Learning – or re-learning – to live with Blake is a slow and painful process for me, and probably for Marc as well. I guess after the first night, after Blake’s first breakthrough, we both hoped things would get better right away. It can’t be that easy, though. It took decades and decades for the demons to break Blake, to teach him fear and pain; a few days, even a few weeks or months won’t be enough for him to do more than start healing.

His body is better. His voice, too. At times, it’s all but impossible to tell there’s still something wrong with him. But at other times…

He won’t touch me, for one thing. If I take his hand and set it on me, he leaves it there but only until I let go, then he pulls back again. It makes me want to rage every time, makes me want to ask why and how they trained him, conditioned him not to touch me. Because yes, it’s only me. He doesn’t seem to have a problem touching Marc anymore, at least not usually, and as much as I try not to think anything of it, it still hurts. I promised myself not to be jealous, but I can’t always hold on to that promise.

Sometimes, and those are the hardest moments I ever lived – harder even that fights against demons during which I wasn’t sure I’d survive – Blake just… breaks down. Curls up into a ball, makes himself as small as he can, and shakes even as he tries not to cry. That’s already bad enough, but to make things even worse my intervention, in those moments, only upsets him even more. The best I can do at times like these is to stay back and let Marc try to calm him. I’ve never been very good at staying back and letting others do everything. The fact that it’s Blake doesn’t make it any easier, far from it.

I guess if we knew what triggers these episodes we could try to avoid those stimuli, but Blake is stubborn as all hell about it. He never wants to talk about what happened. We ask him, after he stumbles, when he’s calm again. Ask what we did or said to send his mind back to that place. He always refuses to answer, always says it was nothing, and he’s fine now, and it won’t happen again.

He’s trying to protect us, I understand that, but how can we protect him when we don’t know what we’re doing wrong in the first place?

Marc says we have to give him time, and that he’ll get better, little by little. And he is getting better, I can’t deny that. But at this rate, it’ll take him years, or even more than that before he can go weeks or months without stumbling on one of his nightmares again. That might be fine for Marc, he has centuries in front of him, he can afford to let Blake go at his own pace. But I don’t have the luxury of time. Is it too much to hope that Blake will get better before I grow too old to ask him to turn me?