? New Patreon Post: The Heaviness of Singer Lain: Fawning

  I just published a deeply personal post about the trauma response fawning—why it happens, how it protected me, and how it shaped Lain (yes, literally) in Singer Lain, especially going into Book Two.

  If you’ve ever wondered why she endures what she endures—and why that matters—this is the clearest window I can offer into the heart of the story.

  The dough stuck to everything. To Lain’s fingers, to the worn wooden bowl, to the faint Veinwright sigils carved into the stone beneath the board she was using as a counter. Lain dug her hands in anyway, pressing and folding, working the lump of flour and water and salt until it stopped behaving like mud and started to come together.

  “Again,” she said.

  Morgan stared at his own lump of dough as if it had personally insulted him. His fingers were dusted white to the wrists. There was flour on his cheekbone, a smear across one wing where he’d brushed it against the flour on the ground. His hair had dried in untidy long curls. The shirt he’d finally managed to wrestle into hung a little loose at the throat, showing the thinness in his collarbones.

  “I did,” he said. “Several times.”

  “Not like that.” She reached across, caught his hands, and turned them. The Tuning flared at the touch, a bright and complicated ache. “You’re worrying it. You’ll tear it.”

  “What’s the difference,” he muttered, but he followed the shape she showed him: heel of the hand, fold, turn, press. His first attempt was clumsy. The dough squelched out the sides like it was trying to escape. He growled under his breath.

  She ignored him, and kept working her own.

  The cliff house smelled different now. The stove held a real fire instead of a banked glow, the little iron belly radiating gentle heat. Somewhere beyond the walls, the sea careened against the rock with the same relentless rhythm it always had. Inside it was warm, full of flour dust and the faint scent of yeast.

  He’d fetched water when she asked.

  He’d said please.

  None of that erased the bruises.

  His hands found the right rhythm before his temper did. She could feel it when it clicked, the small flicker of satisfaction as the dough stopped sticking and started stretching. He glanced sideways at her, then down at his work, as if waiting for correction.

  “It’s better,” she said.

  “That’s all?”

  “You want applause?”

  He huffed. The bond carried the ghost of something she might have called amusement, in another life. “If I’m learning,” he said stiffly, “then yes, I’d like to know when I’m doing it right.”

  “I’ll put a bell on you,” she said. “Ring it when you manage not to be awful.”

  He made a face at that. The joke brushed his mind like the edge of a feather. “You don’t have one big enough,” he said.

  For a few breaths, it was almost bearable, kneading side by side, the scrape of dough on wood, the soft thud of her hooves on stone when she shifted her weight. He worked in silence, wings drawn in close so as night to knock into her. She could feel him watching her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Little pulses of awareness, skittish as a feral cat’s attention.

  “What did you dream,” he asked suddenly. “With the apples.”

  She sucked in a breath through her teeth. “You already know.”

  “I know fragments,” he said. “You yanked me in sideways. I want…” he paused, corrected himself. “I would like to understand what I did to you by saying his name.”

  She frowned down at the dough. It was smooth under her palms now, elastic and obedient, unlike her thoughts.

  “Elder Tanel,” she said. “The cloister gardens.” She swallowed. “He gave me an apple. In real life. So I was just dreaming of that, I think.”

  He could tell it was a lie. She didn’t care. His gaze slid away. His shoulders hunched slightly. Shame prickled bitterly along the bond.

  “You were right,” she said, because she wasn’t ready to give him even the comfort of what she’d truly been dreaming. “We were under a falling building. Mallow is dead.”

  The words hurt coming out, and saying them made them more real.

  Morgan’s hands paused on the dough. For a heartbeat she saw the echo of his memory again, of the stone and the wings and the impossible weight. He shut it down quickly.

  “I didn’t say he was dead,” he replied. “I said the odds –”

  “Don’t,” she said quietly. “If you say odds again, I’ll put this dough over your mouth instead of in the stove.”

  A sliver of exasperated fondness flickered at that, absurdly. He was impossible. She hated the part of herself that could feel any warmth toward him at all.

  “We need to let it rise,” she said briskly. “Cover it with cloth. Put it near the stove. Not too close, or it’ll dry out.”

  He obeyed without argument. His obedience was unsettling.

  When the dough was shaped and tucked into the oiled pot to proof, there was nothing to do but wait. Lain dusted the flour off her hands and moved back to the table, to the scattered notes and diagrams she’d left there.

  The mess she’d made with the grain and beans had already been cleaned, but not by her.

  She caught him looking at the empty corner, then at her, then away. Embarrassment rippled faintly from him, colored with apology in the careful way he’d swept the last of the flour from under the shelves and stacked the unbroken jars.

  “It was stupid,” she said, more to the paper than to him.

  “The flour?” he asked.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “The kicking. Your hoard.”

  He exhaled. “You were angry. I was… not subtle about provoking you.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  The sea filled a prolonged silence, roaring faintly up the cliff.

  “You used the bond,” he said at last. “Like a knife. Turning everything back on me.” His hand went unconsciously to his chest, fingers pressing against the cloth where he’d bitten her. “I’ve never…” he shook his head. “I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “You could stop giving me things to throw,” she said.

  His mouth twitched. “You’re very sure of yourself.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not. But I’m sure of you. Of what you’ll do if no one holds a mirror up to you.”

  He stared at her for a long, searching moment. The bond hummed with thoughts he didn’t put into words, crowded and sharp-edged. Then he looked away.

  “I don’t want…” he exhaled. “I don’t want to be that man to you.”

  She didn’t have to tell him that he already was. She just stared, long and hard, and the feeling moved through his chest.

  “And yet,” he said quietly, “you showed me how to be another sort of man. For a little while.”

  Heat crept up her neck.

  “That wasn’t for you,” she said. “It was for me.”

  “Then why did it feel like a gift?”

  She didn’t answer. Because it had been, in some crooked way. She had taken the worst thing in the world and bent it just enough that she could breathe through it. She’d taken his hunger and steered it toward something less savage, something survivable.

  “You can’t have that and this at the same time,” she said again. “You don’t get to take without seeing what it does to me.”

  “I see it now,” he said softly. “Every time you look at me. Every time. I remember.”

  Good, she thought. And the bond carried the word to him bare and bright.

  After a time, the bread finished rising. She punched it down, shaped it, set it in the little iron pot to bake. When she slid it into the stove, the heat flushed her cheeks.

  Morgan hovered nearer than he needed to, drawn by the promise of food or the gravity of her presence. His wings crowded the small space without him meaning to, but every time a feather brushed her shoulder, sparks skittered along the Tuning, startled and something else she refused to name.

  “Sit,” she told him. “You’re swaying.”

  “I’m not –”

  She shot him a look.

  He sat.

  Time passed and the bread’s smell deepened, turning from raw flour to something rich and warm. She opened the stove, turned the pot, checked the crust with quick, sure hands. He watched as if she were performing some intricate spell.

  “You relied on other people for everything,” she said, not looking at him. “Cooking, cleaning, comfort – you only ever learned to do one thing well. Take.”

  “That’s not –” he stopped himself. “No. that’s fair.”

  “And now,” she went on, easing the pot out with a folded cloth, setting it on the stone, “you have to learn everything backwards. How to make bread. How to not die. How to touch someone without destroying them.”

  He stared at the loaf as she tipped it out, fragrant steam curling up. The crust was browned and cracked, the shape a little lopsided but whole.

  “How long does that take?” he asked.

  “The bread? An hour.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  She cut a wedge with a small, sharp knife, more careful with it than she’d been with his feelings. “A lifetime,” she said.

  He took the offered piece with both hands as if he were taking communion. When he bit into it, surprise lit across the bond: the simple pleasure of warmth and salt, the way it filled the hollow of his stomach the way dried fish never could.

  He closed his eyes.

  “...I see,” he said, after a moment. “Why you wanted to waste the flour.”

  She snorted. “It’s not wasting. It’s using.”

  “A revelation,” he murmured, half to himself.

  They ate in relative peace. The loaf disappeared quickly; she hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she tasted it. The food settled in her stomach.

  When the last crumbs were gone, he sat back, watching her with an odd expression.

  “What?” she asked, wary.

  “You did that,” he said. “With things I hoarded and never used.”

  “It’s bread, Morgan,” she said. “Not a miracle.”

  “It feels like one.”

  The bond throbbed with a complicated ache: gratitude, but threaded with the danger of wanting, no longer purely physical. The desire to be seen as more than the man who hurt her. To be forgiven.

  She felt it all.

  “No,” she said softly, before he could put it into words. “Whatever you’re reaching for – no.”

  He saddened. “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “You’re thinking it very loudly,” she said. “I can’t… I can’t ring your bell and tell you you’re good now because you ate bread you helped knead and managed not to put your hands on me while we waited for it to rise.”

  He hissed. “That’s not –”

  “It’s exactly that,” she said. “You want a sign you’ve… what did you say? Learned. That you’re doing it right.” Her throat thickened with tears. “This isn’t a lesson you pass.”

  He swallowed. His hands closed into fists on his knees, then opened again. “What do you want from me? Tell me what to do instead of just telling me what I am.”

  She stared at him.

  What did she want?

  For him to vanish. For the Underserpent to sing the world back into a shape that didn’t have him in it. She wanted Mallow’s voice to call her from the courtyard and for that to be real, not a dream. She wanted to erase all of this.

  Short of that, she wanted… what? To survive him. To bend this monstrous bond into a shape that hurt as little as possible. To keep him from setting the world on fire in his panic.

  “First,” she said slowly, “you stop pretending we’re equals in this room.”

  He blinked. “I’m the one holding you here.”

  “And I’m the one living with your feelings every time you decide to climb inside my body,” she said. “I’m the one you need to reach the Underveins. I am the one whose song you stole. I am not your student. I am not your lover. I am not your tether or your saint. I am the person you hurt. Start there.”

  He didn’t move.

  The Tuning stripped her words of tone or politeness, branded into the place he had once reserved for plans and calculations. For the first time, he looked at her without the veil of what he wanted her to be.

  “I hurt you,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Intentionally,” he added, like someone tracing the edge of a confession. “Knowing you didn’t want it.”

  “Yes.”

  He bowed his head. The wings that had once seemed so invincible slumped, feathers dull as coal dust in the stove light.

  “I don’t know how to live with that,” he admitted.

  “You don’t get to choose whether you live with it,” she said. “You already do. The only choice you have now is whether you keep doing it.”

  He lifted his gaze. He looked defenseless, without his usual anger or sharp, twisting superiority. Just a man facing, perhaps for the first time, the full shape of what he had become.

  “And if I try to be… other than that?” he asked. “If I fail?”

  “You will,” she said. “Often.”

  “Comforting.”

  “But,” she went on,” we have this.” She tapped her breastbone. “The Tuning. You can’t lie in it. Every time you move toward being that man again, you’ll feel what it does to me. Every time you take one step the other way, I’ll feel that, too. We can use that.”

  “We?”

  “You want to live long enough to try and fix what you broke,” she said. “I want to live long enough to see if you actually mean that. So yes. We.”

  The word opened painfully bright within him.

  “And what do you get in this arrangement?” he asked.

  She thought of Mallow, and Sena, and Tanel under the apple tree. And Saint Fillan, bells chiming in her antlers.

  “Safety,” she said.

  “From what?”

  “From you.”

  The sea thundered against the cliff.

  Morgan nodded slowly. “Then we begin there,” he said.