Ursus Arctos
His body was so slight. Elias could feel Victor’s heart rabbiting against his back, and it was somehow more terrible than waking to his hand the very first time they touched.
He carried Victor to the inn and up the dark stairs, shouldering his way into his room. It was so warm in here that it burned his cheeks, and it took a moment for Elias to realize that it was actually that he had let himself get too cold.
When he pulled Victor off his back and laid him on the bed, he could sense that something had changed. It felt like the world was tilted on its axis.
He got a thrill of strength and realized that it may be Victor’s last.
Elias clumsily pulled Victor’s coat from his body, unclothed him to the skin, and shed down to his own small clothes. The tether between them was so thick it felt like a band of iron when they were this close. It yanked him forward, and Elias submitted to this strange thing Alain had given him.
He took Victor’s body blazing with fever and pressed the sigil over his heart to Victor’s chest.
Victor sighed in his unconsciousness and went limp.
Elias hadn’t known Victor had been holding himself tensely until that breath of relief. He understood now that they could not part. Not until something was done.
Elias reached over Victor to light a candle by the bed so he could look upon Victor’s face. So long had it been since he had seen it.
His hairline was beaded with sweat and the tear tracks had dried on the walk, crusting his cheeks with salt. His cheeks were red, thin though they were, and his eyes moved restlessly beneath his bruised lids.
He was, infuriatingly, still lovely. Even this close to death.
Elias leaned down and rummaged in his shed clothes for his jacket. He flung his harness out of the way, and it clattered across the room as he found his book and pulled it out into the light.
How he still had this, he couldn’t understand. Elias had been so sure at the beginning of this journey that the alchemists would have taken this from him in pieces. But here it was. At the end of all things. Whole.
They had opened their doors to him, touched him, like family before he had ever understood that they saw him as one of them:
A little brother, lost.
Elias looked back down at Victor and wondered if he had received the same.