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Sickly sweet, heavy and cloying. Remus had been coaxed into eating beans on toast an hour ago, and the smell still lingered. Hope lay next to him, the dull ache of neglected hunger keeping her just tethered in reality, despite the circumstances teasing her into the pleasant promise of delirium.
She knew she was in the in-between. Generally, it was hard to know when you were in the middle - in the waiting room - but this predicament, where every part of their life, from their physical belongings to their relationship to their one and only child, had been strewn about the little two-bed like scattered glass on the street corner… well, this was obviously the in-between. Waiting for reality to pick a path - for the timelines to collapse into one.
They had been themselves.
And then they had been scattered.
And soon, they would be something else.
What exactly, was yet to be determined. Would the marriage, their joy, or even the child survive the process? Only the passing of time would tell.
But they weren't there yet. Lying on the mattress on the floor of the sitting room, watching the meagre last stripe of of the daylight that the sloppily drawn curtains allowed in to move across the ceiling. Waiting for time to pass.
The shadows lengthened. The church bell down the road rang out. Remus sighed and it shuddered at the tail. He turned to her, pressed his head into her side, and pulled her arm around his shoulders like a shroud.
Ordinarily, she would have had something to say about him cuddling close - risking falling asleep - at six in the evening when bedtime was so close, but what did it matter now? There was no such thing as bedtime. Their life had no routine. No rush for work. No care for structure. Whatever low-effort food was around, whenever it was asked for. The same story, read robotically, again and again on request. Whenever sleep fell, it was permitted. It would only be broken in an hour by nightmares, anyway.
Lyall breached her awareness as he landed heavily in the space next to them, still wearing the same t-shirt and day-at-home relegated shorts he'd worn yesterday. Time-faded and rumpled, but soft and safe in his matching detached misery. He sandwiched Remus between them and tucked an arm across his son, anchored around her waist.
There were things to do, no doubt. Her mind did not linger upon them - she hadn't the energy to even feel the guilt. It would come, eventually. With time. As it was, the mess piled up around them and the smell of the over-sweet tomato sauce in the last clean pan lingered - settled on the unwashed clothes littering the floor, in her hair, on the bedding.
Time had passed. The second hand in the kitchen had made numerous cycles. Remus' breath - made uneven by whatever dream - huffed across her collar, and the church bell chimed.
Lyall's arm tugged tighter and she turned from the ceiling as though wrenching herself away from a play and back to reality. His face was pressed close to the back of Remus' head. She couldn't see his mouth as he reminded her, and his quiet words were spoken into his frizzy hair.
"In twenty-seven minutes."
In twenty-seven minutes.
They listened to the seconds tick, counted the breaths, watched the shadows disappear into the dull cast of March evening, until seven twenty-seven came upon them.
This time, five years ago, in the over-bright ward, deaf to every clamouring noise except the very first scream of their wet-kitten of a son, close-fisted, bandy-legged and indignant, shuddering in the cold light of the world. Strange how every care had fallen away and the world had tunnelled, much the same as now, except not in self-preserving apathy, but in utter disbelief, that the waiting room of the last few months had collapsed into this reality. One where the bewildered little baby had found a slither of comfort tucked against her - head in her collar as he was now, but the rest of him no more than a handful.
She tucked her chin, kissed the top of his fuzzy head, and, noting that the day had come and gone without the boy between them even noticing, waited with empty-chested indifference for the welcome touch of guilt to shake them into life again.