

“Then what, pray tell, is the point?”

“The Yudha name is cursed. There’s a reason I abandoned it for so long, Callida, and there’s a reason I was so reluctant to pick it up again and to let you take it.”

“You wanted me to keep my maiden name,” she remembered aloud.

“You’re just too darn stubborn,” he said with a weak laugh, succumbing to a sudden impulse to hug her. “I’m sorry. The truth is, I know very little about the actual prophecy except that it exists and has brought nothing but trouble and destruction.”

“Maybe you should see a monitor,” she mumbled and pulled away to meet his eyes.

Rogue scoffed and shook his head, his tongue bitterly scraping the cusps of his incisors. “Maybe I should,” he agreed after a moment’s reflection, more to encourage her own path to therapy than because he had any honest intentions of following through with his own. And also because it was the quickest way to drop the subject. He was keenly aware that somehow this conversation had become about him again.

“In the meantime, Rogue, there’s a lot going on right now that’s related to… I don’t even know what to call all of this, but it’s freaking me out a little bit, and I think that’s what had me so worked up when I came home. I’m sorry to worry you.”

He smiled ruefully and nodded. “I’m glad you told me.” But am I? Truthfully, he was even more unsettled now than he had been when things were still ambiguous.

“Rogue, I’m sorry to ask this of you, but I need you to stay home with the boys until I can sort things out at the palace. Please? Promise me that you won’t leave this house.”

He swallowed harder than he’d have liked; he had a lot of anxiety and protests to choke down. “Would that help you?”

“Yes.”

First kissing her forehead in an effort to settle his own nerves, Rogue agreed. “I promise.” He was rewarded with a hug and kiss that were much too brief.

“Thank you. I’ll be back in time to help you put the boys to bed.”

He watched her leave and then dropped into a chair by the fire burning low in the hearth. The cinders seemed to foreshadow darkness and destruction, the bright embers a reminder that where there are ashes, flames once were.

He remembered the fire that night. He remembered the heat of it and the fear. He’d spent a long time trying to forget the screams only for them to ring out, clear as day, whenever the traumas were triggered. Nothing else from that night was a reliable memory, that is, he wasn’t sure how much of his “memories” were accurate. Rogue had been a boy just shy of eleven years when his colony was destroyed.

“Qiangde, you must run! Don’t look back. Run!” That had been the last time he’d heard his name until Callida said it for the first time nearly eighteen years later.

He balked at the threat that history might repeat itself — that his family could be taken from him again, or that he might be taken from his family. But it was different this time, right? This time they were aware of the threat, and this time he had Callida. No. It would be different this time. Even if the Yudha curse hunted them for the rest of eternity, Callida wouldn’t let it touch their family, and he wouldn’t either.