Chapter Text
It was the music that made her do it. Or that's what Sloane tells herself, at least, when a moment of what must be temporary insanity takes over. It's Tyrrish, and she knows half the cadets in the overcrowded pub in Aretia don't understand a word, but she knows he will. That's definitely it - not the fact that she can't stop thinking about the words "you're life."
There's a strange, borderline unhinged mood in the pub - people either drinking to celebrate being alive, to mourn the lost, or both. The effect is that she's dead sober, surrounded by a sea of sloppy drunks and practically drowning in melancholy. Maybe that's it, that strangeness, she tells herself, that leads her away from her friends (and the space amongst them that Aaric should be standing in) and to the corner where he sits alone. She really doesn't know what makes her do it, but before she can second guess herself, she plants herself in the chair across from him. It's quieter over here, set apart from the other cadets and the musicians and the flowing liquor.
"Mairi?"
Her name comes out of Dain's mouth, half question and half sigh, and she fights the urge to look away when he meets her eyes. Eyes here, he'd said. Had it really only been hours ago? She feels as if she's lived lifetimes since she and Thoirt had landed, Dain and Cath hot on their heels, to the image of Mira Sorrengail bleeding to death on the ground. He had steadied her and she had told him to fuck off - an automatic reaction that makes her feel the smallest tinge of regret now.
"You're not dead." It comes out of her mouth unbidden, in a rush, and in her head, she hears Thoirt make a sound that sounds suspiciously exasperated.
"Thank all the gods I didn't choose you for your people skills."
"Not. Helping. If you're so good at this, why don't you try it?" Sloane grumbles down the bond.
Laughter fills her head. "I'll have you know I'm very popular with -."
"Ew," she thinks emphatically before shutting out Thoirt's chortling and looking at Dain to find him already watching her.
His mouth quirks up at one corner, but there's no real mirth in it. "Sorry to disappoint, Mairi."
Sloane opens her mouth to respond, but closes it in favor of really looking at him. He looks haunted, hollow eyed and exhausted, his ramrod straight posture slumped. His hair is damp and the skin of his cheeks and hands red and a little chapped, like he had tried to literally scrub the day's death and horror out of his skin. It's the most vulnerable she's ever seen him, and she fights the sudden, inexplicable urge to reach across the table to touch his fingertips.
"I'm not," she stumbles. "We've lost too many already. Quinn, Xaden..." A lump rises in her throat. "And we don't know where Violet or Garrick or-." He flinches at the mention of Violet's name. Of course he does. "I don't want anyone else to die," she finishes. "Even you."
"Even you?" Thoirt repeats in her mind and she swears even her dragon is embarrassed for her.
"If you're so emotionally intelligent, then you can feel free to help me out anytime," she all but hisses back down the bond. " I don't even know why I'm sitting here but it would be weird to just walk away, right?"
"You think that would be what makes it weird?" Thoirt chortles. "Try not to break the wingleader's heart more, will you? If not for him, for my sanity - Cath is in an awful mood and he's a real pain in the ass."
When she slams her shields down again with a huff, Dain is still looking at her, his molten brown gaze steady but guarded. "Even me?" he repeats. "Thanks, Mairi."
She wants to crawl under the table and disappear. "I didn't mean it like that. I don't know what I meant. I don't know why I'm here," she babbles. "Maybe I should let you get back to your night and-."
The corner of Dain's mouth twitches again - is that humor or pity in his eyes? Either way, she silently prays for Thoirt to immolate her where she sits, just to put her out of her misery. "Yes, because you're interrupting such a wild evening," he says with a self deprecating chuckle, gesturing to the corner he's tucked into, alone. "You don't have to go. You don't have to stay either, but you don't have to go. I think you saying you don't want me to die might be one of the nicest things you've ever said to me."
Something that feels a little like shame tugs at her. "I saw you sitting alone," she stumbles.
"That's not new." For the first time, he averts his gaze from hers. "Not since -."
Sloane knows what he's about to say. Not since Liam. Not since his best friend very publicly threatened to kill him if he touched her. Her stomach clenches and she looks down at the table too.
She surprises even herself when she speaks. "Thank you." But by the time she's opened her mouth, the words "I'm sorry" are halfway out of his.
Dain looks back up at her like she's just siphoned the breath right out of his lungs. "Thank you?" he repeats. "What could you possibly be thanking me for, Mairi?"
"Today," she explains. "You risked your life following me past the wards. You helped me, you saved Mira. You haven't immediately court martialed me for disregarding a direct order to deliver some mail or quoted the Codex to me. We've been talking for a whole minute and you haven't even started bossing me around yet. That might be a record."
At that, an actual, surprised laugh escapes his mouth. "Not yet I haven't," he agrees. "Not that you would listen anyway."
Sloane huffs a laugh too and tries to shove down the feeling that rises in her when she sees some light return to his eyes. "Fair enough, I probably wouldn't."
"But I guess I might give you a pass because you saved Mira, Mairi," he continues, tone serious. "It was fucking incredible."
Something in her chest cracks a little at that and she has to avert her eyes again, realizing in horror that she might actually cry. "It was your power." It comes out so quietly that he has to lean across the small table to hear her, close enough for her to learn that he smells exactly like pine trees and somehow, like the earth after the rain. There's a word for that smell, she knows, but she can't bring it to her tongue when she's so consumed by the way he's speaking to her. "I was just the conduit."
"My power wouldn't have been enough to save her without you." Suddenly, his gaze is sharp, intense, and she feels her cheeks heat under his scrutiny. "I couldn't have given it to her or Brennan myself. All I can do with my power is take, not give." He stops and she catches it again, the slightest flinch. He's talking about Liam, she thinks, and she has to blink back tears. She chances a look back up at him, and represses a shiver. No one has ever looked at her that way - he looks like he's searching her face for something only she knows the answer to, and she's only vaguely beginning to grasp what the question is.
"Did you or did you not hear the wing leader tell you that you are life this afternoon?" Thoirt's voice floats back into her head, uncharacteristically gentle. " Or are human memories that tragically short?"
No, Sloane remembers that perfectly well. Along with the warmth of him when she'd wrapped her hand around his wrist, the humming of power eagerly rising to meet her touch, how solid and firm he had been while she was in danger of flying to pieces.
"I couldn't have done it on my own either," she blurts. "I froze. I was so afraid of hurting someone else that I would've stood there and watched her die because I didn't know what to do. And you stayed with me and you told me I was life , and you trusted me not to suck your life force out too."
Dain's hand is on top of the table now, close enough for her to touch, but he doesn't reach further, just sits there, still staring at her in a way that makes her stomach flip. The world has gone quiet in a way - she is tangentially aware of the music and the other people in the room, but everything has narrowed to him.
"I meant it, Mairi. When I said you were life."
And gods damn her, Sloane reaches. Her fingertips meet his halfway and something in her ignites. "You let me hurt you," she manages around the lump in her throat. She doesn't just mean at Draithus. The shift between them is actually palpable.
"You didn't," he answers without hesitation. "I'm right here. Like I said, you weren't going to kill me, no matter how much you wanted to."
"I don't want to kill you." It comes out more forcefully than she intends, and his eyebrows raise for the briefest moment, his eyes full of something she can't name. "Or hurt you."
"If you really had wanted to," Dain starts, his voice sounding like it's been raked over hot coals. "I would've handed you the fucking dagger myself, Mairi."
The way her breath catches in her throat, he might as well have stuck a dagger between her ribs. A million words race through her mind, but what comes out is one word. "Sloane," she corrects him, barely audibly.
"What?"
Before she can stop herself, she wraps her fingers around his wrist again, just like she had at Draithus. This time, instead of power, she feels the racing of his pulse - the proof of a different kind of power she didn't know she had over him. "Sloane," she repeats more firmly. "Say my name, wing leader."
"Dain." His voice is firm. "Say mine, Sloane." She comes dangerously close to telling him that she likes the sound of her name when he says it. And when he adds the word "please," she contends with the sudden, completely insane impulse to climb across the small table and plant herself in his lap, but she becomes dimly aware once again that they are not alone.
Instead, she surprises them both by tugging his hand to her mouth and brushing her mouth across his fingertips, keeping her eyes on his. His pupils blow wide. "Dance with me," she says.
"What?" Dain is looking at her like she's grown a second head and maybe like she punched him in the face just for good measure.
Sloane realizes she has caught him off guard, and that she loves it, and she files that away in the back of her head with every other confusing feeling that has sprung up since he landed behind her on the battlefield.
"Dance with me, Dain ," she repeats, and she smiles at him, really smiles, and watches his gaze drop to her mouth when she says his name.
"I don't..." Is he blushing? Sloane resists the urge to say out loud, caught up in temporary insanity as she is, that he's gorgeous like this, but gods, she thinks it. His hair is no longer damp by now, and unruly curls fall over his forehead and the slope of his ears. His eyes are still ringed by dark circles, but up close, she sees that his eyes are just a few shades darker than the wildflower honey her mother had used to sweeten her tea, and full of unexpected warmth when he looks at her. He has an extraordinarily kissable mouth, she thinks. His skin is sun-kissed and she suddenly wants to run her fingers over the faded outline his flight goggles have left on his face, maybe smooth her thumbs over those dark, exhausted circles under his eyes. She realizes that his lip has been recently split and notices a bruise darkening his jaw, and it reminds her that they're at war. But they're alive. He still looks vulnerable like this, a little disheveled, still a little haunted, but the way he's looking at her, unflinchingly and open, makes her swallow hard. He's looking at her like she's absolution.
"You don't what?" she manages.
"Dance," he admits. "I don't have any kind of rhythm."
"I don't believe that for a second." She lets herself laugh as he squirms a little under her gaze. "Don't worry, I have an excellent sense of rhythm," she adds, intrigued as he visibly tries to school his face into neutrality at her words. "We're not dead but odds are pretty good we'll die next time, so dance with me."
"Ever the optimist, aren't you? Nothing more romantic than the threat of embarrassment coupled with impending doom." Thoirt's amusement ripples down the bond again, and Sloane resists the urge to scowl.
"Go be popular somewhere else. I'll let you know if I need you to roast anyone," she retorts. Like her. Definitely her.
She watches the struggle in Dain's face, knows he's thinking of Quinn and Violet and maybe even Liam, and gods know how many other people he's lost in the last three years, and her heart clenches when she remembers that his father had disowned him for doing what was right. At least she had known beyond a shadow of a doubt when her parents died that they loved her and Liam all the way to their last breaths. She thinks about the protection runes her mother had made for every single one of the marked ones. His father had somehow looked at his living, breathing son and orphaned him with his words. She looks at him and for a moment, the ghost of Liam hangs between them and she sucks in a sharp breath. She wonders briefly who protects him or if anyone ever has. "Dain. Please," she adds. She can't remember the last time she used that word with him - maybe never. "I don't care if you're a good dancer. I would actually love it if you suck, I've never gotten to feel superior to you at anything. I just can't sit anymore, you know? I feel like I'm going to crawl out of my skin."
He relents. "No laughing at me," he orders with a playfulness she's never heard from him as she tugs him from his chair.
"No promises," Sloane retorts, and she is under no illusion that she's dragging him of her own strength - he's going willingly, even if he's dragging his feet a little. Still, it's the tiniest bit gratifying that he's granting her this small concession. She steers him into the crowd and turns to face him, watching him turn red all the way to the tips of his ears as he meets her eyes again. She strains her head to look him up and down, and laughs at his stiff posture and his hands, fisted loosely at his sides. "You can touch me, you know. It's generally accepted when people dance together."
"Where?" Dain questions, his brow furrowed just enough to make her bite back another laugh as his cheeks flush again. She desperately wants to reach up and smooth the creases in his brow with her fingertips.
"Where do you touch me?" Sloane repeats gently. Anywhere, she thinks suddenly - insanely. Everywhere. She wonders briefly if she's managed to pick up a contact high from the churam a group of cadets is smoking across the room, because clearly, she is losing her fucking mind.
"Where can I?" Dain clarifies , and he's looking at her like that again and he's biting his fucking lower lip and her laugh dies in her throat. She has never seen him so off balance or anything but perfectly composed, closed off, and seeing him just a little undone gives her the wild urge to kiss him until she forgets who they are and the constant, painful tension between them.
"Please refrain from mounting the wing leader in public," Thoirt chimes in drily, and suddenly, Sloane knows her face is burning too. She tries to tell herself she wasn't thinking about that, but the truth is she definitely wasn't not thinking about that, and it wouldn't be the first time she didn't not think about it. He is right there, and he's beautiful, and he smells like home, and some of the crippling weight of the day feels like it's lightening when she meets his eyes.
She glances up at him and takes a deep breath before stretching onto her toes to wrap an arm around his neck, bringing them nearly nose to nose. "Just listen to the music. And follow me," she instructs, and uses her free arm to guide his arm around her waist. Dain stiffens the slightest against her and she knows she shouldn't be enjoying his awkwardness so much, but it stokes the warm feeling that had been rising in her since the moment she touched his hand. "You can touch me," she repeats. "I swear I won't stab you."
"I'm still processing that." But Dain smiles as he presses a hand gently into her lower back. "You just might be the death of me anyway though," he adds, then sucks in a breath when she tugs him closer.
"Do you even know how to follow something other than the Codex, wing leader?" she teases, even as she starts to lead him to the music and finds him a more than willing follower.
"I thought we established that you were going to call me by my name," he says, his voice low in her ear. "And I don't know if you noticed, but I did an awful lot of following you today, Sloane." Following her ass, in fact, she recalled him saying, just before she - they - had saved Mira.
Sloane bites back the retort that was on the tip of her tongue and nods quietly, wrapping her arms more tightly around him. He had been either lying or drastically underselling his sense of rhythm, she muses - he moves with the same steady grace on a dance floor that he does on a sparring mat or the back of a dragon - and they fall into an easy, comfortable rhythm together.
"Sloane," he starts, and her heart leaps into her throat and her mind races with the possibilities of what he might say while he's looking at her so intently. Every single possibility she comes up with threatens to buckle her knees, so she dares to press one fingertip to his mouth, stealing the speech from him, but not before he plants a feather light kiss on her fingertip. Her knees almost give out anyway. Something about his touch is setting her aglow, a gentler fire than the burning resentment she's fought so hard to maintain.
"Just listen," Sloane manages thickly, turning her face into his chest and inhaling that earthy, glorious smell. She isn't ready for what he might say - not here or now. "This is why I came over to you in the first place." It's not quite the truth, but she doesn't know herself yet what the truth is.
He cocks his head momentarily, listening to the music as if he's absorbing it for the first time. "Tyrrish," he says simply.
"Yes." She chances a glance up at his face. "Xaden and Bodhi and Garrick, gods know where they are. Imogen won't come out of her room and won't let me in either. And you -."
"Speak Tyrrish," Dain finishes for her. "And yet we haven't spoken a single word in it," he adds with a wry smile.
"I forgot," Sloane answers, feeling the red creep back up her cheeks as she utters the half truth. "Or I got distracted, I guess. You were sitting over there looking as lonely as I feel," she confesses. "And I realized I was glad you weren't dead." She turns her head into his chest again and feels him shake with the laugh he's trying to suppress. "Trust me, I was as surprised as you were," she adds, flailing for the shreds of her dignity.
"Hearing you say that, I'm still not positive that I'm not already dead," he responds. "But if I am, there's no way in hell I was good enough in life to deserve this." He drops his chin to the top of her head and lets out a long sigh. To call what they're doing "dancing" is to use the term in the loosest possible sense - his hands have relaxed onto her hips, content to let her steer, which has begun to equate to nothing but swaying.
"No, you're definitely here," Sloane assures him - in Tyrrish this time, and slides a hand from his neck down to rest lightly on his chest.
"Well, thank all the gods for that." As soon as the words come from his mouth, she freezes in his arms. He doesn't just speak Tyrrish, he speaks it beautifully , and it makes her chest ache because it sounds like a home that no longer exists and that he'll never see.
"Dain?" It comes out cautious, a question, but her mind is made up.
"Yes." From his mouth, it isn't a question. There is nothing she could possibly ask of him that he would say no to. Her head is still spinning from his admission that if she'd really wanted to kill him, he'd have put the fucking dagger in her hand himself. For almost a year, she had tried to punish him at every opportunity. She knew she couldn't win a fight with hands or blades, but she had tried to hurt him with her words daily. Knowing that she had succeeded doesn't feel like victory - it had never occurred to her that he might be punishing himself too. That quiet revelation of his pain had shaken her, shifted something in her that suddenly feels seismic.
"Do you trust me?" she asks, but she's already leading him by the hand, off the floor and outside, into the quiet. He's already following when he answers, again with no hesitation, "yes." He had trusted her enough to let her put her hands on him and pull his power from his veins, for fuck's sake, when she'd given him every reason to believe she wanted to hurt him.
"Good," Sloane says, heart hammering in her chest as he meets her eyes in that steady, quiet way. "Because I think I'm going to kiss you and I don't want to do it with an audience."
"Good," Thoirt echos in her head. "I was beginning to think we'd all die of old age before you came to this conclusion."
"That no audience part includes you."