Yorika
Rain on my face pulls me back to consciousness.
I'm lying on broken stone. Every muscle aches, but I'm whole. Unharmed. The gallery is gone. Scattered rubble and pink puddles where crystal dust mixes with rain.
The Soul-Still. Golden light. Nezavek wrapping around me. Then nothing.
My left hand throbs with warmth. I raise it, finding a silver mark etched into my palm, interwoven threads of light forming a pattern that shifts when I look directly at it.
It pulses with its own rhythm. When I focus on it, whispers rise: gratitude in a hundred voices, power given freely, a gift from the freed.
The bond screams.
Thin, fraying, about to break. I follow that sensation through the ruins, stumbling over debris, scraping my palms on sharp edges.
I find shadow pooling on stone without source or shape. Darkness that shouldn't exist under the open sky. I drop to my knees beside it, plunging my hands into the shadow. They pass through, finding nothing solid.
"Nezavek?"
The shadow ripples. Through the bond, not through sound, his voice comes. "You're alive."
"So are you."
"No. I'm scattered. Dispersing. This is just the last fragment."
I try to gather the shadow, cupping it in my hands. It runs through my fingers.
"There's a portal. Behind you. P?ivi's emergency exit." His voice in my mind grows fainter. "Take it. Go home."
I turn. The portal flickers ten feet away, already destabilizing, its edges eating themselves.
"When I finish dissolving, the bond will break. You'll be free. Human again. Normal."
"Normal." I test the word. "You mean a life without someone who saved wine from a dying world? Without the man who buried a creature in an eternal garden? Without the person who taught me that small things matter?"
"A life where you live."
"I am living. You showed me how. Not just surviving, not just hunting. Living."
"Yorika."
"You wrapped yourself around me. Channeled death through yourself so I could breathe. And now you want me to walk away?" I press my marked palm into the shadow. "Fuck that. You're mine. I chose you in that warehouse, in your bed, in this gallery. I choose you now."
The mark burns. Not hot, not cold, but wrong. Like it's pulling from the marrow of my bones. Silver light pours from my palm into the darkness. The shadow tries to pull away.
"It's for you. The souls gave it to you."
"And I'm giving it to you. My choice. My gift."
The resistance breaks. Light flows into shadow, and Nezavek screams. Not sound but sensation, agony that makes my teeth ache. I feel scattered pieces fighting the pull back to coherence. They want to stay dispersed. Dissolution is easier than reformation.
My arm shakes. The mark pulls from my breath, my blood, the calcium in my bones. Each pulse takes something essential and converts it to light. My vision narrows. My heartbeat stutters.
I don't stop.
Shadow begins to take shape. A denser darkness. Then edges. Then the suggestion of a form. Silver veins run through the shadow, creating patterns I recognize, mirroring my marks, the ones he left on my skin.
"Come back," I say through clenched teeth. "I didn't survive the Collector just to lose you to your own nobility."
More fragments gather. A torso forms, then arms, then legs. Still wrong, twisted, caught between states. The mark pulls harder. I taste copper in my mouth, blood from where I've bitten through my lip.
His hand solidifies first, shadow threaded with silver, reaching for mine. I grab it, and the connection completes. The remaining fragments slam back into him.
He solidifies gasping, on his hands and knees. Not pure shadow anymore. Silver veins pulse beneath skin that shifts between solid and smoke. Where the light runs through him, his skin radiates warmth. Where shadow dominates, he's cold enough to raise goosebumps.
His eyes open, gold shot through with silver threads.
"You." His voice is different, rougher, more solid. "You gave me everything."
"Not everything. Just what you needed." I'm shaking, muscles giving out. "Besides, you already took everything from me. My revenge, my anger, my isolation. Fair trade."
He touches my face with a hand that's solid, real, warm where silver traces his palm. "You can barely sit up."
"So? You can barely exist without me. We're even."
"The portal..."
I look back. P?ivi's portal is barely visible, just a shimmer in the air.
"Can you make another?"
He nods, then stands, pulling me up with him. My legs don't work properly. He holds most of my weight without comment. The new portal he creates opens smoothly, a proper doorway, not the desperate tears in reality he used to make.
We stumble through together, him holding me up, me keeping him solid through touch. The portal closes behind us, sealing away the Collector's dead realm.
We collapse on the floor of his study, our study, still clinging to each other. Both changed. Both depleted. Both alive.
He presses his forehead to mine. "We need to stop almost dying."
"Agreed. It's exhausting."
I can sense his relief, his wonder at his new form, his gratitude mixed with frustration at my stubbornness. I send back exhaustion, satisfaction, and the absolute certainty that I'd do it again.
We stay there on the floor, too tired to move, existing in the space between what we were and what we're becoming.