Chapter 40 Lyx
FORTY
Lyx
Lyx helps Cav through the woods. Around them, the forest slowly returns to life, whirring and calling without the threat of fire. They come across an outdoor shower, and Lyx sits Cav on the wooden bench and washes the soot from both of them until the water runs clear.
The nearby cottage is quaint, one large room strewn with clothing and alcove beds carved around the windows. Lyx finds a bed that’s undisturbed and eases Cav up against the pillows before she rifles through the others’ bags.
Cav’s lip quirks. “Stealing from our hosts?”
Lyx gathers fresh clothing and potion bottles, summoning the words through the painful vice of her throat. “I’d say we’ve earned it.” She returns to the bed and dresses them both, plying Cav with medicine and water. He makes her pour all of it from her hand.
By the time she’s done, his breathing is still shallow, but his cough has calmed from violent to sporadic bursts. His eyelids are heavy where his head lolls against the pillows. Even after treatment, the burns on his body are still vicious beneath the bandages, raw skin surrounded by crusted blood.
Lyx digs her nails into her palm. She wishes it was Tidus’s neck.
Her hatred has amplified. It doesn’t matter that he’s gone, that he’s gotten what he deserves.
She wants to give him more. It’s a cruel twist of fate that when Tidus had the shell, he held all her power.
She felt useless without it. Hopeless. Weak.
Yet now that her song is gone for good, just seeing Cav’s wounds makes her feel deadly.
Suddenly, she could kill Tidus with her bare hands.
Maybe she could bring him back just to make him suffer. Maybe the ocean would help. Maybe —
“Are you going to leave again?” Cav’s voice is little more than a whisper, his eyes barely cracked in their war against exhaustion. There is no doubt in his expression. He already knows the answer, body braced for the familiar feeling of falling asleep together and waking up alone.
That breaks something in Lyx’s chest. It’s a crack she’s long ignored, but the chisel of Cav’s eyes finds the seam and taps it gently. When that fissure opens, the hate boiling inside her begins to leak and leave room for something else. She sinks down on the end of the bed. “Yes.”
Cav doesn’t flinch, but a deep-seated hurt blooms behind his eyes.
Lyx’s heart trips. She has to say the rest. She has to speak the words she’s wanted to say since the last night in the grotto. Roughly, she swallows. “And I want you to come with me.”
Cav tries to sit up, wincing and coughing, but she reaches out to still him.
“I don’t want to rejoin the Indulgence,” she says.
“Right now, I want…” Hesitantly, she rests the heel of her hand on the mattress.
Without thinking, she reaches toward his, and he mirrors her to slot their fingers between each other.
Her chest flutters. “I want to decide where I go. What I do. I want to be free. I know that ship is your home —”
“It’s not my home if you aren’t there.” He presses their palms together, lowering his head to catch her eyes. “I mean it. Take me with you. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” He winces when his wounds shift. “I may be slower now, but —”
“I’ll wait.” She flushes at her own eagerness. It surprises her, almost as much as his. No one would follow a siren without some convincing…no one, except for Cav.
He lifts a hand to run his thumb down the column of her throat. His face is etched with regret, like she’s not the only one holding her pain. “I’m sorry we didn’t get your song back. That was the only thing you wanted.”
For the first time, she faces it fully. Her eyes close.
She swallows again, breathing deep and sinking into the loss.
This pain is different. It’s not the separation she spent years accepting; it is a void, a chasm, an emptiness that cannot be filled.
When she reaches outside of herself, there is no painful response.
There is nothing. Nothing to call to. Nothing to answer her.
Her throat aches like she screamed it raw, like a hand reached into her mouth and dragged out her vocal cords.
Every breath gets caught on the gaping wound, but when she opens her eyes, Cav sits in front of her.
When she looks at him, a balm smooths over the pain.
The sight of him alone dulls the ache until it’s easier to bear. “I’m not sorry.”
It’s blasphemy coming from a siren, but somehow, that feels good. It’s freeing. She’s never found these words before, but they rise to the surface like the empty space in her is desperate to be filled.
“I spent my whole life seeking misery, because I was supposed to. I was made to create turmoil. To fight — my siblings, the hunters…my emotions.” Her eyes dip.
“I was like the tide, moved by these forces out of my control. My song was just another thing to pull on me. But I needed it, because it was the only way to get what I wanted — but what did I want? Why did I want it?”
The words feel like they’re spilling out of her now, possessed by the effusive spirit that always has a hold on Cav.
“I never thought about that. It didn’t matter. I was only allowed to hunger for one thing.” She looks at Cav again — at the vibrant heat pooling in his golden eyes — and her body thrums. “But I see now that it didn’t dampen my other appetites. It only made them stronger.”
Cav’s chest glows. He doesn’t look away from her, that same hunger spreading across his face. “What other appetites?”
The glint in his eye says he knows the answer. He’s always known it, even when she swore it was impossible. But knowing is not enough. He wants to hear her say it. Her body flushes with nerves, apprehension, and the thrill of finally speaking it aloud. “Something I don’t believe in.”
A smile tugs at his lips.
The sight of it fills her so completely that the hollow place inside her no longer aches as strongly. “I do have sentimental feelings…for you.” Each word sits on her tongue so that she can savor the taste, the weight, the feeling. “I do…love you.”
Her mouth tingles around the words when Cav reaches to pull her closer.
All her life, she thought love was weak and fragile.
It couldn’t be what she felt for Cav. Love wasn’t powerful enough to captivate her thoughts and drive her every motion.
To keep her going for days while she dreamt of finding him again.
To fill her with feeling so compelling that she needed to eat him alive.
She thought only hatred could do that. Now, she understands.
It was always this. It has always been this.
Love.
His lips find her cheek, and her head swims. How can one emotion be so potent and delicate all at once? He kisses her temple. “You love me,” he teases, but he says it again with a reverence she’s never heard before. “You love me.”
Her heart swells, and she groans when she realizes she wants this dragon to antagonize her for the rest of time. It’s overwhelming. It’s strange. It’s embarrassing.
She presses her forehead into the side of his neck. “I swore I’d never crave you.” She mouths at his pulse to make her voice sound weary, but her affection gets in the way. “Those roaming hands. That cocksure smile. The never-ending stream of your voice.”
Depths, she wants them all. Her grip tightens in his shirt, and his fingers curl in her hair until the curved bridge of his nose brushes hers. Her body illuminates the window.
“My most vicious captor…” His breath is warm against her lips. “You haven’t had your song since you found me again, yet you still have me ensnared.”
Her chest fills with bubbles. She rolls her eyes, but he cups her jaw to keep her attention.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose that, but you’re still just as powerful. Just as captivating. Just as strong. You’re not lacking in anything. You did all of this without it.”
Her head tilts into his hand. She never recognized it before.
Even without her power, she survived Tidus.
She got a place on the Indulgence. She discovered the pearls.
Above everything else, she kept Cav alive, when days ago, she thought she was incapable.
What once felt like the only worthwhile part of her now seems like a relic from another time. She does not need her song to be whole.
“And you have me without it.” Cav’s voice grows softer. “I want to give you everything you crave. You don’t need command or persuasion.” His thumb brushes her cheek. “You don’t need magic to have my devotion. It’s always been yours. It always will be.”
She molds their mouths together, and he meets her with the same need.
He always does. Somehow, this pirate has found a way to match a siren’s intensity.
It’s never scared him off; if anything, it draws him closer.
When they stand on the precipice of what this could be, he doesn’t back away.
He puts his arm around her waist and cuts the lifeboat free, sending them plunging into the unknown together.
For so long, she thought only pain and suffering could sustain her, but perhaps chaos is more than that. Perhaps it’s the unexpected. Like Cav, crashing in her grotto. Offering his cheek to her hand. Feeding her his scales.
Like her, falling impossibly in love with him.