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Snow was still falling in Ishgard.
Night cloaked the city, leaving it entombed in silence and stillness with the heavy grey skies above. Timeworn streets and elegantly manicured pathways lay empty, with surfaces slowly slipping away into obscurity beneath a thick, windless layer of softly falling snow. The lonely darkness held its breath in anticipation of the arrival of its long-absent interloper, while the watchful gazes of ancient statues silently tracked the shadowed, purposeful movements of what seemed to be the Pillars’ only living occupant on such an evening.
For a breath of quiet, the Warrior of Light ducked beneath the Arc of the Venerable. Mantled with snow, she pressed her back to the cold stone wall and bowed her head beneath merciful shadows. Muscle memory ensnared her, and she tugged the hood of her coat further over her head, tucking her identifiable hair and features further away. On either side of her, snow fell thickly onto the streets, creating a nearly opaque curtain beyond the edges of the archway above. Around her, the city lay silent, lanterns long extinguished, oblivious to the fact that it had gained another soul.
Only a few steps remained between her and the destination that she’d been mapping out in her mind. She could never have predicted the days, weeks, and months that would pass from the last time she’d set out from its doorstep. The knowledge sat sharp and painful against her breastbone.
She’d left the Scions behind with no small amount of trepidation at being caught leaving. Still heavily tasked with rousing her companions from their strange, soulless slumber, she was acutely aware of how it would look for her to suddenly abandon them. The Exarch – G’raha Tia – in particular, was bright-eyed and lively since the Tempest, eager to make good on promises made and vows unspoken.
His guilt was so palpable sometimes that she felt like she might suffocate on it, even now that she had finally – finally – traversed the rift to return to the Source.
The choking claustrophobia, however, made it all the easier to let yet another half-truth slip quietly through her lips as she’d met Tataru’s questioning gaze in the doorway of the Rising Stones.
“I’ll come back soon.”
The simple sentence was loaded heavily with implications that weren’t, at their core, entirely true. Even the Scions couldn’t begin to unravel the tangled mess of conflicting emotions that lay heavy in the suggestion that she needed to be alone, but none of them dared question it. She’d headed down the stone steps into Mor Dhona without a backward glance, tugging her hood up to cover her face and letting all that was unsaid lay in a broken trail behind her like smouldering shrapnel.
The burden of saving the First. The trials of destroying Wardens. The excruciating pain of the Light consuming her, clogging her throat and tearing her soul apart at its edges.
The burning, terribly knowing look in Emet-Selch’s eyes on hers after she’d run him through.
In the Ishgardian darkness, the hero closed her eyes, drawing cold, clean air deeply through her nose in steadying breaths. Above her, beyond her line of sight, the churning clouds thinned, just for an instant. Silently, a distant tapestry of stars peeked through the snow, flickering dimly in the night sky.
A few moments, and the gap closed again. Far below, the warrior opened her eyes, steadier than a moment before.
Somewhere in the distance, carried on the faintest breeze, she nearly caught the haunting melody of a piano. Melancholic and not wholly unfamiliar, it was distant as a dream, but enough to tether her back into the moment, and to where she stood.
The First was beyond her; and for now, behind her. For now, she was a ghost; no one from Mor Dhona knew where she’d gone, and no one from Ishgard knew she’d returned.
For now, after paying her tithe in blood, she could come home.
Breathing out slowly, the Warrior of Light pushed away from the cold wall. Stepping back out into the falling snow, she let her steady footsteps lead her down a pathway she knew with a deep-set familiarity. Indeed, there had been a time when she’d known every shadowy corner, every hidden alcove in the Holy See, with a familiar intimacy that burned bright against her memories. It was easy to keep to the darkened corners, knowing where the blind spots were should any wayward soul wake in the night and glance out their windows.
She was used to prying eyes. And there were some things in her life that she would take meticulous, desperate pains to keep secret from them.
She knew he’d been watching her.
Her entire life, she’d endured the unnatural glances people spared her; ones that spoke of the tragedy of her existence, the foretelling of doom, and the disappointment she’d always managed to manifest into. Since her public accusation of regicide, the glances had only deepened in complexity, particularly in the cloistered streets of Ishgard – no one seemed to know what to make of her. A ward of one of the high houses, Eikon slayer, murderer, Warrior of Light. She frightened them in her way, that much she knew. She wasn’t surprised anymore when people crossed to the other side of the street when she passed.
And now, it seemed, she’d turned the head of the Lord Commander as well. Only this time, the expression in his eyes when they landed on her was softer than she expected, and heavy with questions that she didn’t know how to interpret, never mind answer.
“There’s a good fire going in the main hall.” Aymeric’s voice was quiet as he closed the door to the congregation behind him, shutting away the warm golden light from within, and muffling the distant sounds of chatter and cutlery clattering.
She turned just enough to indicate that she’d heard him, her breath forming delicate clouds of mist in front of her when she shook her head. She stood facing the square with her arms crossed across her chest, filtered in minute degrees of shadows just outside of the circle of nearby torchlight. “I don’t mind the cold.”
She didn’t say that what she needed was space.
“No, you don’t,” he answered calmly, drawing up alongside her.
He didn’t say that he knew what she needed was space.
Around them, soldiers milled leisurely about in the silvery moonlight of the snow-dusted square. Shift change had rolled around, and Ishgardian knights moved in varying degrees of alertness to and from their posts. She’d seen the Lord Commander arranging these very schedules on similar nights before, ensuring no knight went too long without proper food or rest. The better to guard the city, yes, but also a particular flavour of kindness that seemed so few and far between in other military operations she’d seen.
It made her gaze flick sideways towards him, watching him exchange a quiet word with a bright-eyed young dragoon as he passed, clasping his hand steadily on the lad’s shoulder after a few moments of low conversation when he moved away towards the barracks again. Something about the Commander’s demeanour caught her gaze, and held it. She’d met countless men and women in positions of power in the arguably short amount of time she’d been a high-profile adventurer.
None of them had ever caught her attention the way Aymeric had.
Maybe, she thought traitorously to herself, he’d turned her head in return.
The thought made her blood turn to slush, and she turned away before she was caught looking.
The door behind them opened again, and for a moment light spilled warm and golden onto the cobbled ground, heralded by the sounds of voices from within. The light caught the side of her face, and she turned her face further away, conscious of herself in a way that was unfamiliar to her and settled, hard and uncomfortable, between her ribs.
“They’ll miss you in there.” Her throat was oddly constricted, and she swallowed around it, gaze piercing upwards towards the star-studded sky.
His laugh was low, and seemed to run across the back of her neck like a warm breeze. “No, I think not. I was one of the Temple Knights myself once, my lady. I know better than most how some of the brighter moments of camaraderie can only be permitted to happen when the Commander is occupied elsewhere.”
Her glance was sharp, and more suspicious than she wanted it to be. “My lady now, is it?”
She didn’t expect his quiet smile, nor the way his gaze dropped in thoughtful reconsideration of his own words. She’d never met someone so willing to admit their own mistakes before, nor so easily willing to learn from them. “My apologies. I fear you’ve gained so many illustrious titles of late, I’m rather at a loss of which is more appropriate.”
The feeling in her throat turned sour, and she looked away again as her blood began to crystalize with sluggish threads of ice. “I see.”
“I–no, forgive me.” He was quick to move, and quicker to freeze when he seemed to realise that he’d taken unconscious steps towards her.
Too close.
“You’re not…” His exhale was heavy, and hearing him falter so was uncharacteristic enough to draw her eye once more. That same maddening emotion was flickering in his eyes, the one she had no idea how to interpret but refused to flinch away from. “I don’t want to address you by any title. I don’t want to address a story, or a rumour. You aren’t– I came out here to talk to you. Just you.”
Gods.
He stood close enough that if she turned to leave, their shoulders would brush. He stood far enough away that those passing on their way towards The Forgotten Knight didn’t glance twice at them.
Her skin felt like it didn’t fit as properly as it had a moment ago. The air between them was thick, and heavy, and harder to breathe in.
He said her name, just once. Every letter curled around each of her ribs, warm and soothing. Their clouded breaths mingled in the air, and it felt daring.
“I don’t want you to feel unwelcome here,” he continued, low. “I don’t want you to consider yourself any type of burden, or risk to us. I don’t want you to think that you and your friends are only permitted to stay based on what benefit you can serve. Our burdens, our battles, should be ours alone.”
Carefully, the Warrior of Light breathed out, steady and calming. “That’s a lot of things that you don’t want,” she said, quiet. Turning, she felt the carefully measured distance between them stretch, pushing against the boundaries they’d set and testing its limits. He stepped back a little, and the space held still and poised in the winter air. “What is it that you do want from me, Lord Commander?”
His eyes burned on hers, but he shook his head. “Nothing.”
Everything, he didn’t say.
“Nothing that you aren’t willing to give.”
Everything, she didn’t answer.
Behind them, the door to the congregation slammed open, heralding the arrival of a group of loudly chattering knights, their arms around each other in easy companionship as they passed the commander and the warrior. Without another word, Aymeric turned away to allow them space to move between them, and walked back inside.
At her sides, the hero’s fingers flexed, just enough to test the emptiness she suddenly held.
The manor was heavy with silence.
The eternal winter may have only been since the Calamity, but the cold had always been harsh in Coerthas, and the cities were built with that expectation in mind. Any sound she may have made entering the house was absorbed into the heavy furnishings, sucking sound from the air itself. She felt formless, drifting noiselessly through the empty house and up the staircase as snow melted sluggishly off her coat and from her hair where she’d pushed her hood back.
The manor was familiar to her in ways that the Rising Stones never seemed to be. She might allow the Scions to refer to it as home without comment, but home wasn’t a place. Home breathed, somewhere above her, left behind for too long without an explanation. The crushing weight of it all made her footsteps feel heavy, like she was moving through water.
The bedchamber was draped in shadow when she slipped through the door. Without moonlight, the darkness was deeper, filtered in places with the faint, shadowy impressions of the snow falling thickly outside the window. The fire was low in the hearth, and her shadow swung ghostly spires across the floor as she moved past it and deeper into the room.
He was asleep. Prone on one side of the bed, he lay heavy and motionless in open exhaustion. Her gaze caught on the way his chest rose and fell in slow, steady movements, a rhythm so intimately familiar to her that her own traitorous heart nearly stuttered in its instinctive attempt to fall in time with it.
If she’d paid attention, she could have mapped out the life he’d been living in her absence, merely from the changes in the room. The way he’d moved the stove closer to his personal desk, so he could have warmth and coffee late into the sleepless evenings. The jumbled handwriting on his pages, so dissimilar to his usual script, speaking of endless, lonely nights. The way he’d carefully, meticulously cleared every other surface, like even the bare remnants of furnishings he usually kept were too stark of a reminder of something he’d rather forget.
She stepped towards him as though in a dream; slow, and not wholly of her own choosing.
The mattress barely dipped as she eased herself down. Sleep lay heavily across him, holding him safely in a deep slumber that didn’t register her presence as she stretched out carefully alongside him. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the familiar curves of his face came into clearer focus, tightening painfully around her throat. Her head settled heavily onto the pillow next to his, her body curled towards him without daring to touch just yet.
This, then. This, for the Lightwardens, and the horror, and the stench of melting flesh that seemed to follow her wherever she went. This, for the liquid lava searing through her veins, for the waterless oceans, for the suffocating skies. This, to burn away the aching, unexplainable emptiness of heartbreak that had settled deep in the secret recesses of her soul, as though it had belonged there all along.
Only this; Aymeric’s chest rising and falling, undisturbed, protected and safe. Only her fingertips ghosting a breath above his exposed collarbone, letting her grief and exhaustion melt at the edges of her thawing, fracturing heart.
I’ve been gone too long.
In heavy, expectant silence, she watched him sleep. Her eyes mapped out the minute changes she found in his expression, weighing heavily against her own guilt and regret at how much time had passed. She watched his slow, steady breathing, marvelling at the simple miracle of it; Aymeric’s breath from Aymeric’s lungs.
She hadn’t let herself miss him. Affording emotion, particularly one that wrapped around her soul as this did, was a dangerous luxury that she’d forced herself to be cut off from. She left room only for the Warrior of Darkness, the hero of the Source. For a full year, she’d gone back to who she’d been before, as best as she knew how; the woman who would never think to miss the way it felt to be held, and loved, like she was something precious to be cherished even if she’d never accomplished anything in her life.
To have it hit her now, all at once – her longing, her loneliness, her anger, and her brutally broken heart – nearly knocked the breath out of her lungs. It burned through her chest, a different pain from the way the Light felt, even as her heartbeat attempted to once again settle into its familiar rhythm, perfectly in tandem with his.
Laying beside him, after months of not letting herself want this – only ever this – left her feeling terrifyingly close to breaking.
With one hand, she carefully reached out to gently brush his dark hair away from his forehead. He was warm, and real, and so extraordinarily alive that her blood burned with it. She wouldn’t let herself blink; she needed to see the instant he opened his eyes. Of all the vibrant blues of crystal on the First, there was a single shade that was perpetually missing, and it was the only one she wanted – needed – to see.
The moment his eyes were open, they landed on her face, and they both stopped breathing.
It was as though the colour and sound in her life had suddenly been turned back to normal. The fog she’d been walking through was burned away simply by the look in his eyes, the one where if she remembered her dreams, she’d surely dream about. A part of her had barely been existing; now, she was laying here, and it was real. Aymeric was real, being back on the Source was real, and all the bloodshed and horror and sacrifice she’d battled through had finally brought her back to him.
Just like she’d promised.
For a breath of quiet, he merely stared at her, studying her face as he properly drove himself towards wakefulness. He looked at her like she was a ghost, and maybe she was. She pulled her hand back from his temple, hovering her fingertips in the purgatory of the empty space on the bed between them.
“Aymeric.” She felt her lips shape around his name, tasting it on her tongue for the first time since she’d been ripped away to the First.
The sound of her voice – more hoarse than it had been before, burned and deepened with a pain that she didn’t know how to describe – seemed to trigger something in him, and the look in his eyes nearly broke her when he surged forwards, reaching desperately for her.
And then, gods, then .
Then she was in his arms, pulled to his chest so tightly she couldn’t draw a proper breath, and it was as though the world had righted itself once more. Aymeric, her Aymeric, was here, and alive, and safe, and she suddenly felt dangerously like she was going to cry. She pressed her face into his chest, taking a deep, cleansing breath, letting the feel of his warm skin push away every agony-ridden moment that had finally led her back here. He surrounded and consumed her, whispering her name like a plea against her forehead, her cheeks, her jaw; anywhere he could reach. He whispered fervent prayers of gratitude into her hair, crushing her to him, and she realised he was trembling, too.
For the first time in a long time, she was whole once more, sundered soul be damned. People were dead; good people. The Ascian was dead too, and at her hand, but she was alive, more alive than she’d been in months, cradled here in the darkness like she was something precious to be preserved, not wielded as a weapon in someone else’s grand plans.
Aymeric’s arms tightened around her, pressing her down and wholly surrounding her, shielding her from the world and the gods themselves with his body as he pulled back, just enough, to press his forehead to hers. One hand traced the edges of her face with tender reverence, and she burned with broken regret. He should never have had reason to look like that.
Especially not because of her.
Apologies lingered acid-thick on her tongue, but her jaw locked around them, swallowing them down alongside the relieved tears she refused to shed. He traced his thumb under the curve of her eye anyway, catching the threat of them and pressing his lips to her forehead, warm and insistent, his palpable relief making her limbs feel weak.
I love you. I miss you. I never told you enough, and then I was gone, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. But I love you. I love you so much it terrifies me, and if you cast me out now I think I would finally break.
But then he was kissing her, and kissing her, and kissing her, and she let herself be consumed.
The world could burn. She’d kept her promise.
The first time she’d kissed him was in a hidden church alcove.
She’d found him before the altar to Halone. Watery winter sunlight filtered blue and indigo around him from the towering stained glass windows. His face was impassive as he faced the Fury, spine straight and eyes steady. His lips spoke no prayers, yet his hand on the hilt of the sword at his waist spoke volumes, muscles undulating against an unspoken strain, twitching against unforgiving steel.
No one else ever seemed to notice his tells. She wasn’t quite sure yet what it meant that she did.
He didn’t look at her when she drew next to him, one hand on her own sword at her side in unconscious mimicry. She crossed herself by rote with her free hand as she regarded the elaborate altar, her fingertips moving lightly from her hip to her opposite shoulder in an ancient pantomime of drawing a weapon.
“You are determined, then?” His voice was low, and meant for her ears alone, but his eyes remained fixed heavensward, unflinching beneath the cold, unseeing eyes of the Fury above.
Before she could respond, the door to the church opened somewhere behind them, the sound echoing tenfold through the cavernous space. Docents moved into the cathedral, lighting candles as they went, fighting against the ever-encroaching darkness of Ishgard’s winter afternoons.
He didn’t flinch at the noise, nor the intrusion, but the distance between them – carefully professional, always professional, perfectly parallel and worlds apart – was immediately charged in the presence of others. There was nothing untoward about the Lord Commander and the Warrior of Light paying their respects to Halone on the eve of potential battle, but it felt like being caught at something nevertheless.
From the corner of her eye, she saw his gaze drift over to look at her. “Estinien says you’re to leave at dawn.”
She didn’t need to confirm what he already knew. Instead, she focused on the way she could nearly feel every breath he drew, resonating against her very bones.
For a long moment, silence stretched between them.
Then without a word, she turned away. Coloured light shifted across her face as she walked, tracing down her exposed features and sliding away again as she moved, unable to hold onto her. She headed with meaningful purpose towards the shadowed passages off to one side of the basilica, cool, and secretive, and away from prying eyes and ears. The intricate iron gates opened soundlessly for her as she passed through, and she found empty corridors and shrouded alcoves beyond, inaccessible by the general public and forgotten by many of the high priests in favour of the more open and well-lit passages.
She didn’t need to turn her head to know he was following behind her.
The warrior fit her hand against the worn stones of one of the pillars as she stepped into one of those myriad alcoves, hidden from view when she drew to a halt, smoothing her palm against the worn surface like it could steady her. When Aymeric drew up against her shoulder, she could measure the coldness of the stone by comparing it to the warmth filling the space between them.
“If you have concerns about our plans, Lord Commander, you should speak them now.” She turned around to face him, meeting his eyes with the sort of bravery she’d always been accused of, but never seemed to truly feel was earned. “As you say, we leave at dawn.”
The sound of her own voice seemed foreign in this shrouded space. It felt tinged by something that beat hard against her chest, and set her fingertips tingling.
He seemed softer, somehow, in the darkness. His title and responsibility fell dimmer on him here, like the endless responsibilities set upon him only shone in the light of Halone.
She wondered if the same rule applied to her.
She wondered if he could see it too.
“Forgive me.” His own voice had dropped to match her own. Echoes carried in these walls, and their words were for each other alone. He was too close and too far by half; she’d missed when he’d somehow stepped that much closer.
“I agreed to your strategy, and I am not wont to go back on my word. But…” He paused, and his eyes searched hers with startling clarity. “I would ask you, Warrior of Light, if this is a venture you go on because it is your wish, or because you feel the needs of our city have pressured you so.”
His eyes were a sharper blue in this light. She could attempt to chronicle every shade they caught, and still be unable to describe any of them with enough accuracy to describe how they pierced through to parts of her soul that she hadn’t even realised she still possessed.
“Is there a difference?”
Something fell in his gaze, so quickly that she couldn’t find where the difference lay. There was merely a lingering sense of loss that she couldn’t quite name, but was acutely aware of all the same.
“How can you ask such a thing?” He was closer again, and she matched him in reverse, half a step backwards only to find her back pressed against the cold, unforgiving stone wall behind her. “Your life is not weighed by the duties others ask of you. Your decisions should be for yourself, and your own wellbeing.”
She studied his eyes, searching for what had been lost. Parsing out what she found there instead, with a strange, not altogether unwelcome feeling unfolding in her stomach. Like flower petals unfurling. “And if my wellbeing is tied to that of our quest? What then? This is who I am, Lord Commander.”
“Then I will support you as steadfastly as I always have.” His gaze dropped, and for a long, loaded moment, his eyes held at the slight parting of her lips.
For a heartbeat, she stopped breathing; if he noticed, he didn’t voice it.
“But,” he said, nearly a whisper now as his eyes met her once more, “I would ask that you come back.”
Her heart clenched uncomfortably, but she kept her unwavering gaze on his, forcing down the betrayal of her fluttering heartbeat as she nodded her quiet, resigned acceptance. “For Ishgard.”
Impossibly, she felt his gloved fingertips brush tentatively against the delicate skin of her bare wrist, his gaze unfaltering. She couldn’t breathe. “No. Not for Ishgard.”
Something fell away inside of her with a soft shattering feeling.
Like breaking glass. Like thawing ice.
She kissed him.
Immediately, her lips on his set right every stolen glance, every wordless expression, and all the weighted space between empty fingertips. Wrapped as he was in cold steel to protect him from the heartless cruelties of the world, his lips were still as warm as she’d suspected, and for the space of a single heartbeat, she pressed to him like the starving woman she was.
Just as quickly, she pulled away, breathless. Warm he might have been, but the ice still packed around her heart recognized the feeble flame it thought it found in return, and the shards stabbed painfully at her chest where they’d fractured apart. She resisted the urge to press the back of her hand to her lips, fleeting and foolish. She didn’t want to see the expression in his eyes, nor acknowledge the consequences of her deepest loneliness set bare. Her throat constricted, dry, and tried to find words to set the situation right.
“Aymeric–”
Only the quick movement of his hand to the back of her head kept her from hitting the wall when he surged forwards. Aymeric pressed his lips to hers with an open surety that betrayed countless imaginings of the exact movement, cradling her head with one hand and wrapping his arm firm around her waist with the other. Her hands flew up to catch in his collar, pulling him close and feeling her fingers brush against the warm skin of his neck she found beneath. He tilted his head to slot their mouths together better, and she was lost, scrambling to press every missed opportunity into this singular moment. Trying to convey without words – words, which always failed her when she needed them most – that if he asked, of course, of course she’d come back to him. Come hell or high water, she was coming back to him.
And the longer he pressed against her in the holy shadows, kissing her breathless, the more she was convinced that every press of his lips was asking her to do just that.
Much later, she curled against him, draped sideways across his lap in front of the re-kindled fireplace. It was unbearable to be separated from him now; to not be touching him was akin to losing a limb, fragile and exposed as she was. Though unspoken, his mutual feeling was palpable, manifested in the way he couldn’t seem to stop tracing the lines of her ribs with one hand, or his consistent impulse to press his lips to her bare shoulders and neck.
Yet he still pulled the relocated blanket up around them both, just in case the fire wasn’t warm enough against her bare skin. It felt like an extra layer shielding them both from the world, and she relished it, running her fingers lightly over the old scars on his arms.
“I’m sorry.”
Words were difficult. The whole of her being felt as though it were going to pulse out of her chest, bleeding out through the fissures in her soul that the Light had created and should never have existed. She didn’t know what was holding her together anymore, but she suspected a lot of it had to do with Aymeric’s arms around her, cradling her to his chest while his head dipped low, his face hidden in the curve between her neck and her shoulder.
For a long moment, he was quiet, breathing against her skin. The fire crackled gently, and she carded her fingers through his dark hair, rhythmic and patient. She didn’t deserve forgiveness; that much she’d made her peace with long ago, before she’d even met him.
But he, of all people, deserved honesty. And she’d never once lied to him.
“Will you tell me what happened?” His voice was soft, but the question cut through her nevertheless and her fingers tensed against his scalp. He pressed his mouth silently to her neck, holding himself there, waiting for her pulse to even out again beneath his lips before speaking again.
“I never doubted. You kept your promise.” Correctly interpreting her tension, he pulled her closer against him, smoothing his hand along the length of her exposed thigh, soothing her with warm, steady touches that they’d both been starved of for so long. “But I’d like to hear it. If you’ll tell me.”
A part of her resolve hardened to steel, then and there. Never again would she give him a reason to doubt that he could have everything, anything he wanted from her.
Fingertips underneath his chin, she coaxed his head up to meet her, her kiss open and languid. She couldn’t press her conviction into him with touch alone, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.
Pausing for breath, she rested her forehead lightly against his, letting her eyes fall closed. Talking about the First felt like sucking out a poison; painful, but necessary if she wanted to live.
“I have to go back,” she began softly, the regret heavy in her tone. She felt his hands tighten involuntarily around her, and she pressed herself closer in return. “An invocation went wrong.”
As the night crept slowly towards dawn, she told him everything. The sin eaters. The Lightwardens. The trapped Scions, the Exarch, the Source and its Sundered reflections.
Emet-Selch.
Through it all, he held her, letting his arms around her hold her up through her memories of the pain, the bloodshed, the unbearable loneliness of the burden she’d borne. He pressed his love in soft kisses against her temple, soaking in her tale and letting his pain show. It killed a part of him, in its way, to hear it, and she laced her fingers with his, holding tight as she forced the tale out.
But he never faltered.
When it was over, he kissed her until she was breathless, further conversation shelved for a later moment. Outside, the dawn went on without them.
Eventually, she would need to get dressed again. Eventually, she would need to leave his warm home, and warmer bed, to face the cold alone again. Eventually, she would return to the First, and find a way to bring her cast-off friends home. Undoubtedly, she would encounter further difficulties, further manifestations of fate that tried to keep her away from him, and made her fight all the harder to come back every time. In the meantime, however, they had months of separation to undo, conversations to have, promises to remake, and blessed privacy under which to do it.
They had waited long enough. The world could wait a bit longer.