Title: The Rising Night
Challenge #90: Doorway
Fandom: In the Flesh
Rating: G
Length: 338 words
Summary: Jem supposed that it made sense that her relationship with her brother had changed, but she didn't have to like it.

It was the middle of the night when Jem thrashed her way out of a nightmare to a sweat soaked bed and quiet house. Following her near nightly ritual of needing to get up and get a new towel to line her bed she headed out of her room, but stopped, surprised, when she saw that Kieren's door was open and his light on. "Kier?" she called, but got no answer.

Kieren had fallen asleep fully dressed on top of his bed, he still even had his boots on. Jem paused in the hall and peered through the doorway at her older/younger brother. She remembered a time when she thought he could do no wrong, back before the rising, before he... killed himself. He'd always seemed so big, so strong, to her then. Now, he only looked young. Small.

His hair was a mess, standing up this way and that, and before she even thought about what she was doing she'd crossed into his room to smooth his fringe back and off his face; carefully, so not to wake him. Which, why? What the hell was she doing? Kier was a rotter and rotters don't feel. PDS sufferers, she meant. Not rotters, PDS sufferers. Kieren. Kieren couldn't feel so she didn't have to worry about him wakening from her touch.

His hair was softer than she'd have thought and she had a sudden sense memory of sitting curled up in his lap on the sofa watching a show on TV that had scared her - a Doctor Who rerun or something similar - and burying her head against his shoulder. He'd wrapped her arms around her and when he bent down to whisper, "It's okay, I got you" into her ear his hair had pressed against her cheek. She remembered feeling so safe and warm in his arms.

Of course, post-Rising his arms were always cold. He was always cold to the touch. And she wasn't sure she'd felt safe since her HVL days.

Not anywhere.

Not anymore.