And sometimes he sits up straight in the middle of the night gasping open-mouthed and trembling, with the covers clenched in his fists and wide eyes unseeing, blinded by bloody memories. And sometimes tears run silently down his sleeping cheeks and he speaks, short clear words that mean nothing to her, usually, though once he cried "mother" and she wept with him till morning. And sometimes she swears she can hear some broken part of him rattling around in his chest as she pillows her head there, like a piece knocked free and lost somewhere inside him (she wishes she could open him up and take it out, clean it and bolt it snugly back in place with a new coat of paint for his poor chipped heart while she was at it). And sometimes he wakes up screaming, struggling away from her arms as she tries to hold him close when all he can see is a door slowly opening with all the universe behind it, waiting to fall on him like the tide. And once he struck out at her before he was awake, screamed "give him back" and slammed the back of his hand across her nose (it bruised later, and he couldn't look at her, and the shame in his eyes at hurting her was like a tiny vicious flame burning inside). And he is so broken, oh god, how did she let him get so broken? But no, that's an Ed thing to say. One of them has to know how to decline the irrational blame. And she sands down the broken edges on which he cuts himself even now, slowly, with quiet words and stern patience and kisses and time, and the warm steady rise and fall of her breath as she lies next to him, tangled in sheets he's kicked off and sweated through in his labyrinth of a thousand nightmares. Someday she'll lead him out of this hall of sick reflections inside his head. She'll trace a map along the lines of his face with her fingertips and break every damn mirror in there with a kiss truly meant, and then perhaps they'll both be free. She's always had a knack for fixing things, and how many thousand times harder can this be? --Tobu Ishi, "To Be Hurt, To Heal"